The Nightlife San Antonio: (Urban Fantasy Romance) (The Nightlife Series) (6 page)

Dark, hun
gry eyes assessed him. She stared at his neck, and then tracked down the line of his body, to the lump in his pants. He could almost feel her eyes on him, like she wanted him, his body. Nutjob probably wanted to take another chunk out of him. Or maybe she was simply hungry.

“Can I get you something to eat?”

“Yes.” Her eyes flicked up to his face, to his neck. “Later.” She slumped there on the toilet seat.

T
he woman looked exhausted. She should be. That kind of near death experience takes a lot of recovery. He recalled that desperate moment when her heart had actually stopped – he thought she was gone for sure.

The woman was
tough as nails.

He stared
at her again. She opened her eyes and caught him. Like before, she held his direct gaze, unflinching, unblinking. She stared so long that he actually began to feel uncomfortable. Him. He was never intimidated by women.

The girl had something very different about her, something he couldn’
t quite put his finger on. “Okay then. I’m going to clean you up, change your bandages, and then get you dressed.”

Finally she looked away to close her eyes with a nod of agreement. He wondered if he had met his match, another sociopath.
That would be his fate, to meet a smoking hot piece of ass, get her home and naked, only to find out she was even more fucked up in the head than him.

His hands worked fast, almost on automatic. In a few minutes he had her cleaned up, fresh antibiotic cream, gauze, and tape. She never moved, never made a sound, just
gritted her teeth as he worked.

There was
something sexy about a naked woman gritting her teeth in pain, even when it shouldn’t be sexy.

She didn’
t move when he slid her leg into a pair of his shorts, then the other leg, and scooted them up to her thighs.
Dammit, she fell asleep
. He picked her up ever so gently, wrapping one arm around her back to hold her against his chest, while he worked his shorts up over her ass one-handed.

This was just a little too intimate for medical professionalism.
Who was he kidding? He’d never been a professional anything, except for his days in the military. Adrian knew his shit in the field, for sure.

This paramedic crap
isn’t for me. Should’ve gone for the mercenary contract.

* * * *

He was very strong. Strong enough to carry her with one arm while his hand groped all over her ass, doing a little more than just pulling up her pants. She didn’t care. Let him get a handful. The pain was slipping away as the pills kicked in. Her limbs felt like gelatin, and all the hairs on her scalp had turned prickly, itchy. He’d given her something strong.

She briefly wondered if he was planning to take advantage of her after she passed out, but then he set her back down on the toilet. One arm at a time he slipped a t-shirt over her head and pulled it down. Though his fingers brushed her breasts,
he wasn’t frisky. Maybe her initial impression was good. The man could be trusted, to a point.

He had a certain
something odd
she identified with. She sensed he was a free agent, uncluttered by the conventions of society. She had no idea how she understood this about him, but it felt true. He was a man who could handle extreme and unusual situations without balking. How many men would bring a gunshot victim home to their apartment and clean her up in their bathroom without complaint, without calling the police?

Luck had been with her when she found him in the parking lot. H
e was the only thing she had going for her, and she wasn’t willing to leave this sanctuary anytime soon. Not until she figured out the answers to who, what, where and why.

After washing his hands three times with antibacterial soap, he tow
eled off and turned those deep, intense hazel eyes on her again. He had no problem staring her down, like she was just a piece of meat. Another interesting thing to add to the list of interesting things about him.

She knew it was coming befor
e he spoke. “What am I going to do with you?”

“I
need to rest … for a while.”

She needed to feed, again, soon.
She needed the taste of his rich blood in her mouth.

“Yeah. Um … W
here are you from? Don’t you have some people you can call for help? A bus ticket or something?”

Asshole
was already planning to shove her out the door. What a mess of contradictions. Why did he help her? Because he was a paramedic? Not likely. This guy was way too much of a prick to be a selfless, life-saving, paramedic. Nothing about him made sense.

“No. There’s no one
I can call.
Daime tiempo
… Give me time to rest.” Then it hit her – Spanish? She spoke Spanish? She met his intense, soul-scraping stare as her slurred words rolled off her tongue slow as molasses. If he thought a little stare down was going to get her off that toilet seat, he had another thing coming.

As she sagged into the porcelain, spineless and feeling no pain, she realized h
e would have to carry her. The pills had kicked in hard, and she was so exhausted, high, she could barely focus on his beautiful, arrogant face.

“Fine. You’ll have your rest. But then I’m putting you on a bus to
wherever it is you came from.”

That’s what you think
.

Smart enough to figure out
she couldn’t walk anymore, he scooped her up in his arms. Her world faded to black as she rested her cheek against his warm chest, asleep next to the only man she knew, the only person in the world she could trust.
Sort of
.

* * * *

“What the hell am I trying to prove?”

With the crazy chick asleep in his arms, he walked into the kitchen and managed to snag a Hefty trash bag from the drawer without dropping her. No way he was putting this girl on his sofa without a protective barrier. There are some things you can’t wash out of fabric.

She murmured something and her little pink tongue darted out to her lips, as if she was thirsty. He thought about trickling some water down her throat, but she had seemed p
retty adamant about her dislike of water. And, she was sleeping. He’d rather not wake her up and have to deal with any more crap.

