Fire Me Up (3 page)

She passed the first-in bag to Jeff, who caught it without looking while the police officer stepped to the background to give them a wide berth.

“My name is Teagan O'Malley, and I'm a paramedic with Pine Mountain Fire and Rescue,” she said, her hands a flurry of movement as she geared up to do a rapid trauma assessment. “Can you tell me your name?”

The guy lifted a pierced eyebrow toward his spiky platinum hairline and speared her with a stare caught somewhere between hazel and cold gray. God, how did she
know
him?

“I'm fine,” he ground out, his voice pure gravel and aggravation. “Which I already told that fucking jarhead, but he wouldn't let me leave.”

Yeah. It was going to take a little more than a bad attitude and some uncut testosterone to get her to back down. “That fucking jarhead, as you so eloquently put it, might've saved your life by keeping you here until you can be medically cleared. While I doubt there's a gift registry for that kind of thing, a simple thank you might be nice. Just to be on the safe side.”

Her would-be patient took a step back, his stare going from cutting to calculating in the span of a breath. “I don't need to be medically cleared,” he said, although it didn't escape her notice that he caught the cop's attention to toss him a tight nod.

Teagan bit back the temptation to point out that, from the looks of things, he was a walking, talking version of the game Operation with that arm bent up like it was. “Okay. Why don't you let me give you a quick once-over to be sure?”

“No.” The word fell between them without subtlety, and she drew back with a frown. The tough guy routine was cute really, but nobody was indestructible.

“Look, I know this isn't fun, but it's necessary, so—”

“If you think I'm getting in that ambulance, then you don't know shit.”

Jeff locked eyes on her in a nonverbal communication of
say the word,
but Teagan gave a quick shake of her head. She'd handled enough tough guys to fill a stadium, and this one was no different.

She craned her neck and stepped close enough to see the numerous abrasions peppered in with the guy's dark stubble, meeting his stare head-on even though it sent an involuntary shiver down the plumb line of her spine.

“Let me tell you what I
do
know.” She dropped her voice to just a notch above a whisper and threw on a smile as thick and sweet as store-bought frosting. “I know your arm is broken, and I think you know it, too. I know you don't want me to look at it even though it hurts like a bitch. And I also know that's not an option, because it's possible that broken arm is the least of your worries. So here it is. You can either cooperate with me and we'll do this the easy way, or I can sedate you and work you over so thoroughly, I'll be on a first-name basis with every last part of you. Are we clear?”

A muscle tightened in the hard line of his jaw, drawing out the silence for a beat, then two before he turned toward her ever so slightly, as if waiting for her to get on with it.

Good enough, she thought as she lifted her hands to start checking him out.

But before Teagan could even start on his pulse, the guy's free hand had turned to form an ironclad circle around her wrist.

Heat shot all the way up Teagan's arm and her heart whacked against her ribs like a hockey puck dropping at center ice . . . right up until she realized the guy had simply reached out to get her attention.

“Adrian.” The word, little more than a harsh affirmation, pushed past his lips quietly, and it snapped her focus back into place.

“Excuse me?”

As fast as he'd touched her, he loosened his fingers, as if the movement of getting her attention in the first place had drained his strength to fumes. “My name is Adrian. And yeah. My arm hurts like hell.”

And just like that, she was moving again, even though her skin still prickled with strange and residual warmth. “Can you rate the pain on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you've ever felt?”

Something Teagan couldn't get a gauge on flickered across his expression, darkening his eyes to a steely green gray, but he snuffed it out with an audible exhale. “If I don't move it, it's fine.”

“And if you do?”

Adrian paused. “Six.”

Damn. She'd hate to know what had given him his ten. “Okay, Adrian, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to have you sit on this cot.” Teagan stopped to acknowledge Chris's impeccable timing as he rolled the thing over, and she reached for the trauma shears Jeff had wordlessly taken from the bag before she continued. “And I'm going to ask you a couple of questions while I check you out. You okay with that?”

He dropped his chin a fraction, and the wince it produced wasn't lost on her. “What're those for?” Adrian asked, gaze firm on the shears in her grip.

“I'm sorry, but in order to get a good look at you, that jacket's got to go.”

The feral expression she'd just lulled off Adrian's face made a vengeful comeback. “You're not cutting my jacket.”

Oh, come on. She was a paramedic, not a magician, and that arm probably resembled a jigsaw puzzle right out of the box. “You got any better ideas on how to get it off over a broken limb, Einstein?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

In the time it took her to blink, he had the jacket halfway off his shoulders even though the move had to hurt like nothing else, and Teagan's gut gave an uncharacteristic yank.

“Wait—stop!”

But before her words could make it all the way out, the deed was done. “There . . . you go,” Adrian grated, his face roughly the color of the sheet on the cot as he gripped the jacket in his free hand. “Problem solved.”

