Escort (A Standalone Romance Novel) (New York City Bad Boy Romance) (19 page)

“You’re going to be fine,” I tell him. “If
I can do this, you can do this.”

“Yeah, that logic doesn’t really work, but
I’m willing to try.”

I’d never considered that Jace might be
scared of heights, too, but as he leans forward, bringing one foot slowly over
the side of the car, I could swear that his face is a pale shade of green.

“I wish you didn’t tell me about the front
of the car,” he says.

“Had to,” I tell him. “If I didn’t, you
might have tried to use it for support and-”

“Please stop,” he pleads.

It’s almost nice being the one talking him
through this. It might be a lot nicer if I wasn’t still so terrified, myself.

His eyes are on me as his foot comes down
onto the floor of the car, and I hold out my hand to him. He’s gripping the
back with one hand, but with the other, he slowly, deliberately reaches out and
takes mine.

“You’re almost there,” I tell him. “When
you get in, just sit down slowly and lean back a little. You’ll be fine.”

“Okay,” he says, though his voice is
hardly anything but air.

He brings his other foot into the car and
it crunches down on whatever that glass paraphernalia is, and he sharply raises
his foot, the change in weight distribution causing the car to pitch backward
and then forward and I’m leaning back with every ounce of me to keep from
having this be the last thing I ever do with my life.

His foot comes back down quick enough and
he sits down, still clutching my hand, though “crushing” may be the more
accurate term at the moment.

He’s shaking more than I am, although not
by much, and both of his arms are around me as if I’m the immovable object
that’s going to save his life if this thing pitches forward any farther.

“Lean back and stay leaned back,” I tell
him. “Do it slow, though, we don’t need this thing rocking any more.

“I don’t know how in the hell I let you
talk me into this,” he says. “This thing must be a hundred years old and it’s
rusty and they obviously took it out of whatever theme park it was in because
it was-”

I shush him as calmly as I can.

That whole being the rock for him thing
has lost its glamor, and right now, I’m just trying not to start freaking out
as vocally as he is.

“You’re fine,” I tell him, “we both are.
We’re going to be okay.”

His grip on me lightens a little, but he’s
not ready to let go, and I’m all right with that. It’s just good to be able to
expand my lungs again.

I look at the front gate of the car, and I
notice that there’s something dangling from one side of it.

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing to it.

“I don’t know,” Jace says, unwilling to
look anywhere but at me.

I lean to one side a little, just enough
to see where that dangling piece of metal goes: it’s the pin that locks the
restraint shut.

When I start leaning forward, Jace pulls
me back.

“I’m going to lock the front,” I tell him.
“Trust me, we’re both going to feel better about this after I do.”

“What if you have a-” he starts, but I’m
not about to let him finish.

“Jace, shut the fuck up right now.”

If I have a seizure up here, chances are
I’m not going to be able to stay in the car whether the front is latched closed
or not, and I’ve done really good about not thinking about that until dipshit
over here just had to bring it up.

I lean forward again, but Jace is still
pulling me backward.

“You have to trust me,” I tell him.

His embrace loosens. Though not much, it’s
just enough for me to reach the pin and find the hole it slips into.

“I’m going to have to pull the gate shut a
little more,” I tell him, hoping that letting him know what I’m doing will help
ease his mind.

It doesn’t.

Jace pulls me back and the startle from
the motion causes me to drop the pin. Fortunately, it’s on a little chain, but
the sudden movement has caused the car to pitch back and forth again and both
of my hands are on the unlatched front gate.

I quickly release my grip on that and in
the process, I elbow Jace in the nose, causing him to jerk back fast and his
arms come off of me and up to his face.

The car is rocking, and all I can think to
do right now is to try to get the front latched.

I scream at Jace to lean back — the actual
words being, “Lean back,
fuckhead
!” —
and
I grab onto the restraint with one hand and grab the pin
with the other.

With one, hard jerk, the metal bar goes
into place, but I’m having a hell of a time getting the pin to go through the
hole in the right way: it’s through the top, but I can’t find the bottom.

