“How long?”
“Several sessions, definitely. A few months, certainly. I would venture to say close to a year. Possibly longer.” She’d seen tattoos take ages to fade. And some…some never went away. “There’ll almost always be remnants, Mr. Blane. I just need to make sure you understand that. Your skin’s never going back to how it looked before.”
He nodded and sighed, that big back curving slightly, as if in defeat. Were he a woman, she’d put a hand on his shoulder, comfort him, but this man… No. Better keep that to a minimum.
“I’ve got a couple farther…uh…farther south.” One wide, ink-blackened hand gestured vaguely to his legs, and she smiled nervously, nodding as if this were all just par for the course. As if she hosted half-naked bad boys in her office every day.
“Yes, well. How about we start with one session whenever we can fit you in, and we’ll—”
“Start now.”
“Oh. No. There’s prep that needs to be done. We need to numb you for big surfaces like this. And then when you come in, we’ll also ice you down. For the pain.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly, and she could feel his nerves or fear or whatever that edge was. “Clock’s ticking, Doc.” His expression grew impossibly harder: jaw tight, lips curving down into a sharp, pained sneer. “Just…” One of those big, rough-looking hands skimmed his chest. “At least my face and knuckles. Here too. Whatever a suit can’t cover up to start with, but—”
That surprised her. “A suit?” she asked before she could hold the question in.
He gave a tight smile, one brow arched high. “Yeah. Can’t picture that, huh?”
“Oh, no, that’s not what—”
“I know what you meant, Doctor.” He caught her eye, held it, intimidating, but also human behind the markings. “Not offended.”
“Look.” She glanced at her watch, trying not to think of the parody of a timepiece etched into his wrist. “It’s late on a holiday weekend and—”
“I don’t need pain meds. I can do this. And I know you got family waiting. But maybe you could just…” He looked away before nodding once and turning back to her with a harshly expelled breath. “You’re right. Not the best time. I’ll let you get back to your life.” He stood, swiftly and smoothly, and George couldn’t help but stare at the mess of his skin, contrasted with the perfection of his body—the mystery of the man within.
All sorts of bodies came through her clinic, young and old, tight and saggy. She’d examined some whose scars were hidden and others whose damage was obvious. There’d been babies, fresh and new and already marred for life, and yes, there were sometimes men she admired. Next door, for God’s sake, was a plethora of hard bodies to choose from. The MMA school overflowed with them—men who lifted and punched and fought and worked, but this…this was masculinity in its purest form. This man didn’t primp in the mornings or even look in the mirror. He got up, he washed, he walked out the door. Only there wasn’t a door in her musings. There was nothing but the great outdoors, savage and unkempt, or the mouth to a cave.
Hard and dark, his hair almost black, with brows that arrowed straight out from three deep frown lines. And his body—she stared, caught up in the realness of this man, which was the oddest thought, as if the rest of her patients were somehow less than this one. This wasn’t just another epidermis to examine. This was muscle, undeniable in its curves and hollows. And even the damage was heartbreakingly appealing, layered as it was on top of that firm flesh, his energy palpable, tensile strength, so real that she could almost feel him vibrate with it.
Beneath her gaze, under the harsh, white light, she could have sworn his nipples hardened, and viscerally, her body felt it, reacted as if separate from her doctor’s brain.
Keep it in your pants, Hadley! The man is probably dangerous, possibly in trouble, and, if nothing else, completely inadvisable.
Out of guilt, as if to make up for her rogue brain or overactive hormones or whatever the hell was pushing her to skim the line between brazen and professional, she put a hand up to stop him.
“Fine. We’ll do your knuckles and your eyes and see how it goes from there. Your face is… You’ll need injections and metal eye shields. Would you like something to drink? Water or tea?”
“Tea?” he asked, that brow up again, and she felt herself flush.
Right. Not a man who drank tea.
“All right, well, I’ll need to numb your lids first.”
“No numbing.”
“It’ll be painful, Mr. Blane. Like being splashed with hot bacon grease.” I know firsthand, she almost added but decided to keep that detail to herself. “And if you accidentally open your eyes, it’s… Look, I don’t recomm—”
“No numbing,” he repeated firmly.
“Okay, then. But I’ll have to insert eye shields. They’re like big metal contact lenses.”
“Sounds sexy.” His voice was low with what might have been humor—an apology, perhaps, for his abrupt words before.
George’s eyes flew to his to find him watching her, and rather than dwell on the way his gaze affected her, she looked quickly away and busied herself by collecting supplies. If nothing else, she could at least pretend to act professional.
She was, after all, a doctor.
3
Jesus Christ, the doc wasn’t kidding. This shit hurts.
Like poison, the Sultan ink hurt worse going out than it had being put on. There’d been other shit happening on the day Ape had gotten him, of course. Stuff like adrenaline. Fear too. Fear had been a distraction. Ape’s whispered words rushed back to him: I’ll pop your fuckin’ eyeball. He was still shocked the asshole hadn’t blinded him.
He’d been the traitor, after all. He’d deserved it in the eyes of the Sultans.
