Cold Hearted: Bad Boy Romance Read online

  Second, he didn't work on her floor, so she wasn't going to work with him either way. He worked in the cancer ward. The one where her father was.

  "Hello, Miss Rice? It's Dr. Strand calling. It's about your father. There's nothing to worry about, but you might want to come around some time today. Your father's being transferred for surgery and if you'd like to see him beforehand, he's going in at, uh..." She could almost see him looking down to check his notes, even through the speaker.

  'Nothing to worry about' he'd said. But the fact was, surgery was always something to worry about. No matter how minor it was supposed to be, no matter how easy it would be, there was always some risk that things would end up with a complication. The minute that things were complicated was the minute that you had to worry.

  As it turned out, nobody ever performed surgery unless things were already complicated. The risk of getting someone hurt was too much to just perform surgery willy-nilly, so they only did it when they thought that by poking around inside someone they could at least hope to improve something that couldn't be improved without the surgery.

  What did that mean for Dad? If he needed surgery, why hadn't someone told her? It wasn't as if she were hard to reach. She was in the same building more days than she wasn't, and she was speaking to doctors on a near-daily basis. And yet, nobody had decided to tell her, as if it were no big deal.

  She closed her eyes and sucked in a breath, and the Dr's recorded voice picked back up. "Noon, he'll be transferred to surgery. Sorry to spring this on you, it was a little bit of a surprise for us, too. But again, we've got everything in hand. There's nothing to worry about, we're not worried in the least bit. We're just trying to make sure that we don't run into any trouble."

  Doctor-speak is a thing. Not a formal thing, of course. In all of her classes, nobody had sat Caroline down and told her that this was how you were supposed to lie to your patients about how bad something is. Nobody said 'just call it a little pressure, and when it feels like they're being kicked by a mule, well, technically it won't have been a lie.'

  But somehow, everyone managed to come up with their own euphemisms, their own white lies, and they stuck with them as well as they could. Nothing to worry about was a phrase, four words long, which meant nothing at all, but it made the patient's family feel better so they said it anyways. Well, that might work with other people, but Caroline knew better, and being treated like a rube was about the last straw.

  She let out a long breath and pulled her hair back. She'd have to take the coffee to go this time. That, or burn the shit out of herself. The shower would wait. But she had two hours to get to the hospital, and that really meant she had forty-five minutes before they started seriously prepping for surgery.

  She could make that, of course. She would have to make it somehow, but she could do it if she tried. All it meant was that she had to leave now, she had to leave in a hurry, and she had to do her best not to worry too much on the way, because with the way the last few days had been going already, she was going to give herself an ulcer if she didn't cool it for a little while.

  The car started, though it let out a high-pitched noise that made her ears hurt and made her shoulders tense up like the worst of her scoliosis patients until it went away a minute later when she shifted the car into Drive.

  The drive to the hospital generally took about fifteen minutes; nothing special was slowing her down, except that her usual trips were before the sun even came up, one of the few cars on the road, and now an army of stay-at-home moms had apparently finally gotten around to going out and running their day's errands. A fifteen minute trip took twenty minutes, but she was still there by eleven.

  Which made her that much angrier when she stepped out of the elevator, walked to Dad's room, and found the room empty save for a nurse changing the sheets of a bed that had been stripped.

  "Oh, hey, Caroline," she said. "They found space in OR-3 for your dad, so he's a little early. Sorry."

  Caroline's eyebrows raised but she wasn't the least bit surprised. "Yeah, figures."

  "Sorry again," the woman said. But there was nothing that she could do, and they both knew it. Caroline tried to keep her frustration off her face. Tried to keep her worry off her face.

  "You know where Dr. Strand is?"

  "He's in his office," the nurse offered. That would make a decent second stop, at least. He could tell her nothing to her face, rather than over a telephone message, and in a few hours when Dad was out of surgery and the painkillers had worn off, she could see him and maybe find out from the horse's mouth precisely what it was that he was making such an effort not to tell her.

  She took a deep breath and forced her body to keep moving. Dr. Strand's office was right at the end of the hall, and as long as she didn't think about anything beyond making it to the door she might be able to get that far.

  13

  Caroline swallowed hard and watched the clock tick by. There was a lot that she needed to wait for. A lot that she needed to do. The majority of it, right or wrong, wasn't something that she was looking forward to.

  At some point, for example, she was going to need to figure out what she was supposed to be doing about her father's surgery. What was she supposed to think, and what was it all supposed to mean?

  'Exploratory surgery' didn't sound like the sort of thing that people who were perfectly healthy got very often. It didn't sound like the sort of thing that doctors did when they had the entire situation in hand. Of course, Caroline already knew that; even in only a few short years of studying medicine, and in a few short weeks of working at the hospital, she'd already developed a wealth of knowledge about the sort of things that people generally ought to worry about.

  She would develop more, and in years to come, she knew, she'd think of herself now as barely knowing anything at all. But those two words, 'exploratory surgery,' put back to back like that, she already knew those spelled more than just a little bit of trouble.

