Rough Hand (Bad Boy Fighter Romance) Read online

  "Her boyfriend or something?"

  "Yeah, something like that. I haven't really gotten into it."

  "Okay," he said. "What's your point?"

  "Well, I kind of mentioned it one time, and then he came back the next day and said he'd talked to Coogan about it. Said that he should be off your back."

  "Your roommate's boyfriend knows Sean Coogan?" The expression on his face was somewhere between disbelief and dissatisfaction.

  "I don't know anything about it," she told him, halfway true. "I asked who Mr. Coogan was supposed to be and he said he just asked around."

  "So before I told you, you only knew the name? Where'd you even hear it?"

  "One of the cops said it," she told him. Hadn't she told him this before? She wasn't sure any more, and if he remembered it then he was playing awfully coy. "I just mentioned the whole thing. I don't know about you but I was really upset by the whole thing."

  "Yeah? I bet you were. I'm sorry that happened."

  "Don't be sorry for me," she told him, her temper flaring just a little bit. "It's not my shop, Dad."

  He made a face that she didn't have any interest at all in unpacking. "No, I guess it's not. I'm not worried about it, okay? Your Dad can take care of himself. I'm not decrepit just yet."

  He gave her a halfway smile, one that made her throat choke up. She came dangerously close to losing it, and she hated herself for it.

  "Miss Rice?"

  Caroline turned to regard the woman who had stepped into the room.

  "Yeah?"

  "Dr. Strand is calling for you. He says it's important."

  She nodded, tired, and followed along behind. Whatever Dad's doctor had to say, if he said it was important then she'd go, even if every bone in her body said not to.

  17

  The day had already been too full by the time that she got home. She let out a long breath and closed her eyes, leaning her head up against the steering wheel of the old Toyota, hoped that the strange pulling she'd been feeling as she drove was just the road playing tricks on her, and tried to forget everything that had happened.

  It wasn't going to work, she knew. There was too much that needed to be forgotten to make it work, and none of it was likely to happen. But that didn't mean that she wasn't going to try.

  The electric garage door made a loud grinding noise as it went down behind her, like it always did. She tried to force herself out of the driver's seat but her body started to stage a protest and Caroline knew that she wasn't in any sort of position to argue with it. Not when she was this tired.

  She at least turned the keys in the ignition, and the Toyota went quiet. If only she could have turned everything else in her life off so easily, she might not have had all the trouble she was currently in.

  Her eyes scanned the garage, lit only by her dim headlights. This was Dad's place, mostly. He had never complained about her parking the Toyota in there, even though it was obvious that it made it tricky to get to the workbench tucked into one corner.

  Over it, on a pegboard, hung dozens of tools, each one hanging from its own special hook. She looked over at them tiredly. The steering wheel was almost totally uncomfortable, but she couldn't bring herself to quite hate laying on it, and she couldn't bring herself to lift her head off of it, either.

  She'd never known what a man could use three different hammers for, but he assured her how much he needed them every time she questioned him about it. That wasn't even getting started on the saws, for which she was convinced there could not possibly be a real use. It was a joke, right? There were practically a dozen of them, all lined up one next to the other like there was a difference between them.

  Caroline was surprised when the hot tears fell from her eyes. As surprised as anyone, really. What was she so worried about? Dad was going to be fine, she reminded herself. There really was nothing to worry about.

  She forced her body to move, in spite of itself. There were a thousand other things she needed to worry about, and getting out of the car was the tiniest one of them. If she couldn't even manage that, how was she supposed to deal with the rest of her life?

  She forced her arms to move to the door handle, pull the handle and push the door open. The car started making a loud, annoying beep until she pulled the keys out and turned the headlights off.

  Then she swung one leg out. Then the other. That was progress, and if she could make progress on this, she reminded herself as if it was going to make a difference, then she could make a difference on anything. Right?

  Her body hurt, not from any sort of fatigue but from a general sense of tiredness that wasn't going to go away no matter how much she slept. No matter how many days off she had.

  The back porch light flicked on the minute that she opened the side door of the garage, illuminating the large, slightly overgrown back lawn. She should have mowed, but there was just too much to worry about, and now it was going to be twice as annoying.

  But she was going to have to force herself regardless. That was how it was going to be no matter what she did, so there was no reason to kill herself over it. What was done, was done, and she wasn't going to cry over spilled milk when there was so many better things to cry over that she was trying to get herself to ignore.

  The door was unlocked. It probably shouldn't have been, but Caroline was past the point where it mattered, and when the den seemed to be in perfectly orderly condition, she took it as proof that there was nothing to worry about.

  "You're home," Shannen said. He looked at her from the easy chair, and closed a leather-bound book with a snap as he came to his feet. "Everything okay?"

  Caroline shrugged. He was so big that he seemed to practically dwarf her. It felt like everything did today, though. She was too small to deal with any of this, and yet there wasn't much choice but to make sure that she managed somehow.

  "Everything's fine." It was a lie but it was the lie she had to tell herself. If she could ever make herself believe it, then she would be telling Shannen the truth.

