Force: Blacktop Sinners MC (3 page)

Chapter Four

“You’ve been here three hours after your shift ended,” Dr. Malek said, as Tess double-checked the heart monitor and made notes on the clipboard for Derek Allanson. “You can go.”

She nodded and played with the St. Christopher medal around her neck. The patron saint of travelers. It had been Jason’s and then hers after the fallout. “I just wanted to hear that the radiologist agreed with your reading of the MRI. I’m glad it looks like only a concussion.”

“Still, we’re keeping him here overnight for observation, so he’ll be here when your shift officially starts in nine hours, Tess. It’s going to be fine.”

She frowned back at her boss. Dr. Malek had never called her by her first name before. “I just freaking hate motorcycles. They’re death machines, good for nothing at all. He’s lucky, absurdly lucky.”

“God willing,” the doctor finished. “He should be someone we can let go in the next twenty-four hours. I understand you’re worried, but frankly, Everhart, he’s not your brother. It’s not going to go like that at all.”

Her spine stiffened at the casual reference to Jason. She hadn’t realized that Malek knew. Hell, being a transplant from three hours away, Malek had always been someone that Tess assumed didn’t know. She certainly didn’t think she’d caught the doctor’s attention enough to have her asking questions. Yes, at first, she’d been leery and panicked when motorcycle accidents came into the E.R., but that had been years ago. She thought that with the few she’d seen since Dr. Malek had come to Boone General, she’d been professional and as good a nurse as ever.

Maybe not.

Not if Malek had seen through her ruse or, well, her trying so hard.

“How long have you known? Did Lizzy say something?”

“No, but I was curious about some reservations I noticed with an otherwise stellar nurse. Google wasn’t hard to use. Everhart, you’re a good nurse because you care, but don’t get too involved. Mr. Allanson is going to pull through just fine, and we’ll have twelve hours of patients to deal with tomorrow. Get rest, and I’m sorry for your loss.”

She sighed and slipped the medal back under her scrub top. “So am I.”

***

She’s laughing with Lizzy at the registration desk when the gurney rushes in. At first, she can’t process what she’s seeing. It doesn’t even look like Jason. His right leg is crushed and already swelling, maybe even compartment syndrome setting up in his lower calf. His chest looks just wrong, and he gurgles out blood when he breathes. She can’t tell from her vantage point and without tests if the ribs are crunched, but she’d still bet at least several are, but it’s his face that scares her most.

It’s swelling fast and it’s covered in blood. If he weren’t wearing the jacket she bought him last Christmas, she might not even be able to tell it was him.

It’s too much.

She pole vaults practically over the desk and rushes with the other staff toward the nearest emergency operating theater. Tess rushes with them, calling her brother’s name, but he stops even gurgling and starts to convulse on the bed. She tries to grab him, but Lizzy wraps her arms around her waist and pulls her back.

“Stop, you have to let them work.”

She screams and pulls against her friend, but she can’t budge. Instead, Tess crumples to her knees and cries, trying to ignore the loud beeping of a failing heart monitor from the operating room behind the swinging doors.

Chapter Five

The pounding in his head rivaled some of his greatest hangovers. He’d turned twenty-one at the clubhouse and celebrated by doing twenty-one shots of Jagermeister. That was the only time he could remember that his head felt this poorly, like a huge battering ram was beating from the inside against his skull. Blinking awake, he tried to recall what happened. There’d been the warehouse set up and trying to get Spike out to safety after he stabbed the vice president of the Death’s Head club, the VP who’d been oddly restrained to begin with. Ron was missing, probably taken captive by the rival gang or, worse, found by the cops in the raid. Then he’d grabbed the knife and gotten on his bike and the rest?

The rest was a damn blur.

Sitting up, he realized he was in a hospital bed. There were the dull lights of the faded overheads above him. He couldn’t tell what time it was because his watch had been cut off, and there were no clocks in the room. Groaning, he noticed that he was in a gown as well and that he needed to find his gear, call the clubhouse, and get back to figuring out how the Death’s Head club had set them up so easily.

First, though?

He had to tear the leads off of him.

The beeping came fast and loud when he tore off the stickers adhering the heart monitors to his skin. He hissed a bit as they came off and cursed whoever invented the adhesive. Working faster, he reached down and pulled out the IV dripping into his arm and then used a few paper towels at the sink next to his bed to stop up the bleeding in the vein there. By then, a nurse was rushing into his room.

