Hawke: A Bad Boy Fighter Romance (With bonus book Sons of Flame MC) (10 page)

“And then,” I said, shaking my head a little as I straightened, and then turned to pull my feet up into the booth, “I don’t know he just grew on me. He’s so real. Like, the world around him is barely there; everything is just smoke and mirrors and politeness and masks and… Jack just doesn’t have any of that. He’s just who he is. You know what he’s thinking, how he feels, what he wants. It’s all upfront, unhidden. He doesn’t have any hidden agendas, doesn’t mince words, or dance around a subject. Not unless it’s about his past but he opened up about that, too. He has a temper but he’s not violent. At least, I don’t think he would be with me. He’s angry at the world. I don’t even know if he ever gets angry at anyone, so much as the lies they tell, the masks they wear. I think that’s why he seemed so angry at me at first; he thought I was wearing a mask.

“And I was. As soon as I took it off for him… just decided to be myself around him, it’s like I suddenly saw how well we fit together.” I picked my martini up, sipped it, watched the cherry in the bottom drift around before it settled.

“And so…?” Nic urged.

I shrugged, smiled, blushed; sipped my drink again. “So, we… had sex. Once. It was fast.”

“Because you were at work,” Nic muttered.

“Yes,” I sighed, “because I was at work. It was so wrong, and I shouldn’t have done it but he just has this way he looks at me that turns my brain off. And, my God, Nic it was amazing. Just… I mean just everything. He’s so…”

“I get it,” Nic said. She snorted softly and sipped her drink. “So… but what now? I mean, he’s still a patient. I’m not giving you my full approval—not until I meet him—but, Nic this is dangerous. You could lose your job if anyone found out and from what Jason said about this guy he’s connected to some bad stuff.”

“I know,” I said. “And that does worry me. I think Jack would get out of it if he knew how, or if he knew he wouldn’t be alone.”

“Careful trying to fix people, Nomi,” Nic said. “Muscles and sinew are one thing—fixing people’s lives is a whole other ball game and you have a history of losing that game.”

That was true. Who didn’t want a bad boy who wasn’t also an inmate? But with Jack I could feel it. He just needed an anchor. “I’ll be careful,” I said. “And if we’re going to… I don’t know, take this further then that will be the condition. That he quits that life. I hate making ultimatums like that and I would hate to lose Jack over it but… you and Jason both aren’t wrong. His life is dangerous. I just think that if we could get out… he could see a different way. A better way, where, who knows? Maybe we could be happy together.”

“If he can make you happy, Nomi,” Nic said, reaching across the table. “Then that’s all I want from him.”

“Thanks, Nic,” I said, squeezing her hand. “It means a lot. I missed you, even for just a couple of days.”

“I missed you too.” Nic smiled, and sipped her drink, and withdrew her hands. “But you need to introduce him to me so I can tell him that if he hurts my little sister I’ll yank his dick off and feed it to him in bite-sized bits.”

I laughed, and shuddered, and then finished my drink, and the two of us moved on to other, less emotional matters over our third round. By the time we were done, and both headed back home, I felt lighter. Ready.

Tomorrow, I would tell Jack how I felt. And then, we’d see.

Chapter 11

Naomi

I woke the next morning with a sense of purpose. The weight of the secret of it all was finally off me, and even if he was a dick about it, getting the air cleared with Jason was another burden I could finally put down. Whatever he decided to do next, he knew how I felt, and for me that was the only part I had any right to worry about. Nic and I had worked things out, the schism between us bridged over and for the first time in what seemed like a very long time, everything in my life seemed to be clear.

When I walked into my shift, my phone rang. Nic. I wanted to answer and talk a bit, but I had ten minutes to clock in and get my patient list, and they didn’t allow phones on the ward floor. I sent her to voice mail and promised myself to call her back over my break.

When I got to the nurse’s counter and clocked in, Lorraine gave me a sympathetic smile and handed me my caseload for the day. I looked over it twice, and then frowned. “I think I’m missing one,” I told her. I handed the clipboard back. “Jack Hawke, he’s usually my nine o’clock.”

Lorraine patiently pecked away at the keyboard, looked at the screen through her half-moon spectacles, squinting, and then shook her head. “Nope. He checked himself out last night, rated everything satisfactory. Still banged up, I imagine, but, looks like you’ve sent another injured stray back out into the wild successfully. Good job!”

I blinked through the sudden hurt I felt. I expected him to check out eventually, of course; he wasn’t going to take up residence in a hospital room and God knew I didn’t intend to live out our whole relationship here. But surely he could have waited for me. Why would he just leave like that?

“We had talked about outpatient care,” I lied. “Just check-ins, mostly. Did he leave contact information or set up appointments for later?” I tried to sound professional, not panicked.

Lorraine looked over another screen, then shook her head again. “Nope. He didn’t file insurance, though; paid cash and took a bill, so, frankly I don’t know if he could have afforded you.” She made a ‘whew’ sound. “Probably dodged a bullet.”