  "I may be an idiot," the big man growled. "But I'm not stupid, you know. I can see you're upset. You want to talk about it?"

  "No," she answered. That was even closer to the truth. What she wanted was to pretend that there hadn't been any interruption earlier. To pretend that she wanted him to fuck her senseless as much as she had earlier.

  But she didn't. The whole thing was a mistake, and she had known it from the very first instant. She'd been willing to ignore the fact that she knew that, though, when her hormones were pumping and the blood was rushing through her ears. Now, she couldn't even make herself feel any of it.

  "If there's something I can do, then…"

  She looked up at him. "I think that it was a mistake, earlier."

  "You mean when we…"

  "That's exactly what I mean."

  He let out a long breath as if he were either relieved or frustrated, but she ignored it because she had to ignore it.

  "Alright," he said, finally. He pressed himself up to his full height and started to move towards her. Caroline could feel her skin start to prickle. If he was going to make her feel like this, then maybe it hadn't been nearly as much of a mistake.

  "It's not you," she said, as if it were going to change something about the way he was feeling. She knew better than to believe that, but she said it regardless. Something told her that she had to tell him, that she'd regret it if she didn't.

  "I know that," he said in a voice that sounded remarkably like it had never been in question. "You sure you don't want to talk about it?"

  She wanted to talk about everything, she thought glumly. First, she wanted to know the truth about whatever had happened with Coogan. Then she wanted to know why he kept showing up in her life, over and over again, in spite of the fact that he was nobody and nothing to her.

  Then, once all that was settled, they might be able to talk about all the other stuff. But that wasn't really an option at this point.

  "I'm sure," she answ
ered instead. "Just leave me alone for a little while."

  He nodded at her. "Well, whatever I can do, just let me know."

  He started past her and Caroline didn't know what she was doing until her arms wrapped around his chest and pulled him in close. "Don't go."

  Shannen stiffened in her arms, but he didn't move to pull away from her. "Okay," he said, at last.

  She felt like she was there forever, holding him close, but it couldn't have been more than a minute or two. Her body started to shake, with something between silent, dry sobs and the shiver of feeling that went through her when his arms drew, finally, around her shoulders and pulled just the tiniest bit tight.

  "I don't know what's wrong with me."

  He squeezed her tighter still. She wasn't sure which part of her felt better when he did it, between her body that relaxed into it or her mind, which finally decided she could let herself believe that someone might be on her side.

  But he didn't answer. If he knew what was wrong with her, he kept it to himself.

  "I'm sorry," she said, finally. Caroline forced herself to relax her arms, and pulled away. Shannen let her go without any argument, without even a comment.

  "I'm here if you need me," he said. His own voice sounded as uncertain as hers, as if he didn't know what it was that she wanted and didn't know how he was going to give it to her when she asked for it. But he offered, and that was something at least.

  The door to her bedroom was right there, and part of her wanted to drag him right in with her and finish what she'd started. There was a bigger part of her now, though, and that part was whispering in her ear when she opened the door and slunk inside, over and over. 'What's the point?'

  She didn't have an answer for that, and she wasn't likely to come up with one any time soon, she knew. That was the hardest part. No matter what she did, no matter what she thought, she knew that there was no way she was going to be able to get away from that question.

  What's the point? Why fight? Why worry about any of it at all? The only thing that she'd get out of it was a few minutes, maybe as long as an hour, and at the end of it, the only hole in her that would have been filled would be the one that she was the least worried about.

  18

  Work was supposed to be hard, Caroline told herself. There was a lot of it, and the day was twice as long as she would have liked. There was more to worry about in a single day's work than she should have had in a month of her everyday life.

  Instead, it was a welcome reprieve from the rest of her life, as if there was nothing to worry about as long as she could keep forcing herself to do a little bit more.

  It felt wrong, but she couldn't even hope to deny it. That was the hardest part, she thought. The idea that she had become weak or something. It shouldn't have felt that way because if she were weak then she wouldn't have been able to deal with the nursing, either.

  Seeing other people in trouble pulled at her heart strings, but not enough to make her lose her composure. Not like everything else she'd been dealing with lately. And the day moved so fast that she only had a few fleeting moments to wonder what was going on with Shannen. To wonder what she was going to do about him.

  For that matter, what he was going to do about her, as well. He'd been different last night. Kind, in a way she couldn't explain. But he'd seen her weakness, no doubt he'd sensed it for what it was, and apparently he wasn't interested in exploiting it. She should have thanked him for that but she just wasn't going to.

  Maybe if he'd decided to take advantage, and forced himself on her, she'd feel better somehow. It felt like there was a plug in her brain, and if he could pop the cork free then she wasn't going to begrudge him the methods he used. Not for a moment.

  Her body shivered and she forced herself to keep moving down the elevator, stopping to grab her usual evening cup of coffee. Shannen would be there any minute, and with any luck he'd tell her what the hell she was supposed to feel about the entire situation.