Here, Clay could feel the ink splitting apart with every painful pass of the laser, flooding his bloodstream, and one day soon, leaving him forever. Months. Months of this treatment, she’d said. It couldn’t happen fast enough.
Besides, what was a little more pain? It didn’t bother him. In fact, the burn helped center him.
A good thing, considering the goddamned racket the machine made. A fuck-ton of noise for such a small piece of technology. He eyed the big red Emergency Stop button on the machine’s console, wondering about the circumstances that might lead to pressing it. It let out these rhythmic beeps and zapping sounds that brought him right back to his room in the clubhouse, where he’d been caught like a rat. That feeling of being trapped and useless and alone, with the sound of gunshots tearing through the place. It was all he could do not to get up and bust the hell outta here. Or, more likely, cover his ears and curl into the fetal position, right there on the paper-covered table. He shut his eyes, tight, remembering Handles’s face just before that first bullet tore into his back. It was that face he saw over and over again. That look that told Clay the man wasn’t there to protect himself or his brothers. No, this was an execution. Pure vengeance. For taking them all in. For making them believe he was one of them. For making Handles like him, even love him, maybe, like a son.
But the woman—Dr. Georgette Hadley—kept Clay from losing himself in memory with calm, gentle touches. She moved his hand into place, held his body where it was, and kept his mind right there, in the room. Mostly.
He’d been fighting this thing for a while now, this compulsion to disappear into his head. Had fought it in the months at the hospital and the single week at home before they’d torched his place. He’d fought it while talking to that lawyer, Hecker.
Get that shit off your face, Navarro, the assistant U.S. attorney had said at their last meeting. You’ve got seven months to prep, and all you’ve gotta do is get your goddamned story straight, stay the hell outta sight, and get rid of the ink. I don’t wanna see a hint of that shit in the courtroom, you got it? At Clay’s resent
ful nod, the suit had headed to the conference room door before turning around and barking his last order. And for God’s sake, stop talking like a fucking biker.
I am a biker, he’d thought at the time. Although he didn’t feel quite so much like one without his chopper thrumming between his legs.
The laser skimmed over the knuckle of Clay’s middle finger, and he held back a groan, forcing his body to stay seated. Not an easy task, despite his claims of immunity to pain.
Not immune. He just knew there were worse things in life than physical suffering.
“Need a break?” the doctor asked, focusing the numbing blast of cool air on his hand.
“No,” he managed. “Don’t stop.” I’ll keep it together.
“I’ve got the levels low for today. But it’s still going to burn. That’s inevitable. You’ll blister before scabbing up. And I can’t guarantee you won’t scar, especially with the hands. We wash them and work with them. They’re the most painful, usually. Well, besides those eyelids. I don’t know what kind of work you do, but it could be a handicap. At least temporarily. Let me know if you need a note or—”
“Off the books, Doc.”
“Right.”
Two more knuckles, then the clock face on his wrist before she stopped and leaned over to shut down the machine. Silence, as loud as the buzzing had been, engulfed the room.
“You got good aim,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“You never miss your mark.”
Although he couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark, protective glasses they both wore, he noted how her brows lowered briefly before they lifted, understanding dawning. “Oh, you mean the laser? No, no. This is an Nd:YAG laser. It follows the ink. Kind of…ah…hunts it down.”
“So what happens if you accidentally get yourself?”
“Nothing,” she said with a smile, tugging off her glasses and revealing those eyes again. “And the treatment gets easier as we go. The less ink you have, the less pain. Next time, it won’t hurt as much.”
“Good deal,” he said before she tightened her lips in a smile and moved on to his face—the numbers on his lids that weighed on him the most, that made him a target, that meant he could no longer do his job.
The ink he hadn’t agreed to.
“How’s it feel?”
The air was thick with the stench of singed hair and maybe burning flesh too. He swallowed and stretched out his fingers. “Burns, I guess.” Understatement of the year. But better than Ape doing it. Anything was better than Ape with his tattoo machine.
“Okay. Let’s do the eyes now, Mr. Blane.”
“Sounds good.”
“This is dangerous. And without the anesthesia, it won’t be easy.”
“I get that, Doc. But I was told you’re the only one around who’ll do the eyes.”
“That’s true.”
“It’s why I came to you,” he said with a big, fake grin. Anything to put them on even footing. What was it about this woman that made him so off-kilter?
“Good.” Her smile echoed his, only it looked real. It shamed him with its warmth.
When the doctor slid the eye shield things in, they were uncomfortable and almost impossible not to blink out. His eyeballs felt strange—thick and paralyzed and blind. Worst of all, it reminded him of corpses, those cotton balls morticians slid under the lids to make the eyes look full and alive again.
Full and alive. With a detached, self-deprecating sort of humor, he wondered how that would feel.
* * *
In the short time it took to do the eyelids, the man on George’s examination table transformed…or went somewhere. She could see the moment it happened. The moment his soul left his body, she thought, before realizing how absolutely odd that was. He wasn’t dead after all. He was just…gone. Narcoleptic, perhaps? She’d gone to school with a man who suffered from that.
