That was what Grandfather warned me before he passed away. Aside from my parents, he was my only living relative. Until Dad dropped the news on his deathbed that he wasn’t my biological father.
“Find Thomas and Eleanor Stevenson. Threaten him with a paternity suit. He is your real dad, Leigh. Be disobedient and defiant. But always for the right reasons.”
And then he was gone, and my world transformed from worse to godawful unbearable.
I tear my gaze away from the paperweight and stand next to the door. There’s grunting and the creaking of the bedframe. I squeeze my eyes shut and take deep breaths in and out.
I need to cool my temper and remember that my loyalty firmly belongs with my mother. I don’t want my father to go to prison. We don’t need Tony’s men and his family harassing mine. I’ll stick with the status quo for now.
But the minute Tony makes my mother cry again, I’ll defy to my heart’s content.
Be disobedient and defiant.
But always for the right reasons.
He might not be my father, but I am proud to call Alistair Kim my dad.
8
SEVEN
On the way to the hospital, Leigh goes in and out of consciousness. I step on the gas pedal. The scenery passes by in a blur. Soon, we’re at the hospital. I come to a screeching stop in front of the double doors of the emergency department and rush out of the truck.
I sprint around to the passenger-side door, and with Leigh in my arms, I run inside, calling out for help.
The staff come at me with a stretcher. I set Leigh on it and give the nurses the story. “Gash to the back of her right thigh. Might’ve swallowed bad pool water last night.”
They wheel her into a room and pull the curtains closed. Leigh moans, and her eyes flutter open.
“Seven?”
“I’m here.” I step around the nurse and lay my hand on Leigh’s shoulder.
Worry lines stretch across her forehead. “My clothes—”
“You decide what comes off.”
“Sweatpants and sweatshirt only.”
The nurses listen and help her out of her clothes. They get Leigh into a gown two sizes too big for her skinny body. One nurse puts an IV in the back of Leigh’s hand. Another hooks Leigh to a heart monitor and gets her vital signs.
Other people come into the exam room and ask a bunch of questions. I find out Leigh doesn’t have a middle name, she’s on birth control pills, and she’s allergic to strawberries of all things.
“Leigh, I should step out.”
“I’d like for you to stay if you don’t mind.”
Do I mind? Hell no.
After the nurse draws blood and starts a bag of fluids in her IV, the doctor comes in. He gestures for me to sit. I pull up a chair. Leigh reaches for my hand. I grasp her hand in mine. Her skin is hot, and her grip, weak.
“Miss Kim, I’m Dr. Anderson. The nurse showed me your vital signs. Your blood pressure is low, your heart rate is over one hundred, and you’re running a fever of 101.3. They said you have a gash on the back of your leg and that you swallowed pool water. We’ll get a chest x-ray. Make sure you don’t have pneumonia. May I see your leg?”
Leigh rolls onto her stomach. Streaks of red go up and down her leg.
“When was the last time you ate or had something to drink?”
“Toast for breakfast, but I couldn’t keep it down. Same with water.”
“Miss Kim, you’ll need to be admitted for antibiotics, something for the fever, and hydration.”
He instructs the nurse help Leigh onto her back. The nurse lifts the head of Leigh’s gurney. The doctor shines a light in her eyes. Asks her to open her mouth. He listens to her heart and her lungs. Zones in on her face.
“May I ask what happened to your temple and your lip?” He shifts his attention to me.
“Seven stays,” she says, preempting the doctor’s intention of asking me to leave. I get it. He thinks I gave Leigh the injuries.
“I heard a dog whimpering in the middle of the night last night. I thought it was hurt. I went after it, tripped, and hit my face on the tractor.”
I cry bullshit.
“And the gash on the back of your leg?”
“The dog ran past and scared me. I backed up and scraped my leg on something metal.”
Double bullshit. The doctor looks as skeptical as I’m feeling, but he doesn’t question her further.
