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If he’d walked in wearing colors, the pearl-clutchers in the waiting area might have fainted, but the staff would have known what was what.
But he was in his Sinclair uniform, and the new girl didn’t know enough to make four out of two and two. “Yeah, I’m afriend.”
She picked up the phone and pressed a button. “Dr. Helm? There’s someone named Dex at the reception area. He says he needs you.” She listened, nodded, and hung up. “She’ll be right out.”
“Thanks.”
Dex stepped back from the desk and tried to find a place to stand where the pearl-clutchers wouldn’t feel threatened.
He was just a guy in a work uniform, for fuck’s sake. He wasn’t wearing colors, none of his ink showed, and he was cuddling an injured puppy. There was no scenario in which he presented less of a threat than right now.
A collie came bounding up the corridor from the exam rooms, dragging his person behind him. And right behind them walked Kelsey.
Dex felt guilty every time he thought it, butChrist, she was beautiful. And sweet as could be. He’d been nursing a silent crush since she’d saved Lennie—a crush ignited simply by her reaction to seeing him when Dex brought him in. So much tender compassion, so much obvious competence. Yeah, he was extremely into this woman walking toward him.
But there was no woman on the face of the earth more out of his league than Kelsey Helm. Setting aside his essential lack of fitness as a partner for somebody like her—or anybody else, for that matter—there were other, even more insurmountable obstacles.
For one thing, he’d known her since she was fourteen, and there was a part of him that remembered that bouncy girl with the ponytails, braces, and legs too long for her body every time he thought about the woman she’d become. It freaked him out and made him feel like a perv. He was eleven years older. Even now, when she was twenty-seven, that felt like a huge gap.
For another thing, she was Maverick’s daughter, and that mofo was protective as fuck. Mav would skin him, shove an apple in his mouth, and stick him on the spit in the club roaster if he caught him looking twice at his firstborn.
Dex and Mav were well matched, pound for pound, and traded wins in the ring—but the fact that Mav was twenty years older than him tipped the scales a bit in Mav’s favor, toughness-wise. Add in a daddy supercharge, and there wouldn’t be enough parts of Dex left to identify him.
Besides, the only time Kelsey had paid him much attention had been that night last year, when her ex had crashed her brother’s patch party and tried to snatch her right out of the Bulls’ hands, while brandishing an AR-15.
After a tense standoff with an array of angry Bulls pointing big guns of their own, Dex had been the one to find the shot and take it.
Kelsey had hugged him for that. A long, tight, grateful hug, and a lingering kiss of his cheek. First and only time she’d ever really touched him.
More than a year later, he still thought about it. How she’d felt in his arms, pressed all up on him. How soft her lips had been. How good she’d smelled.
The days right after that night constituted the only time he’d ever seriously considered trying to get to know her better. He’d wised up pretty quickly, though.
It wasn’t Maverick holding him back. It wasn’t the age difference. It was him. He was not anywhere near her league. He wasn’t even playing the same damn sport.
As she approached him now, looking so smart and professional in her white doctor’s coat and light purple scrubs, stethoscope hooked over her neck, her long blonde hair tied back and her big blue eyes sparking, he did the thing he usually did: shut the fuck up.