Narcoleptic or not, she couldn’t imagine falling asleep mid-treatment. She’d undergone it herself and knew exactly how painful that laser could be. And on the eyelid… Not something she could imagine sitting through without proper numbing.
After finishing up, George removed the eye shields and applied a thick layer of petroleum jelly to his eyes and hands, up to his wrists. After a brief hesitation, she cleaned up around him, ignoring the strange brew of feelings that had replaced her initial wave of fear: curiosity, empathy, and attraction that worked away inside of her as she wondered how on earth she was going to get this big, slumbering man out of her clinic.
Finally, she laid a palm to the warm flesh of his shoulder with some notion that she’d shake him awake. Fast and hard, his hand gripped hers, squeezed, held her there, and his eyes opened, cold and unfocused but violent. Oh, she could feel the violence in that hard, shaking grasp, see it in those cloudy eyes.
For a split second, she froze, eyes glued to his unseeing ones, adrenaline coursing through her.
“What the fu—”
Her squeak interrupted that no-nonsense snarl, brought his hard gaze to hers, and as she watched, the man came back, his return as clear as his leaving had been.
His eyes took a quick inventory of the room before landing on his hand trapping hers. Finally, his hold loosened, his confusion disappeared.
“I…I’m sorry I frightened you. I’ll give you a minute to…” She let her words trail off, extricating her hand from his before rushing out of the room, her heart too big for her chest, her skin hot where he’d squeezed her. What if he hadn’t let go? A man like that—so big and rough, his body packed full of muscle—could do whatever he wanted to someone like George. What had she been thinking coming back here alone with him? She stopped in the hall and leaned against the wall, working to catch her breath.
He could have hurt her badly. He hadn’t looked like someone who wanted to hurt her, though. More desperate, like that initial instinctive response that made dogs or bears attack at the first hint of a threat. What kind of life made a man react like that?
By the time he emerged, Andrew Blane appeared to have recovered.
“I’m sorry” was all he said before she led him out to the reception area, turning lights off as she went.
“You’ll need petroleum jelly. Thick layers, reapplied often. Like I said, it’ll blister and then scab, but whatever you do, don’t pick at it. You don’t want to scar.”
“Right. Don’t need any more of those.”
“For the…” She swallowed, remembering the skin of his back. “For the rest, I recommend that patients purchase a pack of cheap, breathable cotton T-shirts, because you’ll need the jelly all over, and you don’t want to ruin your clothes.”
Night had almost descended when they finally made it outside, Andrew Blane holding the front door open for her and waiting as she locked it behind them.
“Have to pay you,” he said.
“No need.”
“No way, Doc. You’ve gotta let me pay for your services. I’m not a—”
“You wanted this off the books?” she cut through.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If you’re off the books, then you’re pro bono, which means—”
“On the books, then. I’m not a charity case.”
“Look, Mr. Blane, I can’t accept money from you and not include it in my accounting. It’s just not ethical.”
He looked to the side, shook his head, and shut his eyes hard on a sigh. “I appreciate it, Doctor. And I apologize for scaring you earlier.”
“You didn’t—”
“You were a woman alone and I pushed you to take care of me. I appreciate that.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Blane. Look, if there’s anything you need, anything else I can do…”
“Just need the tats gone.”
“That I can do.”
“That’s it.”
&n
bsp; She wanted to argue, wanted to ask him if he had a place to stay, give him dinner, make sure he was okay, but he clearly wasn’t the sort of man who accepted help. Besides, he was big and he could be frightening—she shouldn’t want to be around him, no matter how attractive he might be.
“So, you’d like to come in again, I imagine?” she forced herself to ask.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why don’t you call the office on Monday, and Cindy can—” She stopped herself, remembering. “Actually…we need to get you in after hours, don’t we?” And something about that idea had her pulse picking up.
“Whatever you can give me,” he said, sounding so eager that she had to flush. What on earth is wrong with me? “The sooner the better.”
“Monday?” she offered. “Five p.m.?” She pictured Mrs. Venable running into him in the waiting room and amended her offer. “Actually, make that closer to six.” She’d do paperwork while she waited. “Oh. Wait.” She pulled out a card and found a pen, then scribbled her cell on it. “I give my cell to after-hours patients. It’s easier to call me directly, once the answering service kicks in.”
“Monday. Great.” He took the card, and when he reached out with his other hand, she thought he meant to grab her arm. The few seconds he waited were awkward before she finally understood.
Gently, avoiding his gel-covered knuckles, she clasped it. Warm and firm around hers, his grip reminded her of why she did this, why she’d gone into medicine, why she offered these services: to help people.
And more than almost anybody she’d ever treated, George knew this man was in trouble.
The other thing she felt, the shimmer of excitement, she chose to ignore.
* * *
Clay watched the doctor’s Subaru disappear down Main Street. He was tempted to follow her, which made no sense whatsoever. Then he dug deeper and recognized the urge: protectiveness. Curiosity. Maybe a little something else thrown into the mix.
By Her Touch Page 3