I didn’t think Polly was cut off by my murderous man. She was cut off by another.
Heath.
Guess he was back.
Couldn’t fault the guy’s timing.
“Holy fuck, Rosie,” Luke all but yelled, pushing past a male nurse who was about to take my blood pressure.
His hands gathered my face with a gentleness that didn’t match the rest of him. “You got shot,” he whispered.
“So they tell me,” I murmured.
“Baby,” he rasped, his tone broken, defeated.
I put my hand on his. “I’m okay.”
“You got shot,” he repeated.
“But I’m okay,” I repeated.
He wanted to say more, I could tell. He wanted to declare how he would protect me forever and how he’d failed in his job and how he was never letting me out of his sight. The usual things an alpha male said to his woman when she’d just been shot.
But we weren’t usual. We were real. We were different. Different than the saint and sinner we’d once been. The cop and the criminal.
We were just Luke and Rosie now.
“We’re going to kill every single person responsible for this,” he declared.
I smiled. “Yes we are. We’re well overdue for that kind of date night.”
“Um, sir?” an uneasy voice interrupted.
Luke didn’t turn. “What?”
“I’ve got to take her blood pressure.” The nurse Luke had almost bowled over had finally gathered the confidence to speak, but fear saturated his tone.
It was strange, seeing the effect this Luke had on people. The Luke from before, Luke in uniform, in his saintly white hat, he put people at ease, made them feel safe.
That was his job, after all.
But this Luke, the one I’d torn the white hat away from and stained it with blood, he scared people, intimidated them. Just like animals in the wild could smell a threat, people could too. They could sense someone who didn’t play by society’s rules, smell when they weren’t safe with them.
It was a mixture of pride and shame that curdled my stomach at that thought. Or maybe it was the cocktail of drugs on an empty stomach.
Could’ve been the bullet wound.
I doubted it, though.
Luke didn’t answer or move. His eyes did a dance with mine, refusing to let them go. Then he pressed his forehead to mine, inhaling sharply, like he was testing the scent of my aliveness, making sure the stench of death wasn’t clinging, hidden somewhere he couldn’t see.
Satisfied, he moved back, though only slightly, still keeping a firm grip on the side of my neck.
The nurse stared at him for a moment.
Luke snapped his eyes from mine. “I thought you had tests to take,” he snapped.
“I’m going to have to ask you move away, sir,” the nurse said in a small voice.
“Don’t care if you have to ask it or not, it’s not fuckin’ happenin’,” Luke said.
The nurse paused, then awkwardly brushed past Luke to take my vitals.
I smiled, shaking my head. “You couldn’t just play by the rules?”
He smiled back. “Been doin’ that my whole life. Now that someone’s taught me how fun it is to break them, I’m not going to play by shit anymore.”
I grinned wider, tasting the sweetness of his smile, ignoring the sour of the thought that maybe it might backfire on me, this lesson I’d taught.
Maybe he’d turn into someone who resented me for taking those rules from him.
Maybe I’d turn into someone who resented myself for doing that.
Chapter Twenty
They discharged me from the hospital a couple of hours after they made sure I wasn’t going to die and then they’d have a lawsuit on their hands.
Well, I kind of discharged myself. They wanted to keep me overnight, but in the words of Cher from Clueless, “As if.”
“They say you need to be here overnight, then you’re fuckin’ staying overnight,” Luke clipped, trying to stop me from getting up.
I raised my brow. “Them saying that is a rule, and I’m pretty sure you said you’re done following rules not two hours ago.” The morphine was wearing off and my arm had started to ache. Not that I’d tell Luke that.
He kept his hand where it was, right over my heart, exerting gentle pressure. He flattened his palm so my heartbeat vibrated it slightly. His eyes found mine. “Not all rules,” he murmured. “Any rules concerning your health and safety are nonnegotiable. Not when everything I am is attached to them.”
I swallowed roughly. “I’m safe. With you, I’m safe, right?”
He gritted his teeth. “Of course.”
“Then I need you to get me out of this hospital. I hate them. They’re not safe for me.” My eyes glimmered with the words I didn’t want to say, scared that if I mentioned Death, he’d hear. He lingered around these sterile hallways.
His eyes softened and his palm moved upward to my jaw. “Only if you promise complete bed rest.”
I waggled my eyes. “I can totally promise that.”
He narrowed his. “That’s not what I mean. Rest,” he said firmly, no hint of sexual innuendo in his tone.
I grinned wickedly. “I can rest with your head between my legs.”
His face darkened. “I’ll allow that,” he rasped.
Unfortunately, that plan was ruined by my family.
You’d think with the commonality of shootings within the club, they wouldn’t be dropping everything to break the land speed record to land here in LA almost immediately after we got home. Not for a mere shoulder wound, at least.
But apparently they did.
“Where is she?” Cade hissed, pushing at Luke before he could even answer.
“She’s resting,” Luke clipped, stepping back so almost the whole club could pile into my tiny living room, all of them with grim faces.
Well, not Gage. He was smiling.
But that didn’t count because he was fucking insane. Drive-by shootings were like his Christmas. And he wasn’t one to get all soft about something as simple as a flesh wound.
Cade’s eyes ran over me, focusing on the bandage visible under my thin tank, resting there for a long time. They looked blank. Empty. Cold.
I knew different.
I knew he wasn’t moving or speaking not because of fury. Well, it was certainly part of it, but I knew he wasn’t because he couldn’t. Because he was replaying everything that could’ve happened, trying to remind himself that it didn’t. He was waiting to speak, to move, until he trusted himself to do it in the way the president of the Sons of Templar: California Chapter should do.
I winked at him.
It did what I’d intended, pissing him off enough to react. “Who the fuck have you pissed off now?” he demanded.
“We don’t know this is Rosie’s fault, so why don’t you lay off?” Luke said, face and voice hard.
Cade turned his glare to him. “You’re acquainted with Rosie, right?” he shot. “Of course this is her fuckin’ fault.”
Luke clenched his fist. “You better watch what you say about your sister being responsible for getting herself shot, almost fuckin’ dying. That bullet was three inches shy of her heart. Think she’s that eager to leave this fucking world?”