The door opens, and the curtains part. A guy wheels in one of those portable x-ray machines. The doctor and I step out. He thanks me for bringing her to the ER.
“You saved her life, son. Had you waited any longer, she could’ve gone into septic shock.”
I don’t want to minimize how sick Leigh is, but that girl has as many lives as a cat. The x-ray guy backs out of the room. A nurse rushes past me with another bag in her hand. I’m guessing it’s Leigh’s antibiotic.
“We’ll work on getting her a room. I’ll check on her again before they take her to the unit.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I head back inside the room, grab a chair, and bring it to the side of the bed.
“Should I text Hannah? Or Thomas? My dad has his number.” In case of an emergency.
“Can we keep this between us?”
“They’d want to know.”
“Please, Seven.”
Again, she’s begging. The bastard in me wants to pounce on her fear, but I don’t have it in me to kick her when she’s down. What’s the fun in that?
“Fine, but this is your one pass. Don’t ever beg or ask for a favor again unless you’re willing to work for it or give up something in return. Deal?”
She closes her eyes and smiles. “No mercy. I like that. It’s a deal. Thanks, Seven, for not making it easy for me.”
A girl thanking me for giving her grief?
Doesn’t happen, and that’s how I know Beautiful Defiance plans on wrecking my world, smashing to smithereens my bastardly heart.
9
SEVEN
I stay with her, leaving the room only to use the bathroom and to get something to eat from the cafeteria. The next evening, they discharge her with a week’s worth of antibiotics.
The color is back in her face, but she isn’t steady on her feet. What’s also returned is her defiance. Leigh put up a good fight, not wanting to be taken out in a wheelchair to my truck.
But when she swayed as the nurse helped her dress, she conceded. Thank fuck she cooled her defiance long enough for me to get her ass in my ride.
When we arrived at the Stevenson’s place, I opted for the shorter route to Leigh’s place. I park my truck alongside the property line, carry her in my arms, and carefully get us over the low-lying fence.
She buries her face in my hair, and every cell in my body comes to attention, same as it did last night. Last night, she’d tossed and turned in her hospital bed. Sometime around two in the morning, she broke her fever. The nurses were kind enough to change out the damp sheets for fresh ones.
While they did, I held Leigh in my arms. Her breathing was rhythmic, a sign to come that she’d fall fast asleep, hopefully more soundly this time. Me, on the other hand, my breathing was shallow and labored. It was sheer torture holding Beautiful Defiance’s body close to mine.
I make my way down the hill, careful not to run into the whimpering stray dog, the sharp piece of metal, or the damn tractor. The things that attacked Leigh in her imagination. Yeah, I’m being sarcastic as fuck.
“Doing okay?” It boggles my mind that a man as smart as Thomas would have a guesthouse built at the bottom of two steep hills.
“Yes, thank you.”
Before Leigh went to the medical unit, the emergency room doctor delivered the double whammy. Not only did Leigh have a festering infection in her leg, but she had the beginnings of pneumonia from aspirating pool water.
Finally, we’re at the front door. I pride myself in not huffing and puffing from carrying her the distance. Not that she’s a load
of bricks or anything. Leigh is light. Skinny. Needs more meat on her bones.
“Where to? Bedroom? Couch?”
“Bedroom,” she says, her voice scratchy.
I walk us inside the bedroom.
“Are you up to eating something?” It’s after six.
By the time I ran down to the hospital pharmacy for her medicine, only to wait for Leigh to be done with defying the nurse’s suggestion she be wheeled out, her discharge was delayed by two unrelated things.
One, a patient in the next room spiraled downhill and a code was called overhead. Soon after, there was a fuck load of commotion. Fifteen minutes later, a patient across the hall from us went bonkers, and security had to be called.
We stayed in Leigh’s room behind closed doors until the yelling stopped and Leigh’s nurse returned. Yeah, that was our action for the day.
She holds on to my shirt and rests her head in the crook of my neck. Her hair is soft on my skin, and her puff of warm breath does crazy things to my junk. I mentally tell my excited dick to calm the fuck down. This isn’t the time to be at full mast.