The clock on the oven
shone the bright red numbers of 4:10 a.m. He felt burned out. He needed a shower and some serious disinfectant. He laid out the trash bag end to end on his couch and placed her on it. Comatose by Percocet, she didn’t move.

“What the fuck was I thinking?” He should have driven away, left her in the parking lot, or taken her back to the emergency room. This
shit was not his problem. Who knew what kind of insane mafia crap she was involved in.

Adrian hit the shower, scrubbed long and hard with antibacterial soap, and toweled off. He thought he heard something, so he slid out into the darkness of his apartment in nothing but his boxer shorts. She lay on his couch, curled up in a fetal ball. The plastic bag was all over hell. Damn, might have to throw out those cushions
after all. Then he noticed she was shivering.

He’d neglected
to give her a blanket.

He rummaged through his linen closet and found an old comforter left ov
er from some chick he’d dated a few years back, name long forgotten. He figured he could just throw it away after the fact. As he slipped the blanket up to her shoulders, one eye peeked open at him briefly, and then slid closed again.

With the craz
y girl squared away, he hit his bed so hard the mattress springs groaned in protest. He drifted asleep within seconds.

* * * *

“Corporal Adrian Faulkner. You have a … colorful and interesting service record.”

Colored red is what he probably meant to say. Red with blood
and death.

Adrian nodded, like he always nodded every time this dream played out.

“Two tours in Iraq, that’s a bit unusual. Most soldiers have no desire to come back here. Most soldiers would rather be stationed in Hawaii or somewhere they can grab some third world ass for a few pesos. Iraq is not a soldier-friendly environment.”

Adrian nodded again. What do you say to shit like that?

“I read your psyche profile. Read your military records. Read your CO’s recommendation for counseling. Nothing here tells me what you think. What’s on your mind soldier?”

“I was ordered to counseling, so here I am.”

The Army shrink stared at him with eyes that sought to strip him of his secrets. “Lieutenant Stevens says you’re a cold-blooded bastard. Says you never complain when it gets ugly, when the casualties pile up. All the other guys in the unit complain, but not you.”

Adrian shrugged, as he had always shrugged when faced with the unpleasant truth of his experiences in the military.

“He says the only thing he really knows about you, besides the fact that you are very good at killing the enemy, is that you’re excessively clean. You have the cleanest uniforms, the cleanest equipment, and you carry around antibacterial soap like other guys carry condoms.”

Adrian shrugged again. Guilty as charged.
So sue me, I like to be clean
.

“Got nothing to say about all this?”

He shook his head. Never really pays to say anything to a shrink, they twist words into whatever meaning they want, kinda like an attorney.

“You know what y
our service record doesn’t show which says a lot to me? Guilt. You don’t express any remorse for killing in the field of battle.”

Since shrugging was inappropriate, Adrian just watched him, a wary feeling creeping into his gut. He didn’t like the direction this interview had taken.

“There are certain kinds of people who can pull the trigger and not feel guilty. Usually they feel the opposite, excited, invigorated. For these people killing is a rush like no other. It’s the ultimate exercise of power, to take a life.”

Silence was probably more inappropriate at this moment, so he grunted. “I guess. I’m a sold
ier. I do what the Army tells me to do.”

“Certainly. And you’re a damn fine soldier at that. But you’re also a human being, and us humans tend to feel shitty about blowing people’s faces off.”

Fuck
. This must be related to that checkpoint bomb a couple months ago, the one where the media got involved. It was a damn IED, a home-made explosive, not an up-close, personal kind of deal. Bombs leave collateral damage all the time. That’s just the way they work.

“But not you
, Adrian. You don’t feel shitty at all, do you?”

Silence wasn’t gonna cut it. He went for faking it, like he always did when forced into this kind of corner. “I don’t feel good about blowing someone’s face off, and if
you’re referring to that explosion at the checkpoint, there was nothing we could do about it. These people send their kids out into the streets with AK-47s and IEDs, and it’s our job to stop them.”

“Yes, it is. And you did your job well
. Shot the kid right in his arm, bomb went off in his face before he could get near the guard shack. Saved your whole unit.”

Adrian had purposely avoided looking at the kid’s face after the fact, but this asshole shrink was determined that he should
know. He slipped a photo loose from a file on his desk and slid it across the table to Adrian.

Yep, there’s a meaty looking kid, face half gone.
Yuck.
He felt like washing his hands just looking at the disgusting photo.

“Yes sir, that’s my job, sir.”

The shrink gave him the deep searching look. “You know that most of the guys in your unit had nightmares about that kid? They had a group counseling session over it.”

Damn, he knew he should have gone to that session. Strike one more on the inappropriate tally.

“I know what you are, son.”

Why do old military men always call younger men
son?

“The word
psychiatrists used a few years ago was psychopath. You know, like that movie about Norman Bates and the hotel.”

Adrian stopped nodding. There just wasn’t any kind of appropriate response to this shit.

“Now we call you guys sociopaths. Has a better ring to it.” The old man grinned at his own bit of snark. “You’re a pretender, Adrian. You pretend to be like everyone else, but its situations like this, when people die in ugly ways, you just can’t pretend well enough to hide the fact that this shit doesn’t affect you like it affects everyone else.”