He frowned at the short yet curvy blonde beauty striding into the room. She had the most alluring hazel eyes he’d ever seen, flecked liberally with cold, a heart-shaped face, and thick lashes that he felt were real and not drug store fake. Her scrubs were wrinkled and her eyeliner smeared, and he wondered if she were nearing the end of her shift. Even if she were scowling back at him with what seemed like righteous fury, it was hard to take her seriously when she looked like she'd just rolled out of bed.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing, Derek?”

He blinked. Was he supposed to know her? Shit, his head felt like the Kentucky derby was being held inside of it. He wasn’t sure he could remember anything, at least not after he’d headed out of the warehouse district as fast as if the hounds of Hell were after him. Not that Derek would mind remembering such a gorgeous woman; he just couldn’t.

“Who are you?”

She reeled back just a little, disappointment creeping into her features before she started to explain. “I’m Nurse Everhart.”

He snickered. “Really?”

“Yes, and I was the one who did your neurological exam yesterday. You don’t remember that.”

“I don’t remember anything since the warehouse.”

She frowned. “That’s more information than we had. Here, you don’t have to put on your leads, and I’ll see if we can get you some scrubs. We had to cut the leathers off, but if you get cleared by Dr. Malek, you’ll be free to leave with what’s left.”

He stopped and sucked in a heavy breath. He’d worn his jacket proudly for a decade. It had been his jacket as a probie, and he remembered earning his first patch for taking out a rival Los Lobos gang member by breaking his knee in a bar fight. There were quite a few others now, including the skull, itself, that symbolized his position as the lead enforcer for his crew. It was ten years of scuffs and wear, but it was his ten years of effort thrown into it. To know that it had been cut up by the docs made him want to puke. Hell, it had even survived nine months in the federal penitentiary down by Raleigh, waiting for him to claim it after his stint there.

Now it was just gone.

The biggest part of his identity was gone.

The club could get him another, of course it could, but that wasn’t the one he’d worn in more tough scrapes than he could count, the one he’d worn the day he’d sprung Ron from a trap laid by the feds about five years back. It wasn’t what he’d worked so hard for as a punk out of juvie with no hope and no clues.

“I don’t understand,” was all he could manage. It was such a small phrase, so insignificant. It was as if a relative had died. Moreso, considering he’d never had a family he could rely on.

“We cut everything off. We had to prepare any wounds for possible debridement, I mean,” she said blushing. “For pulling any rocks or dirt out of your wounds.”

Looking down, he ran his hands over his arms and under his scrubs enough to feel his chest. There were a few scrapes on his arm, but nothing deep or angry. He’d had worse road rash a dozen times before. When he looked up, he noticed that Tess seemed to be licking her lips and focusing hard on his torso. Now that was interesting…

“I have to get out of here. My cre…family is expecting me, and no one knows where I am.”

“Again, let’s go through the neuro battery. You suffered a concussion and a few broken toes on your left foot. You’re pretty high on the morphine for the pain, and you aren’t feeling it.”

“That’s nuts,” he said, gesturing down to his left foot, which felt perfectly fine. His eyes went wide at the huge sock covering it. “Huh?”

“It’s covering the splints underneath, that’s all. The smaller two we couldn’t set, and I’d be careful just trying to walk more on your heel, but we had some we could do on the big and pointer toe. You really just need to sit down,” she said, striding forward and pushing on his shoulder.

He smirked at that. The nurse was five foot three if she were an inch. There was no way she was going to be able to manhandle him anywhere. Her efforts, though, were adorable. It was like being a Bernese Mountain Dog ordered around by a Yorkie.

“Look, you can’t get me to sit if I don’t want to.”

“Well you’re the one putting a lot more weight on your toes than you should currently and walking around with a concussion, so I’m not the one who should be heeding my warnings. Besides, Dwayne the orderly. He’s not 6’5, but he’ll manage, and I’ve seen him wrestle down psychotics.

Well he’s never dealt with the Enforcer for the Blacktop Sinners.

He didn’t dare say that out loud. The nurse was sweet, completely All-American, even down to her deep twang that told him she was pure Appalachia mountain folk and had grown up that way. She was not the type he ever dated, not like the sweet butt that hung around the clubhouse or the whores that worked the streets as part of the club’s income and sometimes offered things to the board as fringe benefits for their service.

She wouldn’t understand what he did, that he’d killed more than once before.

He’d never been ashamed of being a Blacktop Sinner, and he wasn’t now. They’d been his family when he’d had none, and he’d kill again for his brothers-in-arms. Hell, there was going to be a turf war soon against the Death’s Head crew for the trick they’d played on them. He’d
definitely
be shedding blood again.

