Rough Hand (Bad Boy Fighter Romance) Read online

  "You shouldn't be doing anything at all, Shannen. I should have you tied down to a bed for two weeks."

  He waggled his eyebrows at her. "I can think of circumstances where I wouldn't be remotely upset about that."

  "I'm not joking. You were stabbed."

  "That's not true," he lied. She knew he was lying, and the look on his face said that he knew she knew, but hoped she was going to believe him. It was almost endearing.

  "You absolutely were stabbed, so don't you try to lie to me, Shannen. Now if you're not going to tell me what you were stabbed over, I'm not going to push it, but…"

  "But what?"

  "But I don't think a home suture kit is going to get the job done, is what! And if you start moving around, no matter how good the stitching is, and it isn't very good, it's going to tear right open again!"

  He looked down at his chest. He'd been lucky, not to have taken the point of the blade in his lung. But somehow, that luck seemed to fit with every other part of him. He was a lucky sort of man, it seemed, and there was just no way around it.

  "Don't be so hard on yourself," he told her after a second. "The stitches are great. Some of the best I've ever had."

  Caroline rolled her eyes and stalked out of the room, then thought better of it and stalked right back in. "Don't try to flatter me, Mister. I'm not going to bend over for you like you want."

  "I don't think I'd be very good if you just bent over. You'd probably have to be on top, just this once."

  Caroline rolled her eyes, but the thought was strangely intriguing, in spite of the fact that she knew, and he knew, he was in no shape at all.

  "I'm not going to indulge your little fantasies, Shannen. Just lay there and think about how to be a good patient, for once in your life."

  He barked a laugh. "Good patient? You're kidding yourself."

  "I know I am, but I have to pretend to keep my sanity intact," she answered, her voice caught up in frustration she hadn't realized was even there.

  "Oh, don't be like that," he offered. "I won't cause any trouble."

  Caroline scoffed. "No? You expect me to believe that?"

  "I don't expect you to believe anything. I was hoping you'd order some pizza or something, though, if we're not going out. I'm really starved. Come on, just a little?"

  She closed her eyes and then opened them again. "Really. Pizza, at a time like this. Aren't you supposed to be on a taper or something?"

  Shannen shrugged. "I can burn a little thing like that, no problem."

  "Without training?"

  "Who said anything about not training?" The smile on his face told her that he thought he was being a perfectly cute rascal, and she hated to admit that she agreed with him. He ought to have been smarter, he ought to have been a little more concerned about his own health. But apparently that wasn't in the cards.

  "What do you want on it? I'm serious about not training, but if you really want a pizza…"

  "Oh, everything," he said, as if it were the most perfectly normal thing in the world. As if he'd said 'whatever you want.'

  "Everything?"

  "Yeah. Trash can or something. I forget what they called it."

  A line formed itself between her eyebrows. "Anything else?"

  "Depends. They have good bread sticks wherever you're calling?"

  "Do you want them or not?"

  "Sure," he said. His voice was mild, but no doubt in an effort to please her he settled down into the couch a little further, leaning his head against the pillow behind it and crossing his legs at the ankle where they hung off the other arm of the couch.

  "If I call, you've got to behave yourself."

  He smiled at her and nodded. "Of course, Master. I'll be good, you'll see."

  Some part of her thought of a children's book she'd read once, about giving a mouse a cookie. He was an awfully sweet mouse, Shannon. She ought to have turned him away, slapped that sarcastic grin off his face and let him know who was boss. Instead, she added cookies to the end of the order.

  22

  Caroline watched her roommate, a man who was decidedly not her lover in spite of how she thought of him. In spite of her best efforts and his, as well, as far as she could tell. He shouldn't have been drinking, but then again, she wasn't about to give him anything for the pain, either, aside from aspirin.

  And besides that, as he continually reminded her, she was right there in case something went wrong. She could take him to the hospital, induce vomiting, whatever was necessary to make sure he didn't die right there in front of her.

  Like everything that he did he seemed to think it was some kind of terribly entertaining game. She didn't find the game nearly as funny as he seemed to, but she wasn't about to scream at him any more than was absolutely necessary. So instead she took another sip from the long-neck bottle in her hand and tried to let it take the edge of the day off.

  Tomorrow, of course, she'd be regretting it. Like she regretted most decisions that she made as the result of a particularly long and hard day. There was one that she managed to avoid, at least for now. He was too injured to make a move on her for at least another twenty minutes.

  "So tell me," she said. "I saved your life, I'd say you owe me."

  "Owe you what exactly?"

  "An explanation," she said. He shrugged and shook his head.

  "There's nothing to explain. This little thing is nothing. A simple misunderstanding, nothing more to tell."

  "Not about that," she said. She chewed on the words for a minute before she continued. "I don't get you, you know that?"

  "Who says there's anything to get?"

  She snorted. "I'm sure there isn't. It's better to be dumb, remember? Well, I don't imagine you ever had trouble with that!"

  He smiled. "Nope. Never the least bit. But what don't you understand?"

  "You. You're a fighter, right?"

  "Sure."

  "Legally, right?"