  Those were practically nuclear-level 'oh shit' situations just waiting to manifest themselves, and that was what Dad was staring down the barrel of. In a few hours more, maybe she'd go in, and see him, and then she'd find out that everything was completely fine. She was worried for no reason, and there was nothing to worry about in the first place. They'd found everything they needed, and it wasn't nearly as bad as they had feared.

  But that didn't seem likely. Instead, she was likely to go in and be told that after all that searching, they'd found some new ideas that would be perfectly interesting to explore, but were the furthest thing from conclusive. That wasn't really good enough, not to be digging around inside someone's organs, but it would have to be.

  Which was why she was sitting in the driveway, staring absently at the garage door, still closed and not moving to open, when Shannen's black-pearl coupe pulled up, purring like a chainsaw until he eased it out of gear and turned the ignition off.

  He looked like a wreck, and there was no way he ought to have been home this early. The entire 'ride home from work' situation worked because Shannen generally left the gym not too long before she got out of work herself. They were both heading to the same place, around the same time, and it wasn't so far out of the way.

  Of course, being convenient for her didn't hurt things, either, but that was only one part of the puzzle, and it all came together to mean that she could get her ride from him in spite of everything.

  But at two in the afternoon, he shouldn't be coming home, and he shouldn't be coming home looking like he was dragging himself across the lawn by the skin of his teeth.

  Furthermore, he didn't notice that she was sitting in the car. If he did, then he wasn't making any sign of it. He just pulled himself into the house, closed the door behind, and whatever he did after that, she couldn't see, beyond what was visible through the gaps in the front window blinds.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to get out of the car, even though her body didn't want to move. There was a whole day ahead o
f her, and if she hadn't gotten that call then some of it might have been productive. As long as she could keep forcing herself to move, and keep avoiding thinking too hard, she might have a chance of salvaging some of it yet.

  The sound that hit her first was the noise of the shower turning on. Shannen wasn't being particularly quiet about it today. She wasn't sure if he was assuming that she wouldn't be there, in spite of her car in the drive, or if he was trying to give her some sort of warning that he was home, and she was supposed to be in her room, but either way it seemed strange.

  She let herself wonder for a minute before she eased herself onto the couch, flipped open a medical text, and started reading through it with the sort of care that she might have taken on a paperback novel. It wasn't productive work, but it felt like it could be, eventually.

  By the time that she heard the sound of his moving around in the shower, the sound of grabbing shampoo or conditioner or whatever he was on, she was almost convinced that she could start to seriously focus on the book.

  Caroline skimmed, her eyes critically looking out for anything that stood out as distinctly unfamiliar. The first and most important thing that she had to do was figure out what she was going to have trouble with, before the problems ever arose. Her pen absently noted words she didn't recognize on one side of a piece of notebook paper as her eyes scanned.

  A noise caught her attention and pulled it away from the page in her lap. Something moving behind her. Her eyes flicked over to the back hallway before she could reason with herself, that it had to be Shannen doing the moving.

  He wasn't wearing anything at all, again, and he hadn't noticed her, again. She watched him with an interest that she didn't bother to hide this time. She was too tired to play coy, and she knew that it wasn't going to lead to anything. At least, she knew that until he turned and caught her looking, smiled, and turned toward her.

  "You like what you see?"

  She felt her throat dry up. He was teasing her, she knew, and it wasn't intended to be taken seriously. But she couldn't stop herself, whether she wanted to or not, from hearing an edge of serious flirting in his voice.

  "You should get dressed," she said. Her voice was weak and it lacked conviction even to Caroline's own ears. "Nobody wants to see that."

  "You do," he said. "I saw it in your eyes, that first day. Fucking what's her name. I can see it right now."

  As he spoke he walked forward, and it was only a moment later that she could smell the bath wash on him, the softly masculine, woody smell of whatever product he used.

  "Don't flatter yourself," she said. Her throat was dry and the words croaked out of her, but she managed to say them nonetheless. That was a small victory, but from the expression on his face it wasn't anywhere near enough to convince the fighter.

  "Have you ever been fucked before, Caroline? Have you ever had a man take you?"

  "No," she said. There was more to it, when she'd planned the response in her head, but when her mouth started moving it came out short and didn't have the protest that she'd intended.

  "But you wanted to. You've been wondering what it's like for so long that you don't even remember when you started. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong, and I'll stop."

  He rounded the sofa, his cock starting to grow. Even flaccid, he had a size that was a little bit intimidating, but as he stared at her it grew. He seeming to see right through her defenses and into a private world where she had wondered very much what it would be like to have him take her. It made her shiver.

  "You should go get dressed," she offered. It wasn't a refusal, though, and deep down she knew it.

  "I could do that. But I don't want to disappoint you."

  "Who would be disappointed?"

  He leaned down over her, his face filling her vision and the rest of him filling her mind. Her body tingled, every nerve in her body waiting for him to touch her. She held herself still, held her body stiff and forced herself not to reach out to him. But she desperately wanted to.

