Hawke: A Bad Boy Fighter Romance (With bonus book Sons of Flame MC) (5 page)

“‘Course,” Jack said a moment later, smiling his crooked smile again like nothing had happened, “I’m more into showing than telling anyway. If you want me to show you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me, I’m happy to oblige.” He looked me over in that way of his; like he wasn’t broken from head to toe, like he was in that bed only because he wanted to be, and if I said yes he’d get right up out of it and…

Just like that, all my anger faded away. It had for him, it seemed like, too. How did he switch it on and off like that? How did he switch me on and off? It wasn’t fair that he could do it.

“In your dreams,” I said, immaturely, the only thing I could think to counter with; to strike at him again, try and stir him up like he had me.

Jack was a better fighter than me, though. In the ring with him, I was the amateur. Maybe that was the problem.

“Baby,” he said, “all the time. I got nothin’ better to do here.”

And, just like that, he switched me right back on. “You’re a creep, Jack.”

“Yep,” he agreed.

My mouth hung open just a little, until I saw him staring at it, and then I closed it so hard my teeth hurt. There was a clock over his bed. “Shit,” I muttered. “I’m late. God, you are so…” I didn’t finish. I made a hasty retreat before I pissed someone upstairs off and gave everyone more reasons to talk.

“I’ll see you tomorrow if you don’t die of internal injuries by then,” I said. “You should have had that MRI.”

“Hey,” Jack snapped.

I turned around before I realized I’d done it. His voice had sunk a hook into my shoulder and pulled, hard. “What?” I snapped right back.

“You’re a fuckin’ idiot if you can’t see how beautiful you are.”

Those words hooked something else. Something in my stomach that was attached to something in my chest, and something else, lower. I felt stupid for it. What, getting butterflies just because some jerk told me I was pretty? Jesus, what was I twelve? I stared, dumbfounded, while he shrugged and closed his eyes again.

“Just sayin’,” he muttered.

I left, fast, back to the ward, and then returned, grabbed the door handle and closed it. A second later, however, I went back in and walked wordlessly to the side table to get my clipboard with my patient route on it. Jack didn’t open his eyes when I did, but he was smiling.

Asshole.

I didn’t want to let him have the last word. It was petty, but I couldn’t help it. Just before I closed the door, I looked over my shoulder at him. “Don’t fucking call me ‘Darlin’.” I closed the door before he got a word in.

Take that.

Halfway down the hallway to Mrs. Johnston’s room, I paused, and rubbed my forehead, trying to quiet the nervous flutter in my stomach. What the hell kind of mess was I falling into?

Chapter 5

Naomi

“So I told him not to fucking call me ‘darlin’ again,” I told Nic, who was watching me over her glass of wine from the other end of my sofa. I had a self-satisfied grin on my face because I felt very self-satisfied, the more I replayed my session with Jack and everything that had happened during it. I’d been doing that all day and into the evening.

Nicola frowned slightly, and looked into her glass for something to say. She must have found it, because she pressed her lips together in preparation of launching into a lecture on how I ought to do things. I sighed preemptively.

“When you said you thought you could help this guy,” Nic said, “I assumed you meant in a professional sense, Naomi.”

I frowned at her. “Of course. That’s what I meant. Look, if you don’t want to hear about my day—”

“I’m entirely on board for chatting out what’s going on at work, for both of us, but Naomi—you’ve been talking about this patient for almost an hour.” She gestured at my phone on the coffee table.

“It hasn’t been that long,” I said. But I hit the button on the phone, and felt my face heat. Only a little. “Alright… fine, so I had a lot to say. He’s an asshole, and he set me off and I needed to vent, Nic. I’ll stop.”

“It’s a little late for that,” she said. “Are you sure you’re in the right head space about this guy? I mean, now that you know about what he does…you realize he’s a criminal, right? Cage fighting is illegal. Can you even imagine what Jason would think?”

