by Blair Grey
Where to even begin with that one.
The truth was, I didn’t know what was holding me back. Part of it was, it had been so long. I didn’t think I had forgotten how to do it; I wasn’t that stupid. But maybe there was a part of me that was worried I might start getting attached to him if we had sex. And that was the last thing I wanted.
I couldn’t go getting attached to him. I was busy, and I didn’t believe in the idea of finding my one true love. I was too jaded at this point. I realized that I was probably never going to have what Rachel and Victor had, and I had come to terms with that. It probably had something to do with the way I’d been raised. Why open myself up to hurt for no reason?
And besides, even if I were looking for my soul mate, Marcus was far from it. Sexy though he might be, I wasn’t about to end up with some tattooed hunk of muscle. If the hulking biker look wasn’t enough to convince me he was trouble, that knife cut along his forearm definitely was. I didn’t need to get caught up in something like that.
But I wanted to enjoy tomorrow night, and I didn’t want Rachel to talk me out of going out with him. I shrugged. “I don’t put out on a first date,” I said.
Rachel rolled her eyes and groaned. “God, you’re such a prude,” she said. “How are you ever going to get pregnant?”
“Artificial insemination,” I told her, sticking out my tongue.
“Yeah, yeah,” Rachel said. A motherly look of concern came into her eyes. “Just make sure you’re careful, okay? Do you want me to tag along with you? Sounds like you don’t really know this guy very well, and I don’t want you to get into a situation you can’t handle.”
I was almost tempted by the offer, even though I knew Rachel would be hauling me out of there as soon as she got a look at Marcus. I shook my head. “Nah, I’ll be fine,” I told her. “I’ll text you if things are going terribly.”
“Sounds good,” Rachel said, smiling at me. “Who knows, maybe you’ll decide to put out after all. He could be Mr. Right.”
I snorted. “If he is, then he won’t mind waiting a couple dates before having sex with me.”
Rachel rolled her eyes but didn’t comment.
13
Marcus
Saturday
I finally decided on a place to take Leila to, thanks to a recommendation from Will. He said it was a place that Belle loved, so I had to believe it was the kind of place that any chick would dig. Even if I felt pretty out of place in my button-down shirt and slacks.
I always had this weird bit of dysphoria when I came to places like this. The tattoos covering my arms and chest told everyone I didn’t belong here. The fact that I was in a biker gang would tell them more of the same if they only knew that. I could picture myself as they saw me, and I knew I didn’t fit in, no matter what I wore or how much time I spent trimming my beard so that it wasn’t even slightly scruffy.
But hell, I was an educated man. I had a master’s degree, which was probably more than a lot of these people could say. What right did they have to judge me? If I wanted to take my lady out somewhere nice, then I was going to do that. They couldn’t stop me.
Not that Leila was my lady. She was definitely her own person. I was still mildly surprised that she had agreed to go out on a date with me at all. Even though I could tell that she was as attracted to me as I was to her, I had expected her to protest, to remind me that she was too busy and that she couldn’t do this. I thought I was going to have to work a lot harder to break down those walls.
For a moment, I wondered if maybe she was planning on standing me up. Maybe that was why she had wanted to meet at the restaurant rather than at her place. But when I got to the restaurant, I was surprised to see that Leila was already there.
I looked at my watch. I was a couple of minutes early. I grinned at the thought that she had gotten there even earlier. She must have been pretty excited to see me.
I didn’t comment on that, though. Instead, I just took the seat opposite her. “You look amazing,” I told her.
She blushed and ducked her head. “Thanks,” she said. “You clean up pretty nicely, too.”
We perused our menus in silence for a moment. Once the waiter had come to take our orders, though, there was no more distraction. I smiled easily at her. “How was your week?” I asked. “All good around the hospital?”
“Yeah, it was pretty long. But it was good,” Leila said, smiling back at me.
“You seem to be in there every time I am,” I mused. “You must work a lot of shifts.”
“I do,” Leila agreed.
“Trying to pay back those med school loans?” I guessed.
Leila laughed and shook her head. “No, actually. My dad set up a trust fund for me when I was a kid, and I was able to use that to pay for school. Between that and the work I did while I was in school, plus the scholarships that I got, I was able to graduate debt-free.”
“Impressive,” I said. “Especially for a trust fund kid. Aren’t you supposed to take that money and go explore the world, drinking and partying until you’re broke and you have to come crawling back to Daddy for more money?”
Leila grimaced. “It wasn’t really like that,” she said. “My dad had a lot of money when I was a kid, but he made some bad investments. And I wouldn’t come crawling back to him now anyway.” She paused. “He and I don’t have a relationship anymore.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, assuming that meant either that her father wasn’t around anymore, like he had moved away, or else he was dead.
She shrugged and changed the subject. “What about you—do you have any family?”
“The guys I work with are kind of like family,” I said cautiously. I still didn’t want her to know about Red Eyes. Not yet. Not that I was involved in too much illegal stuff. The club was pretty tame as far as those things went. But still.