  "Touch it," he whispered. "Touch me. You can, you know. Nobody would have to know. Nobody would judge you."

  "You're a tenant, and I'm saving myself."

  Shannen didn't scoff at her. He didn't laugh. He didn't even smirk. He pressed his lips against her jaw and she didn't pull away. Then he put those same lips, surprisingly soft for a man who was, in so many other ways, so hard, right by her ears.

  "Are you sure? Think about it. Think hard. Think about what you're missing. About how good it would feel to have this cock inside you, fucking you, filling you up in ways that you never even dreamed of."

  "You're very full of yourself," she said. The defenses were crumbling, and it was all that she could do to keep her hands pressed hard into her own hips.

  "I can back it all up, if you'll let me," he purred, and Caroline shivered. God, the offer was tempting.

  "You'd better," she breathed.

  14

  "I can back it all up, if you'll let me," he purred, and Caroline shivered. God, the offer was tempting.

  "You'd better," she breathed.

  The next time that his skin touched hers wasn't sweet, or tender. It was rough and hard. His lips pressed against hers in a way that reminded Caroline that for every day that she'd fantasized about him, he hadn't taken another woman to bed, either. It told her that he was looking forward to this, every bit as much as she was.

  Her body reacted, just like Caroline had been afraid it would. Just like she'd hoped that it would. Her body felt good. Better than good. 'Orgasmic' was starting to take on a whole new meaning, and she knew that she wasn't even close to her peak yet.

  The feeling of the thing in her hand was strange and wonderful all at once. His cock was stiff and long and uncut, and the skin glided over his hardness as if it were made specifically for her to be doing this. He rocked his hips forward to meet her hand, and she wasn't sure which of them was sighing, except that she knew that she needed him to do more, to take more.

  His hands reached up under her loose-fitting shirt, and Caroline suddenly felt embarrassed about the clothes she was wearing, somewhere between too casual and too childish, but if Shannen noticed, he didn't make any sign of it. His fingers pinched her sensitive flesh and drew a gasp from her. It didn't feel anything like when she did it herself.

  There were things she hadn't experienced, in her explorations. Things that she was very much looking forward to, in spite of herself, but what Caroline hadn't expected was exactly how much of it was going to be better than she expected, areas of her body's sensation that she thought completely explored, and she was going to have to go over again with a fine-toothed comb and the exact wrong sort of man.

  He smiled against her lips as she let out a gasp. She realized dimly that she'd stopped stroking his member and started moving her hand again, slowly. His sharp intake of breath told her that she was doing something right.

  "God, just like that," he whispered. It was her turn to smile.

  His hands left her breasts, stopped teasing her nipples to impossible hardness. Her body was impossibly ready for what was going to come next, but she let him take the lead anyways. He was, without a doubt, the more experienced.

  "Fuck me."

  Caroline hoped it made her sound... something. Experienced, or excited, or something. He pressed another kiss on her lips, looked into her eyes.

  "What's the rush? I've got all day."

  She was about to ask him what he meant, why he was going to deny her when she was offering herself and everything that entailed, when he started moving her hips around on the sofa, dangling her legs off the couch before putting himself between her knees.

  "You ready?"

  "Ready for what?"

  He smiled up at her, a toothy thing that should have made him look pleased, but instead made him look like an animal about to devour her. "Trust me," he told her, instead of answering.

  She was wearing dirty scrub pants because they were loose-fitting and comfortable, and becaus
e she had a half-dozen pairs that were just lying around if she didn't use them. As a result, they slid down over her hips easily when he pulled, even before she lifted her ass up to accommodate him.

  Caroline was suddenly glad that she had bothered to shave yesterday as his hands ran along the silky-smooth skin of her calf, up her thigh. The feeling of his fingers moving across her skin built up a need inside her that she had to force herself not to try and sate with her own fingers.

  The smile on his face, she knew, wasn't meant for her. She was an unwitting recipient of what was to come; whatever he planned, it was for him, and she was along for the ride. Something about it only made the entire thing more erotic. That was even more true as his fingers danced across her pussy, shooting white hot electric pleasure through her body, even as she knew that more was to come.

  Her hips shifted uncomfortably, wanting more and wanting less all at once. "Please, just..."

  "Just what?" He pressed his lips against her thigh, the sensitive flesh tickling. She squirmed away from the kiss but he wrapped an arm around her and held it fast. He pressed another kiss, closer this time to her core. The tickling came again, stronger, the whiskers on his chin scratching and sending that ticklishness shooting through her.

  She squirmed harder, but there was no way that she was moving him off of her, no way that she was going to fight away from him. He nipped a little at the sensitive flesh of her inner thigh. His head was impossibly close, now. He turned to face her moist box, and his nose brushed her curls. Her entire body tensed up in anticipation of what was going to come.

  She didn't know what it was going to be, not exactly. She'd seen videos, of course. She had a general sense. But nothing could prepare her for the feeling of his tongue, hot and strong and wriggling in the most delicious way imaginable, parting her folds and flicking upward across her clit.