Ash: A Bad Boy Romance (4 page)

“I didn’t mean—” I didn’t mean what? To cause her any problems? My gut twists, and I remember the last time I saw Summer, standing with my friend instead of me at Penn Station, searching the crowds for my face and never finding me.

Debbie keeps pushing me, her hand centered between my shoulder blades, and I stumble forward, still a bit unsteady on my feet from the morphine pill. “I should get a wheelchair, but there’s a shortage, and it seems like you can walk well enough on your own.” She pauses. “There’s an urgent care center up near Currituck. You might be best suited to go there until Summer gets her bearings.”
 

She pushes me out the door, and I’m left standing in the hallway, alone.

One look at Summer—that sideways glance, her cunning, intelligent green eyes—and I feel just like I did when I left her to get on that bus alone three years ago.
 

I’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, and now it feels like I’m right back where I started.

Three Years, Five Months Ago

I’ve been thinking about the man with the red hair, the one I agreed to go home with. The one in the dim light of the bar who brushed a lock of my hair behind my ear and told me that I was beautiful, even if I was his for only one night.
 

But shit.
 

There are more important things to think about.
 

I thought moving to New York for medical school would protect me from my family drama—my mother and her constantly failing bed and breakfast—but coming to live with my aunt in my last year of medical school has done anything
but
remove me from family drama.
 

I wring out the cooling rag into the kitchen sink and soak it with scalding water again.

“You don’t need to wash that bar a third time,” my aunt says. Bianca Colington is sitting in the corner of her bar, one of the last of its kind in the Irish corner of Hell’s Kitchen, a holdover from years ago. She peers at me over the rim of her glasses.
 

“I have nothing else to do,” I tell her. “School is done, and I’m not starting my residency just yet. Maybe I’ll do Doctors without Borders or something instead.”

She blows a puff of smoke out of the window. “A mistake if you ask me, child. Your mother needs you home. I need you in the States. That’s how it is.”

“My
mother
needs to sell the inn,” I reply, swallowing hard.
And you need to sell this fucking bar, B.
Two sisters, too much alike. Both of them have more baggage than I care to think about, and the debt collectors have started to harass them both.

Bianca just watches me wipe down the bar, steam rising from the hot rag, burning my palm. I glance up at her, and she watches me with her cool green eyes. Like my mother, my aunt Bianca was once devastatingly beautiful. Strawberry blond hair, deep green eyes, and broad, Irish cheekbones. Now she just looks tired. But from time to time, there are hints of a woman I never knew. She was once able to keep the Irish Family off her back somehow, but with the growing money concerns, she’s in debt to them. I won’t say it, and she won’t admit it, but that’s the reason I’m wiping down this bar right now and not on my way home to start a residency.
 

“Cullen’s men are coming to get the money.” Bianca stubs out her cigarette and drops it into an empty beer bottle. She coughs into her sleeve and gets up, slower than she should for a forty year-old woman. “After this, we’re scrambling to make payments. I’m sorry you’re in the middle of this.” As always, her voice is clipped. When she speaks to me, there’s a distance there I can’t quite define. She never pulls me into fierce hugs like my mother does. It almost seems like Bianca was meant to be the older sister, and my mother, the younger one—enthusiastic and open where Bianca is cold.
 

I could tell my aunt I’m sorry I’m in the middle of it too, but I put myself here. Just like I put myself in that redheaded man’s apartment two weeks back. I suppress a shiver, thinking of him. I shouldn’t have gone to that stupid bar. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. But I knew I found it when he whispered in my ear and sent chills running down my body. He had it—the only thing that could take me away from all of
this
.

I shake out the rag in the sink again. It’s as clean as the bar is and still smells of bleach. Something about that smell makes me feel desolate. Instead of getting away from my family’s mistakes, I’m wrapped up in the middle.

At 9:45, we hear cars pull in, come to collect on Bianca’s loan—with interest. Up until now, the boss hasn’t come along with them. But now, Cullen Flood strolls through the door, his face unmistakable, a long scar in place of one eye. His single, milky blue eye passes over me like I’m nothing, and he strolls to Bianca and sits down across from her.
 

She pales, hands shaking, and pulls back from him. “Cullen,” she says. “I didn’t know you were coming this time.”

“We’re old friends, B.” He nods back to me. “Whiskey, neat. Bring it over, girl.”
 

As I pour the whiskey, I hear car doors slamming outside. A man I don’t recognize—short and red-faced, with watery eyes—strolls in, followed by a very tall man. Shadows cross over his face so I can’t quite get a good look at him. But there’s something that strikes me deep in my core, like my body recognizes him before my brain does.
 

My mouth drops open, and my attention turns away from my aunt’s conversation with Cullen. There’s a tattoo on the tall man’s right forearm, visible in the dim light even though his face isn’t. I see its details, the red and blue colors mixing together—a sword and cross—just before he puts his hand in his pocket and steps toward Cullen.

