“So speaking of running over people,” Nic said, apropos of nothing, “early this morning I was crossing eighteenth street and this guy on a bike—maybe like a messenger or something—got nearly run over by a guy running a red light. I almost thought about calling you, Jas, but I didn’t know whether I should or not. There were no cops on the block. Can you report things like that, or do one of you boys in blue have to see it yourself? I always wondered.”
“You can call in reports like that with a description of the car and the license plate,” Jason said professionally, entirely missing the eyes Nic made at him when she asked. “And, there are female officers on the force.”
“Yeah,” Nic said, amused as ever by Jason’s density, “but ‘boys in blue’ sounds better than ‘boys and girls in blue’. Besides, I’m more interested in boys in blue. That uniform…” she bit her lip and squinted her eyes up at him when he pointed his eyes back at his plate.
Jason just shrugged. We’d moved passed the various stripper, nightstick, piece, and pistol jokes a few years back. It hadn’t seemed like they would ever get old, when he first joined in, and Nic poked fun at him relentless about showing us his stick, or whipping out his pistol. She was shameless. I use to be, before Jason started paying me more attention than her. Now, I kept the innuendos to myself.
For a while, I’d thought that Jason had some serious interest in me. He might still have, I guess. He never approved of the men I dated, as if he had the right. And maybe for a little while I thought I might be interested back. How could I not? You’d think that falling in love with your best friend would be the best thing that could possibly happen. Nobody knew me quite like Jason did; maybe not even Nic. It just never happened.
Once, that had confused me. It didn’t anymore. And Jason never spoke up anyway, so I tried not to read into his weirdness too much. He’d dated other girls, and knew how to pursue someone; I figured that if he was interested he would have said something. I waited, back then.
But that’s the thing about teenage interest. It doesn’t last. Eventually, I was relieved that he hadn’t made some kind of move. Nic was still waiting, though. She had this idea that men should always be the first to make the move. Dinner, flowers, professions of love, hell, poetry; the works. And a girl like her could get it.
Me? My track record was not dinner, or flowers, or poetry. I guess Jason thought I deserved those things, but I liked my men, on balance, just a little bit dangerous. That hadn’t always been the case, but it was the running theme of the last few years. Men who were strong, and aggressive, and took control a little. Very probably, it had something to do with my being, by necessity, constantly in control. It just felt good to let go sometimes, let someone else drive for a little bit.
Poor Jason was not that. Unbidden, I had a kind of anti-fantasy about him; how he’d probably ask if he could take off my shirt, ask if I was okay, ask to take off my bra, check in again, get my spoken and maybe written consent every three minutes. At least, he was likely to make sure we both got equal time and attention. And, I’ll admit, a man with Jason’s sense of detail and fairness probably put in his hours learning how to work a woman’s body. He’d make someone happy, at some point. Maybe Nic, if she ever grew some balls and said something instead of waiting for him to sweep her off her feet. I doubted Jason could sweep a floor if it was wet for him already. Poor guy.
I couldn’t help smiling at him as I imagined all this, and imagined that same methodical way he had of doing everything applied to one thing after another. Maybe I didn’t need a third glass.
Too late, a third one arrived. Time to cut myself off. “I’ll take my check when you get a chance,” I said.
“Leaving?” Jason asked. He dabbed his mouth, tucked his napkin away, and caught the waiter’s eye before the kid left to get his check, too. “You’ve had a bit,” he said. “I should walk you home.”
“I’ll get a cab,” Nic announced. “When I go.”
“You should call one beforehand,” Jason said, handing her a card from his pocket. Prepared for everything.
“You have a cab company’s card in your pocket?” Nic wondered as she turned it over, one eyebrow dropped.
“Public drunkenness,” he explained. “If they’re not disturbing anyone, we just encourage them to get a ride home before they do.”
She handed it back to him. “I’ll Uber.”
“Uber is unregulated,” he said, “not like a yellow cab. Anything could happen.”
“I’m touched for your concern,” she said a bit coolly. “But I can take care of myself. Mace, keys, krav maga, the works.”
