Cut to the Chase

by Lori Ryan

  “He didn’t tell you we were coming, did he?” Chad asked with a grin. “You were supposed to tell him we were coming.” He turned toward Jonathan Simms.

  “I hadn’t gotten to it yet.” Jonathan shrugged. “Anyone want a beer while Warrick changes?” Jonathan had a way of making friends with everyone.

  “You realize I haven’t played basketball since…” He cut off. He couldn’t remember the last time he played basketball. Probably in prep school, maybe college.

  “That’s okay.” Andrew clapped him on the back. “You’re playing for the other team. They tried to cancel because they’re a man short, but your uncle volunteered you.”

  “When did this all happen?” Warrick knew the three men had come by Simms that afternoon to tour some of the facility, but he hadn’t realized his Uncle Jonathan had been in the office at the time.

  “This afternoon.” Jonathan looked at his watch. “You better get moving. Who knows, maybe your future is in the NBA.”

  Warrick rolled his eyes, but he left the room to change. What was the worst that could happen?

  Chapter 8

  Warrick was about as skilled with crutches as he was on the basketball court. Not at all. He winced at the memory. He probably shouldn’t have tried a jump shot with Chad guarding him. It was about as hopeless as trying a jump shot against Shaquille O’Neal. Chad was a seriously big man.

  As for the crutches, it wasn’t that he couldn’t get around on them. It was that he didn’t want to. The slowness of them did nothing but irritate him. He tossed one of them toward the couch in his office and proceeded to hobble, leaning on the remaining crutch. The air cast on his ankle was awkward, but he was able to walk on it.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s not what they meant when they said ‘use crutches.’”

  He knew Sara’s voice immediately by the way his body involuntarily reacted to it. She had one of those voices straight out of an old movie, throaty and sexy as shit. He cursed under his breath, reminding his body he didn’t appreciate the reaction to her.

  Not to mention the kick to his ego at her seeing him like this. Why the hell did it bother him so much to have her see him as weak in any way? He shouldn’t care.

  He turned as he got to his chair and sank into it, letting the other crutch drop to the floor beside him. Glaring at it made him feel better. It also let him ignore her a little longer while he willed his dick back into line.

  “Here.” She held out an ice pack wrapped in a towel. “Charlotte told me to tell you, it’s time to ice and elevate.”

  He grunted and took the ice pack, but tossed it on the desk instead of lifting his leg to ice it.

  Sara tilted her head at him and he saw an uncharacteristic playfulness cross her face. At least, it wasn’t an expression she had around him very often. Maybe she was more at ease with her friends.

  “I should have known you’d be a bad patient,” she said. She sat in the chair opposite him and settled in.

  “Why is that?” He focused on pulling up the files he’d need for their meeting, keeping his eyes on the computer screen instead of her. He didn’t want to admit, even to himself, that he liked it when she teased him. He liked the feeling that maybe she liked him. What was he? A teenager?

  The thought brought back a memory of him waiting behind the bleachers for Vicki to sneak out of study hall and meet him. The memory served as cold water, shaking him out of the stupor Sara had put him in.

  “You just strike me as someone who’d never want to slow down long enough to heal. I was the same way after my injury. The physical therapists actually had to try to slow me down, instead of pumping me up to try one more rep of an exercise.”

  He hadn’t ever heard her talk about her injury or her recovery. He turned her way. “Did it work? Did they get you to slow down?”

  “Nope.” Her smile was wicked as she laughed, but she gestured to the ice pack. “You should still ice it.”

  With an exaggerated glare that she rewarded with a laugh, he grabbed the ice pack, lifted his leg to the extra chair Charlotte had placed by his desk, and followed her direction. “You have a twisted sense of humor.”

  He wondered what it had felt like for Sara to go through months of recovery and learning to use her prosthesis. He was frustrated from this little sprain. Embarrassed and worrying about what she might think of him. What was it like for her when she came home and had to face the loss of her hand? He couldn’t imagine the frustration she must have dealt with learning how to use a prosthesis to do things most people took for granted.