My chest tightens, fear mixing with something deep and insistent, a pulse that’s been running through me at a low thrum since the night he first touched me.
 

His eyes meet mine for a moment, and his brows furrow for one instant. He walks toward me and takes the whiskey I’ve poured over to Cullen, his finger barely brushing against mine.
 

With his back toward Cullen, he
winks
at me and leans in close. “Hey there, Sunshine.”
 

A jolt runs through my body, sending heat to muscles I didn’t even know I had. I feel like my heart might stop, but somehow, it keeps on going. I watch as the man I slept with, despite all of my better judgment, sits down beside the man who’s been threatening my aunt for months.
 

“This is Jonathan Ash,” Cullen says. “Former fighter, now a member of the Family. He’ll be watching your bar and making sure everything goes smoothly from here on out.”

Holy. Shit.

Present Day
 

I keep waiting for Ash to pop up again during my shift, but he doesn’t. For once, it seems like he listened to me. When I left for Syria, I emailed him and told him to never contact me again, but he emailed me back anyway—again and again until I closed the account altogether. And then there were the letters. All in his tiny, cursive writing that was impossible to read, on what I assumed was college-ruled notebook paper. That’s what it looked like when I held the letters up to the light. But I didn’t open them, not a one. I only knew he didn’t show up to sign the divorce papers, and that he didn’t respond to any one of the summons I’d sent for him. And then he’d fallen off the face of the earth, and the letters stopped coming.
 

I comb out my hair and change from my scrubs, my body still alight from seeing him. I feel a pang of disgust from the excitement that’s coursed through me during my entire twelve-hour shift, but I can’t exactly fault myself when a man stumbles into the room looking like
that
.
 

Why does the thought of him still
thrill
me, like it used to? It shouldn’t. He’s trouble, with about three or four capital T’s. I know what’s at the end of any road with him.

I throw my scrubs angrily inside my locker and adjust my top. It’s one of the Doctors without Borders shirts I picked up in my three years away. It hugs my breasts and stretches the MSF logo across the shirt.
 

“Medecins sans frontières,” I mumble. “I dodged bullets for three years and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.”
 

And I thought about Ash every day.

My hand still feels his, fingertips pressing against mine, like they used to in the frenzied months after we first met. Young and stupid. It was like he’d never grown up, and I had the idiotic idea that we’d do it together. But he’d certainly proven that idea wrong in the end. I put on my windbreaker—even in June, the winds whip in from the Albemarle Sound and can be biting even when the day has been humid and hot.
 

Calm down. You’ll deal with him, and it’ll be over with once and for all.
 

I take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Before I leave, I look around and silently welcome myself to my new life. I knew this part of it would be hard, but I didn’t know how quickly it would sneak up on me.
 

Throwing my purse over my shoulder, I stride confidently out of the residents’ changing room. I walk left for about ten feet before I realize I should be going right.
 

“Damn fluorescent lights,” I mutter. My muscle memory will adapt soon enough, and I’ll fall into a rhythm. If it weren’t for that stupid man showing up. With any luck, he’ll leave me alone until I can gather my thoughts. I’d figured I’d be driving up to New York and trying to find him there, or scouring through the letters I never read. But he’d been here all this time. And when I was done running, when I thought it was all okay, I’d ended right back where I started.
 

Isn’t that the way of things.
 

I walk down the yellow tile floors to the exit, and the doors to the waiting room open. When I reach the revolving door that leads to my car outside and the world that lies beyond this hospital, I can see a tall figure standing outside, obscured by the glass.

It’s not him. It’s not.

But I’d know him anywhere, across any distance that stood between us.
 

“Shit, shit. Shit.” I look around. It’s probably not a good precedent to set for a doctor to stand around muttering to herself on the first day of work. If I walk around to the back of the hospital, there’s no way for me to get to the parking lot, and if I wait it out in the dressing room, there’s no guarantee he’ll go the hell away like he should. My stomach growls. I haven’t eaten since the cake this morning, and the idea of fish and grits has been toying with me all day. I clench and unclench my fists and push my way through the revolving door. Ash is standing right in front of me.
 

“Sunshine—”

“Don’t start. I just want a burger. Or some grits.” Ash didn’t know what grits were when I first met him, and he’d certainly never heard of fish and grits. But he’s been here for three years now, living a whole life without me. And I would reckon he knows plenty about grits now, even if he usually orders the steak and potatoes.
 

“You need something to eat, looks like.” He gives me a once over, eyes lingering too long before they rise again and meet my face. He cocks his head to the side and gives me a grin.
 

“Ash, what I really need is for you to just get out of my way and cooperate when I send the papers this time. MSF didn’t ask any questions when I listed myself as married. But people here are going to ask.”