Dammit.
“Will you fill out some paperwork for me?” I asked, trying to break the silence and hopefully the atmosphere. “We need details on him.”
He nodded, but the way he looked at me made me feel like he had a lot of other things on his mind. And it put them on my mind, too, which I hated. Distractions were a problem around here, especially blond-haired, blue-eyed ones that looked at me like that. I cleared my throat and turned to leave. One sidestep and he was in front of me, blocking the opening. It was just a curtain, but if I wanted to escape now I would have to crawl underneath.
Nothing sexy about that. I cursed myself for even caring.
“Really,” he said, and his voice was deep and husky. “Thank you.”
His face was so close to mine I could see the flecks of gray in his eyes. The blue had changed to the color of the ocean, dark and drowning deep, and he looked at me in a way that would have been offensive if my body didn’t respond to it so much.
The problem with doctors, though, is the fact that no matter what, your head is still firmly in place. Which meant that no matter how much heat he was pushing into my body with that stare, it was still damn offensive. And I wasn’t in the mood to play games. It was two in the morning and I had blood on my hands. His brother’s blood. If that wasn’t a mood kill already, I didn’t know what was.
“Let me go,” I said in a stern voice. He didn’t. Instead the cocky bastard grinned at me and stepped even closer, putting himself right up against me. His face was so close I could feel his breath on his skin. I was aware of his lips, and I fought the urge to sneak a look. His eyes were on mine, but I was so aware of my breasts underneath the white doctor’s coat, and I was sure he was, too.
We were caught like that in some kind of spell. His lips were so close I could almost taste them. What the hell was I thinking?
He moved forward in slow motion and pushed his lips against my cheek. It was a chaste kiss, technically, but there was so much heat behind it, it was as intimate as full-blown sex. I wondered how it would have been if it had been my lips instead. I felt heat creep up my cheeks, and I knew I was blushing like an idiot.
He saw it, too, because he grinned at me. The fact that he’d gotten me to a point where I lost myself pissed me off. I didn’t want to be in a situation where a man got me to forget what was most important. I took a deep breath, and I did what any woman with half a brain should do.
I slapped him in the face.
CHAPTER TWO
Daniel
Nights like tonight had my blood boiling and my fingers itching for a fight. The darkness pressed against my skin like it was alive, and there was a feeling of foreboding in the air that had the capacity to bear something dangerous. It was the stuff bikers fed off, and I was no different. I felt alive and burning in my skin.
I drove my motorcycle slowly through the streets of empty downtown. I was looking for someone, but the guy had given me the slip. I wasn’t too worried. I would give him some time to catch his breath—the chase was no fun when they gave up so quickly—and then I would go after him again. This was just a game. I was a big, fat cat, and he was a tiny, pathetic mouse. Bounty hunting was as much a predator-prey thing as in the wild.
Up ahead I saw a Harley turn onto the road. We passed each other in a roar of engines, nodding as we went along, but we didn’t stop and have a chat. We all had work to do. The Broken Lions was a motorcycle gang that patrolled the streets at nights, filling all the gaps where there were no cops to keep our own definition of peace, making sure all sorts of illegal orders came in and went to the right places without raising suspicion. Just another day at the office.
At least, that’s what I had the rest of them do. As the leader, I was allowed to choose my own work, and I worked as a bounty hunter instead, only organizing my boys and keeping tabs on them. There was just more of a thrill in chasing down guys who didn’t want to be caught than there was smuggling drugs under the radar. Maybe it was the one-on-one action that got me. Drugs were so boring.
My phone rang, and I pulled over to answer. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in not driving with a phone against my ear, but with the roar of the engine I wouldn’t be able to hear shit.
“What?” I barked into the phone when I saw Ben’s name on the screen. He was the biker that worked as our P.A. We didn’t officially call him that, but that was his job by tacit agreement.
“It’s Taylor,” he said. “He’s in hospital. OD’d on drugs. Jack came across him getting picked up by an ambulance.”
The message was short and to the point, without Ben trying to dance around the fact for the sake of my feelings. My blood ran cold, and my ears started ringing.
“Where?” I asked.
“St. Joseph’s,” he said.
I hung up before he could say anything else. I didn’t want to hear it. My head was a scrambled mess as I turned my bike to point in the direction of the hospital and opened throttle. It had been just me and Taylor for so long, I’d forgotten what it was like just to be a brother, and not some sort of father-figure, too. Not that I was the best example when it came down to being a male role model, but I kept Taylor alive, fed, and out of trouble. That was what love was about, right? I had no regrets.
If something happened to him now with him working out on the streets with us, I would never forgive myself.
He wasn’t a part of the gang. He didn’t get on a bike and risk his neck like the rest of the idiots in our gang did, but he was a big part of our group. He worked as a lawyer downtown, bailing out all sorts of criminals like us as a district attorney, and he handled our paperwork so that it never went through anyone who could officially screw us over.