  He shrugged. "I mean most of the time, sure."

  "Most of the time?" She raised an eyebrow and tried to give him a look that suggested that he should continue with that train of thought, but if he noticed it, he was also ignoring her. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "It means whatever it means. I don't know. Don't ask me questions you don't want to know the answer to."

  "Don't try to be mysterious, it doesn't suit you."

  "Oh no?"

  "Not at all," she said. Another drink. It wasn't her preferred beverage by any stretch, but she had to admit that the local micro-brews had their charm. Something about being made locally made them taste better than the sensations on her tongue.

  "What would you say suits me?"

  "I'm pretty sure you'd tear your stitches if I told you."

  "That good, huh?"

  "That's how it is," she told him, took another drink, and gave a wink. He snorted and then let out a groan and his hand moved towards his stomach. She let him do it, conscious of the fact that if things started getting worse, he would let her know. "You alright?"

  "I'm fine."

  "If you hurt yourself acting like an idiot…" she waited a moment for the words to sink in. "So why do you do it anyways?"

  He looked over at her with a strange, distant, almost vacant expression. "Do what?"

  "Fight." She rolled her eyes and when they settled back on him, she was looking harder and had to admit, perhaps a bit meaner as well. "Why do you fight?"

  "I don't know," he answered. "Just born this way, I guess."

  "There are a thousand other things you could be doing so don't try to pull some 'just the way I am' crap. You've got to have a reason, now just, I don't know, tell me. It's not like you're in a hurry to get out of here."

  He let out a long breath and looked far away. There was something strange in his voice when he started to finally speak. "Alright, fine. You know when you're in school, and they hand out those surveys? What do you want to be when you grow up?"

  "Sure," she said. They'd never given her s
uch a survey, but if they had then she'd have known, so there was that, at least. "Why, you've always wanted to be Mike Tyson?"

  "No," he said. His voice was flat and not nearly as amused as she had hoped he would be, but there was nothing that she could do about that but to let him get all sour. "Not really."

  "And yet, here you are."

  "I wanted to be a lion, specifically. But my second choice was police and firefighter."

  "It's the uniform that gets 'em," she said. "You wouldn't believe what it does to a girl."

  "I could stop by a costume shop some time," he offered.

  "I don't think it would do much."

  "No? Anyways, so where was I?"

  "You didn't grow up to be a firefighter," she said. "Nor, I'd stake my reputation as a medical practitioner on this, did you become a lion."

  "No, I guess I didn't. So I was about sixteen when things turned south a little."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Well, my Dad died, and my Mom…" He let out a long breath. "I don't know. Shouldn't speak ill of the dead and all that."

  "What happened?"

  "Long story much, much shorter than absolutely necessary? I dropped out."

  "Oh."

  "It happens. There was a lot going on and I needed to be home more than I needed to be in school."

  "And then what?"

  "I fell in with the wrong crowd, they got me involved in the fighting game, first helping them pass messages organizing underground stuff, then I stuck my big ol' hands into the ring and made some money there."

  "I see." Caroline was starting to see why maybe he hadn't really wanted to get into the story, but it was too late now. She was already invested and had already put him on the spot. She'd already opened up Pandora's box, there wasn't going to be any closing it again.

  "My Mom spent it. So I kept making more, and before I knew it, I had people coming along asking if I wanted to turn things straight."

  "And you did?"

  "Damn right I did. I've got no interest in having to worry about the damn cops showing up every time I try to go out and make a buck."

  She pinched her lips together. There was a second part to the question, and the more that she thought about it the more she didn't really want to ask. The more that she didn't want to ask, though, the more that she started to realize that it wasn't going to be clear until she did.

  "So… I don't think most professional fighters are getting stabbed on the regular."

  "No," he agreed. "They're generally not."

  "Wanna tell me what really happened tonight?"

  "If we're in the middle of story time, then I guess we'll start from the beginning. What do you remember about last night?"

  She blinked. "Remember? Last night?"

  The look in his eyes shifted in the space of a heartbeat. No more flatness, no more bored expression. No more vacant look. He was angry, and he didn't seem to be afraid that she would see it in his eyes.

  "Nothing at all?"

  "I remember you came in and got me."

  "Just a big blank space?"

  "Uhh," she said. "It didn't have to be anything like that," she offered. "There are all sorts of reasons that I could be forgetting the night before. It's really not a big deal."

  He cursed. "Not a big deal, my ass. If I ever get my hands on that guy, I'll–"

  She took a drink, and was surprised to find the bottle empty. "You want another?"

  He drank deeply and handed her the now-empty bottle from beside his hip. "Yes, please."

  She grabbed two new bottles. "So anyways, you were saying?"

  He took the beer from her and used his shirt to cover his hand as he twisted off the cap. She did the same, the sharp metal points digging into her hand as she did so.

  "You spent a long time asking me why I was at the club."

  "Why were you?"

  "I told you last night," he said. A smile spread across his face. Slowly, very slowly, but impossible to miss at the same time.

  "And I just told you I don't remember."

  "I had some business."

  "Legal business?"

