Page 2 of Fake It For Him

Her dark eyebrows shot up, her sparkly, light eyes drawing me in as she stared up at me. “Let’s go. I’ll help you get cleaned up.”

“You will? Why? You don’t know me, so why do you care?”

She scoffed. “You’re injured in a foreign country after midnight and you clearly have no idea where you are, so just stop asking questions and come with me.”

It was then that I realized her accent was American instead of Scottish, my brain clearly slow as a result of the whiskey—or the head injury, which I still didn’t know if I had. The girl turned back to her friends, still standing outside the door and watching us with varying degrees of impatience, confusion, and curiosity on their faces.

“You guys go on. I’ll catch up later.”

She didn’t wait for a response before she wrapped her arm around mine, a bundle of surprising strength and energy for such a tiny person, and she dragged me across the quiet street. She couldn’t have been more than five-foot-four, yet she commandeered my person like I was a ship she was taking charge of, marching me toward a bank of bright lights around the next corner.

She led me into a twenty-four-hour store. I blinked hard, squinting against the sudden intrusion of light after so long in the dark. She hummed under her breath as she kept marching with my arm held tight in hers, her strides purposeful and sure.

As we walked, I glanced down at her, noticing her thick, long eyelashes as her gaze darted up and down an aisle that held some basic medical supplies. Without wasting time, she selected some gauze, a small bottle of disinfectant, band-aids, and water, and then she marched us to the checkout counter and paid for it all before I could even wrap my hazy mind around what was happening.

After she dropped her change in a small tin on the counter in support of some charity, she took my arm again and marched us right back outside into the cold. Once again, her strides were purposeful and I frowned.

“Where are we going?”

“The hostel I’m staying at is right around the corner,” she said, peering up at me without breaking stride. “Do you want to tell me what happened to you? You weren’t mugged or something, right?”

I chuckled. The movement caused more pain to flare from my face and I winced. “I wasn’t mugged and I still don’t get why you’re helping me.”

“Us tourists need to stick together, right?”

One of my eyebrows arched without my brain having given it the conscious command to do so. “You’re a tourist? You seem to know your way around pretty well for that.”

She shrugged, dropping her gaze back to the street instead of looking at me. “I’ve been here for a while. The hostel is right down here. Come on.”

“Wait. This hostel is nice, right? Like, it’s not the kind of place where they’re going to put me in an ice bath and carve out my kidneys?”

She let out a bark of surprised laughter. “Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s nice, but I’ve been staying there for a bit and I haven’t seen an ice bath yet, so I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“Funny how you didn’t mention whether you still have your kidneys,” I mumbled.

The girl laughed again, shaking her head at me. She pulled me toward a door in a wall without even a sign over it. It was a hole-in-the-wall kind of place—literally—and definitely not someplace where I’d usually stay.

In fact, I wouldn’t usually be anywhere near it, but here I was. I followed her in. Heat rolled over me once we stepped inside, and I breathed out a sigh of relief. We were in a lobby with a huge fire burning in a fireplace, a quiet bar off to one side, low ceilings, and mismatched, well-used furniture dotting the space.

The lights were dim, but the girl didn’t seem hesitant or scared at all. In fact, she seemed kind of at home here, which made me wonder just how long she’d been staying. She shrugged off the parka when we got to a sofa right in front of the fireplace. Then she opened the bag containing the supplies she’d bought and motioned for me to sit down.

“I promise, no one here wants your kidneys. Just relax.”

I darted another look at the old stone walls and the faded flags from all sorts of different countries hanging from the wooden beams overhead. “I’m not sure about this.”

“Just sit down,” she instructed gently as she sat. She caught my hand and pulled me with her. I went, allowing her to drag me down with her and wondering if she was hiding something. No one was this kind to a perfect stranger who was covered in blood and no one was so insistent about helping them, but she was so gentle and she seemed honest, so I stopped fighting.

At least if she kills me, I’d have been murdered by the most beautiful, tender serial killer in the history of the world.

Strangely, I was okay with that—and I also wasn’t getting any serial-killer vibes from her, so I was pretty sure I’d be okay. At the thought, I let myself relax a little, finally pulling my hand away from my face and turning to her.

She scrunched up her nose at whatever injuries she saw now that my hand wasn’t in the way, but she went about dabbing some of the disinfectant on the gauze without commenting on it. Meanwhile, I stared at her openly, examining the face of the woman who had come to my rescue.

In the soft light of the fire and with my head a little bit clearer after walking back here in the cold, she was even prettier than I’d clocked her to be out there on the street. Her features were delicate, and now that she wasn’t wearing the fur-lined hood of the parka, I could see that her face was heart shaped and her cheekbones were high.

Those eyes were a bright, happy, sparkling green and her touches were gentle as she brought the gauze to my cheek. I winced at the initial sting, and her nose wrinkled, her eyes filling with sympathy. “If it helps, I don’t think you’re going to have a scar. The cut doesn’t seem to be that deep.”

“Damn. I’ve heard that chicks dig scars.”