The gang loved him though. He wasn’t just our lawyer. He was everyone’s little brother, not just mine. He was a good kid, who had his head screwed on right. It had taken me years to get his rebellion and anger toward our parents out of him, but he’d gone to law school and he’d made something of himself. And he hadn’t gotten in trouble with any girls, either.
He wasn’t following in my footsteps. Nothing made me prouder.
And now the little asshole had gone and OD’d on drugs. What a fucker. I’d made him promise since he was seventeen that he wouldn’t touch the stuff, and he hadn’t. At twenty-five, the urge to control something that was out of his control should have been out of him. Then again, anyone could fall into drugs, no matter their age. All that was needed was the right combination, and God knew there was more than enough of that going round.
I parked my bike close to the emergency room door, ignoring the wheelchair sign in the first bay, and shoved open those doors. My ears were still ringing. The urge to see him was an ache inside of me. I felt like I was going to throw up. Nothing manly about that. If he died, I didn’t know what I would do without him.
The hospital smelled like chemicals and blood. I shuddered, thinking that the blood might be Taylor’s. The metallic smell clung to the back of my throat doing nothing to help the nausea. The ladies behind reception eyed me as if I was bad news, and maybe I was. Right now, I didn’t give a shit.
I pushed through the doors that led from the waiting area to where the doctors did their magic, ignoring the receptionist shouting that I couldn’t go in there. If Taylor was in there, I was going in there, no matter what they said to me. The smell in here was even more overpowering, and my stomach rolled. If I retched now, I was going to look like a real asshole.
A woman in a white coat stood in the middle of the small passage that was created by curtained cubicles. Dark hair was pulled away from her face in a sensible bun, but her eyes got me—gunmetal gray and strong like a warrior’s. She’d seen a lot and gotten through it. She was the one I needed to talk to. If anyone was in control, she was. The others ran around like puppets obeying a master. She stood there as if she had the world in her hands and she handled it.
“Where is he?” I asked. My head was spinning and that smell was just egging me on. She raised h
er eyebrows at me and jutted her chin up a little. The defiance was hot as hell. I’d never seen anything like her before. She was small, but I didn’t doubt the size of her character. It was in her eyes, in her fearlessness.
“Who?”
I didn’t have the time for this shit. I wanted to scream. I wanted to break something. I wanted to scare the living shit out of every one of those pansy-ass nurses until they gave me what I wanted. Until they took me to Taylor. I took a deep breath and calmed the storm inside enough to get a coherent sentence out without any physical damage attached to it. This doctor would just fight me; she didn’t look like she would back down.
“My brother. He just came in with a drug overdose.” This was St. Joseph, right?
Her face changed. It softened, but not with pity. It was more like mutual understanding. Whatever I felt, I had the feeling she knew what it felt like. She gestured toward the cubicle on my left. I yanked the curtain back and took in the limp form on the bed.
It didn’t look like Taylor at all. Taylor was vibrant and full of life. His eyes laughed even when his mouth didn’t, and he was always alive with some idea, some plan. Life was colorful to Taylor, even when it looked like a black-and-white kind of hell to me.
And that kid on the bed just didn’t look like him. He was so pale that I was almost scared he was dead. His eyes were sunken in and dark, and his sandy hair was a mess. There were tubes going into a hole in his throat and blood caked around the base of his neck.
The doctor talked to me, but I didn’t register much. I just caught the last bit where she said he was okay. I walked toward him and leaned over the bed.
“Dammit, Taylor,” I said. I pushed my hands into the bed and leaned on my arms hard enough so that it cost me energy to do it. I wanted to freak out and break something. I wanted to rip all that fancy wiring away from him, break all the beeping monitors so that they would shut up, shake Taylor, and tell him to stop fucking around.
It was easier to get violent than to deal with all this emotion. What the hell had he done to himself?
“What was it?” I asked. My voice broke, and I sounded like I wanted to cry. Dammit, I hated looking weak. I kept pressing down on my arms so that at least I had some sort of support. Being a biker was a bitch sometimes. I could never break down.
She said she didn’t know. Great. I needed to find out what the hell was going on.
I took a deep breath, forced all that emotion into a little compartment, and shut it so that I wouldn’t be in danger of it bubbling out. I straightened myself up, satisfied that I was switched off enough not to lose it now. The upside of living on the tragic side of life was being able to switch off all the feelings that didn’t work for me so I could keep moving.
I turned to look at the doctor. Good God, she was a piece of work. And young, too. Doctors were usually gray and wrinkly. And male.
This one was beautiful. Her skin was smooth like porcelain, and her body was slight under that white coat. She wore black under it, comfortable pants, and a shirt with a relatively high neckline. Pity. I would have liked to see more of her body.