  He almost asked, but they weren’t close enough for that question.

  “What happened, anyway?” She asked. “There are all kinds of rumors going around. Everything from skydiving accident to a mishap with a mechanical bull.” Her eyes said she was enjoying this a little too much.

  “Seriously?” Why on earth would anyone be coming up with that kind of shit, much less talking about his injury in the first place?

  “Yup. Renee over in accounting is guessing it happened during kinky BDSM role playing that went awry, but she’s a little obsessed with Fifty Shades, if you ask me.”

  Warrick stared blankly at Sara. He was sure his brain was attempting automatic shutdown so he didn’t have to acknowledge the fact his employees were imagining him in a BDSM dungeon. It wasn’t working.

  “I—” He stopped and just stared at her. “What?”

  This made Sara laugh harder.

  He should make sure she knew it hadn’t been some crazy BDSM experiment gone wrong. Shouldn’t he? “Basketball,” he said abruptly.

  And she laughed harder.

  Chapter 9

  Sara crossed the park, balancing a tray of small coffees in her hand. She’d had to get out of the building, to get away and clear her head. One minute, she’d been laughing with Warrick, and the next…well, she didn’t know what happened. The energy in the room shifted somehow. It had become charged, and the charge had come directly from the energy zipping back and forth between them. It had thrown her off.

  He’d noticed it too. She’d seen the minute he became aware of the shift, and he hadn’t seemed any happier about it than she’d been.

  She steadied the tray of drinks with the stump of her left arm as she scanned the park. She was giving her arm a break from the prosthesis while she was out. One thing she’d noticed, no one in the homeless population seemed to bat an eye at her stump. Some of her friends didn’t either, and it was what had drawn her to them. Samantha, for example, hadn’t been the least bit phased by seeing the portion of Sara’s forearm that was thinner than it should have been, where the muscle had been torn right from the bone. She didn’t seem to mind the angry scarring or any of that. Instead, Samantha had been immediately fascinated with helping Sara design her prostheses. They’d calculated figures together and tried various attachments, without any of the unease she typically found when engaging with new people. It was why the two were close friends now.

  The first time she’d shown the slightest bit of hesitation at removing her prosthesis, Samantha had taken care of the issue. In true Samantha style, her friend lifted her shirt clear up to her neck, flashing her breasts at Sara. It brought the laughter Samantha was likely hoping for. It also exposed the crescent-shaped scars that topped each breast, a result of Samantha’s horrific run-in with armed mercenaries sent to kidnap her.

  “There.” Samantha had pulled her shirt back into place. “We’re good now. Take it off.”

  Sara shook off the memory as she spotted a small group of people in the park and recognized two of the three faces. Darla was one of them. She thought one of the men might be named Matt, or maybe Dave. She didn’t know the other one at all. She headed that way and offered the coffee silently to the group. All three took a cup, nodding their thanks.

  “You goin’ go broke, you keep this up,” Darla offered, but her smile and the way she wrapped her hands around the cup told Sara a different story. Darla was no longer homeless thanks to Co
nnecticut’s zero homelessness initiative. She had recently moved into a room at a local place, but she came out and spent most days with her friends. She’d told Sara she couldn’t stand to look at four walls when she wasn’t asleep.

  “I’ll tell my boss I need a raise,” she said, smiling back, before walking toward the other end of the park. One man sat alone on a bench. She didn’t know his name yet, and he seemed to keep clear, even of the others. She had a feeling interacting with people was hard for him. He seemed to be living inside his own head most of the time.

  Sara approached slowly, and waited until the older man looked at her. He seemed to look through her for a minute, then his face brightened with recognition, and she moved forward, her hand outstretched to offer the last of the cups of coffee.

  “You came back,” he said, a somewhat reverent disbelief in his voice. He didn’t move to take the coffee, so Sara pulled it from the wedged spot on the tray and set it next to him on the bench, then sat down on the other side of it.

