He smiled, a more honest smile than the one he’d given her before. It was a little boyish, a little rueful, and sexy as hell. She wondered if he could see inside her head. Hell, she hoped not. She had to stop herself from shuffling her feet and pressing her thighs together. “You’re very perceptive, Miss…”
He trailed off, and she let him hang for a moment before she filled in the silence. “Howell,” she said. “Roxanne Howell.” She gave him a debutante smile. “Pleased to be your nurse for the next five minutes.”
“Leaving so soon?” Did he sound regretful? God, that thought gave her body one hell of a pleasant squeeze.
“End of my shift.” She did a thing Izzy did when there was something she wanted. She shifted her feet, let her eyes fall to the floor, and then looked up again, letting her gaze fall through her eyelashes. He made a little sound that gave her the idea he didn’t mind the expression. “Unfortunately.” She let the word trail through her lips, like an offer. Or a promise. What the hell was she doing? She knew better than this. She could lose her job, her license. Get his phone number, call him after he was out of the hospital, but you did not flirt with patients
when
they were your patients. You just did not. There were so many ways that could play out so incredibly badly.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” He shifted for a moment, and she was completely fascinated by the way the sheets pressed against the outline of his cock. That image of taking him in her mouth was nearly overwhelming.
She swallowed. Her mouth was dry. “I only work in the emergency room. You’ll probably go to the general wing if your pressure stays stable, and you don’t need a transfusion.”
“So this is goodbye?” His hand was resting on his thigh, so close to his erection. Goddamn tease.
“So it would seem.”
He reached out to her and caught her hand in his. She could have pulled away, but she didn’t, and he lifted her fingers to his lips, watching her eyes the whole time. He pressed a kiss into her knuckles, then turned her hand over and brushed his lips even more gently against the pulse in her wrist. Her entire sex pulsed with ragged, edged need, and she had to fight to keep her breathing steady and even. “I hope to see you again, Miss Howell, when I am not your patient.”
“Roxie,” she breathed. “Most everyone I know calls me Roxie.”
“Roxie,” he said. “Lovely.”
“You’re not a vampire, are you?” she asked, all of a sudden. “Because people in East Texas—we don’t do suave here.”
He laughed, a little too hard and loud. “No. No, Roxie, I am definitely not a vampire.” He gave her hand a little squeeze, and then let it go.
* * *
There was nothing stopping him leaving and going after her, except that he believed it would be an incredibly bad idea.
It was all well and good for his heart to choose now to finally be happy and complete and rediscover love, but he had a job to do. His pack was decimated. He needed to lay low, rebuild, and figure out who had attacked him and why. There had been something somewhat familiar about the Alpha’s scent, but he couldn’t put it together, as hard as he’d tried to.
They would track him here, he was sure of it. They’d been on his heels as he collapsed from exhaustion at the edge of the road, only retreating when the truck stopped next to him. He didn’t remember the face of the man who’d stopped, seen him, and dialed 911. He didn’t know if that man knew how close he’d come to death. He didn’t know if the wolves had waited in the woods, wondering if they’d have another chance after all. They could be circling the hospital right now, for all he knew, wearing their human skins and waiting to destroy him.
But Roxie had called it right. He wasn’t in anything like the kind of pain that a human man would be in right now, but if he had to run—he didn’t want to think about how much it would hurt. He would close his eyes for just a bit, let his body rest a while. When he woke, it would be time to move on. Long before Roxanne’s next shift, he suspected, which was a shame. He’d always wonder what could have happened there. What it would have felt like to press his lips against hers, to feel her body arch with pleasure underneath him. There was more that he needed to think about, however, than his own lust. No matter how much he wanted to focus entirely on himself.
Her parents had been so confused by her career choices. Daddy had insisted that she really could be a doctor if she wanted to be, and Mama had just shook her head and kept her mouth shut. She’d tried to explain that she’d seen both doctors and nurses in action over the years, and while doctors were the ones who got all the credit for the miraculous recoveries and the daring surgeries, it was nurses who made it all happen. It was nurses who were there when the patient was getting better, and nurses who got the thank yous and the joyful moments. And yeah, they got plenty of crap thrown their way too. But the good moments, she’d found, more than made up for the bad ones.
She walked out to her car in the parking lot—a little old beater from the late 80s that was amazing on gas and ran mostly on faith—and slid behind the wheel. She didn’t have a car alarm, and she didn’t even bother locking it most days. Of all the expensive cars and trucks in the lot, no one was going to bother hers. And if they did, she would send one of her many large cousins after the offender. If she didn’t find them and kick their knees in herself.