“Soup would be nice,” she says, bringing my mind back to the topic of getting her fed. “Whatever they have at the Soup Kitchen. I’ll pay you back.”
“No need. My treat.”
“Thanks, Seven.” She slips off her shoes and crawls under the covers. “Don’t forget the house key.”
Good thing she reminded me. I would’ve forgotten. I leave and lock the door behind me. Inside my truck, I check my messages. There are a shit ton of them from the guys.
Something to the effect of coach benching me if I miss another practice. And why the hell did I miss practice? The team and the school are counting on me to be a leader. Who wants to follow a loser? This from Malice. Screw him.
Leigh being sick is none of their business. But that pneumonia of hers . . . I’m gonna kick Henry’s ass the next time he shows his face in Cambridge.
No one messes with a girl to the point she goes in and out of consciousness and has to be admitted to the hospital. Also, whoever fucked up Leigh’s face, I’ll be looking for that asshole too.
I send the guys a text. “See ya tomorrow, fuckers.”
Short. Sweet. No weakness. Top of my game. Their leader. I don’t wait for a reply. A girl’s counting on me to get her food.
I hurry to the Soup Kitchen and order soups and sandwiches. I also stop by the mini-mart and buy pints of ice cream in different flavors in case Leigh’s craving sweets.
At her place, I put the ice cream in the freezer, then head inside the bedroom. Moonlight shines in through the parted curtains. Leigh is sleeping facing the wall. The covers are bunched near her waist, and her hair is pulled off to the side and draped over her shoulder. Did her fever return?
So as not to wake her, I skim my fingers down her neck. She’d taken off her sweatshirt, leaving her in her tank top. Her skin is warm but not overly feverish. I stop touching her and inch back. The tattoo at the base of her neck catches my eye.
It’s a heart spliced in half by a solid black line, the line extending above and below the heart. I trace the outline of the heart and the intersecting solid line.
“Symbols of my life.”
Leigh awake doesn’t catch me off guard. The moment I touched her neck, she’d awoken. The nerves on my fingertips were aware of every hitch in her breathing.
“I only see a heart, Leigh.”
“Look closer.”
I do, and it hits me what they are. “Backward Ds.”
“Dismay. Disloyal. Destruction. Disillusioned. I’ve been and seen all that and more.”
“Leigh.” I go to stroke her hair, then think better of it.
What she named off is what I don’t want in my life. It’s best I leave those things to live inside her, to have it inked on her skin, not seen by her eyes, but never to be removed either without it causing her pain.
“Don’t feel sorry for me.”
“I couldn’t care less what you’ve been or seen.” Not true. I don’t want to care too much.
She rolls onto her back and pushes herself up into a sitting position. She moans and closes her eyes.
“Ugh, too fast.”
I plop down next to her on the bed. “You okay to eat?”
“Yes.” She leans into me.
“I can bring the food in here.”
“The kitchen is fine. Can you stick close by in case I get dizzy?”
“Yeah, sure.”
She rises slowly to her feet, waits a few seconds, and then shuffles out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. The hallway isn’t wide enough for two people to walk side by side. I hang back with my hands near her waist in case I need to grab her if she decides to keel over and kiss the floor.
At the kitchen table, I rush around her and pull out a chair, being careful not to brush my hulking body on her slight form. It’d be my luck for Leigh to get this far only for me to kill her progress with an accidental body check.
I open the containers of soup and set Leigh’s in front of her. “Ask and you shall have.”
What the fuck came out of my mouth? I’m a moron. But not a pussy-whipped moron. Huge difference. After I make sure Leigh won’t keel over sideways and fall out of her chair, I grab plates from the cupboard and set our sandwiches on them. I put the plate in the center of the table. She tips her head back in the direction of the fridge.
“Help yourself to juice and soda.”
“I’m good, thanks.”
