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Nor did I notice her nipples tighten or her stance go rigid as I moved.
Zach did, however.
And he confronted me on it when we got to the kitchen.
“Did you fuck her?”
I frowned hard and started to unwrap my hand. “What? Who?”
“The help,” he grumbled. “The moment you got close, she went red, and then her tits all but threw themselves toward you. It was more than obvious that she knew you. Intimately.”
I shook my head.
“Don’t know what it was,” I admitted. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
His eyes narrowed, and I held up three fingers in the universal sign of ‘scout’s honor.’
He snorted. “Were you ever a scout?”
I nodded. “Actually, yes. I got my Eagle, too. Scouts was the only thing that got me through a really shitty childhood. Our scoutmaster, Scott, was the one thing that kept me sane. Swear to God, if I didn’t have Scott in my life, I would’ve for sure wound up in jail a lot earlier than I did.”
Zach’s eyes went intense. “You know, you’re the only one I don’t know why you were in jail.”
My brows went up. “You know why Bruno was in jail?”
Out of everyone, Bruno was definitely the least talkative of us all.
Which was funny, because Bruno was the only one of us who hadn’t technically been in jail.
At least, not for any length of time.
He’d been arrested all right, but he hadn’t been imprisoned.
“I know that he wasn’t in jail because he’d been put there by a court. I know that he infiltrated it as a guard, was arrested for his crimes, then promptly released because he wanted to be there in the first place. And the judge decided to let him go so he didn’t get what he wanted,” Zach admitted.
I burst out laughing. “How did you figure that out?”
He was right.
It’d taken me five years to figure it out, though.
It’d taken Zach less than one.
“I know a lot of people, thanks to working at the hospital.” Zach shrugged. “And, when we were asked to do this.” He gestured at my cut and then his. “I asked around. Found out that he was really good at getting out of almost everything that someone’s tried to pin on him.”
“Who?” I wondered as he gestured to my hand.
I placed it on the counter on the towel that he’d laid out, then gritted my teeth as he went on to disinfect it, then suture it.
It took him five minutes total and three stitches.
“A police officer that I used to spend a lot of time with at the hospital. He was the night shift security guard,” he explained. “I’m done. You need antibiotics. I can call in some but you’ll have to actually go pick them up this time.”
I shrugged.
That would be the smart thing to do.
But I never was good at taking pills.
Hadn’t been since my foster father forced half a bottle of Xanax down my throat when I was twelve.
The act of swallowing anything when I didn’t have to was abhorrent to me.
“You won’t, will you?” he asked.
“I…” I began to form an excuse, but it died on my lips when he stiffened.
Zakelina’s cry of pain had Zach standing and hurrying toward the sound before I’d even finished my sentence.
Zakelina’s chapped lips had cracked, and a drop of blood leaked down the length of her chin, causing Zach to stiffen.
“Crockett,” Zach said quietly. “Can you get her to the bathroom? Get her cleaned up? That’s a white shirt, and you know how she loves it.”
That white shirt being one that I’d bought her the day that I’d seen her with her eyes open the first day after her surgery.
She’d hugged it to her like it was the best gift in the world when in reality it was only a plain cotton t-shirt that I’d had in my saddlebags that’d not had a slit up the back.
Zakelina now wore it every single day and refused to take it off.
Crockett rolled her eyes and held out her hand. “Come on, baby. I’ll help you.”
The two of them disappeared into the bathroom, then Zach’s narrowed eyes went to the woman.
“Maybe if you were paying more attention to my girl and not how you have the hots for some man that doesn’t reciprocate, you wouldn’t be hurting your patients,” Zach snapped.
Words that didn’t even make sense, yet Zach said them anyway.
Damn, he was off his fuckin’ rocker.
Catori’s eyes went from me to Zach and narrowed.
Oh, she was pissed.
Pissed as hell.
“I’m doing my job.” She calmly stood up, gathering her things. “My job is to help that little girl get better. To help her to learn to speak and eat normally again. Now, you need to work on her opening her jaw all the way. She’s spent weeks with it wired shut, and I’m sure, as an ex-doctor and all, you know what’ll happen if she doesn’t use those muscles, correct? Or did you forget your medical knowledge when you killed that patient?”