  He shrugged. "Legal is a pretty flexible limitation."

  "You'd be surprised how much police officers disagree with you on that one."

  "You'd be surprised yourself. They're a lot more flexible than you might think at first glance."

  "Not in my experience."

  "Then you've met the wrong police officers."

  "You're getting off-topic," she countered.

  "I needed some extra money."

  "So, what, you were… doing a drug deal or something?"

  He smiled widely, took a drink from his bottle, and set it down on the floor. "Hardly. I was setting up a fight."

  "You're really not in any condition to fight."

  "And yet," he said, his voice low, "I'm not going to let it stop me."

  He pressed up from the couch, took another drink, and started towards the door. There were a thousand reasons he couldn't be allowed to leave, but the one that mattered the most was the one that she wasn't remotely ready to admit to.

  23

  Caroline looked down at Shannen and frowned again. He was asleep for now, which she hoped meant she could go to sleep herself. Something told her, though, that the minute she let herself crawl into bed, regardless how much work she had in the morning, she was going to regret it.

  That was going to be a very serious issue, because she could hardly afford to go without sleep with a 12-hour shift waiting for her in the morning, but at the same time, she wasn't a nurse so she could log hours. She had spent the better part of the last decade learning to help people heal, and Shannen was just going to wait for her to leave and go out, no matter what she had to say about it.

  She shook her head and headed towards the back. She'd hear if he turned that fucking car on, she knew, and furthermore, there was nothing she was going to be able to do to stop him short of tying him down and making sure he never got the chance to leave.

  There were other problems with that, though, problems that she didn't remotely want to have to deal with. Like questions of what sort of ideas he would get in his head, and once they were in his head, what might happen to him if he managed to maintain an erection for longer than four hours.

  Her eyes closed and the throbbing in her head managed to subside nearly long enough to start getting a decent amount of sleep. She hoped so, anyways, because she wasn't going to be able to fit a nap in the next day.

  She woke the same way that she usually woke. To the sound of Shannen, up and about. The routine was so simple and so ordinary that it took her a minute to even realize that there was something wrong with it.

  "What are you doing moving around," she finally called out as she pulled a shirt on. She took a moment to stop in front of the mirror and examine herself, making sure that she didn't look quite so much like she wasn't wearing a bra as she was afraid she did.

  The sounds outside her room stopped suddenly, and when she finally resigned herself to her nipples poking through the fabric of her shirt, she stepped out to see Shannen standing there looking as if he'd just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He had a bowl out and stood with a single cracked egg in his hand, hovering over it.

  "Morning," he said, watching her. His eyes were wide and held a strange glint. The lights hurt her eyes but not as much as they had the day before, so it was progress.

  "You should be laying down. If you needed to get to bed, then I would have helped you."

  "I got tired of laying down. I was hungry."

  "Then come wake me." She left off the part where she didn't mind how he did it. She especially left off whatever those suggestions might have been.

  "You need your sleep," he answered, the first correct and almost sensible thing he'd said the whole conversation.

  "Well, I'm awake now." Her alarm started going off behind her, and she scrambled to turn it off. When she padded back out of the bedroom, the eggs were
pouring into a pan, and making a noisy sizzling sound. Caroline noticed something else, as she came closer and the last cobwebs of sleep started to sweep themselves out of her mind.

  Bacon, she thought. The oven was turned up and it didn't take a rocket scientist to put two and two together. "You better be making enough for me, if you're cooking," she said, in a voice that she hoped didn't sound bitchy.

  "Of course, my lord," he answered mildly, the expression on his face a mockery of seriousness. "I wouldn't dream of anything else."

  "Good," she growled. She had her phone plugged in a minute later and coffee brewing a moment after that, and started toward the bathroom. "I'm going to get a shower. You'd better not be getting ready for work, is that clear?"

  "I know," he answered mildly. It was a surprise, and not a pleasant one. Shannen was never mild, as a rule. In the past month, he'd never once been anything but contrary, sarcastic, and occasionally openly flirtatious. Pleasant, though? Not on her life.

  She tried to push that feeling of nervousness out of her gut. There were other things that needed worrying about. Important things. If she was going to worry then it ought to be about one of those things, not about where her tenant had suddenly learned manners overnight.

  The shower felt good on her skin. Almost scalding, hot enough to burn off any of the contaminants of her daily life. There was something almost holy about the feeling of being clean. There was even a verse in the bible about it.

  She shut off the water and pulled on a towel, stepped across the hall and into her room as quickly as she could and dressed in a rush. There was always a hurry, but today there was a special hurry on account of having to make sure that Shannen didn't suddenly get a very bad idea.

  The sound of the car driving off as she pulled her bra on told her everything she needed to know. Not only hadn't he taken her advice, he probably hadn't given her anything to eat, either. Two strikes. Her lips pressed together to form a tight line.

  Whatever, she said to herself. He wasn't really her responsibility. If he thought he was going to be fine then it was his body, not hers. And all she could do without a badge and a gun was to give him advice. After all, he'd avoided the hospital for a reason, and no doubt being able to tell her to fuck off was one of them, as much as it pissed her off.