I thought the time had finally arrived three days later, when I was chatting with Vanessa over a cup of bad cafeteria coffee. We were standing by one of the nurses stations when suddenly, her eyes went wide at something happening just past my shoulder. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a warning look. I turned toward the sound of footsteps approaching us, to see Kevin with his white coat on over his scrubs. His expression was serious.
I sighed and squared my shoulders, mentally rehearsing the little speech I’d prepared to let him down gently. But instead of asking me out, his tone was strictly professional this time.
“Eva, I’d like you to come with me,” he said, completely ignoring Vanessa. “There’s a patient who’ll need to begin therapy to rehabilitate a femoral neuropathy. And I’m assigning him to you.”
3
Trig
“Femoral neuropathy? What the hell does that mean?”
I’d been in this hospital for three days, and it was about two and a half days too goddamn long. I was ready to jump out of my skin. When the doc walked in a few minutes ago and started flapping his gums, I thought for sure he was just gonna look at my chart and tell me he was releasing me. I mean, shit, last time I got shot, I didn’t even need to be hospitalized. Patch took the bullet out at the clubhouse and I was good to go. I couldn’t figure out what the holdup was. I mean, sure, this time was a more serious wound. Apparently, I almost died. But aside from some numbness in my leg and foot, I felt basically fine.
I had been almost unconscious when Repo and Patch arrived at the motel. Patch took one look at me and said, “Oh, shit, this ain’t something I can sew up, Trig. We need to get you to a hospital.” They managed to get me to St. Luke’s — the next town over and fifteen miles away — in record time. Five and a half hours and forty-eight stitches later, here I was. Stuck in this hospital bed, hopped up on pain pills and itching to get the hell out of here. And now the doc comes in and says something about physical therapy? Fuck that shit.
My club president, Grey Stone, was sitting in the chair beside my hospital bed, his leather cut slung over the armrest. He had been filling me in on club business for the last couple of days since I’d been laid up. Mostly, he was telling me stories about how Frankenstein, one of our newer guys, had gotten so fucked up on whiskey the night before that he passed out on one of the couches by the pool tables. Cal had grabbed some makeup from one of the club whores and painted his face up real pretty, and Grey was showing me the evidence on his phone. I was laughing so hard I thought I’d rip my stitches open when the doctor came in to see me.
The doc, whose name was Larkin, was a young guy, maybe early thirties, and Jesus Christ, he was an arrogant son of a bitch. About half of the time he had spent talking to me the past three days was bragging about how lucky I was that he was the one to sew me up. To hear him tell it, he was the only one on staff with the skills to save my life. As he yammered on about it right now for the umpteenth time, I wondered vaguely if it had been worth it if it meant I had to listen to his bullshit.
“The numbness in your leg that you were complaining about yesterday is the result of nerve damage,” he was saying. “It’s not surprising, considering the severity and location of the wound. You’re very lucky that I was on staff to operate on you.” He smiled smugly. “The numbness would probably be even more pronounced if another, less skilled surgeon had treated you.”
“What does this guy want, a fuckin’ cookie?” Grey muttered under his breath. I snorted.
“The numbness, unfortunately, may not be temporary,” Larkin continued. “It’s possible it may be severe enough that you will never regain full mobility or strength in that leg.”
I had been listening with half an ear as he talked, just waiting for him to get to the part about me being released, but that stopped me. “Wait. What?” I barked. “Are you saying I might not be able to walk?”
“You’ll be able to walk, but possibly not without the aid of a cane,” he specified. “And you may not regain full mobility or flexibility of the muscles in that leg.”
“Hey, I’m gonna take off,” Grey murmured, getting up. “Let you guys continue this in private.” He looked at me. “Talk to you.”
I lifted my chin at him. ‘Thanks, brother.” This conversation was not going the way I’d expected. I appreciated not having an audience for it.
I waited until Grey was out the door, his boots echoing down the hallway. “That doesn’t make any damn sense,” I argued with the doc. “I’ve been shot before. Hell, I’ve been shot in the leg before. And I recovered, no problem.”
“Yes, I noticed a scar on your lower right calf,” he smirked. “Not much more than a flesh wound, that one. The difficulty here, Mr. Jackson, is the location so near the femoral nerve. As I said before, femoral neuropathy — nerve damage — is often a result of a gunshot wound of this type, provided the patient survives. Which is not always a given, but in your case, you were lucky I was on staff to save you.” He took a breath, his chest puffing out with pride, then continued.
“The femoral nerve is one of the largest nerves in your leg. It controls the muscles that help straighten your leg and move your hips. It’s also what provides feeling in the lower part of your leg. When it is damaged, it affects your ability to walk and may cause problems with sensation and movement in your leg and foot.”
He glanced down at the bed. “As you continue to recover, you may find that the numbness and tingling in your leg continue, and that you have difficulty extending your knee. You may also find that you have less than full mobility in your foot. When you stand, you may feel like your leg or knee is going to give out or buckle on you.”
Shit. “Does that mean I might not be able to ride a bike?” I asked. A cold, thin finger of fear began to snake through me.