Yeah. Right. What would Mom and Dad 2.0 think? If Jas and Nic decided to start picking out my clothes for me, I wouldn’t be even a little shocked. “I don’t care what Jason would think about a guy I was interested in—if I was interested in a guy, which I’m not.” I’d raised my voice, and Nic’s eyebrows were up.

She lowered them slowly, and set her glass down on the table. She tucked her knees up, and propped one elbow on the back of the couch, and tilted her head to rest it on her hand. In three, two, one…

“Do you remember when you dated Mike Wheeler?” she asked, in that tone that said she didn’t expect an answer. “Mike Wheeler was a nice guy. Super sweet. I liked him. Jason… tolerated him, like he does any guy you start seeing who isn’t a felon. Mike was good. Mike was marriage material, Nomi. Nice job, nice car, dressed well—”

“Boring as fuck,” I threw on the list. “Even when we were actually fucking. Where is this going?”

“A real relationship is boring, Nomi,” Nic said. “Most of the time. Because it’s stable. Stable things are boring. But boring doesn’t have to mean bad.”

I swirled my wine, checked my temper, and then finished the rest of the pinot off. Nic only ever brought the good stuff.

“Let me tell you about Mike Wheeler,” I said, calmly. “Mike got up at seven, and spent an hour getting ready for work. He ate oatmeal in the morning, with no sugar, just one half of a sliced banana. He saved the other half for the next day in the fridge.

“In Mike’s closet were ten suits. Just ten. Coat, shirt, tee-shirt, tie, slacks, socks, all neatly pressed and in a row. He owned one pair of jeans.” I rolled my eyes, remembering the last week we were together, when he’d offered me a drawer in his vast apartment, and suggested how I could make the most of the small space by organizing properly. “We had sex once a week, from the very beginning, missionary, no talking, lights dimmed but not off, no music playing.

“Every single time we did it, it was exactly the same. Like some kind of ritual. Not even. Like a game of tic-tac-toe when both of you always take same first two spots, and you always think that maybe this time it will be different but of course it never is because from that point there’s only one way it can go down.” I groaned, and poured myself the last glass from the bottle. If Nic wasn’t going to take it, I would.

“And speaking of going down,” I said, almost a sneer, “Mike never did. Not once. You know why? Because he didn’t see the point.”

“Okay,” Nic said, sighing, “then not Mike Wheeler. But someone like that, who isn’t entirely OCD about everything. Someone who’s strong, and passionate, but good hearted and thoughtful like—”

“Like Jason?” I asked.

“Well,” Nic said, with forced casual disinterest, “sure, like Jason. Or like Dean.”

Dean Reece, she meant.

Dean Reece was literally the boy next door. My next door neighbor. He was sweet, honest, ate his wheaties. He was a nurse, but he worked almost entirely in the non-profit sector, tending the homeless, the elderly, and the infirm. He was nice, exactly the way Nicola meant it. He was also probably gay.

“I don’t think Dean is that interested in me, Nic,” I said. “And even if he was I mean… I can’t just fake attraction to someone.”

“Dean is gorgeous, Nomi; do you need glasses?”

For all her talk about nice guys, she thought I should go after Dean because he was pretty. This wasn’t the first time we had had this conversation.

“How about I handle my life, Nic, and you handle yours, and we have these talks about things that don’t involve you trying to steer my ship?”

And now she was hurt. “I just want what’s best for you, Nomi,” she said, wounded. “You work too hard, you never date anyone anymore; you’re twenty-six, sis.”

“You know who I miss?” I said. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I miss—”

“Lance,” she said at the same time I did. “Nomi, you are crazy, that guy was a massive dick.”

“No, he
had
a massive dick,” I corrected her. Though, Lance had been kind of an asshole, too. Full of himself, though he was the second coming. Not of Christ. To be fair, a few times he was…

“What’s the difference between putting up with a guy who lives a wreck of a life but has a big dick, and putting up with a guy who’s a little boring but hot?” Nic asked.