I nodded agreeably and took my clipboard back from her, then wandered in a daze to the break room. I didn’t have long, maybe five minutes, but my chest was tight, and suddenly I felt… used. Jesus… he’d fucked me, gotten what he wanted, and then left?

That couldn’t be right. Not after the way he’d spoken to me. Not after everything. I buzzed Randall at the UVO helpdesk as I made my way slowly to my first patient’s room. He answered promptly.

“It’s Naomi,” I said, “from ward seven east, trauma. We spoke a few days ago about a patient of mine? I just wondered if you’d seen a gentleman who certainly looks like he needs help getting moved. He’s… maybe six two, muscle bound, dark hair, stitches over his left eyebrow? He’d have had a cast.”

“I haven’t,” Randal said, disappointed. “At least not yet. Did he discharge?”

“Last night apparently,” I said. “I’d told him about the UVO, and hoped he’d take advantage.”

“Not this time,” Randall said. “Sometimes they’re just not ready. Our door is open, though. They go back to that life, and then sometimes come back to us when they realize they have another option. Don’t lose hope just yet.”

“I won’t,” I said, though I didn’t think Jack would have skipped out on me if he didn’t intend to make a clean cut. “Thanks, Randall.”

“No problem, Naomi. Have a good shift.”

“You, too.” But my heart wasn’t in it. I hung, up, switched my phone off, and tried to force it all out of my mind. I had a job to do. I helped people. Jack had been a fantasy, obviously. The reality was, that kind of thing didn’t happen to people. Not to me, to anyone.

God, I’d been such an idiot.

***

“Ow! It’s too much! What are you, some kind of man-hating dyke? Leave me alone, lady, or I’m calling the orderly!”

I’d worked with Mr. Simmons for almost a week now. He was a balding, nearly seventy-year-old man who’d had a mild stroke that left him hospitalized for the past four months, while he wasted away and his joints almost stopped bending altogether.

Once Jack had started filling my days with that odd sense of unreality, dealing with Mr. Simmons had gotten drastically easier. I endured his constant spitting and snapping and repetitive, tired insults with the realization that he didn’t matter. The job did, making him better; that mattered to me. But his attitude? His lack of appreciation for what I was helping him achieve? Who cared?

The first three clients of my morning had gradually stripped that attitude away from me. There was precious little left to spare for poor Mr. Simmons.

I gently replaced his leg on the bed. “What did you just say to me?” I asked.

“You’re stretching it too far,” Mr. Simmons snapped, spittle collecting at the corner of his mouth. “I can’t go so fast; you have to be gentle with me. I can tell you’re the type that just hates men. I want another physical therapist. Someone who’s competent.”

I’d given Mr. Simmons back over thirty degrees of bend to both his knees in just a little over a week of rigorous, admittedly uncomfortable work. Physical therapy was like that. I wasn’t here to make people feel at ease, I was here to make them work, and make them benefit from it.

Mr. Simmons was the last straw on what I now realized was a remarkably, almost inhumanly tall haystack.

“I can arrange that,” I said. “But if you don’t want to work and sweat and hurt to keep yourself healthy and alive at your age, Mr. Simmons, maybe you should do us all a favor and drop dead instead of sucking up other people’s air and energy when they’re just trying to give you a slim chance at some kind of quality of life.”

Mr. Simmons stared at me, shocked, with his sunken, beady brown eyes. His mouth worked. “I… I never… you… I’m a patient here, you can’t… I want my nurse.”

“Yvonne’s tired of you coming on to her like you think you have a chance, you shriveled old limp-dicked bastard,” I growled. “And I plan to tell the nurse manager that, so let’s see how many of your new team of nurses and doctors become big, burly black men.” Repeatedly, Mr. Simmons had berated the nursing staff that looked after him literally twenty-four hours a day. The ‘Mexican’ nurses were stealing from him, the ‘colored’ nurses hated white people; now I was the angry ‘dyke’ who hated men. He was miserable, and I was miserable around him, and I hated all of my ungrateful patients now and was more than willing to inform the nurse manager of my opinion on the care and feeding of racist, sexist, nationalist Mr. Simmons and what she could do with the money I was being paid to do his PT.

I stormed out of his room itching for a fight, and slammed my clipboard down on the nurse station in front of Lorraine.

Her eyes snapped up when she jumped a little. “Lord almighty… you scared me half to death, Naomi.”

“Sorry,” I said, though I can’t imagine I sounded like it. “I just left Mr. Simmons, he’s concerned that I’m a man-hating lesbian, that his Latina and Middle-Eastern nurses are stealing from him—he can’t tell the difference, naturally, but I believe it’s clear that his particular racism is directed primarily at Mexican Americans—and that our African American nurses are this close to starting a race war in the ward.”

Lorraine took all that in with wide eyes and a partially open jaw.