“You do krav maga?” I asked, shocked. When had she picked that up?
“Well,” Nic said, giggling, “either that or Kriya Yoga… which one involves stretching?” Yeah, she was buzzed.
“Right,” I said. “I live two blocks away, Jas. You should make sure Nic gets home. Plus you live closer to her. Really,” I said when he started to protest. “I grew up here, people know me; I’ve treated half the criminal populace in a ten-mile radius. Who will keep them limber the next time they get their legs broken or their kneecaps busted if they put me out of commission?” It went without saying that I also had mace, and knew how to slip my keys between my fingers and go for the eyes. Jason had long ago been sure that Nic and I both knew how to handle ourselves, how to keep from being a target, how to not get raped or robbed.
But that was Jason. Captain America. Here to keep our city and its humble, helpless denizens safe from harm.
I didn’t let him press the issue. My check came first, I paid, kissed cheeks, gave hugs, and hustled out into the city. It’s a scary place, don’t get me wrong. Especially at night. But, honestly, you get used to it. It was home. You couldn’t just be afraid all the time. You had to take chances once in a while.
I just learned to pick my battles.
Chapter 3
Naomi
One bath, six hours of sleep, and three nearly tolerable patients later, and again I stood before Jack Hawke’s room, steeling myself and working up the necessary nerve that Nic and Jason were both so certain that I had.
Take no crap, lay down the law, draw the line; eyes front and center.
My mental checklist prepared and my nerve properly steeled, I took a breath and pushed through the door. Jack was awake, alert, and smiled at me when I came in.
“Figure out how to fix me up, Naomi?” He asked. “If you want my advice, my suggested course of treatment would be less stressful for both of us, I’d bet.” There was that look again. Did that work on other women? Probably.
“That depends,” I said as casually as I could, avoiding meeting that look because, if I was honest, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did work. “How long do you want to be in the hospital? Your insurance will cover the two and a half grand a day, right?”
Jack’s smile faltered just a bit. “You got a little spark in you,” he said.
I didn’t respond. Spark? Right now I have my own personal Sun. Try me. I realized I wanted him to, a little. Maybe I was extra spunky today. A little wine and good friends will do that for you. Take no crap.
“The faster the better,” he said finally. “How long before I’m in shape to get some… exercise? In your professional opinion.”
I tapped the clipboard twice on the side table, and then sank into the chair next to his bed. Phase two, lay down the law. “The whole point of what I do,” I told him, “is exercise. It’s painful, and grueling at times, but if you do what I tell you, you can be out of here in week. Maybe.”
“Fixed up in a week?” He wondered. “Missy, you get me out of here in a week and I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.” It didn’t sound like he expected me to tell him to do anything he wouldn’t enjoy.
Draw the line.
“I can only do that, Mr. Hawke,” I said flatly, “if we can cut the crap and focus on getting you well. Every time I have to waste a minute fending off your advances, if that’s what you call makin
g an advance, is a minute taken away from your therapy. It may not sound like much, but it adds up, and you’re not my only patient, or even the one in the worst shape.”
“All business,” Jack muttered, but he didn’t seem as disappointed as I thought he should. It was clear I hadn’t been convincing, but at least I’d laid the groundwork. “Alright. Message received, Naomi.” What was he seeing when he looked at me like that?
Not that I didn’t know what I looked like. And when I was done up right, I could turn heads. But now? In scrubs? No makeup, hair in a utilitarian bun to keep it out of the myriad possible disgusting messes I stood a high chance of encountering on any given day? People like me don’t look sexy at work. Trust.
“Great,” I said, ignoring the way he looked at me while, at the same time, keeping my own eyes glued to his face. Eyes front and center. “Then let’s get started; we’ve already wasted some of those precious minutes.”
Most of the damage was to his upper body. People don’t always realize how connected everything is to the core of your body, or how their muscles constantly worked to hold everything together until something interfered with it, or how much that baseline tension kept muscles from atrophying. In cases like Jack’s that was the main concern.