Sometimes, I wondered what she saw in the world around her. If we switched bodies, if I looked through her eyes, would I see the same colors? Would food taste different? How could she not see the difference?

Part of it was that she was avoiding the point. “You hated Lance because he wasn’t clean cut professional-something,” I said. “He wasn’t all straight, clean lines and pressed socks. But you know what? Lance had passion. He was hungry for life, he made me feel like I was waking up after I got off work, and, yeah, he did me right with his big dick.” Nic cringed when I said it.

“And then he fucked around on you,” she said. “Because that’s the kind of man you want, isn’t it? If you keep going after that kind of guy, you’re going to end up alone and old, Nomi.”

If I’d had just a little more to drink, I would have slapped her.

“I could say the same about you,” I snapped. “When’s the last time you told Jason how you felt about him? Or, does he notice that you’re there yet? What does it say about someone who tags along after someone like a lost little kitten when that guy won’t even look at you for more than ten seconds?”

I regretted saying the words the second they were out of my mouth. I wanted desperately to wind the clock back just fifteen seconds, really process what I was saying, and just not.

Nic’s face had gone still, and she wasn’t looking at me anymore. She stared at her half-empty wine glass for a moment.

“Nic,” I said, “I’m—”

“You can be such a bitch sometimes,” Nic whispered. “You know that? All I want is for you to be happy. Not just for the five minutes some jerk will pay attention to you, but for the long haul. That’s all I want, Nomi.”

“I know that, Nic,” I said, properly shamed.

“I’m gonna go,” Nic said.

“No, Nic,” I stood when she did, “stay. I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have said anything, I know it’s complicated, and it’s none of my business.”

“No,” Nic said, “it is your business. Jason is a… fantastic man. Everything you should want in a person. He’s a catch, and he’s just waiting for you to see him as a man instead of a brother, or a friend. That man is willing to build his house in your friend zone, Nomi. It’s got a fence around it and he can’t even see me standing on the other side of it. Everything you said is true.”

“It wasn’t,” I told her. I took a step toward her, I wanted to hug her, to squeeze the hurt that I’d caused her out. This wasn’t me, this cruelty; that wasn’t how we did things. Why had I said that?

But Nic turned away as I approached, and picked up her purse, and slid it up onto her shoulder. She stepped into her heels. She was still in her work suit; she’d come straight over when she got off. It was only nine. These nights were supposed to go on until it was two and we were both drunk and giggling, and…

Nic put her hand on the doorknob as I watched her leave, and then looked back at me. “Be careful with this guy, Nomi. Jack? You’re in denial. I know what it looks like when you spot one of the bad ones and can’t tell. It scares me to death that one day, one of them is going to hurt you, bad.”

She didn’t wait for me to say anything, just left quietly. I fell back onto the couch, and pressed both my palms to my eyes. Whatever anger I’d had before, it was gone now. I wanted to curl up somewhere and stay out of sight for a few weeks, put myself in time-out like when we were kids and Nic had to watch me. Little Mini-Mom.

Be careful with this guy.

Jack.

I didn’t have any kind of feeling for him that wasn’t either professional or some breed of frustration. Right? He had some charm. I’d grant him that. He had a body, but those were a dime a dozen in this city, if you didn’t mind a rap-sheet. He had big hands. He had that smooth kind of voice that slipped inside you and stirred things up. But so did Jason. So did Doctor Morris. So did Samuel L. Jackson. That didn’t mean anything, didn’t count for anything.

Nomi was right. She was always right. I hated that. I loved her for it, too. I’d never tell her that.

Jack was trouble. The bad kind of trouble. Not trouble like Lance was. Not trouble like the other bad boys I’d fallen for. Jack’s kind of trouble was permanently written on his body, in the healed fractures of his bones and the scar tissue in his muscles. It was literally written on his forehead, printed in stitches: Trouble with a capital ‘T’. I was old enough to know better.