“We’re going to fucking die!” Jace shouts,
his voice a muffled by his hands.

I scream right back, “Shut the fuck up!”

I jerk the bar backward again, this time
throwing my body weight into it and hoping the metal pin goes in place before
the car has a chance to pitch forward again.

“This is so fucking stupid,” Jace says,
and I’m about ready to elbow him in the nose again.

With the palm of my hand now, because my
fingers keep sliding against the smooth metal, I force the top of the pin
through the bottom hole just as we start to pitch forward harder than before.

There’s no reason to believe it’ll hold,
but both Jace and I instinctively grab for it as we tilt so much it feels like
we’re already falling out.

The restraint holds.

Jace is finally out of his panic just
enough to realize that he was acting like an idiot before. He doesn’t say
anything, but he does his best to make amends by staying perfectly still in a
backward lean.

It feels like it takes a long time even
though it can’t be more than a few seconds, but the car slowly stops rocking
and finds its equilibrium.

“You know,” I tell Jace, “I was thinking
of fucking your brains out up here, but after that, I think you might just toss
me out of the car for moving it too much.”

“We can’t,” he says. “It won’t hold.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about —
everything’s going to hold,” I start, though as the words are leaving me, they
strike my ear as being extremely naïve. That’s not helping. “To tell you the
truth, though, I’m really not in much of a mood to give you anything that might
be construed as a reward for your behavior.”

“That’s fine,” he says quickly. “Let’s
just be as still as possible.”

As I sit here, about fifty feet off the
ground in the car of a broken down Ferris wheel, which, by the way, can’t be
any older than thirty years, despite what Jace may think, it starts to sink in
why the front restraint was open when we got here.

It comes over the knees.

For us to get back out of here, we’re
going to have to take the pin back out and open the front a few inches like it
was before.

I’m trying not to think about how we’re
going to get down from there.

Chapter
Sixteen

Solid Ground, Meet
Quicksand

Jace

It’s been about a week since the Ferris
wheel, and I think Grace is slowly starting to forgive me for slightly losing
my cool when we were at the top of the thing.

I know that because I’m sitting on the
couch in her living room. Yeah, she’s barred me from jumping in the shower with
her, but at least I’m still in the apartment.

From the other room, I can hear the shower
turn off and a second later, there’s the clatter of the shower rings as the
curtain opens.

I get up from the couch and make my way to
the bathroom door, but it’s locked.

“Occupied!” she calls out.

“How long are you going to be mad at me?
We got back down safe enough, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, with absolutely no help from you,”
she says through the door.

Okay, I might have thrown a bit of a fit
when she took the pin out of the front of the car, but in my defense, she
hadn’t given me a proper amount of time to digest what she was telling me.

The door to the bathroom opens and Grace
has one towel wrapped around her upper body and another wrapped around her
head.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she says,
“but you’ve got to promise that you’re not going to start flailing your arms
again. That really wasn’t you at your most attractive.”

I groan, but say, “I promise.”

“Okay, but just bear with me. It’s
something I’m still working on and it might take a little while longer before
it’s where I want it, but — well, you’ll see. Go sit down.”

“All right,” I answer and go back to the
living room.

“Are you sitting down?”

“Yeah,” I tell her and plop down on the
couch.

“Okay, just a second,” she calls.

All things considered, things are going
great right now. Yeah, Grace is still denying me the random privilege out of
sheer spite, but we’re together.

Her treatment, from everything she says,
is going along just fine. Her
oligodendroglioma
hasn’t shrunk, but she hasn’t had any worsening symptoms. In fact, she told me
a couple of days ago that she’s been without a headache for almost a week.

“All right,” she says from just around the
corner, “are you ready?”

“I’m ready,” I tell her.

Grace comes around the corner, and at
first, I’m wondering what it is that she’s trying to show me, but soon enough,
it clicks.

She’s taken the towel off of her head, and
she’s not wearing a wig. Her hair, while only a couple of inches long, is
starting to grow back significantly.

“I can actually do stuff with it now,” she
says. “Feel.”

