Page 12 of Complications

TEMPTATION

CHAPTER ONE

Michel

Matteo

My house. Now.

Michel

On my way.

“What’s the emergency?”

The clipped message I’d received from Matteo hadn’t given me much to work with, but when Matteo Leone called, I responded immediately. He didn’t pull me out of my practice unless it was urgent.

“Elio’s gone and done something stupid,” Frankie said as he escorted me down the hallway toward the guest bedrooms, which told me everything I really needed to know.

Oh. That made sense.

Matteo and I had been friends since college, both of us growing up in a world we never had to explain to each other, which was perhaps the only reason our friendship had survived as long as it had.

Over the years, I’d patched Matteo up more than once, though lately his focus had shifted elsewhere. He referred to Elio as his nephew, though I’d never quite understood the exact mechanics of that relationship since Matteo had no siblings. It didn’t matter. Blood was blood in this world, even when it wasn’t.

And Elio had a talent for doing something foolish and getting himself hurt in the process. He liked to think of himself as part of the family business. Typically, he preferred to hover around the edges of things that were far bigger than he understood, but every damn one of them knew he was only playing at the fringes. A bored rich kid looking for something to do, except the something usually ended up with him bruised or bleeding. It annoyed me to no end, but he wasn’t afraid to back up his mouth. I had grudging respect for that, though I was sure not everyone in Matteo’s organization felt that way.

“Your patient’s in here, Doc.” Frankie opened the door and stepped aside.

The room was quiet. The bed was empty, but movement from the couch in the corner pulled my attention.

Elio looked as he always did—rumpled in the deliberate, expensive way that said he’d spent good money to look careless. A T-shirt and jeans tailored within an inch of their lives clung to a body that had no business being that distracting. He had dark hair like his uncle’s, broad shoulders, and thick thighs. Absolute perfection.

But his face carried a softness Matteo had never possessed. The family’s brown eyes were sharp and clear, framed by long dark lashes and heavy brows that made him look almost innocent if you didn’t know better.

He looked like a fallen angel.

And I was out of my goddamn mind for noticing. Noticing meant acknowledging that I wasn’t immune, and I had worked very hard to convince myself that I was.

“What have you done to yourself this time?” I asked, setting my bag down and sitting on the heavy wooden coffee table so I could examine him properly.

There was a shallow abrasion on his cheek, but it was his hand that concerned me. His knuckles were already swelling, the bruises blooming fast enough that I didn’t need an x-ray to know at least one finger was broken.

“Why do you act like you’re not happy to see me?”

His tone was flirtatious, but it meant nothing. Elio flirted with anything that moved—male or female, it didn’t matter. As long as they were adults, they were fair game. He liked reactions. He liked attention. He liked pushing boundaries just to see who would hold firm.

He’d been poking at me for years. I’d ignored the pull for just as long. But his antics were escalating.

What had once happened maybe once a year was now happening every couple of months, and his last patch-up had been only weeks ago. At some point, it had stopped being a coincidence and started being a pattern.

Elio was playing a dangerous game. Matteo might indulge him up to a point—he’d roll his eyes and smooth things over—but there was always a line, and Elio was edging closer to it with every impulsive decision. Business was business, even with family.

“Because I’m not. Whose boyfriend did you piss off this time?” I dabbed antiseptic onto his cheek, and the instinct to soften the sting with my breath rose uninvited before I crushed and turned my focus to his hand instead.

“Stretch your fingers.”

His sharp inhale told me the injuries weren’t as minor as he wanted me to believe, but he moved them—except for his ring finger. A diagonal bruise continued to darken across the knuckle, the swelling tight and angry. It was practically happening in real time and, yes, clearly broken.