So why had I been unable to stop thinking about him all day?

Why couldn’t I stop thinking about him now?

Chapter 6

Jack

I laid in that uncomfortable fucking hospital bed for the third fucking day, listening to the aches and pains that the painkillers they gave me in this shit hole did fuck-all to quiet. Thinking about what I’d do to Valentino when I saw him after I was fixed up gave me the distraction I needed to ignore it, almost.

Counting the number of times I imagined feeling his nose crack, seeing that gush of blood come from it, feeling his skinny little neck break, or hearing him beg for me to let him live was pointless. I’d replayed the scene in my head so many times that I didn’t have to try anymore. It was just there when I closed my eyes.

The only time it didn’t was when Naomi was there.

Naomi.

Maybe, under other circumstances—like a different life—I’d have a chance with a girl like that. Stupid, right? I knew who I was; what I was. I liked my women fast, and screaming my name, and then gone. That’s the way they liked it, too. For good reason. Stick around a guy like me too long, and things get ugly.

Still, she was hot. Not like the girls around the cage, the ones that got decked out, showed off their tits and their legs, promised to show you a good time just by battin’ those unreal eyelashes and lickin’ their lips. No doubt there’s nothing quite like havin’ one of those sluts’ legs wrapped around you after a hard, bloody fight, all that adrenaline ampin’ up your system, grabbin’ onto her hair and her ass and hangin’ on for dear life while she rides you like the bull you are.

Yeah. That’s a good time. Don’t get me wrong. Those women, they trade on their looks, on their bodies, on how hard they can make you come.

This girl, though… somethin’ about her. Cage sluts are made of air. Barely there at all. Coked up sometimes, but even when they’re not they’re figments. Fantasies.

Naomi.

Naomi was real. Solid. She came back. She also hated me. Which was good. That was the way it oughtta be with a girl like that, if she knew what was good for her and a girl with that kind of smart knew what was good for her.

That was exactly why I wanted to fuck her.

Here’s the thing about girls that know you’re a monster. Fuckin’ you gives them a chance to let loose. After all, what do they have to lose to an animal? I never met a good girl that didn’t crave the chance to be bad. Just for a night. Bad girls? They’re used to it. Old hat. I was used to it. Nobody wins with a bad girl.

The door rattled. I looked up, sat forward a bit. My ribs complained, but fuck them. I put my best gonna-fuck-you smirk on.

But the old broad who came in wasn’t Naomi.

I dropped the smile, and relaxed. I’d been tense for a second, huh? “Who’re you?” I asked.

“Yvonne,” the woman said. “I’m taking Lena’s rounds today, she’s out. Don’t worry slugger; she’ll be back tomorrow.” Woman gave me a look like she might eat me alive. Bad girl. I can spot ‘em a mile away.

“Right,” I said. “Okay. I meant, I got PT with Naomi. Miller.”

“She’s got all her patients moved out an hour,” the cougar nurse said, writing codes on a white board with a red marker. “Meeting this morning. She’ll be around.”

She put the marker down, and came to the bedside. Couldn’t keep her eyes off my body. It made me want to cover up, but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. But Jesus, it was like being checked out by my mom.

“Open wide, slugger,” the nurse said.

I did, and she slipped a thermometer under my tongue like it was her finger. I clamped down on it and tried not to look as uncomfortable as I felt.

“Any changes?” She asked. Lena did too, every day, but she was clinical about it.

“Nuh uh,” I grunted around the thermometer.

“Numbness in your fingers? Toes? Anywhere… else?” Her eyes dropped a little, and I shifted my hips, gathered a little more blanket there.

“Nuh uh,” I said.

“Well, that’s good.” She took the thermometer out of my mouth, checked it, went to the foot of the bed to make notes on my chart. She looked at me over it when she was done. “Tumescence? Nocturnal or otherwise?”

I stared at her. “Too-what?”