“Are you out of your mind? I can't help you if you're only going to make things worse!”
Christ
. If there were broken ribs in that granite wall of a chest of his, he could've single-handedly punctured a lung with that little stunt.

His voice only held the slightest hitch as he fixed her with a stoic glance. “You said you needed it off to get a good look, right? Now you're free and clear, Red.”

Jeff reclaimed the trauma shears and put them in the bag with a sheepish grin. “Hate to admit it, O'Malley, but he's kind of right. What do you need first?”

Teagan sucked down a deep breath and shot Jeff the mother of all death glares. “I've got the RTA. You work on getting the stuff together to splint that arm.” She turned her glare on Adrian as Jeff began to rummage for what he needed. “Park it,” she said, jutting her chin at the cot.

Miraculously, he settled against the reclined back of the rolling bed and let her take his vitals without argument. The numbers were startlingly good for someone who'd just turned his motorcycle into spare parts in the middle of the road, but she'd seen vitals nosedive without warning too often for that to mean he was in the clear.

No better way to assess an injury than to let your fingers do the walking. Starting at the top of Adrian's platinum blond head, she skimmed her hands over him, missing nothing as she worked her way down the corded muscles in his neck and chest. The injury to his forearm indicated an obvious break, but since the skin was intact, she placed the limb carefully at his side to await a splint before sliding her hands to his abdomen.

“Careful. Any more personal and you're going to have to take me to dinner first.”

The comment, and the hint of dark humor that came with it, caught Teagan totally off guard under the circumstances, and her fingers stuttered over the left side of his rib cage. She'd done thousands of assessments, and never once had they been anything other than a hundred percent perfunctory.

But right now, with her hands about an inch above the low-slung waistband of Adrian's jeans, her brain heaved forward into forbidden territory, and her girly parts were all too happy to shake off the dust and go along for the unexpected joyride.

Teagan cleared her throat. Twice. “I'm, ah, just making sure nothing else feels broken. Did you lose consciousness at any time? Any dizziness, nausea, trouble breathing? Anything like that?” She reset her hands and forced herself to concentrate as she moved them over the rest of his upper body.

Wow. He really was . . . wow.

And she really needed to knock it off.

“No, and no. Like I told the cops, I'm not an idiot. I don't ride without a helmet.”

She worked her way down the lower half of his body, satisfied that everything was in working order before returning her attention to his face. “Good intentions aren't always enough to save people, you know.”

His pupils looked round, reactive, and a lot less pissed than before, and his gravelly voice held a hint of amusement as he said, “Spare me the lecture, Red. I'm a big boy.”

Teagan fought both the urge to agree with him and the burning desire to roll her eyes. “Gee, I've never heard that nickname for a redhead before.” She sent her gaze up toward her strawberry-blond hairline before reaching out to help Jeff with the splint.

“It's not for your hair.
Ow!
”

Her pulse went double-time, eyes darting to where her hand rested with only bare pressure on Adrian's shoulder. “What?”

“Nothing.” But the painful grimace pulling tight over Adrian's face said otherwise. Teagan wasn't anywhere near his forearm, and Jeff hadn't even touched him with the splint yet. The slight contact from her hands shouldn't have produced so strong a reaction.

Unless that broken arm had company.

“Let's get a better look at this shoulder, shall we?” With the gentlest motions she could call up, Teagan worked her hands over his collarbone, which was still as intact as the first time she'd checked it. Her brain spun with possibilities—what the hell could she have missed?—and then she slipped her fingers all the way around the back of his rotator cuff to find the gut-squeezing answer to her question.

“Can you rate the pain back here on a scale of one to ten?” Damn it, his shoulders were muscular enough that it was hard to tell if he'd partially dislocated the joint or simply sustained a nasty bruise. Her pulse hammered out an uncharacteristic lurch at the flinch her movements produced, even though she was barely making contact with his body.

“It's just a little sore. No big deal.”

Rather than argue, Teagan surprised herself by softening her tone to match her ministrations. “Okay. Can you rate it for me like you did with your arm?”

His mouth turned into a hardened line. “Six.”

Shit. She'd bet the shirt on her back it was dislocated. “Okay, Jeff, we're going to need to immobilize this arm. Chris, get a status on Evan. I want to be en route to Riverside in no more than five.”

Adrian jerked forward, separating himself from the back of the cot to sit at rigid attention. “Hold on a second. I already told you, I'm not going to the hospital.” Another jerk brought his arm tight against his body and his boots off the cot with a heavy, effort-laden grunt.

“Whoa!” Teagan splayed a hand across his chest, her fingers spreading over his faded T-shirt like a determined sunburst. “You agreed to get checked out, remember?”

“I agreed to let
you
check me out, which you did,” he bit out, pain clearly etched on his face. “And now I just want my arm fixed up so I can get out of here.”