This is the first time since Grace and I
met that she’s not jerking away from me when my hand approaches the top of her
head.

The hair is soft, smooth. It’s dark and,
although she just got out of the shower, it almost looks styled.

“It’s wonderful,” I tell her. “Very
beautiful.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I’ve never been that
big on short hair — at least, when it comes to my head — but I’m pretty fucking
proud of it right now.”

“You should be,” I tell her. “It looks
great.”

“Doesn’t it? It was kind of cool to get to
change my hair in every way on a daily basis, but it’s so much nicer to have my
own starting to grow back.”

“I love it,” I tell her.

“All right,” she says, “I think I can let
you out now.”

“Let me out of what?”

“The kennel,” she says. “I’ve decided to
no longer be mad at you for trying to kill me at the top of the Ferris wheel.”

“I was
not
trying to kill you,” I start, but her left eyebrow is rising and I take the
hint.

“Anyway,” she says, “I have something to
tell you.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you know how I’ve been trying to
get my footing back at work since my boss decided not to retire?”

“Yeah,” I answer.

“I ran into one of the members of the
board yesterday,” she says. “At first, she was a little hesitant to talk to me
because, apparently, John’s been spreading some yellow press about me over the
last little while.”

“What a jerk,” I scoff.

“Not my point,” she says. “I finally got
her to relax enough to listen to some of my ideas and she’s going to put
together an exploratory committee to look into the feasibility of spreading our
network into new markets.”

“That’s wonderful!” I tell her, only half
comprehending what she’s talking about. I wonder if this is what people feel
like when I start talking about anatomy. For me, it’s simple enough that it
barely requires thought, but I’ve lost track of how many times Melissa’s eyes
just glazed over when I answered the question, “How was your day?”

“So, I’m going to finish getting ready,”
she says. “You’re still up for taking me to the hospital, right?”

“Of course,” I tell her. “That’s why I’m
here.”

“Huh,” she says, turning and leaving the
room, “I thought you were here because you couldn’t stand the thought of being
away from this hot ass of mine for any extended period of time.”

“That
is
a big part of it,” I call after her.

It doesn’t take Grace that long to get
ready, considering that Melissa used to be three hours in the bathroom and
another hour to hour and a half in the bedroom before she’d be willing to leave
the house.

When Grace comes out, we go.

Today’s my day off, but Grace has to go in
for another day of tests and treatment.

I really wish I knew more about what was
going on, but Dr. Willis has apparently scared the bejesus out of everyone
involved with the trial. I can’t get anyone to give me a sneak
peak
at Grace’s file.

“I was thinking,” Grace says. “You and I
have been a thing for a few days now.”

“A few weeks,” I tell her. “Actually, it’s
been well over a month.”

“Whatever,” she says. “What I’ve been
thinking is that maybe we should exchange keys or something. I’m always
misplacing mine and the guy who has my key right now is either never home or he
hides when he hears me knocking on the door.”

“Who do you have holding your key?”

“A neighbor,” she says. “That’s not the
point. I guess what I’m more worried about is that this treatment doesn’t work
and I have to go back on chemo.”

“Don’t worry about that,” I tell her. “You
seem to be doing really well. If it does turn out that you
do
have to go back on chemo, assuming no significant change in your
oligodendroglioma
, we’ll just go back to five days a
month oral treatment.”

“I’ll give you oral treatment five days a
week
if you don’t put me back on that
shit after this trial’s over,” she says.

“I wish I could promise that,” I tell her.
“Without being able to see your scans, though, I can’t even make an educated
guess where your treatment might end up.”

“Comforting,” she says. “I don’t want you
to misunderstand me here, I’m not suggesting we move in together. I like you,
and we have a great time naked, but I’m not looking to rush into a situation
where I just end up being Melissa the Sequel. I just know that there are going
to be days when I go back on the chemo, that I’m not going to be up to doing
jack shit and I’m going to need some help. I would just hire a housekeeper, but
they really get up there in price when it comes to sexual favors.”

“Sexual favors?”

“That was just to see if you were
listening,” she says.

“How do you feel?” I ask.