She pursed her lips a little. “Erections. Seem regular? More or less than usual?”

“Lady, I don’t know what that—”

“Those rib fractures and broken arm mean your body is drawing on resources, which we’re supplementing in your drip,” she pointed at it with the top of the pen. “But there’s a danger of blood clots, unexpected fluctuations in systolic blood pressure, and toxicosis. Since you’ve refused an MRI, we have to check other symptomatic things. Like your stats, and your temperature, and whether you’ve developed symptomatic erectile dysfunction.”

She put the pen to the chart, and smiled that cougar smile again. “So, have you noticed a change in how often you get and sustain an erection?”

I opened my mouth, closed it, shook my head and finally muttered, “No, it’s… about the same, I guess.” Or had been before this, at least.

“Good,” Nurse Yvonne said cheerfully. She made a note on the chart, and I wondered if it actually said something like “patient’s dick still gets hard, but not too hard for too long. Normal dick function.”

She checked my blood pressure, the state of the wrap around my ribs, and the inside of the cast on my arm. Every time she touched me I thought she might start feeling me up, but she didn’t.

Maybe every guy had a naughty nurse fantasy at some point. I decided I didn’t anymore.

“Naomi should be in to work with you by ten,” she said when she was finished. She breezed out of the room after that, but not without giving me a last look. When she left, I pulled the sheet and blanket up to my chest.

Sure enough, Naomi showed up a little after ten. She stood outside the closed door for a good ten seconds. She always did that; I could always tell it was her—she was the only one whose shadow blocked a bit of the space at the bottom of the door for more than a second before it opened.

I forgot to put on my gonna-fuck-you smile, maybe because I wanted to be sure it was her before another horny mom-nurse got the wrong idea.

Naomi strode in, then slowed, and looked me over. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, other than the broken arm, the cracked ribs, the head wound, and the contorsions.”

“Contusions,” Naomi corrected with a little smile. She did that from time to time and I don’t think she knew it. Her little mouth just quirked up at the corner even when she wasn’t makin’ fun of me, like she knew a joke but wasn’t telling.

Those pretty eyes appraised me when I shrugged.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Let’s get started. You know the drill.”

I followed her instructions as she put her soft hands on my rough arms and had me lift, pull, push and twist, isometric exercises she figured would keep me from wasting away or something. Whatever they were supposed to do, I figured it couldn’t hurt, though I’d recovered from my share of injuries.

“You’re awfully quiet today,” she said when we’d finished the first arm and moved on to the broken one. “They up your pain meds?”

“Nah,” I said as she had me extend the arm straight out from my shoulder, parallel to the bed. “Just in my head is all.”

“Anything good in there?”

“Nope.”

“Lift.” She held her hand on top of my cast.

I lifted up until I felt the first hint of pain in my busted arm, and held it there while she watched the second hand on the hospital room clock.

“That’s good,” she said after a full minute.

“What about you?” I asked.

She bent my elbow ninety degrees, and put her hand against mine. “Push.” I did. “What about me, what?”

“Anything good in that pretty little head of yours?” I asked. I smiled up at her through the pain the exercise sent shooting through my ribs. Bad, but not the worst. She had a stray curl of hair hangin’ in her face. It was always there, the little bit that wouldn’t stay put.

“Just work,” she said, all business. But I could tell she was trying not to smile.

Oh, she wanted it. Good girls always do. Inside every good girl is a bad girl trying to claw her way out. I had that effect on good girls like Naomi.

Except, there was something on her mind. Naomi did this thing when she was trying to decide what to say. She squinted her eyes just a little, and chewed the inside of her cheek while she put it all together.

“Good,” she said when whatever mysterious condition she was waiting for was met, and let my hand go. I almost curled my fingers around it before she took it away; did it linger, just a little too long? Probably my imagination, right?

