Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1)

by Susan Fanetti

  “What’re you doin’, baby?”

  Hovering above his midsection, she smiled. Her eyes twinkled in the eerie light of the room, but Rad didn’t see joy in her face. He saw need and fatigue, and he saw intimacy. Trust.

  “I need to be in control. I need to make something good happen.” She licked the length of his ugliest scar, straight down the center of his belly. Her tongue swirled in his navel and continued its progress downward until her mouth was on him. She sucked him as deep as she could, her hand wrapping around his base. He held on, but he let her go, let her have control.

  Fuck, she gave great head. She knew how to use her tongue and her hands together, how to move and when to suck, when to pull back and when to go deep.

  She made tiny little noises at the back of her throat. Rad loved the sound of them, and he loved the feel of them when she had him deep.

  But this was more than her giving him head. She was taking something, too, and Rad sensed it quickly. Usually she lingered and teased, made it last until he was nearly begging to come, but this time, she went full-tilt from the start.

  In fact, she was going too hard, too fast, too soon. He was cresting fast, painfully so, too fast for pleasure to keep up. He jacked himself off this hard sometimes, when he was angry and fired up and needed the release more than the pleasure.

  He didn’t want fucking Willa to be merely release.

  When her teeth scraped over his tip—no light, teasing touch over that swollen, sensitive spot—he took over, clutching her head to make her stop.

  “Easy.”

  She sat back abruptly, panting. “I—I’m sorry. Shit. I don’t—shit.”

  When she tried to move off of him, to toss the covers back and get out of bed, he was ready, and he caught her in his arms and flipped over, putting her under him.

  “Don’t be sorry. That was just a little rougher than even I like.” He settled between her legs, pressing his halfway-there cock against her pussy with a groan and a shudder. “Let me in, Willa. Let me make it good. Let me make it all better.”

  She hooked her legs around his hips, and he took that as an answer and slid deep, claiming her kiss as he did.

  When they came, it was together, pleasure and need coiling around them both.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Willa knocked on the door and opened it. “Knock, knock. How’re we doing? Still feeling okay?”

  The woman in the bed smiled. “I’m still great. Whoever invented the epidural should be sainted.”

  Willa laughed and checked the fetal monitor. The tape showed steady peaks, coming less than two minutes apart for the past twenty minutes. “You’re having a lot of contractions, Betsy. Are you feeling them?”

  “A little. It just feels like my belly is getting hard. But they don’t hurt at all. The last couple, there’s been maybe some pressure.”

  “Pressure? Like you have to push?” The last couple of contractions on the tape had peaked for more than a minute.

  “Maybe?”

  “Is that bad?” Betsy’s husband gaped at Willa, his complexion losing its color. Willa had him pegged for a fainter, once things got interesting—which might be soon.

  “Nope.” She plucked a pair of gloves from the container on the wall and pulled them on. “Everything’s been normal. The epidural takes the pain away, and sometimes it takes the urge to push, too, but if you’re feeling pressure, that’s good. Let’s check and see where we are.”

  She helped Betsy arrange her legs so that she could get between them. Flushing deep red now—oh, yeah, that guy was going to drop like a felled tree before this was over—Mr. Betsy stood up. “I’ll—I’ll go out and tell our folks.”

  Betsy frowned as her husband left the room—she knew what was up. “I don’t think Mark’s ready for this. He was happy when I first got pregnant, but lately…oh—I think I’m having one.”

  A check of the monitor showed that she was. Willa watched it, saw it spike as high as the one before and the plateau stretch another few seconds longer. Betsy was completely comfortable, but she said, “It feels like I have to poop.”

  This labor was well along. An hour ago, Betsy was five centimeters and deeply uncomfortable, writhing and weeping through her contractions at five minutes apart.

  When the contraction was over, Willa lubed her gloved hand, losing no time. “Okay, some cold and pressure. You know the drill by now.” She slid her fingers in and kept talking as she checked Betsy’s progress. “He’ll be ready. Once your little boy is in his arms, he’ll be ready. It’s scary, even when it’s not the first time.”

  “Do you have kids?”

  “No, I don’t.” The day she’d started her most recent period had been a happy one—on the day of the bombing and the day after it, she and Rad hadn’t bothered with a condom four consecutive times. At the time, she’d known it was stupid and reckless, even at that point in her cycle, but she hadn’t cared. It had been the strangest thing—like she’d wanted to get pregnant without actually wanting to get pregnant. She’d chalked it up to the surreal stress of those days.

  Rad hadn’t been any more cautious than she. They’d just fucked without protection for those days and then gone back to safer sex without ever talking about what the hell they’d been thinking or whether they were worried about what might result.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted children at all. It wasn’t that she didn’t love kids. She spent all her work days surrounded by happy new families and sweet, squishy new life. She loved those first moments of wonder between a mother and the child she’d nurtured, and between a father and the child who’d been such an abstract concept until that moment.