“I still haven’t had a headache in a
while. I’m not counting the one after the seizure.”

“That’s good,” I tell her. “Still, I wish
I could see your scans.”

“Too bad for both of us, then,” she says.

We pull into the parking lot and I drop
her off at the curb. I know it’s a bit silly drawing the line there, but I just
have this feeling that if the two of us were to be seen actually walking into
the hospital together, the secret would be out.

Grace wouldn’t be the first patient of
mine I’ve ended up giving a ride to, but after the way I came into the room
after her seizure, I’d rather not take any unnecessary chances.

I park in my reserved spot and head up to
my office.

If I can’t walk Grace in, I certainly
can’t meet up with her when she’s with the trial doctors.

The office is dark as I’m approaching, but
I could swear that I see a flicker of light.

I unlock the door, figuring that it’s just
a clock that lost power and started flashing or something, but as soon as the
light from the hallway meets the darkness of my waiting room, the figure of a
woman sitting in one of the chairs becomes clear.

“What are you doing in here?” I ask the
person sitting there looking up at me, and I flip on the light.

“Jesus, boss,” Yuri says. “Give a girl
some warning before you blind her.”

“Let me amend my question,” I say. “What
the fuck are you doing in here, Yuri?”

“Nothing,” she says. “I just like to come
in here sometimes. You know, there really aren’t that many places a person can
be alone in the city.”

“What about your apartment?”

“Oh, that place is a fucking dumpster
fire,” she says. “It may be quiet, but that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable.”

“And, you’re smoking in here,” I sigh.
“That’s just fantastic.”

“I’m not smoking,” she protests. “I’m
vaping. There’s a difference.”

“Whatever,” I tell her. “I don’t even let
patients do that in here.”

“Oh, it’s not like you can even smell it
or anything. It’s peppermint.”

“Yuri, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” she says. “I
kind of figured you’d be in before too long.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You’re always here when Grace is here,”
she points out. “I was hoping that you and I could talk for a little bit.”

“What do you want to talk about? What
is
there to talk about — you know, other
than you busting in here to get stoned.”

“Will you close the door before you start
saying crap like that? I just wanted to fill you in on a couple of things that
have been going on around here.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“I think you should be careful with
Grace,” she begins. “You wouldn’t believe what the trial docs are saying about
her.”

“Unless it’s something to do with her
condition, I really don’t care in the slightest what they’re saying,” I tell
her.

“What if it was about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“You really need to rethink whether you
want to keep dating a patient,” Yuri warns.

“It’s fine,” I tell her. “We’re not doing
anything wrong.”

“Maybe not right now, but you and her got
together before she was in the trial. That’s kind of an ethical no, no, isn’t
it?” she asks.

“It’s nobody’s business,” I tell her.

“Be that as it may,” Yuri says, taking a
puff from her vaporizer, “people love making other people’s personal lives
their business.”

“So, you’re telling me I should break up
with Grace because we were doctor and patient at the beginning of our
relationship?” I ask.

“You’re still her doctor,” Yuri says. “The
other ones are shutting you out a bit for now because they don’t want you
interfering with the trial, but you’re no less her doctor now than you were
then.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her. “Grace
and I have a good thing going, and I’m not about to throw that away because
some people in the trial are talking.”

“Whatever,” Yuri says. “How long is she in
for today?”

“Not sure. They give her an estimated
amount of time she’ll be in there, but it’s hardly ever accurate.”

“What are you going to do while you wait?”

“I was going to go into the office and
catch up on some paperwork,” I tell her. “I’ve kind of been lagging for the
last week or so.”

“Yeah, I noticed that you really slowed
down after Grace had that seizure.”

“What’s your point?”

“I just think that a doctor should keep
their head in the game for
all
their
patients,” she says. “Not just the ones they’re sticking their meat in during
business hours.”

“What the hell is your problem?”

Yuri stands and walks over to her desk.
She opens up the top drawer and puts her vaporizer inside. “You’ve got work to
do,” she says. “I’m your assistant, so I should probably be doing some work,
too.”

“You’re not on the clock,” I tell her.