We eat in silence. While she’s occupied with her soup, I discreetly check out her living space. Small tan couch. White square coffee table. A television mounted on the wall. Tall palm-like plants next to the large windows on either side of the front door.
The place is a decent size for one person, and spotless. Points to Leigh. Good luck finding anything in my room.
“When did you move in?”
“The same week Henry left for DU.”
“What happened to his stuff?” I’m assuming this used to be Henry’s pad.
“Don’t know. The place was empty when I got here.”
“Where’d you move from?”
“Why the questions?”
“We’re neighbors.”
“And here I thought you were trying to be my friend.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“With a guy like you? Yes.”
“How’d you figure?”
“A girl can’t be just friends with you, Seven. They’ll catch feelings and you’ll either make them a temporary fascination or you’ll keep them firmly in the friend zone. Either way, the girl gets hurt and you get away scotch free. It’s the reason I’d rather have you as my enemy. It hurts less that way.”
Her eyes widen. She ducks her head and concentrates on scooping up her chicken noodle soup and spooning it into her mouth.
I sit back and slide my arm on the back of the empty chair next to me. It hurts less that way. Her words speak to me. Yeah, giving a flying fuck gives someone the power to hurt you. It’s the reason I haven’t let a girl get close to me.
What else do Leigh and I have in common? I should drop the idea of getting to understand her and her life better. I’m not in her life to make it wonderful and shit. I’m here to make her fall in line and accept the status quo. Before I get in over my head, I stop with the questions and focus on my high maintenance stomach.
Working out every chance I get in the home gym as well as daily practices on the field has upped my body’s demand for calories.
After we’re done eating, I clean off the table, insisting Leigh sit her ass down when she tried standing and listed off to the side. I caught her before she could hit the floor.
“What’s the next step?” I hold her upright with my hands on her shoulders.
“Shower, then bed.”
She closes her eyes and blows out a quiet breath. This protective surge crests over me. I pick her up, hold her close, and we make our way inside her bedroom.
&nb
sp; We work as a well-oiled team. With her in my arms, I tip her low. She grabs a pair of undies and a camisole from her dresser. I try not to stare at the white undies and peach camisole she has clasped to her chest. The thin camisole won’t hide her tits from my greedy eyes. Her white underwear will draw my attention to the patch of dark hair between her legs.
Talking down my hormones, I set Leigh on her feet in front of the bathroom. One of her hands rest on my shoulder, and the other on the spot over my heart.
“Thanks for your help, Seven. Can you lock the door behind you when you leave?”
“I’m not going anywhere. Your couch has my name on it.”
There’s no defiance on Leigh’s part. Or complete acceptance, either. What passes between us is what I call a temporary cease-fire.
“I’ll wait outside the door, unless you would rather I come inside?”
I’m not a perv. I honestly don’t want her keeling over and hurting herself. I’ll never forgive myself if Leigh gets hurt on my watch.
“Out here is fine,” she says. “Thanks.”
While she takes her shower, I pace outside the door. Every nerve in my body stands on end, ready to fire the signal to my brain that I need to haul ass inside the bathroom at the hint of Leigh in trouble.
The water shuts off. Metal slides over metal. Then there’s silence, followed by the hair dryer. After she shuts off the hair dryer, the toilet flushes then there’s running water. She must be brushing her teeth. The door opens and I can’t stop staring at the scrape on her face or the cut on her bottom lip. Imperfections, and I’m seething. Whoever marred Beautiful Defiance’s face will pay for fucking up what’s mine.
Mine?
Yeah, mine to harass and wear down until she worships me like the other girls do.
All thoughts of breaking her of her defiance leave my brain the moment Leigh rests against the wall. She closes her eyes, and her chest rises and falls in this slow ebb and flow of breaths. Is she getting worse instead of better?
“Leigh, can I put my hand on your forehead?”
She nods.
I check her for a fever. She’s warm from her shower but not feverish.
Beautiful Defiance: Cambridge High Mayhem (Kiss Starter: Cambridge High Book 1) Page 4