As soon as she was sitting, she pulled off her clogs and stuck them in the passenger’s seat. Her feet ached, and she rubbed at her arches for a moment, hoping to release the worst of the soreness. Her head was swirling, not just from the tiredness of the day, but from the pull of the Doe in bed 24. God, she hadn’t even gotten his name once he’d been conscious. Izzy was going to mock her for days.
She started the car and pointed it towards home, her bare feet pressing against the pedals. It had felt strange the first few times she’d done it, and she always suspected she’d hear about it if a cop pulled her over while she was driving barefoot, but there was no way she could keep her shoes on for another minute after she’d gotten them off. And she was pretty sure it wasn’t actually illegal. Plus, she’d know Sheriff Thomas since she was a baby; she’d babysat his kids. She could talk her way out of a ticket if she really ever had to.
She should have been scared of what had happened with the Doe. She should have been panicked. She’d totally lost control of herself in there. She’d almost kissed him, a stranger, and a patient. Hell, if she was being honest, she might have done a lot more than kiss him if he hadn’t stopped her. The pull had been so intense. So deep.
Roxanne had always been fairly careful choosing her lovers. She had decided early on that she wasn’t going to wait for marriage—as Izzy said, you tried a pair of jeans on before you bought them, and they were only supposed to last for a couple of years at best—but she also hadn’t enjoyed the random hook-ups that some of her friends seemed to thrive on. But she’d always been too busy to invest in full-on relationships, a fact that had been making her friend Matt frustrated for years. He was the marrying kind, and Roxanne—at twenty-eight years old, she was starting to suspect that she really and truly was not.
She sighed to think of it. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men; she did, very much. She enjoyed sex, and she enjoyed the men she’d slept with over the years. She was still friends with several of her exes, but she also suspected that they’d all say the same thing about her if anyone asked them why they broke up.
It got too serious for Roxie
, they’d tell whoever asked.
She always had somewhere else to be when things got intense.
Putting her finger on
why
was a trick. Her parents loved each other and had a good relationship, even if a little traditional and a little conservative for her tastes. They treated each other well, supported each other, and Roxanne had always had a good relationship with both of them. She cared about a lot of the men she’d been with, had even felt like she loved a couple of them. But when push came to shove, she’d chosen school, her career, or even staying home with a good book over them. She’d given the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech a few more times than she cared to count.
Once, in college, she’d tried women just to see if that was the missing spark. She’d had an excellent time with one of her sorority sisters, come more times than she ever had in one night in her life, but in the morning, she didn’t feel any more inclined to stay than she ever did.
Maybe it was just how she was. Some people were gay, some people were straight, some people were bi. Maybe she’d end up being one of those serial monogamists. She’d have an excellent, exciting life, with lots of travel, and when she was old, she’d write a memoir about all the places she’d been and all the expensive and exciting men she’d screwed.
Just thinking of it made her chuckle. Mama would probably need a Xanax if she thought about it, but Gram would have told her to enjoy herself.
She sighed again, thinking of Gram. The kind of tough old bird that seemed to grow extra leathery in the Texas sun, Gram had left her husband when he’d beaten her one time too many. She’d left when it was a thing that was definitely not done, but she’d gotten her kids away from him and never gone back. She’d put herself through enough school to run the farm on her own, and she’d sent her son—Roxanne’s Daddy—to college. It was her money that had put Roxanne’s through school, and when she’d passed away two years back, she’d left the house to her only granddaughter who showed any spunk. Or, at least, that’s what she’d said in the will.
Gram had been half gone in the end, her mind giving up before her body could, but she’d looked Roxanne right in the eye, the last time Roxie had visited her. “Don’t marry for love,” she’d said. “Love won’t do you no damn good in the end. Marry your best friend. Marry someone who’ll take care of you, when you can’t take care of yourself.”
Of course, that was when all the trouble with Matt had started. She wished she’d never told him about those last words with Gram. It would have made the last two years a hell of a lot simpler.
She’d known that Matthew Robbins had been carrying a torch for her since high school. He was a charmer, son of a rancher himself, and the kind of tanned and muscled that a man got working in the fields. He didn’t look like all that much in a shirt and jeans, all narrow and lean and wiry, but when he stripped his shirt off, all the girls—and a bunch of the boys—stopped to watch how the sun shone on him like he was absolutely its favorite. He had dark hair and dark eyes, he loved to read, and he was one of the kindest, fairest people she’d ever known. One of her favorite pastimes, when she was a girl, was to ride out to the Robbins’ ranch and watch Matt gentle colts. He refused to call it “breaking” them; said if you had to break them, you were doing it so wrong there was no point in talking about it. He’d make friends with them, tease them, ease them into partnership. Even before he was in college, people were coming to get riding horses for their kids from Matt’s hand.