  But her life had been ruled in one way or another by Jesse—by his control when he was part of her life and by his menace since then—and she couldn’t picture having a life where she didn’t have to worry that he would pop up and do her more harm. If there were a child, that child would be another target.

  After Oklahoma City last month, she was even more ambivalent. The threat was bigger than one crazy man. The thought of bringing a child into a world where such things could happen, where strangers could mean you harm—it made her sad and ill.

  But Betsy here glowed with excitement, now that her pain had been managed. “I’ve never been scared. I just want him here in my arms. I’ve never been more ready for anything ever.”

  She was fully dilated and fully effaced. Willa’s finger gently grazed the top of a little head. She pulled her hand back and set Betsy’s legs down.

  “Okay. Betsy, you are ready to go. I’m going to get Dr. Diller up here STAT. In the meantime, I want you to keep ignoring the pressure. Don’t push, even if the urge gets strong, not until we’re as ready as you are, okay?” She dropped the gloves in the waste.

  “It’s time?” Betsy’s eyes shimmered, and she smiled a shaky smile and hugged her belly.

  “Almost.” Willa patted her hand. “You’ve got work to do.”

  “God, I love epidurals. They are the best things ever. Will you tell Mark?”

  “Yep. I’ll be back in two shakes, and we’ll get to work.”

  ~oOo~

  Dr. Diller was not one of Willa’s favorite OB/GYNs—not because he was a jerk to the nurses, but because he was overly controlling, in her opinion, of his patients. Doctors knew better about safe and healthy deliveries than most pregnant women, yes, and the number-one goal of labor and delivery was a healthy outcome, but he had a ‘my word is law’ attitude, and didn’t care at all that having a baby was not just a procedure for the women involved. It was a milestone, an event—this was the only floor in a hospital where being a patient was cause for celebration. Those patients had misty watercolor images of what it should be like.

  The reality was rarely misty or watercolor, even when things went exactly right—birth was painful and strenuous and goopy—but the really good OB/GYNs knew how to talk their patients through the cognitive dissonance.

  And then there were the women, almost alway
s first-time moms, who were simply terrified of the whole thing. A soft hand and a heedful ear helped them find calm.

  Which was why women labored with nurses and barely saw their doctors until it was time to catch the baby.

  Betsy was lucky enough to be delivering during the late morning on a Friday—normal working hours. Dr. Diller was in his office on the hospital campus, and he’d been over to see her once already, when they’d decided to do the epidural. When Willa paged him, he said he’d be on the floor in five minutes, and he was.

  Betsy and Mark’s little boy was born ninety minutes later. Mark hadn’t fainted, and Willa took credit for that: she’d seen the moment that his skin went waxy and had laid a cold washcloth over the back of his neck and pushed him down onto a chair at his wife’s bedside.

  She left the new family cuddled together. The smile on Daddy’s face told Willa that he was ready after all.

  ~oOo~

  At the nurse’s station, she checked on her other patients and saw that one, a girl in high school, who’d arrived with her obviously deeply unhappy mother just as Willa’s shift started, had been sent home.

  Janet sat at the desk. She’d been covering Willa’s patients during Betsy’s delivery.

  “302 is discharged, I see. Braxton-Hicks, right?” False labor. The contractions had been wildly irregular and had barely registered on the monitor.

  Janet nodded. “I’m worried about that girl. Her mother…”

  “Yeah. She had her crying a couple of times. I sent her out when I did my check, just to give the poor girl a break. I hate to see that.”

  “Carrying that Bible like it was some kind of weapon. You know, I pray every day. I never prayed harder than I did waiting to find Mike in Oklahoma City.” Her son had been out in the field that day, nowhere near the Murrah building; Janet’s joy in knowing he was safe had been a bright spot on a dark day. “I can understand being upset that your daughter’s life isn’t going in the direction you’d hoped for her. But it’s your kid. You love your kid, no matter what. That woman—when Dr. Ingersoll sent them home, she asked, right out loud like it was normal, if he wouldn’t ‘just cut the thing out and be done with it.’ And she calls herself a Christian. Can you imagine?”

  Willa shook her head—in disgust, not disbelief. “Poor thing.” She checked the record for her other patient. “307 is still at three centimeters? With steady contractions?”

  “Every three minutes, sixty seconds long. Going nowhere. But fetal heart is strong. I put a call in to Galen to check about some Vitamin P. And she’s complaining of pain. She cried when I last checked her. Galen hasn’t called back yet.”

  Dr. Galen had great bedside manner, a homespun kind of sweetness, but she clocked out at six p.m. unless she was already elbow deep in a patient. If one of her patients went into labor in the evening or over the weekend, they were stuck with whatever doctor happened to be on call. Willa had some opinions about that as well. Doctors deserved to have a life of their own, but babies came on their own timetable, and if you chose to be an obstetrician, you chose to follow babies’ schedules.

  Not Dr. Galen. Willa had no doubt that she would order a Pitocin drip—which was the actual name for what the nurses called Vitamin P—to hurry this labor along. Willa was fairly sure, without clear proof, that Galen had even performed C-sections just to free up her evening.