“I presume you mean a motorcycle, and not a bicycle,” he said mildly, glancing at my tattoos with an expression of vague contempt. Snooty little asshole. “In either case, that remains to be seen. Physical therapy can help. I’m going to assign you to someone here at the hospital. If you take the therapy seriously, it will improve your chances of being able to regain functionality to as close to one-hundred percent as possible.”
I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. The idea that I might not ever be able to ride again… it was almost impossible to imagine. If I couldn’t ride, I couldn’t be VP of the Stone Kings anymore. Hell, I’d barely be a functioning member of the club at all. Everything in my life would change, just like that. For a horrible moment, I almost wished that Repo and Patch hadn’t gotten to me in time.
Fuck.
“This physical therapy,” I said slowly, trying to shake off the blackness that was threatening to take me over. “How long do I have to do that?”
“The course of therapy itself will likely run six to eight weeks,” he replied. “And you may need to continue to do exercises after that.” He grabbed my chart from the foot of the bed and glanced at it. “I’ll okay you for release this afternoon, but before I do I’m going to bring the therapist by to meet you, who is on staff today. Do you have someone you can call to pick you up?”
“Yeah,” I said gloomily. Cal was around here somewhere, probably harassing the nurses or fucking some candy striper in a supply closet. He showed up every day to hang out with me and give me the latest on the club, driving a cage just in case I got sprung.
“All right, then.” He looked briefly at his watch, which looked like it cost more than my mortgage payment. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with the PT, and then we’ll get you out of here.”
About an hour later, the doc came back in, followed by a young woman who was about as far away from my idea of a physical therapist as she could possibly have been. I figured I’d get some big, burly guy named Hans or something, who’d take pleasure watching me sweat and groan in pain. That I could take, no problem. That I was ready for.
What I wasn’t ready for was a petite blonde with the most fuckable mouth I had ever seen, and a
pair of tits I ached to touch the second I laid eyes on them.
For a split-second, I didn’t recognize her. The woman standing in front of me with the self-assured, confident posture had shed all traces of the shy young girl I had once known. A girl who had no idea how beautiful she was, or how heads turned when she walked by.
I bent my non-injured knee upward, making a tent out of the sheet so my suddenly raging hard-on wouldn’t show.
“Mr. Jackson,” the doc said, “This is Ms. Van Buren. She’s the physical therapist I’m assigning to you.”
Instead of the scrubs that most of the doctors and nurses wore around here, she was wearing a low-cut long-sleeved shirt that was the same color as her flashing blue eyes, and a pair of black yoga pants that hugged her ass in all the right ways. My dick jumped again under the sheet, and I raised my knee a little higher, cursing the damn hospital gown I was wearing that did fuck-all to hide anything.
The woman was staring at me with a strange expression on her face. I wasn’t sure if she recognized me under this beard, but it was clear the wheels were turning in her mind.
“Ms. Van Buren,” Dr. Larkin said in a formal tone, “this is Caleb Jackson. Gunshot wound, femoral nerve damage. He’s experiencing typical numbness and is likely to have reduced mobility. I’d like you to plan a course of therapy for him designed for him to gain back maximum functionality.”
“Trig,” I said.
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“I go by Trig.”
“Trig?” She wrinkled her nose. “What kind of a name is that?”
A spark of irritation shot through me. “It’s the name I go by. My road name.”
She gave me a strange, mocking half-smile and stuck out her hand. “Okay. Pleased to meet you, ’Trig.’ I’m Eva Van Buren.”
Her smirk told me everything I needed to know. She recognized me all right.
Well, this was sure as shit gonna be interesting.
Evangeline Van Buren.
Fuck me running.
4
Eva
It was clear that he had no idea who I was, right at first. Honestly, I took that as a compliment. I wasn’t the scrawny teenager he had known all those years ago, thank God. But I had hoped never to see Caleb Jackson again in my life. And now, I was going to be seeing him almost every day for at least the next six weeks.
The only silver lining was that this time, I was the one calling the shots.
In some ways, he had changed quite a bit: there were tattoos all up and down his arms now, even some visible from the neckline of his hospital gown. He had gotten larger, burlier and more muscled, and a thick black beard covered the lower half of his face, partially obscuring the square jaw and full lips that I remembered.
But his smile was the same: cocky, sensual, one corner of his mouth tilting up lazily. His eyes were the same, as well: deep, almost-black orbs that looked like they could practically burn right through your clothes when he looked at you.
Which, given the look in he was giving me right now, and the way he was staring at my body, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he couldn’t do.
I shifted my weight nervously from one leg to another and tried to look professional and completely undaunted by seeing him again after all these years.
“Well,” Kevin said. “I’ll leave you to it, then.” He turned to go, then leaned in toward me. “I’ll need to talk to you later, about another matter entirely,” he murmured in my ear, his tone teasing.
I cast my eyes down, feeling my face redden. “I’m sure we’ll run into one another at some point,” I stammered.
Kevin left the room, his footsteps moving away down the hall.
Caleb — or Trig, I guess — was still looking at me with those penetrating black eyes. “I don’t mean to be ungrateful,” he remarked in a lazy drawl. “But that guy’s kind of a prick.”