I didn’t press her about it until she’d finished with my arms, the stretching and prodding that was supposed to keep my ribs from getting stuck, or something. I’d broken just about every rib I had at one point or another and never needed PT to make ‘em keep doin’ what they were supposed to do, but, she was the boss, right? Any excuse to feel around my chest.

When we were done, she sat down in the chair near my bed, and made some notes on her clipboard. “Patient still hard as a rock,” it probably said. “PT pointless, but need to keep touching him or I’ll never work up the nerve to feel him up.”

I was grinning at her when she looked up, but she pretended not to notice. “I had a meeting with the Urban Violence Outreach representative for Saint Michael’s this morning,” she said.

“I think there’s plenty of violence in the city,” I said. “I don’t think they need an outreach for it.”

Naomi gave a pretty little snort, and rolled her eyes. “That’s not… smart ass. No, they… they’re an intervention program.”

“Uh huh,” I said. Saint Naomi, back up on her high horse. Just how good could a good girl be? Christ on a stick. “Not interested.”

“You don’t know what they do,” she said.

“You got time to tell me before your next patient? I can save you some time, but I know how you like talkin’ to me.” I had to be careful about calling her ‘darlin’; I almost did again. She’d like it, later.

She sighed, and set the clipboard down. She set her shoulders, squared her jaw, fixed me with a look. Yep. Three, two, one…

“Randall, the representative, he reviewed your… case. I didn’t tell him much,” she said when I opened my mouth to tell her she needed to keep that shit to herself, “I didn’t tell him your name or anything. They have a program that rehouses at-risk individuals to a place outside the city. People that have had been involved in repeat violence, especially with organized crime. They could put you somewhere away from this. From Valentino. From the cage fighting and all that. You could start over, go legit.”

I laughed. “Legit?”

“Yes,” she said, “legit. Boxing, or MMA, or whatever else. You don’t have to fight illegally, you know? If you’re that good, then, why not go professional?”

She meant well. I had to remind myself of that. Naomi was the kind of person that always meant well. She was just ignorant was all. She hadn’t been where I’d been, didn’t know what I knew—hadn’t accrued debts to the people I owed. So when I explained why that wouldn’t work, I did it as calmly as I could. “Look, that’s… I appreciate you goin’ outta your way. Okay? But I’m a city rat. This is where I live, it’s what I do. It’s how I stay alive.”

“You realize you’re in a hospital?” She asked.

“I don’t mean keep kicking,” I said. “It’s how I live. How I feel alive. I need it like you need air, or water, or blood. All this, what you’re doin’ for me? I’m… grateful, or whatever. I mean it. I know you want good things for me, for all your patients, and want me to not end up back here, worse than before.

“But, dar—I mean, Naomi—this right here, how you see me this very moment?” I waved a hand at all of me. “This is me. I’ve spent more time banged up than I have in one piece. You think I’m crazy, I know, but without stakes, without danger, without the fight, I’m lost. I’m just some schmuck without a purpose. I can’t leave the city.” It wasn’t worth mentioning that if I did, there were people that would come and find me. “You don’t have to understand it. I need this. I’d die of boredom without it. Like a tree without roots.”

She watched me. She had the kind of eyes that always seemed shiny, catching the light just right. You’d think the hospital lights that made everything look clean and clinical would wash her out or something like it did everything else, but not her. Her thick lips turned down a bit, sympathetic or pitying, one or the other.

Didn’t matter, I reminded myself. Once I was gone, she’d write me off. It’s what everyone else did; it’s what I did. I’d write her off too, right?

“I do get it,” she said finally. “The need for a rush. For excitement. Danger, whatever. I get it.” She sighed, and looked for a second like she might just say something else. Something I wanted to hear.

She didn’t, though. Not yet, anyway. Or at least, not what I really wanted her to say. “My life is… not dangerous. Not exciting. I do this, six days a week sometimes, and always for ten to twelve hours and when I’m done I don’t have the energy for anything else. And it’s the same, day in, day out. You say you’d wither and die without the danger? I’m already doing that.