A broken radial bone meant potential atrophy not just in the thick, hard muscle of his forearm, but all the way up his sloped biceps and deltoids and into his shoulder. A broken bone put the whole limb out of commission, and the bone had to get dense nutrients from somewhere and quick. Muscle was the nearest source of ready nutrition.
They’d put the cast on his arm, fortunately, so working with some of it wasn’t difficult. Mostly it was isometric work, pushing against my hand, pulling down against my grip, tensing and releasing the muscles around his shoulder and upper arm. Stretching that strained his cracked ribs but was necessary to keep the muscles between them from locking up.
We worked in silence initially, which I was grateful for at first. But the more I worked like this, the more my mind started wandering to places I had told it not to. Places about Jack’s body, and what it was capable of, and how he’d gotten all these scars. Jack’s presence was like some sort of fine grain sand-paper, constantly rubbing my awareness. He didn’t say anything, and for the moment was even more focused on controlling his reactions to the pain of the workout I was giving his injured body instead of leering at me like he had been.
But even under that mask of focus, there was a raw masculine force that radiated from him. It threatened to infect me if I let it, so I started talking again to keep the space filled with something other than this malingering physical curiosity.
“You’re a fighter,” I observed. “Boxer?”
He shot me a look. “You fishing?”
I tapped the swollen knuckles of one of his large hands. “Scar tissue. You only get this kind one way.”
He turned his own hand over, looking at it carefully, then gave me an impressed sort of frown. “Alright. Good eye. One point to you. You’re single, right?”
I rolled my eyes a little. “You fishing?” I mocked his thick inner city hard-guy inflection.
“Yeah,” he said. “I catch anything?”
Damnit. Don’t be clever. But I sighed. It was better than the alternative. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” I said. “Or a girlfriend.”
That gave him a pause. While he tried to puzzle out what I might have meant, I pulled his arm up—the one that wasn’t broken—and held it while muscles between his ribs held, fought, and finally began to slowly let their grip on the fractured bone relax. “Don’t hold your breath,” I told him. He let it out slowly.
“How’d you guess I was single?” I asked him, curious about what part of me other than my impossibly hectic schedule suggested I didn’t have someone at home waiting for me.
“I didn’t,” He said, grinning. “You just told me. Can’t help noticing you didn’t make up a fake boyfriend.” He let out another long breath for the second stretch, and grunted words through the pain. “Or a fake girlfriend…”
“Maybe it’s because you’re a patient, Mr. Hawke, and I don’t need to make anything up around you.” Take that. Mr. Hawke.
“Or maybe, Naomi,” Jack said, clearer as he looked up at me. “You just wanted me to know you were available.”
I gave him an extra deep stretch.
Jack didn’t flinch, didn’t let his eyes leave me, didn’t make a sound. He just took a deep breath in, and let it out slow through his swollen nose.
“Well,” I said, lowering his arm again. “Guess you lost this fight.”
“I don’t lose,” Jack said. He looked down my body, without a shred of subterfuge to hide it, and then back up at me. “Ever.”
It actually wasn’t until that particular moment that I realized we were, in fact, in a match. My heart sped up. Back out, Naomi, I warned myself. Bow out before it goes a step further.
And I intended to. I prepared my final commentary quickly, and opened my mouth to shut this down. How had it gotten to this point, again? “Neither do I,” I said, instead of what I’d meant. I couldn’t even remember.
Jack’s nostrils flared once. His eyes smoldered, and his jaw muscles flexed. The corner of his mouth that wasn’t quite as stiff from the bruising turned up slowly. “Alright.” There was an unspoken ‘we’ll see’ in there.
“I’d call this,” I waved at his mess of a body, “losing.”
“This ain’t losing, sugar—sorry, I mean Naomi.” The bastard smirked that crooked shit-eating mouth of his, his thick, pouty lower lip stuck out just a little to add insult to it. Not that his lips were anything impressive. I barely noticed them. “This here is what happens when you win when you shouldn’t.” Whatever his face looked like, bastard-grin or not, there was nothing humorous in his voice. His expression grew placid quickly, and he looked off toward the window.
