Quiver (Revenge Book 1)
Page 22
He seized her arm, pulling her back. “Give me some of that sour apple.” He moaned when she did just that, rising to her toes once more and giving him a soft kiss before turning and sauntering away. He watched her go, biting his bottom lip. “The unimaginable things I’m going to do to you tonight…,” he warned.
“Promises, promises.” She bit her own bottom lip.
His smile vanished, replaced with a heated look she’d come to recognize all too well. “My place. Tonight.”
“Okay,” she mouthed before turning away from him, unable to stop herself from rolling her eyes at the shit-eating grin that she couldn’t wipe from her face.
Somewhere around their third time making love on the beach the night before, it had hit Veda. Why she hadn’t been able to kill Todd.
She snuck another look over her shoulder just before she turned down a different hallway, blushing when she saw Gage leaning on the welcome desk, his hot eyes still glued to her ass, and it hit her again.
She breathed in a sigh as her eyes fluttered, letting the new feeling taking over her body race through her veins and soften her heart. She couldn’t believe it. She had a boyfriend. And unlike the last one, Gage Blackwater didn’t feel like a Paint-by-Numbers, Boyfriend Edition.
No. He felt like….
She didn’t know what that feeling was. The one roaring away inside her. She just knew she wanted to let it live. Let it flourish. Let it shine its light on a part of her she’d been convinced was long dead and gone.
Her doe eyes blinked open when she ran square into something, and when she found herself gazing up at Dr. Hitler—er, Dr. Britler—the grin on her face vanished.
“As delighted as I am that the CEO of this hospital has managed to put that dimwitted grin on your face….”
The remnants of Veda’s smile, on life support since the moment she’d laid eyes on him, washed away until she was full-on cringing.
Dr. Britler continued. “As it turns out, this hospital actually pays you to…” He shrugged, chuckling. “Do your job.”
Veda rolled her eyes.
“Crazy, I know.”
Her mind told her to let it go. Her heart said much of the same. But her lips worked on their own accord. “Since my first day here, you’ve never stopped giving me shit. Do you have a crush on me or what? Because this ‘pull the pigtail and run away’ thing we’ve got going here? It’s getting really tiresome. Exhausting, actually. Why don’t you and I just head on into the on-call room and….” She pumped her fist through the air while clicking her teeth, giving him a sexualized leer that was so Pepe Le Pew she was almost waiting for a cartoonish French accent to come spilling from her lips.
Dr. Britler sputtered, went to walk away, sputtered again, and came back to face her, tapping the edge of a medical chart into her chest.
Veda snatched it from him with a scoff.
His voice remained ever monotone. “We’re desperately short on nurses this morning. I need you to listen in on the attending in room 105, now.”
Veda raised the chart as Dr. Britler breezed past her, wagging it in the air. “Half a million dollars in student loans to do a nurse’s job. Worth every penny, that medical degree. Thanks, Stanford!”
Dr. Britler blew a sharp whistle in response because, of course, she wasn’t a human being who deserved actual words.
Veda huffed the entire way to room 105. She tried to remind herself why she’d chosen a small hospital in Shadow Rock for her residency and not one of the more illustrious ones scattered all over the country, most of whom had also offered her a position.
Every day, it seemed, she was forced to remind herself why more and more.
Every day since she’d met Gage.
She turned the corner into the room, and when she caught sight of the people inside, she froze in the doorway, her mouth falling open. She shot a look down at the chart and, sure enough, there it was.
Her wide gaze flew back up.
“Veda, good,” Dr. Jin, the attendant physician, always soft-spoken and warm, waved Veda in.
But that wasn’t what had stopped Veda in mid-step.
Detective Lincoln Hill, slouched in a tattered chair in the corner of the room, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, leaned his elbow on the chair’s handle, resting his fingers over his lips. The moment he caught sight of Veda, he let his lashes flutter shut. A smirk grew on his lips and he chuckled.
But it wasn’t even Linc and his handsome, smug, angry face that had stopped Veda cold.
No.
Todd Lockwood sat on the edge of a bed wearing only a hospital gown. His cheeks seemed more crimson than normal, and the red didn’t fade, not even after several minutes. His blue eyes avoided everyone, stuck to the window as he tightened his crossed arms.
When the silence went on too long for his liking, however, he looked to Dr. Jin and barked, “Can we get this over with, please?”
Now that Veda was there, Dr. Jin was able to speak to Todd freely. Hospital policy required that any doctor who felt uncomfortable in any way always ensured that a nurse be present as witness, for insurance purposes. If a nurse wasn’t available, a fellow doctor would do as well.
Seeing Todd left no question in Veda’s mind why Dr. Jin, who rarely requested a witness, felt so uncomfortable that morning. Todd had that knack. It lived under his skin, that undeniable penchant to leave women ill-at-ease. Especially the soft-spoken ones like Dr. Jin.