  She went to check on her patient in room 307.

  ~oOo~

  There was always a pall that rolled out over the Labor & Delivery floor when a birth went wrong. It didn’t happen often—every day, the floor was awash in flowers and balloons and happy families—but sometimes, the end of a delivery was silence, and it filled every nook and cranny. The happy births around the silence took on a quieter joy. Grandparents waiting for news found fear when families across the waiting room had cause to mourn. Those who could celebrate found sympathy, with a tinge of guilt, for those who couldn’t share their joy. Even the balloons seemed to sag.

  Two hours after Willa’s shift was supposed to end, she slumped into the nurse’s lounge and dropped onto the sofa next to the phone. Death seemed to surround her lately.

  She dialed Rad’s pager and keyed the number for the lounge phone and then 14. That was their code—if he turned the pager upside down, 14 would read hi. Sometimes, she’d page him only those two numbers, just to say hi without needing him to call. For a moment, she considered adding 911, because she really needed to talk to him, but that would only worry him. So she keyed the lounge and their hi, and she waited, letting her head drop back against the sofa.

  The patient who’d been in 307—her name was Amber—was not going home with her baby. After hours of hard but unproductive labor, with pain exacerbated by increasing doses of Pitocin, and the fetal heart rate starting to depress dangerously with every contraction, Dr. Galen had performed an emergency C-section. The baby—a little girl; her parents hadn’t known ahead of time because they’d wanted it to be a surprise—had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck three times, and during labor it had tightened around her tiny throat like a noose.

  She had been born alive but unresponsive. She’d died in Willa’s hands as she’d tried to revive her.

  The doctor who would do a C-section to make sure she got home in time to drive to her lake house for a weekend had waited too long to perform one that might have saved a life. Willa doubted she’d have proof of that, but considering the scene the furious, childless father had made, it was possible that at some point, somebody in an expensive suit would ask her what she thought.

  The phone rang, and she answered it. “Labor & Delivery lounge, Willa Randall speaking.”

  “It’s me, baby.”

  Not until that moment, hearing his voice, had she felt tears. Now they surged up into her throat. “Hey.”

  “What’s wrong?” His tone sharpened into worry—even in her single syllable, he’d heard that she was not right. “Why are you still at the hospital?”

  “A hard birth. Baby didn’t make it.”

  “I’m comin’ to get you.” That was such a quintessentially Rad reaction—he didn’t say he was sorry or ask if she was okay. He knew she wasn’t and did something to fix it.

  But she didn’t want him to come to the hospital. “No. I need to get home to Ollie. But Rad—I don’t think I’m up to tonight.” There was a party at the Bulls clubhouse. It would be the first time Willa would be around his brothers in a social capacity. She knew he’d been looking forward to it, but she wasn’t in the mood for a wild party.

  He didn’t argue or suggest he was disappointed. Instead, he said, “I’ll meet you at your house. You leavin’ now?”

  The mere thought of his arms around her eased her heart a little. “I need to check my notes before I go, but I’ll leave in about ten minutes. I’ll see you there.” She wanted to make sure she had everything noted properly and completely. She had done everything right, and she wanted to remember every moment, in case a suit was filed.

  “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  She fully expected him to try to change her mind about the party later, but for now, he was giving her exactly what she needed.

  When she had made her notes and collected her bag and her helmet, she went out into the corridor and down to the elevators. The one right before her opened, and she faced a young man in a dark suit. Next to him, on a rolling cart, was a tiny white casket.

  “You should cover that,” Willa said as she stepped aside for him to pass. “You’re supposed to cover it.” It was exceedingly terrible form to stroll through a labor and delivery ward pushing a casket obviously intended for an infant.

  When adults died, and older children, they were taken from the room on a gurney and placed into a body bag away from patients’ eyes. They were delivered to the funeral home on a gurney and prepared as usual before they were placed in a casket. But infants weren’t normally embalmed. When a baby died like this, at birth, or before it, they were taken from the room in someone’s arms
and placed directly into a tiny casket.

  Willa had never understood why that step wasn’t taken somewhere more discreet.

  The young man in the suit showed obvious shame—he’d forgotten the cover. Willa guessed him to be new at this difficult job. From a shelf on the cart, he pulled a black felt cover and spread it over the casket.

  Willa took her hand from the elevator doors, and they closed and let her escape from that scene.

  ~oOo~

  He was sitting on the steps at the end of her walk, waiting for her.

  About two weeks into their…relationship? Acquaintance? In their case, both terms defined the same thing—they’d been in a relationship almost from the moment they’d met. About two weeks into their relationship, he’d replaced her door with a beautiful, heavy oak model, custom made, and a brushed-nickel handle and knob. Now she had the deadbolt, with a thumbturn, and a security slider, and no other locks. But he insisted she was safer, and she believed it. The heavy thunk when the door settled into the jamb gave her a snug feeling.