It only lasted a moment. A kind of twitch that moved through his whole body, starting with his face, as though he were about to get off the bed and charge through the window. He was angry. Jack’s anger, just like before, burned off of him like a nimbus of crackling lightning, hot energy too wild to stay inside his skin.
And, just like that, it was gone. “Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. Ladies like that, right?”
“Therapists,” I said quietly, “like to talk about injuries and what caused them and how to prevent them in the future.”
“Arm stretchin’, pullin’ and pushin’ on shit?” Jack asked, a snide edge to his tone. “Is that how I ‘prevent future injuries’?”
“That’s part of it, Mr. Hawke,” I said. “Yes. All of this is for your own good. You can see that, right? That I want to help you? You know that I can drop a patient if I want? Have someone else assigned? All I do is pass my notes on and I can wash my hands of all this.”
“Help,” Jack said, his head bobbing slowly, “yeah. Okay. You don’t want to work with me? Pass the buck, then. I don’t care. I didn’t ask for you to come in here and fuck around, groping me and flirting and—”
“I was absolutely not groping and flirting, Mr. Hawke,” I snapped. It didn’t matter just then if it was true. It did matter that I snapped. Cool it, girl; that’s your job you’re risking.
“If you call me ‘Mr. Hawke’ one more goddamn time,” Jack swore. He didn’t finish, though. He’d what? Fall over on me? Break another rib? Refracture something?
“You tell me what happened to you, and I’ll call you whatever you want,” I said quietly. I heard the words come out of my mouth at just about the same time Jack did, but my reaction was different than his. He raised a puffy eyebrow. Oh will you now? “I’ll call you Jack,” I corrected myself. “Just Jack.”
“Just Jack,” Jack repeated. “I kind of like that. Who’re you? Oh, Just Jack.”
I waited. So did he. He was waiting for a chuckle. I folded my arms over my chest.
He’d call my bluff, if I was bluffing. So, in that moment I managed to make the agreement wi
th myself. If he didn’t tell me what happened, if he didn’t open up just that little bit and give me a moment of that honesty he obviously didn’t mind trotting out when he was making passes at me, I’d give him up. Put him back in the pool, let him be someone else’s problem.
I had to pick my battles.
Maybe it showed. Or maybe he would have cracked anyway. Either way, his lips slowly twisted into an angry frown. “I got on the wrong side of an asshole and his friends. They let me know it.”
“That’s not an explanation,” I told him. “It tells me nothing except that you make everyone about as irritated as you do me.”
“Real professional, lady,” Jack chuckled. “That’s some bedside manner.”
“Be. More. Specific.” I flipped his chart closed. José could could take over. He was a big guy. Gay. Way more brutal than I was; he was still fresh.
“How does this help me get any better?” Jack complained. “You don’t need to know this shit. None of it matters. All that matters is that I heal up and get the fuck outta here, lady.”
“Don’t call me ‘lady’,” I said calmly. “It’s disrespectful the way you say it.”
“Fine, Naomi,” he said in that way he did. “You don’t gotta know the first thing about me other than what you see right now, Naomi.” Every time he said it, it struck something inside me, like flint on steel. I wasn’t sure what kind of fire it would start if it caught.
“Is that your professional assessment?” I asked him.
“Get the fuck outta here,” Jack growled. “You lookin’ for a fuckin’ trophy, or what? Wanna get all the grisly details, be all motherly? Boo hoo,” he said. He waved me off. “Give me to whoever you want.”
“Do you have any friends?” I asked. It was an honest question. No one had come to visit Jack—not family, not friends. He wasn’t in a restricted ward anymore; had he called anyone, to let them know where he was? Did anyone care? Had anyone ever?
“You can’t fix me, Naomi.” He looked back at the window. “I ain’t broke.”
The Hitman's Baby - A Bad Boy Secret Baby Romance (With extra added bonus novel for a short time only!) Page 20