My eyes met hers, and they looked different from when I’d come in. They’d been set then, serious, ready for a fight. Damn attractive.
Now they were warm and dilated. Her hands were by her sides, not in her pockets, hanging loose and open. I wanted to be closer to her. There was something about her that made me sit up and take notice, and I hadn’t noticed a woman like this in a long time. Something about her made me want to get as close to her as I could, and stay there for as long as possible.
“Thank you for saving him,” I said. She nodded, and her face changed again. Again, not pity. Mutual understanding. I slid my eyes slowly over her body. Her mood changes were fascinating. Her eyes were captivating.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and moved her arms as if she wanted to fold them over her chest and cover up, but then thought better of it. I didn’t think any of it was a conscious decision.
“Will you fill out some paperwork for me?” she asked. I nodded, but my mind was on her body. The room seemed small, private, but I was still on the other side of it from her. “We need details on him.”
I took a step closer to her. Heat flowed from her body in a wave that made me dizzy. I wanted her. I’ve never wanted women like this, but I wanted her. I wanted her now. I fought the urge to readjust my pants. Nothing as unnerving as a dead giveaway that I was turned on. I didn’t want her to bolt from me; she looked like she had half a mind to.
She turned just as I thought it. I stepped in front of her so she couldn’t get to the opening without bumping right up against my chest. A part of me wished she would be stupid enough to try. She didn’t. This one wasn’t stupid. That was half of what was so attractive about her.
“Really,” I said, grasping at a reason to be this close and one that would keep her there longer. “Thank you.”
Her face didn’t go to the soft expression of a ‘you’re welcome’ as it had before. That stern look was locked in place now, her eyes the color of slate and her lips pursed. She was the kind of woman you didn’t fuck with, and it was sexy as hell. It just made me want to do it all the more.
“Let me go,” she said. Her voice was all command, but her body didn’t match up to it. She hadn’t moved away from me. I smiled. Her eyes were locked on mine and I was so close I could kiss her. It would be so inappropriate, but God it was tempting. Her eyes slid down to my lips for just a second, enough to tell me what she was thinking. She wasn’t disgusted by me. This woman was tough as nails.
Her body was almost right up against mine. I could practically feel her breasts pushing against me, although she was not touching me. I leaned forward, practicing self-control in a way that would do any man proud, and kissed her on the cheek. It was the least I could get away with. I really wanted more. A lot more.
She blushed—an actual blush with flushed cheeks and innocent eyes—and it was beautiful. But then her face fell as if she caught herself, her eyes spewed fire, and she lifted her hand.
The slap was in slow motion, but I couldn’t get away from it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. My skin stung after her hand made contact with my cheek, but her face was what got me.
Such anger. Such heat. Fuck. Me.
“Get him out of here,” she said in a louder voice, and I realized she wasn’t talking to me anymore. A nurse had appeared, and the curtain was wider open now. “Call security.”
As if they’d already been on standby—maybe the receptionist had summoned them—they appeared. Two men dressed in beige collared shirts and black ties looked at me as if I was the scum of the earth. Whatever. I wasn’t here for a fight. I’d gotten closer to her and that was all I’d wanted.
One took me by the arm, and I went willingly. I wasn’t going to fight it.
I turned and looked over my shoulder. She stood there with her feet planted wide, arms folded over her chest, and she glared at me. I painted a mental picture of her.
“Thanks again!” I shouted.
The security guards were flanking me, as if they expected me to bolt. One yanked me by the arm to keep me moving.
“I need to fill out paperwork for my brother,” I said when we passed the reception desk. They eyed each other—a silent conversation—and the one who held onto me nodded. They stood on either side of me while I filled in Taylor’s details on the clipboard. When it was done, I was hustled out the door like a criminal. When I got outside, I shrugged it off. It wasn’t the first time I was treated as if I wasn’t good enough to be somewhere.
My emotions soared. Taylor was on his deathbed, and I had just gotten kicked out of the hospital, but I couldn’t get that woman off my mind. Those eyes... I hadn’t gotten her name. I would have to look into that. I straddled my bike, shifting to make space for my body and its urges, and smiled.
I pulled out my phone and pressed speed dial number three. I’d programmed it years ago. Maybe it was time to remove Ruby
off speed dial—then again, we spoke so often it wasn’t like it meant anything more than what it was.
“I didn’t get him. I had an emergency with Taylor at the hospital,” I said the moment Ruby answered.
“Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.” I wasn’t going to tell her more than that. We’d been close once, but she lost all privileges to my personal life when she’d cranked her bitch dial up to full.
“You know, you used to call me at this time of night just to say hello.”
“That was when we were still dating. I don’t owe you that now.” I sounded like a dick. Ruby took it in stride. She was used to me by now. And maybe it was more her speed, anyway. She could turn ugly on me, too, if she wanted to. She’d done it enough times for me to know.
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