I wasn’t sure why her opinion of me mattered so much to me, but I couldn’t deny it did.
“You’re lucky,” Leila said, making a face. “The people I work with definitely aren’t like family to me. Which you’d think they would be, given the number of hours we spend together and the number of grisly experiences we’ve shared.”
I laughed. “Don’t get along with any of them?”
“Not really,” she admitted. “I mean, I get along with them, they’re just not friends.”
“You wouldn’t go out for drinks with them after work?” I suggested.
“Exactly.” Leila frowned. “I don’t know, most of them just seem like they went into nursing because they knew they could get a job at it. Not because they actually want to help people. And there are a couple of them that really cut corners, too. It drives me crazy.”
“I can imagine,” I said, smiling at her.
“What?” she asked suspiciously.
“What do you mean, what?” I asked.
“That smile,” she said, pointing at my face. “I know you mean something by it.”
I laughed and shook my head. “I just could tell that you were one of those stick-up-the-ass professionals. In a good way. I like a woman who gets the job done tidily.”
Leila still looked like she didn’t know whether to take that as a compliment or not. But finally, she shrugged, giving me a rueful smile. “I guess I am,” she admitted. “I just like to have things done the right way. Efficiently.”
“Fair enough,” I said. The waiter brought over our wine, and after I did the pretentious taste test, he poured us each a glass. I swirled mine around for a moment, trying to think of something to talk about that might set her a little at ease, since I could tell she was nervous. “So what’s the best thing you’ve ever seen, working at the hospital?”
Leila raised an eyebrow at me. “Usually people ask the opposite,” she said. “They want to know the worst thing I’ve ever seen, or the weirdest thing.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I wasn’t interested in the worst thing she’d ever seen because I’d seen some of that stuff myself. It had
been a long time since anyone had threatened Red Eyes, and I’d been too young to really understand what was going on back when I was a teenager. But I’d seen some pretty grisly nights. Some nights when Dad came home looking like shit and covered in blood, things like that. I knew the kinds of things that happened in the shadows. I didn’t want to talk about those things with Leila.
She thought about the question for a moment and then smiled. “Probably the best one was Geordie Christiansen,” she said. “He was in and out of the hospital for two years with cancer, and his wife just got more and more sad-looking. She had all these plans for what they’d do when he got better, but you could see that she didn’t really believe he was ever going to get better. And no one else really did, either. He had this really rare form of cancer, all experimental treatments. We were doing the best we could, but he was getting weaker and weaker.”
“Come on, woman, this is supposed to be an uplifting story, not a depressing one.”
Leila laughed. “It is!” she promised. “The day that his doctor told Geordie that his cancer was in remission, the doctor handed over two round-the-world flight tickets. He’d worked with a travel agent and booked the whole thing for them. Expenses paid for, all the activities that Geordie’s wife had added to the list. They went everywhere for the next two years, all the highlights and a bunch of off-the-beaten-path places, too. And he sent the hospital a postcard from every single place they went.”
She paused. “I wasn’t here for all of that, I’ve just heard the story so many times that I could practically recite it verbatim from the guys who were, but how amazing is the story?”
Watching her talk about it, seeing the way her face lit up, I could suddenly understand why she went into nursing. She really did like helping people. There was something of a romantic in her, I could tell.
I reached out and took her hand, where it rested on the table. She looked surprised for a moment, but she didn’t pull away.
“He didn’t die the next year or something, did he?” I joked.
Leila laughed. “No, he’s still happily cancer-free, five years later,” she said. “He volunteers at the hospital now, in the cancer ward. He’s one of my favorite people that I’ve ever met. And for a lot of people, it’s tough to go back there. Reminds them of a really dark time in their lives. But Geordie’s there a couple times a week, just lending an ear to people. Letting them know that someone else knows what they’re going through and that there’s hope. It’s really sweet.”
Our food arrived, and we both dug in. “You said something about a friend with a son,” I said, figuring that was more safe territory for talking.
Sure enough, Leila’s face lit up. “Yeah,” she said. She laughed and plucked at her dress. “This is actually Rachel’s dress. She helped me get ready. I wasn’t sure what to wear, and I don’t really have many nice clothes. It’s not like I have an opportunity to wear them much. But her husband is the owner of this start-up business that’s really taken off, and she goes to business functions with him sometimes while I babysit her son.”
She chatted about Gavin and her friend Rachel for a little bit, and I just watched her, listening to her words. She was really sweet. It was obvious that she cared a lot about her friend and the boy. It made me start to wonder about her. Would she want a family one day? What would she be like with children?
But it was too soon to start thinking things like that. Suddenly, she seemed to realize the same thing that I did: that this discussion was getting dangerously close to one on where we saw ourselves in ten years. An important relationship discussion, but this was only our first date. She trailed off.
We were both silent for a moment, and then she cleared her throat. “I feel like I’m talking too much,” she admitted. “It’s been a really long time since I was out on a date.”