“So I’d like to officially lodge my complaint against him with HR, and to have him reassigned to another therapist. Preferably the biggest, blackest, gayest, and let’s just shoot for most Jewish physical therapist you can contract—because while he hasn’t berated the Jews yet, I’m sure he will, given the chance.”

Lorraine frowned, and glanced at her screen, and then back at me. “Uh… Naomi… is everything okay?”

“Lorraine, things are so not okay that I don’t even have the words to explain it right now.”

“Maybe you should take an early break,” she said. “I’ll have Mr. Simmons reassigned.”

“Thank you, Lorraine,” I said. “That is supremely helpful.”

She watched me back away from the nurse station and I wouldn’t be surprised if she called security to have me on watch, just in case I went postal on the whole place.

It wasn’t until I got into the break room and went to check my phone that I remembered not only that I’d turned it off, but that I’d planned to call Nic back. I turned it on, swiped her missed call, and waited for her to answer.

When she did, she sounded like she knew something. “Naomi? I tried to call you earlier, I left a message. Did you get it?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I was late getting in and just took my break; had a terrible client. Plus… Nic, he’s gone. He just left, didn’t leave a message, or contact information or… you were right. You and Jason both. I was such a—”

“No, no, no,” Nic said, hushed and urgent. “God, I… look, I don’t think Jack just up and left.”

I sat up in the chair. “What? Why? What do you know?”

“I was so mad at Jason,” Nic said. “Probably you will be, too… he didn’t really think about what he was doing, he didn’t know the whole story and—”

“Nic, I’ll sort it out with Jason myself,” I snapped. “What happened?”

“I don’t know for sure,” I said, “but I talked to Jason. We talked, about… about everything and I told him he needed to, you know, lay off you about Jack and let you live your own life and he said that it wouldn’t matter because he’d taken care of it because he wasn’t going to see you go down with a… well it doesn’t matter what he said, I think he said something to Jack, or turned him in, or had him arrested or… I don’t know what he did but he did something.”

The words tumbled out of her in a nervous torrent.

My stomach fell. I felt sick. How far would Jason go? Jesus, he knew every cop in town, he could have… But, no. Jason was angry, but no matter how angry he got he’d never do something illegal. There were dirty cops in this town, but Jason wasn’t one of them… was he?

“What else do you know? Anything? Jack”—I glanced around, even though the room was empty — “he checked himself out last night. He wasn’t escorted or anything, there’s a code for that, Lorraine would have told me. So Jason must have scared him off.” Except, Jack wasn’t scared of anyone; Jason couldn’t have just threatened him, it had to be something else.

“He said that your life was more important than your job. Other than that he wouldn’t say anything. This was after we talked; God, Nomi if I’d known he had done anything like this, I would have called you straight away and told him to go fuck himself. I can’t barely look at him now; I can’t believe he would go this far.” She sounded frantic, and hurt, and on the verge of crying. Maybe as much because he’d gone this far for me as that he’d done something so underhanded to begin with.

My life was more important than my job? I scrambled to fit pieces together, and the picture they made wasn’t good.

“Shit,” I muttered. “Jason must have threatened to out us… Jack wouldn’t have left just because Jason showed up and flexed his badge. But if Jack thought being around me was going to screw things up for me, he’d have taken an out.” I stood, and paced the room. “I have to find him, Nic. I have to know what he’s thinking. If he’s discharged, he’s not a patient anymore and I’ve been torn up all day. I have to at least find out.”

But I didn’t have any way of getting in touch with Jack. I’d never needed one; his address was guaranteed to be the same for the next week and I’d planned on making sure he waited for me to check out so that we could, well, probably go back to my place.

Jack was a city rat. This place was his home, and he lived in it somewhere. If he felt like he was giving me up, what would he do? Without his anchor, if that’s what I was, or what I could be for him, what reason did he have to move on, get a new life?

He didn’t.

“Nomi, there’s more,” Nic said. “Jason had pictures. Of Jack, with… well with bad people. He showed them to me. Nothing really bad, to me at least, but… I don’t know. If Jack’s gone… maybe… just…”

“Spit it out, Nic,” I said.

“Looking for him could be dangerous. Okay? So… just wait, and see if he comes to you. Promise me?”

Of course. Jack was a cage fighter, right? Someone knew him. I had mace, and keys, and some self-defense training from Jason. It’s not like women didn’t go to those things. This city was full of people who knew. Randall would, for starters…

“I gotta go, Nic,” I said.

“No! Naomi,” Nic shouted into the phone, “Naomi, promise me!”

I hung up on her. Okay. Okay. I had a direction, a place to look. I just needed a location. I thought up a quick story.

“Randall,” I said when he answered at the UVO desk for Saint Michael's, “I have another patient who I think would be perfect for your program. And, he’s worried about his identity; his story is a little sketchy, though. I don’t want him to take advantage. He says he’s been in forced cage fight matches here in the city? I couldn’t believe it. You know about anything like that going on?”