  “I said I would.” She looked at him and ignored the smell emanating from him. A heavy beard covered most of his face. It was yellowed as if the grime and soil had soaked in to discolor it permanently, and she felt a tug at her heart. Her grandfather had had trouble caring for himself when he’d gotten older, having a hard time bathing or even remembering to bathe. Her grandfather had the benefit of family to help him though. She wondered if this man had anyone.

  She’d also seen him favor the right side of his body, and she wondered if he had been in an accident. She’d never ask about it. It wasn’t any of her business. She never questioned the people she brought meals or coffee to out in the park.

  She hadn’t talked with this man much, but he didn’t strike her as a veteran. Still, he’d seen things in life, she would guess. Been hurt, and not just physically. There was a bone deep pain she recognized in him.

  “Drink the coffee,” she said. “It’ll warm you up.” It wasn’t the kind of brittle cold weather they’d see during the winter yet, but they were certainly having a cold snap, and sitting on the cold bench hour after hour had to get to a body after a bit.

  He nodded, but didn’t pick up the cup. He simply smiled at her, and she wondered if he’d had much company since showing up in town. Darla had told her he was new in New Haven. He’d shown up a month ago, but hadn’t seemed to want to engage with many of them. Darla had passed this information on without judgement, but now Sara wondered about it. He certainly hadn’t seemed hesitant to talk to Sara.

  “Will you come back again?” He asked, and Sara nodded, then turned to look at the park. She wondered what he watched as he sat on the bench. She’d seen him on this bench before.

  Sara glanced toward the sky, but her eyes caught on the figure in the large window at the top floor of Simms Pharmaceutical. Warrick. He stood and looked out over the park, seeming as though he might be looking straight at her. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away.

  “You’ll come back?” The man asked again.

  Sara nodded, wanting to offer some reassurance. “I’m Sara. What’s your name?”

  “Buddy. You can call me Buddy.”

  “I have to go now, Buddy, but I’ll come back and see you again.” She stood and pushed the coffee closer to him on the bench. He smiled, seeming to snap out of whatever memories had gripped him moments before, and picked up the cup this time. He sipped and Sara smiled at him and waved, before turning back toward the building.

  Tyvek watched as she walked away. It was her. She was back. She was different this time, but her eyes were the same. He would always know her eyes. It wasn’t the color of the brown eyes they both shared. In fact Vicki’s had been a little lighter. It was the kindness in the eyes. His Vicki had always had that kindness in her. She was too kind. He was beginning to see that.

  He looked at the Simms Pharmaceutical building and scowled. He had hoped she’d be strong enough this time. That she would walk away from the temptation Warrick held, but she’d never been strong where Warrick Staunton was concerned. Even as a teenager, she’d been drawn to Warrick like he was some kind of drug.

  Not this time. Tyvek hadn’t been firm enough with her before. This time, he’d make sure she wasn’t drawn in again.

  Chapter 10

  “You connect with them in a way most people don’t.”

  Sara turned in her seat to face Warrick as he drove them out to the site where her prostheses would be manufactured. His statement had come out of nowhere and she truly had no idea what he was talking about. “Back it up and give me the whole conversation this time.”

  He let out a huff of laughter and shook his head. “Sorry. Yesterday. I saw you talking to the homeless man in the park. You go there a lot to talk to them. You seem to connect with them. I was just wondering why.”

  Sara shrugged and turned back to the road. “They’re just people.”

  “True.” He didn’t offer any more.

  She was more surprised than she’d care to admit when the next words came out of her mouth. “Transients are safe. They don’t expect me to stick around and I don’t expect them to stick around.”

  The weight of her admission hung in the air around them as Warrick pulled into the drive of the old Simms compound. They were now calling it Simms II even though it was Simms I if you thought about it. It was the original Simms Pharmaceutical building.

