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So, she does remember. I rubbed her back until her coughing fit eased and she fell back against me, exhausted. “If you want to get technical about it,” I replied slowly, still not sure how she felt about that fact, “youkissedme.”
“Lies,” she said with a wave of her hand.
I smiled to myself. Ridiculous. Who held onto that much sass with their life on the line?
The distant roar of off-road vehicles filled the silence. June sat up again, and a little line creased her forehead as she looked from the trail and back to me.
“I’ll stay with you,” I promised. I wasn’t sure why I promised that or why I thought she would want it, but it was all I had to offer to make things easier.
“Prom-uh-ise?”
“Are you questioning my integrity, Matthews?” I joked and pushed a curl away from her cheekbone.
“Ye-uh-s,” she glared.
The engines grew louder as what sounded like several off-road vehicles closed the distance between us. “Just do what the EMTs say, okay?”
“’Kay.”
The cavalry arrived in a cacophony of revving engines, dust clouds, and screeching brakes as the EMS skid, which was a glorified golf cart with a gurney-sized bed on the back, arrived, followed by several ATVs carrying EMTs and a couple park rangers. June shrank back against me, clearly not liking the chaos. The EMTs jumped from the skid and ATVs, bags in hand, and ran through the thick undergrowth to make their way over to us.
They worked quickly, administering steroids and bronchodilators, and I tried to stay out of their way. Although I was able to give them pertinent information about her condition, I knew there were boundaries in our professions, and in this case, I trusted them to get her to the hospital safely.
They got her loaded on a stretcher, and she gave me a look like a cat wrapped in a bath towel. I walked with them toward the skid, smiling slightly to myself over the image of June trapped on a stretcher. I took a mental picture to chuckle over later.
One of the EMTs leaned her mouth toward a receiver on her shoulder, relaying information to the hospital to expect June, and gave a quick rundown of her condition. Someone on the other end replied in a muffled voice, and then the EMT said, “Ten-four. They have Dr. Schuler on standby.”
June coughed. “I have a doctor.” The EMTs looked down at her in confusion. She jerked her head my way. “Dr. Brady is my doctor.”
The EMTs all looked at me in surprise. My chest constricted painfully. She might as well have shoved her hand through my chest Indiana Jones style and ripped out my heart.
Uh oh.
Ten
June
It took forever, and I meanforever, to get discharged from the damn hospital bed. Amos was an absolute, overbearing ass, and he made me sit there for hours with a blood pressure cuff that squeezed the guts out of my arm every ten minutes, and then he made me keep the nasal cannula in my nose even after my oxygen levels had returned to normal. I wanted to rip everything off and scream like a banshee.
Even worse, they had wanted to keep me overnight for observation. At that point, I had actually grabbed Amos by the shirt and threatened to put his entire schedule into pig Latin when we got back to the city if he didn’t do something about it.
Andthatwas how I knew for sure that Amos Brady wanted to sleep with me. Because as he had discussed my discharge with the on-call, Dr. Schuler, Amos had offered to stay with me for the night and monitor my vitals, so I didn’t have to stay in the hospital. And then a slow smile had crept up my face because no man would voluntarily sleep with a woman for a second night in a row if he didn’t want tosleepwith her.
If we were going to sleep in one bed, then I had no choice but to initiate my plan:
The slow, decadent seduction of Amos Brady.
Because here was the thing; I was very much a virgin. I hadn’t intended to be, but life had panned out that way, and regrettably, my moment had never presented itself. Men were generally douchebags, I’d found. And, yes, okay, I’d assumed that Amos Brady was also a douchebag, but I might have been the teensiest bit wrong about that. Or, he was so sexy, I was willing to overlook it. Regardless, I had plans.
It still took an entire Biblical lifetime to get paperwork filled out and my IV removed, but with my lungs clearer than they’d felt since I could even remember, and a prescription bag containing my necessary meds, I finally walked through the sliding double doors of St. John’s to a pitch-black summer night. I inhaled deeply in satisfaction. Brady followed behind me at a slow pace, his attention on a phone call with one of his colleagues about some kind of research project.
I called my parents and told them what happened, and my mom said she’d always sworn I had asthma. My dad wisely agreed with her excellent foresight and told me to come visit for dinner, which I… made a face at. My siblings had a lot of kids. Loud kids. I penciled in a date I would force myself to go to Chaos Dinner as we got to the car.
A notification from Instagram caught my attention and I opened it.
Archer: Hey, just checking in! Would it be too last minute to ask if you could schedule the mural next week?
I kicked myself for not finding time to make that sketch. I’d been a bit distracted. I texted him back.