He should have been her dream. Hell, in a different world, he would be. He’d certainly set his sights on her early on, and both his parents and hers had approved. But he’d been her friend for so long, and the idea of letting him have what he wanted, and then having their relationship be no different than those she’d had with everyone else—she couldn’t stand the idea. He’d never forgive her, and she’d lose one of her best and oldest friends. What had happened between them in college had been bad enough, and it had taken years to recover from that. She wasn’t going to let it happen again. No way.
* * *
The clothes she wore to the hospital tended to be painfully utilitarian, but at home, she liked to indulge. Lace panties with a matching lace bra, sometimes thongs, sometimes nothing at all. She liked the way it made her feel, the sensation that it divided her time from the busy, intense, but sometimes brutally boring day of work into the luxurious joy of her time alone. She chose a set of purple lace this time, and as she leaned forward, shaking her breasts into the cups of the bra, her mind turned toward the man in the bed, and the shocking green of his eyes as he caressed her cheek. She felt her body tighten just thinking of it. Her thighs were electrified with sparkling wet heat, and her nipples twisted into bright, hot peaks. She ran her palms over them and gasped at the rush of sensation that shot straight to her cleft.
She had a sudden, strong urge to play a crazy game, a silly little thing that drove her crazy sometimes—but no, it was too weird to do it when she was thinking about this total stranger. Way too weird. She pulled on a comfortable tank top and a pair of loose pajama pants, but her gaze kept sliding back to her nightstand. She rolled her eyes at herself as she walked over and opened the drawer. She surveyed her toy collection with an interested eye.
It was probably a sign of some deep, psychological disturbance, she mused, that she preferred her toy collection to most of the men that she’d been with over the years. She couldn’t put into words what the difference was between her collection of glass and silicone cocks and vibrators and the flesh and blood ones she’d enjoyed. Perhaps it was that they didn’t expect anything of her? They didn’t demand that she move in a certain way, or live up to some particular porn-based fantasy. She got to just feel what she felt, be who she was. It was liberating. Freeing.
It wasn’t one of the dildos that she reached for now, though. That would be too straight-forward. She was in a vicious mood, and she wanted to be teased. Just a little bit. In the back of the drawer, she found a vibrator that reacted to music. She had an app on her phone that controlled it. She leaned back on her bed, slipping it between her thighs and pressing it into her body. She was already wet, hot, and wide open, so sliding the vibrator up to where it would stay in place, even as she walked around and ate dinner, going about her evening, was easy. She went back down the hallway for her phone and brought up the app. She had just the right play list for the night; classical music, starting slow and soft, and building to exhilarating crescendos before quieting down again.
The first buzz, nestled as it was up above her pubic bone, weakened her knees and made her gasp. She could see the stranger’s face on the insides of her eyes, and she whimpered just a little, imagining his hand on her cheek again. She pushed him away, reaching to focus on the sensation, the delicate vibration deep inside of her, thrumming through her depths.
The music played gently, like rose petals unfolding in the sunlight, as she walked down the hall to fetch her dinner. She had to stop once in the kitchen and lean against the counter, moaning softly as the strings swelled up, but she managed to focus back on drawing out the pleasure.
It was the most exquisite kind of torture. Knowing that all she had to do was slide her fingers into her panties and tease her clit for just a couple of moments, and she’d be howling like a wolf in the woods with her orgasm—and refusing to do it. Going on about her evening like nothing was happening, like her body was totally quiet as she ate her fish and rice, sipped at a glass of wine. She’d crossed her legs without thinking, and the extra tightness against her clit drove her absolutely wild for a moment. She ground against her own body, hearing her noises getting louder as the intensity built. But still, not yet. It was still too soon.
She pushed away from the table, too overwhelmed by the vibration to bother with the food in front of her. She moved to the couch in the living room, relishing the way the vibrations shifted inside of her as she moved.
She slid off her pajama pants and relaxed on the couch, her knees spread wide, stretching her clit and intensifying the sensations rocketing through her. She couldn’t keep her hips still now; they shifted and moved, arcing with each wave of shocking delight. She brought her fingers to her nipples, teasing and twisting. It wasn’t enough to make her come, but it left her aching, wishing there were someone between her thighs who she could beg to move faster, fuck her harder.
She saw him above her then, the man from bed 24. His eyes were gentle as he thrust into her, but his motion has hard, abrupt, driving fiercely into her. She cried out, feeling the urgent orgasm swelling up through her, her body alive with intensity. She twisted her nipples so hard that they burned, and burst over the edge, staring into his bright green eyes. In her fantasy, he followed her in moments, his face tightening as he erupted inside of her, their gazes locked together as they spiraled down through pleasure into relaxation.