The corners of my mouth turned up in the beginnings of a smile, but I suppressed it. “He’s a very talented surgeon,” I responded primly.
He chuckled, then winced a little in pain. “He’s an asshole.” He watched me, trying to read my reaction.
I kept my expression completely neutral. “No comment.”
“You dating him?” he pressed.
“I said, no comment.” I walked to the foot of the bed and made a show of looking at his chart so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes. “Dr. Larkin tells me you’re getting released today. You were very lucky, Mr. Jackson. If you hadn’t gotten to the hospital so quickly, you wouldn’t be sitting there talking to me right now.”
“So I’ve been told,” he said drily. “And it’s Trig, I told you.”
I flipped a page on the chart. “Trig, then.” I wasn’t going to have this conversation with him. Our relationship right now was strictly professional, and I intended to keep it that way. “Dr. Larkin tells me you’ve been having some numbness in your leg. Describe it to me.”
“Nothing to describe,” he grumbled. “It’s numbness. Feels like numbness.”
I sighed in exasperation. Great. He was going to be a difficult patient, to boot. That was going to make things easier. “Where is it numb?” I prompted. “Your thigh? Your calf? Your foot? Does it come and go?”
He frowned. “Kind of all over. And yeah, the foot, too. Just feels fuzzy.”
“Does it come and go?” I repeated.
“Look, do we have to talk about this?” he said impatiently. “Just get me doing whatever exercises you need me to do.”
“I need to know what your symptoms are, Caleb. Don’t be a baby,” I retorted.
Ha, that got a rise out of him. His eyes darkened in a flash of sudden anger. I was pretty sure people didn’t make a habit of calling Caleb Jackson a baby. In most situations, I sure wouldn’t, either. But I had found in course of my career that sometimes men had to be goaded into taking their physical therapy seriously, and anger was a good motivator. If he was pissed off at me, I knew from experience, he might work harder just to show me up.
“It’s Trig.”
“Trig. So. Does it come and go?” I repeated.
“No.” His voice was ice-cold. “It’s pretty much constant.”
I nodded. “Okay. Good to know.” I moved toward the bed and grasped the sheet. “May I take a look?”
He looked pained. “Do you have to?”
“I don’t have to, but it would help me to see the wound, to see the muscles affected. I’ve looked at the X-ray, but it would be better to see the actual leg.”
He groaned. “Fuck. Fine.” He shifted a bit in the bed and bent the knee of his other leg more. He pulled back the sheet and tucked it under the leg. I leaned down closer to look at the wound site. His thigh was hard and chiseled, like the rest of him. Even here in this hospital bed, he gave off a strong vibe of masculinity that was hard to ignore. I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them again, forcing myself to concentrate on the task at hand.
The bullet had gone into his inner thigh, about midway between the knee and the groin. It was heavily bandaged, of course, but I could see enough to tell approximately where the bullet had gone in and through. “You’re very lucky,” I remarked. “If you had been shot much higher, sexual function might have been affected. As it is, you’re probably fine in that area.”
I had slipped into my role as a professional, and hadn’t really been thinking about what I was saying. Now that the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could have taken them back.
A low rumble of a laugh started deep in his chest. “Thanks for the compliment, Eva. I’d like to think I’m better than fine in that area.”
“I didn’t mean…” I started. He lowered his other knee a bit, and through the sheet, I could just glimpse ‘the area’ — which was now growing harder and larger the longer I bent to examine him. Oh, my goodness… All I could see was a faint outline, but what I did see was every bit as impressive as I remembered. Maybe more so. After all, at the time I had never felt or seen another man’s cock before, so I had
nothing to compare it to.
Now, I could see that Caleb Jackson was every bit as much of a man as my memories had made him out to be.
Blood rushed in my ears as I realized I had actually been staring at his… Oh my God. Hastily, I stood.
“So,” I stammered. “Treatment. Basically, you’re going to be on crutches for a while, at least until your leg has healed and your strength has returned. What we’ll do during our sessions will be working on isometric exercises like quad sets, heel slides, hamstring sets. Eventually we’ll start adding resistance to strengthen your muscles, with Therabands, ankle weights, and the like. We’ll progress from gravity eliminated, to gravity neutral, to gravity resisted.” I took a deep breath and risked a look at him. “Does that makes sense?”
A lazy smirk had appeared on his face. “Sorry, I wasn’t really listening. A little distracted.” His gaze slipped from my eyes down to my breasts, burning a path on my skin. My nipples hardened; my breathing sped up as I felt myself grow wet between my legs.
This was not good. I had no idea how I was going to manage six to eight weeks of therapy with this man. Damnit. Even in high school, he had this effect on me, and apparently time had done nothing to make me immune.
Eva. Remember. Remember what he’s like. Remember what he did.
I scowled at him. No matter how his body and presence affected me, Caleb Jackson was the last man I would ever let myself get involved with. It had been ten years, and a lot had happened since then, but once an asshole, always an asshole. People didn’t change. He might be hotter and more handsome than I remembered him, but at his core, he was still the same Caleb. The same boy who had humiliated me and taken pride in doing so.
STONE KINGS MOTORCYCLE CLUB: The Complete Collection Page 37