  Instead, she knew, she was just going to keep freaking out for no reason. If those were her two options, then she didn't much care which way it went as long as she could figure some part of it out.

  He was waiting outside when she got there, standing outside like usual. The expression on his face had returned to usual, whatever tenderness he had found inside himself now retreated back to whatever pit it had crawled out of. The part of her that enjoyed that predatory expression exulted.

  The rest of her sunk a little bit. More than she had necessarily expected, she thought with more disappointment in herself than she probably should have felt. Why was she so caught up on him anyways?

  He was exactly the wrong sort of guy, she knew. That was probably part of the allure, but somehow it didn't really make it feel any better in the end. She should have known better, and the fact that she did know better and didn't care didn't make her feel one bit better.

  There were a thousand other guys out there. Probably a million, two million, three million. She could find one of those. Find someone safe. Find someone who was a smarter choice than him. It wasn't like he was uniquely reliable, right?

  He wasn't reliable at all. He was a loose cannon, a ticking time machine, and probably several other cliches for a dangerous man as well that she hadn't thought of.

  As much as she kept telling herself that, in the hopes that eventually it would start to matter, she couldn't really make herself feel it. It was a mistake and a half, but it was one that she wasn't about to be able to turn off no matter how much she wished that she could.

  Her body reacted to him as he reached over and shifted the gears, even the few inches closer to her made her skin light up with anticipation of what was so close to happening before. What could still happen. What she still wanted to happen in spite of herself.

  She closed her eyes and swore. "Could you drop me off at the house?"

  "Sure," he said, not taking his eyes off the road. Not putting them on her. Thankfulness tried valiantly to drown out the disappointment from that. She pretended that the disappointment didn't win and almost felt better. "Everything okay? Not hungry?"

  "I'm just tired," she lied.

  Caroline Rice was a great many things, but the first and foremost among them was, she wasn't a slut, and she wasn't going to go around advertising that she felt as horny as… well, as horny as anything, and the closer that he got the more she felt it.

  There were a great many reasons for that, but she only needed one good one, and the fact that it was a bad idea came to her mind so fast that it was like a slap in the face.

  Her eyes shut and she forced herself to ignore the tingling between her thighs. She'd prove that she wasn't caught up on him. She'd prove it to herself, and then she'd prove it to him, too. He'd see then, and he'd finally learn that he shouldn't have gotten her all caught up in his talons.

  That was his mistake, and he was about to learn. Right?

  The car pulled up in front of the house, and she slipped out, pulling her purse out of the back along with it, and she ignored the sound of his car rumbling away. Doubly ignored how fucking sexy she found it.

  It was a car, and that was all it was. There was nothing remotely attractive about it and it was stupid to imagine that there was. She wasn't stupid, and she didn't think it. It was all an advertising campaign, and not one that she was going to fall for.

  The door unlocked easily with a turn of the key and she let herself inside. Most of her wardrobe was sensible clothing. There wasn't exactly a whole lot of need for anything else. After all, it wasn't like she was showing off for anyone.

  Half her time was spent in the hospital. The other half of the time was split between going to the hospital, going to school so that she can go to the hospital, and spending time at home reading about hospital-related subjects.

  Nobody needs to wear anything especially nice when they go to the hospital; the few doctors who bothered to wear particularly nice suits only wore them when there was something to commemorate. Dinners
and awards ceremonies.

  That wasn't the sort of thing that nurses had to worry about. Nurses in training not only didn't need to worry about them, they didn't need to think about them. That was the reality and it was a reality she'd accepted before she even made it to high school.

  That being said, Caroline was still a woman, and she still had a woman's taste for clothing. It was rare that she let herself indulge that, but not nearly as rare as it probably should have been if she were being thrifty.

  She pulled her scrubs off and looked at herself in the mirror. It wasn't like she had a bad body, she thought. She'd been comfortable with it for a long time, and the less that she had to show it off to other people the more comfortable with it she was.

  She pulled out a dress that showed far, far too much of it, held it against herself and frowned. Yes, fine. It would do. She dressed herself quickly and then it was into the Toyota. There was a lot she had to prove to herself, and even more she had to prove to Shannen.

  She'd give it a few short hours, now. Then she'd be able to prove that he wasn't so special. There would be any number of guys on his level, and she didn't doubt for a moment that she could attract one of them.

  Particularly, she thought sourly, because in this dress she looked like they wouldn't have to make it past the parking lot to score. While she wasn't planning on just throwing herself at anyone, she wasn't sure that was the wrong impression.

  As long as it wasn't Shannen, she needed to get her mind off things, and almost anyone would do. She pulled into a crowded parking lot, swallowed her pride and pulled up to the valet, took the claim ticket, stuffed it into her bra, and stepped inside.

  It had been a long, long time since she'd been inside one of these places, she thought. Maybe it had been too long. After a few drinks she could make it onto the dance floor, find some perfect-looking stud, let him think that it was going to turn into something, and enjoy herself for once in her life.

  Needless to say, Caroline didn't believe any of that was going to happen.

  19