But Veda knew that Todd’s days of fine-drawn abuse had come to a startling end, and she entered the room with her head down, trying to fight the smile threatening her lips, leaning against the wall a few feet behind Dr. Jin.
Don’t smile, she warned herself, shooting another look at Linc, whose eyes were on her.
He seemed to be fighting the same internal celebration she was, but unlike her, he was doing a piss-poor job of hiding it. She’d never seen Linc smile, but now that he was almost there, she could see that it showed in his eyes long before it actually hit his lips. New life had been breathed into his green orbs that hadn’t been there before.
The police badge hanging from the chain around his neck seemed to rise and fall faster every second their eyes remained locked.
Why was he breathing so hard?
“Can you fix me or what?” Todd’s deep voice rang out again, shaking with the same helplessness present in his eyes.
Snapped out of her Linc-induced trance, Veda studied Todd, taking note of the vulnerability in his eyes. She couldn’t help but wonder if her own had looked that helpless, that soulless, that unprotected the night he’d taken her innocence.
Dr. Jin sighed. “Mr. Lockwood, it seems whoever performed the castration was highly trained. The quality of the stitching was executed at a professional level. Whoever did this… Well, they knew what they were doing.”
Veda fought the urge to brush her shoulders off, never more grateful for the surgical electives she’d picked up during med school than she was right then. Not bad for an anesthesiologist, eh?
Dr. Jin shuffled her feet and cleared her throat. “I’m afraid, in the absence of the testes, the best we can offer you is your choice of prosthetic.” Dr. Jin’s cheeks heated. “Testicle prosthetics actually feel perfectly natural. They have the weight, shape, and feel of a normal testicle. You wouldn’t even be able to tell the difference—”
“What’s going to happen to me?” Todd’s voice rose so high that, if Veda weren’t looking at him, she could’ve easily placed it on a ranting five-year-old in his place and never know the difference. “Can I still have sex?”
Dr. Jin looked over her shoulder and locked eyes with Veda and Linc, both of whom were still on the verge of passing out from holding their breath to keep the laughter at bay, before returning her tightened lips to Todd. “Unfortunately, sterilization will prevent you from reproducing, and the absence of the testes will immediately reduce the production of testosterone—”
“Can. I. Get. Hard?” Todd roared, pressing his thumb and forefinge
r together, as if he were talking to an infant.
And just like that, the redness vanished from Dr. Jin’s face. Her shuffled feet steadied and planted. Her crossed arms fell to her sides.
“Yes,” she said, with the kind of authority that hadn’t been in her tone until then.
Veda nodded ever so softly, glad to see Dr. Jin finally realizing who the man before her was.
She began listing off the facts like wildfire, clearly no longer worried about Todd’s delicate feelings. “Seeing as the testes produce ninety-five percent of the testosterone in the male body, you can still have an erection, and you can still ejaculate. However, your sex drive with be greatly diminished.”
Todd’s face collapsed.
That did nothing to impede Dr. Jin, whose voice actually rose. “The frequency, strength, and length of your orgasms will dwindle and never recover. Premature balding, hot flashes, and vertigo are common, and it’s highly probable you’ll experience rapid breast growth.”
Todd buried his head in both hands just in time to stifle the belly sob that raced up his throat, the strength of his cries shaking the bed below him.
Only then did Dr. Jin let up. Sputtering, she skipped a beat and then hurried across the room. Her hand lingered in the air over Todd’s hunched back for a moment before she finally lowered it and laid a delicate touch. She rubbed his back the way a hypochondriac would rub an infectious animal, all while whispering about the medications that would help him live his new life.
But Veda knew better than anyone that there wasn’t a medication on Earth strong enough to give a man new life. To help a man grow back wings that had been slashed beyond repair. To touch the sky once more after you’d already crashed into the ground.
Pushing her hands in the pockets of her scrubs, Veda watched Todd weep, and even as Dr. Jin fell for his alligator tears, Veda guzzled them like an eighteen wheeler low on fuel.
She used his pain as fire.
She used his tears as fuel.
Before she could stop it, the smile she’d been fighting broke ground on her lips, and it kept spreading until she was sure it smashed through the ceiling and touched the moon and the clouds.
She cut a look at Linc, saw his smile had broken free as well.
She fisted the bronze coin in her pocket, and for a moment, she was okay.
For a moment, she could breathe again.
One down.
COMING SOON
The Revenge Series: Number Two
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Also by Trevion:
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Stereo
Encore
The Romanovsky Brother’s Series:
Taming Val
Claiming Roman
Loving Leo
Finding Gary
The Almeida Brother’s Trilogy:
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Thunder Rolls
Lightning Strikes
Stand Alone Novels:
Dead or Alive