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“The problem is,” Doc muttered, “I can’t examine you with all your clothes on.”
My mouth dropped open.
“I’m fine. I told Antonio—”
“Pretty boy is the one who insists you are examined. I can’t even hear your heart.”
“What if I . . .” I reached for my shirt buttons, undoing two so that part of my bra was visible. I looked up in time to see Antonio curse and turn around. He really was a gentleman.
“That’ll work. For this part, anyway.”
Doc listened to my heart for a bit, then had me breathe in and out. I turned for him, and he lifted my shirt in the back to listen to my lungs there. Then he took my blood pressure. At some point, Antonio asked if I was decent and turned around to watch again.
“It’s low, but that’s normal for young women at your body weight.”
“How low?” Antonio barked. I jumped at the terse sound of his voice. I wasn’t sure what was happening. Why was he so upset about my blood pressure?
“It’s fine, Ant.”
“It’s not fine. What will bring it up? I want the actual numbers. Get some blood work, too.”
I blinked as Doc sighed and pulled out a syringe.
“I’ll write everything down.”
“Good,” Antonio said. But he didn’t sound like he thought it was good. It didn’t sound like he thought anything was good. “What else can we do?”
Doc sighed and shook his head.
“We could do an IV with vitamins to make sure she’s hydrated.”
“Do it.”
“Wait, what?” I asked as Doc neatly slipped a needle into my arm. I frowned at the number of vials he had laid out on the table. “I don’t need . . . all . . . that.”
“Shit, she’s gonna faint,” I heard Doc say from a distance. And then I was tilting. Something very, very warm and very, very hard caught me. I looked up to see Antonio’s concerned face staring down at me.
“I got you, sweetheart.”
Chapter 9
Antonio
“You didn’t have to touch her.”
“Are you still on about that?” Doc grumbled, rolling his eyes as he adjusted the IV drip. “I just examined her. I don’t make a habit of drooling all over my patients.”
“She’s different.”
He sighed and looked at me.
“Yes, she is.”
“More than drool worthy.”
“True, but I still didn’t. Now if I had met her first…”
I growled at him like a rabid dog whose territory was threatened. Doc must have seen something in my eyes because his eyebrows shot up.
“Holy shit. Are you keeping her?”
I nodded once. That was enough. Word would spread up and down the coast, from biker to biker. Evangeline was protected by the Margarelli’s and anyone else who wanted to do business with us. Or near us.
Which was pretty much everyone. Legit, upper class or on the fringes of society. We did it all.
The girl laying on my bed moaned and tried to sit up. I pushed her down again.
“Hold still,” I said harshly. Then I tried to temper the tone of my voice. “You don’t want to rip out your IV.”
She looked up at me with the innocence of a child. She had fainted at the sight of her own blood. The irony of that was not lost on me.
If I kept her, if she became a mafia wife, it was likely she would see lots and lots of blood. Even though we protected the women and kept them separate, we came home with blood on our hands and clothes on a regular basis. My aunt had some special method for getting it out. Otherwise, if it was too much blood on a white shirt, or something we needed to get of, it went into the incinerator.
Our house had a really big incinerator.
So yeah. If this was going down the way I wanted it to, I’d have to find a way of insulating her from the ugly side of things. From the blood and gore, especially.
If? That was funny. Who was I kidding? There was no way in hell I was letting her go.
“Sleep it off,” I ordered her. She closed her eyes and nodded. I smiled a little bit as her pretty little mouth opened the tiniest bit.
“She’s a Goddamn angel,” I muttered.
“She is,” Doc agreed. “I better get these samples to a lab.”
“Come with me. One of my guys will do it.”
Doc nodded and scooped up his bag, following me out of the bedroom. I shut the door softly and headed out of my suite.
For once, nobody was in the hallway. We had guys patrolling constantly. My Spidey senses went on high alert. Something was up.
“Tiny? Where the fuck is everybody?”
That’s when I heard it. A woman whose voice I didn’t recognize was screaming. Not in pain. In fury. I heard Tiny trying to talk to her. I couldn’t hear the words but I knew what was happening from the cadence of his voice. He was trying to talk her down.