“What made you agree?” I asked curiously.
“Maybe the fact that you wouldn’t get out of the hospital otherwise, and I didn’t need everyone thinking that I was causing drama?” she suggested, but I could tell that that wasn’t it. After a long moment, she sighed and looked away, taking a sip of her wine. We were through most of the bottle now, and I could tell from the flush in her cheeks that she didn’t drink very often. She seemed pretty lucid still, though.
“I just wanted to have a little fun,” she finally admitted. “Not that I don’t, with the things that I normally do, but I don’t know, I guess I’ve sort of been in a rut lately. It’s like I’m doing the same things over and over again. I go to work, I hang out with Rachel and Gavin, I relax around my apartment.”
“You wanted to have a little fun, did you?” I asked teasingly, even though I remembered what she had said at the hospital, about how we were just going to go to dinner together and then head straight home—to our separate homes—afterward. Was it taking advantage of her, asking if she wanted to go to bed with me now that I’d gotten some wine in her? Probably.
So instead, I said, “Why don’t you let me walk you home? We won’t do anything. If you invite me in, I’ll decline. But I just want to make sure that you get home safe.”
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” Leila said haughtily, but I could tell it was just an automatic reaction. She bit her lip; she was clearly considering it. “I want to go back to your place,” she said quietly.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” I said slowly, even though I could already feel the blood rushing toward my lap at the thought of bringing her home and fucking her to within an inch of consciousness. “If I take you home, I’m not going to be able to keep my hands off you.”
“Who says I want you to keep your hands off me?” Leila practically purred.
I laughed. “You did, at the hospital,” I reminded her. “Before you started drinking wine.”
“Before I had a real conversation with you,” Leila said, her eyes turning suddenly serious. “Marcus, please. I’m an adult. And I want this. I want you. I have ever since you came into the hospital the first time. It’s just been a while, and I was holding back.”
I stared at her, but she seemed certain. And who was I to argue? Like she said, she was an adult. She was responsible for her own actions.
“All right,” I said. “Let me pay the bill, and we’ll get out of here.”
“All right,” Leila said evenly.
As we walked back toward my house, she nestled under my arm. It made it awkward to walk that way, but I didn’t mind. I liked having her warm curves pressed against me. “Are you sure about this?” I asked as we headed up the front walk.
In answer, she stopped, turning to face me and grabbing two fistfuls of my collar. She yanked my face down toward hers and kissed me hard. It might have been a while since she was on a date, but she was a good kisser: just the right amount of pressure, with a little bit of tongue sneaking in there. I groaned, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her even tighter against me in the night’s air.
Slowly, she started unbuttoning my shirt, and I pulled away with a laugh. “You might want to wait until we’re inside for that, darling,” I told her, winking down at her.
She fished in my pocket and dug out my keys, holding them up in the air. “Then let’s get inside,” she said breathlessly.
Fuck, there was something hot about the raw, carnal way she looked at me, like she wanted this even more desperately than I did. Which was saying something, given that my slacks already felt uncomfortably tight.
I grabbed the keys from her and led the way to the front door, fumbling to get it unlocked. I had just managed to shove the keys into the lock when she was on me again, pressing me back against the door and putting her lips insistently against mine for another kiss.
I growled and flipped us around, pressing her back against the door and pressing a leg in between hers. She ground down against me and broke the kiss with a gasp, quickly repeating the motion. I smirked at her. “Think you could get yourself off just like that?” I asked.
Her confi
dence flickered for a moment, and she looked bashfully up at me through her lashes. “If you don’t want this, all you have to do is say so,” she murmured.
I cut her off with another kiss, plunging my tongue into her mouth and drawing sweet little whimpers out of her. I reached around behind her to unlock the door, as she continued her way with the buttons of my shirt. She pushed the fabric back off my shoulders just as we tumbled through the front door, with me barely keeping the two of us on our feet.
I pulled back, grinning down at her. This was going to be fun, I could already tell.
14
Leila
Saturday
I didn’t know what possessed me to go back with Marcus to his place. I kept trying to remind myself that this wasn’t the type of girl I was. But I wanted him, in ways I had never wanted anyone before. I needed to get my hands on him, to explore his body and to let him explore mine. My panties had been damp practically from the time that he had shown up at the restaurant, maybe even before that. I was excited about this. And as much as I loved my life, there were so few things that excited me like this.
I had shown up early for the date, and I didn’t regret it. We’d had a great time, or at least I definitely had. He’d been so nice, and he’d really been listening to me, even as I babbled on about Gavin and Rachel and things that by all rights he shouldn’t care about. At first, I’d thought it was just because he was hoping to get into my pants by the end of the night.
But then he’d offered to walk me home and promised that he wouldn’t come up to my apartment even if I asked him to. When I really thought about it, that was the moment when I’d let my guard down. He was letting me take things at my own pace. Like he was genuinely a good guy. Whatever else he might be, whatever business he might have that had caused someone to stab him in the arm with a knife, he was a good guy.