Still, she was what Ron had once called “an indoor girl.” She wasn’t a wild one for the road, not like the women he’d fucked before. He could be delicate, and, besides, he wanted all his stuff back, including the knife that could tie his president to the murder of Gunner Sampson from the rival club. He couldn’t arouse suspicion that he was anything other than a law-abiding citizen, in case his valuables were taken from him and turned over to the pigs.

“I need to get out of here.”

“Sit, mister, or I’ll tell everyone you’re working against medical advice and leave you to Malek and Dwayne. Trust me, you won’t like that.”

He sighed and shook his head, but he followed her lead and sat back on his bed. Derek wasn’t a fool, nor had he gotten as far as he had without being able to read people and without knowing when to shut up and truly listen.

Crossing his arms over his chest, he glared down at the blue and white dotted monstrosity he was wearing. “Can I at least get some scrubs? Then you can Nero me all you want.”

“Neuro.” She corrected him. “As in ‘neurological battery.’ A concussion.” She added quickly. “You already have a gap in your memory from your accident and passed out. You were unconscious when they had you in transit. You might still have headaches, dizziness, and short term memory issues for a while.”

“So, a bad hangover. When can I ride?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Yeah, when can I ride, and where’s my hog?”

“Unbelievable
,
” she breathed as she disappeared out the door for a moment.

He waited until she was back and deferred to her again. He needed her to be on his side, and he needed to be out of here like yesterday. He still had no idea where his president was, and neither of them had seen Ron before fleeing the warehouse. Derek stiffened and forced that thought away. Ron was the toughest man he’d ever known; there was no way those bastards of the Death’s Head had gotten the best of him. Also, he was slick and never could be forced to talk to cops. All this was true, but he needed to be out there, helping his crew. It was part of his duties, damn it.

Not sitting around here playing doctor, even if he half wanted to ask Tess, hottie that she was, to give him an extra-long “examination.”

The mint green scrubs she handed him were still an eyesore but not as bad as his current get up. He grinned back at her as he stood up and took off his gown. She narrowed her eyes and turned around quickly but not before he noticed her ears go red at the sight of him.

Clinical detachment, my ass
.

Chuckling, he shoved on the scrubs, bottoms first, and groaned a little when they were still too short. It looked like he was preparing for a flood, but at least he didn’t feel a stiff breeze blowing up his rear like with the gown. Slipping the top over his arms, he slid back onto the bed. His left foot was starting to ache and cramp up; maybe he’d been stupid to take out the free morphine just a bit too early.

“So, you accusing me of not listening?” He asked, arching an eyebrow at her.

Tess rolled her eyes but grabbed the clipboard at the foot of his bed. “You’ve got a damn concussion and broken toes. You shouldn’t be walking or doing things for at least a few more days, just taking it easy. You can’t be serious about wanting to get back on one of those damn death machines.”

“Look. First of all, pain don’t hurt.”

“Sure it doesn’t, Swayze,” she huffed.

Huh, at least we could agree on movies.
“Second, it’s not a damn death machine. It’s the best thing God’s ever invented.”

“No,” she argued, her voice hard. “Some jackass with a massive death wish did and inspired tons of others to do it. If I were nastier, I’d say it was an orthopedist who wanted a steady supply of people to work on. They’re dangerous, and I tell every person who comes in here because of an accident, ‘You got off lucky. You’re going to live another day,’ but there’s a reason some people around here joke and call them ‘donor bikes.’ You should reconsider.”

“Should I pick up a helmet, some training wheels, and live in one of those plastic bubbles? Y’know, for my safety.”

“Well a helmet is state law for
everyone
.”

“So, blondie, are you going to turn me in? Call the cops on me for that?”

“No, but if you won’t give up something so dangerous, then you need to at least compensate.”

“You talk like you care an awful lot about me right now.”

“I do,” she said, her voice earnest and gentle.

For a moment, that dampened the smirk on his face. Outside of Ron and the board, the brothers Derek was closest to, he never heard words like that. He’d never had an old lady that would ever say something like that, not even close. Wasn’t his style. The girls he went after were the same as him: wham, bam, thank-you-ma’am. No cuddling, kissing. Just fuck and dip.

Tess, though… Now, she was a nurse, and that should mean that she said that to everyone she met. But her sincerity felt real, as did the strong regard in her gorgeous hazel eyes.