She opened her mouth to argue, to just let Jeff and Chris restrain him and be done with it. But then his calloused right hand covered the one she had pressed to his chest, gluing the words to the roof of her mouth.

“Please.”

 

 

Adrian gave himself a mental beat-down for not balking harder when Carly had sent him home for a nap he didn't need. He should be deep in the belly of La Dolce Vita's kitchen, helping her experiment with specials and supervising that produce delivery. Nowhere on his agenda did it say to wrap his fingers around a feisty paramedic in a living embodiment of how pain could turn you into a total moron.

Fuck. The pain was killing him, too. But no way was he getting in that ambulance. If he did, it would only be a matter of time before his life became profoundly difficult.

After all, hell hath no fury like a crusty parole officer. The fact that Adrian hadn't done anything wrong wouldn't make a dent in Big Ed's reaction if he saw a police report with Adrian's name in the headline. The guy had been looking for a reason to drag Adrian back to Rikers ever since he'd left New York a little over a year ago. He was going to salivate over this like it was a steak dinner with all the fixings, twisting it up like a pretzel until somehow, the blame lay right in Adrian's lap.

He just had to go and get knocked off his block with forty-seven days left to go, didn't he?

Teagan turned her hand to squeeze his fingers, shocking him back to the here and now of Rural Route Four. “Adrian, listen to me. You need to be treated by a doctor at the hospital. I can't just splint you and let you walk. That's not how it works. There could be something wrong that I can't see. Something serious.”

The murmur came out in quiet tones, and anyone taking in the rush of the accident scene—including the firefighters helping close by—would probably assume she was just doing her job. He was tempted to tell her he knew damn well his shoulder wasn't quite in its socket, and since the third time seemed to be the charm with this particular injury, he also knew damn well how to get it back where it belonged without wasting a trip to the hospital. But from the warm whiskey flash of Teagan's eyes, it was blindingly clear she would fight until she dropped to get him into that ambulance.

And if
that
crossed Big Ed's desk, Adrian was flat-out screwed.

“Okay, fine.” As amusing as it would be to watch her give it her all, the pain in his arm was really starting to piss him off. Plus, dealing with a bunch of white coats was better than dealing with the cops, even if only by a hair. If they got out of here now, maybe he could avoid the latter. “Let's go before I change my mind.”

“Really?” Teagan tucked her brow in tight, but started moving before he could answer, as if she was afraid he really would change his mind. “Okay. It might be a little uncomfortable getting you splinted, but the less your arm moves until the docs can take a look, the better.” She scooped a hand under his mercilessly throbbing forearm, and even the featherlight touch felt amplified and covered in nails.

“I think you need to reevaluate your definition of uncomfortable,” he hissed, bracing himself against the cot. Even the mundane movement of lifting his arm to put the splint underneath it sent tremors of borderline agony into his chest, and it flattened the breath right out of his lungs. Damn it, he needed something to distract him from the pain, because right now it was enough to make him want to scream.

“I'm sorry. I'll try to be quick.” Teagan leaned in close, and he latched onto the sight of her with all his waning might.

Her flame-colored hair was fastened into a no-nonsense ponytail at the back of her head, and it smelled fresh, yet not fragrant in a perfumy sense, kind of like rosemary right off the stem. Every time she shifted to adjust either her movements or her gaze, it swung against her lithe shoulders in a little arc, leaving the scent in its wake. Determination shaped her pretty features, bringing a serious bent to the high curve of her cheekbones and the soft dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose. But her mouth was the crown jewel of her face, as red and ripe as a strawberry on the vine, and for a dark sliver of a second, Adrian wanted nothing more than an impulsive taste.

And then she tightened the splint into place over the train wreck of his arm, and he was right back at square one, wanting to scream.

“Hey, T.” A guy with light brown hair and a uniform that matched Teagan's came up behind her, slinging his bag over one shoulder. “Minivan checks out fine, with the exception of being a little shaken up, so I gave the cops the okay to take her report and start to clear. What've you got?”

“Injury to the left forearm, left shoulder, no visible head or neck injury, no LOC.” She rattled off a bunch of numbers and phrases that might as well have been ancient Sanskrit before turning to the firefighter guy who'd helped with his arm. “Jeff, tell the cops we're rolling out. Ev, we're stable for transport if you want to grab this thing.”

Teagan swung the cot around into the other paramedic's waiting hands, and Adrian snapped forward with sudden realization at the scene over her shoulder.

“My bike.” Scraped up or not, no way was he leaving his Harley here unattended. “I've got to—”

“You've got to relax.” Teagan's hand was right back in place over his solar plexus, and hell if it wasn't the only spot on his body that didn't hurt. “The cops will make sure your bike gets to the impound, where it'll be safe until you can send someone to get it. Now stop fighting and let me do my job, would you?”