  Part of her got the creeps any time they came to the site, knowing a woman had been left to burn here a month before. She’d been saved, but the event was troubling nonetheless. Sara had met Carrie Hastings and the man who’d saved her, Jarrod Harmon. He was a detective who was friends with Jack Sutton and Jack’s cousin Chad. Carrie had seemed nice, although they hadn’t talked much. Sara and Samantha had been having coffee one day when the couple had come in and stopped by to say hello to Samantha. When Samantha introduced them, Sara realized who they were.

  Warrick parked in front of the lab that was being converted into the facility to produce her prostheses and they stepped out. He was still wearing an air cast on his ankle, but he’d abandoned the crutches.

  The old administration building was being refurbished and would be leased out to other companies. The building William Tyvek had set on fire was being torn down. Warrick planned to wait on building anything on the site until he had a lessee for it so the new structure could be custom designed for whoever leased it.

  The foreman on the project met them at the temporary chain metal fence surrounding the structure and handed them each a hard hat to put on. The gesture sent a memory through Sara and she remembered putting her protective helmet on her head hundreds of times when she was deployed. It didn’t take much for that memory to warp into the sight of her helmet lying on the ground beside her when she’d been thrown from the armored vehicle she’d been in the day she lost her hand. A roadside bomb. The smoke and noise. Everything had sounded muffled, the way things sound when you’re in the bathtub and you submerge your ears under the water.

  She stood still, her hands on the hard hat as she remembered the feeling of looking around her. Seeing the others in her unit. Feeling relief that Johnson and Danners were all right. Then turning when they shouted and ran toward her. Looking to her left to see who they were running for. The realization they were running for her. Because her arm…no, not her arm. Blood. A bloody stump where her hand should have been. She’d moved it then, pulling it away from where the truck lay. The pain had roared through her as she put two and two together and her brain kicked into gear. Her stomach had twisted as bile raced up her throat and she lost the contents of her stomach. The hand that should have been there was now under the truck. She could see it. See the ligaments, torn muscle and bits of cellulose.

  “Sara!” Warrick shook her gently, as he called to her and she snapped back.

  It wasn’t Johnson and Danners calling to her. They had called her Blackburn that day, just as they always had. They were protective of her, as the only woman in their unit. The
y’d called to her and told her to hang tight while they got her out of there. And they had. They’d gotten her right out to safety and treatment, and she’d gone home.

  “Sara,” Warrick said, quietly now as the foreman moved away, giving them space at Warrick’s hard glance. “Are you okay?”

  Sara nodded. She didn’t have flashbacks anymore. Not in a long time, but she knew they’d probably come once in a blue moon forever. It was something she accepted and lived with. Nothing that had happened to her overseas would ever go away entirely. She forced a smile. “I’m good. We can go in now.”

  Warrick studied her and she scowled at him. “Go. Now.” She pointed to the building. She hated attention on her. And attention from this man made her doubly nervous. She didn’t like for anyone to ever see her vulnerable or weak, but the idea of Warrick seeing her that way was even worse.

  He seemed so perfect, she mused. Never mind, seemed. The man was perfect.

  And she was not. Not even close. She tucked her left arm against her side, almost hiding it behind her back, but not quite going that far, and walked toward the building. They were here to check the progress on the room that would house the techs charged with assembling the prostheses and testing each of the hands as they came off the line.

  “Everything’s on schedule?” Warrick asked the foreman, who fell in line alongside them again as they entered the building. Sara couldn’t believe how fast they’d been able to repurpose the rooms and put together clean rooms for the manufacturing and assembly. Half of the building was finished already and the components of her hands were being fabricated on 3D printers that were twice as large and much faster than the one she’d been working on during the design phase.

  “Just barely,” the foreman said. “It’s a hell of a schedule.”

  Warrick didn’t apologize for the schedule. Sara had a feeling he didn’t apologize for anything in his life and she realized somewhere along the way, her view of him had begun to change. She’d thought he was this trust fund guy who’s had everything given to him, but the truth was, he seemed to be busting his ass to make sure his employees had a job at the end of the month. She had to respect that.