by Jill Shalvis
“You going to work like that?” she asked.
He looked down at his hard-on. “That bad?”
“Boy Scouts could camp in there.”
He snorted, and Grace found herself laughing again. She was trying to remember that they weren’t well suited, that he was the opposite of everything she’d ever wanted, but it wasn’t working.
Not even close.
She wanted to tug down his pants and finish what she started.
“Christ, Grace,” Josh said on a groan. “Don’t look at me like that.” He closed his eyes. “I’m standing here trying to mentally recite chemical elements to calm down, and you’re looking at me like you want to eat me for breakfast.”
She slapped a hand over her eyes. “Oh my God. I was not.”
“Yeah, you were.”
Okay, she had been doing exactly that. “Sorry!” She paused, lowering her hands. “And you can recite the chemical elements?”
His hands gripped her arms and hauled her up against him. He kissed her and said, very quietly, very seriously, “We okay?”
“Well.” She gave him an embarrassed smile. “I am…”
Letting out a laugh, Josh let her go and turned for the door. His cell phone was vibrating from the depth of his pocket again. He was already on it before the door shut behind him.
Grace took a moment to fix herself, even though the truth was she needed a lot more than a moment. Her hair was a complete wreck, her body still quivering, but she couldn’t seem to get rid of the grin that came from two pretty great orgasms. She did the best she could to look presentable and entered the big house, nearly tripping over Anna. “Sorry!”
Anna studied her for a beat. “You just missed Josh.”
Grace worked on looking innocent as they went into the kitchen. “Oh?”
Anna shook her head. “Amateur.”
Grace sagged, giving up the pretense. Tank was jumping up and down in hopeful entreaty behind his baby gate, snuffling and snorting. Grace released him from his doggie prison. The puppy immediately caught sight of the lightsaber lying on one of the chairs and began posturing, growling fiercely at it.
“You drive him crazy,” Anna said. “You know that, right?”
“It’s the lightsaber.”
Anna rolled her eyes. “My brother. You drive my brother crazy.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure that’s you.” Grace gave Tank the signal to sit.
He didn’t. Instead, he barked.
Grace took a doggie cookie out of a container on the counter. “Sit.”
Tank rolled over. Twice.
“Tank, sit.”
Tank offered her a paw to shake, and Grace gave up.
“So,” Anna said, “are you going to fall for Josh like the other nannies? Because I don’t recommend it. Falling for him is the fastest route to getting fired. Or dumped.”
“What are you talking about?”
Tank whirled in circles, then rolled again, clearly going through his entire repertoire of tricks for another cookie.
“Didn’t you interview your employer before you took the job?” Anna asked Grace.
“Well, I…” Not this time, she hadn’t. “This job sort of happened in a hurry.”
Plus she hadn’t wanted to probe. Which was entirely different from not wanting to know. Because she did want to know.
Bad.
“You never wondered why none of your predecessors are still around?” Anna asked. “Or why such a great guy with such a great family”—she stopped here to flash a grin so similar to Josh’s that Grace blinked—“can’t keep a nanny? Or a girlfriend? It’s because they all fall hard for him. And he doesn’t have a heart, so he doesn’t fall back.”
“Wow,” Grace said.
“I know. You really need to get it together.”
“No, I mean you’re pretty mean. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Anna didn’t seem to take this personally at all. “Mean as a snake,” she agreed. “I’m majoring in it at college.”
“No, you’re not. You’re majoring in not-going-to-class.”
Anna sighed. “Is this going to turn into another lecture?”
“You’re taking cooking and a creative writing class,” Grace said. “A saint would be bored. I’m telling you, try something more challenging.”
Anna shrugged.
“But why not?” Grace asked. “I don’t get it. If you’re smart enough to be as mean as a snake, then you’re smart enough to do something with yourself.”
“Like?”
“Like whatever you want,” Grace said. “It’s wide open. Hell, you could play softball if you wanted.”
“Hello, I’m in a wheelchair.”
“No, I saw it on the Washington University website,” Grace said. “They’ve got a whole handicapped athletic program, including softball and soccer and self-defense classes.”
Anna blinked twice.
“Run out of excuses?” Grace asked her.
Anna snorted. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you’re supposed to be nice to the poor handicapped girl?”
“You have to earn nice.”
Anna narrowed her eyes, and Grace shrugged. “It’s true. You don’t get an ass-pass just because you’re handicapped, no matter what you think. And to be honest, you don’t seem all that handicapped.”
Anna sputtered at this. “Are you blind?”
“No. Are you?”
Anna just stared at her. “I’m paralyzed.”
“I know. You keep telling me.”
“I’m paralyzed from a car accident that killed my parents,” Anna said with great emphasis. Clearly she had this routine down, and just as clearly, it usually worked for her. “You’re supposed to feel sorry for me. Everyone feels sorry for me. It’s what they do.”
“Listen,” Grace said softly. “I hate that you went through that. It must have been hell. No one should ever have that happen to them.” In fact, just thinking about it brought a punch of emotion that blocked Grace’s windpipe, for Anna, for Josh. She physically ached for him and what he’d faced, and she had no idea how he’d managed to keep it all together. “But you lived,” she reminded Anna softly.
“So? I still can’t play soccer.”
“Could you before?”
“Yes! I was great before.”
“Then you’re still great,” Grace said. “Play wheelchair soccer.”
“That’s stupid. And pathetic.”
“No, stupid and pathetic is not doing anything at all but bitching about not going to Europe, when really, if you wanted to go, you’d just go. I mean, as you keep saying, you’re a grown-up.”
Anna let out a low, disbelieving laugh. “I take it back. I don’t like you better than the last few babysitters at all.”
Grace smiled sympathetically. “They babied you, huh?”
This got some spark. “I don’t need babying.”
“No kidding!”
That got a very small smile out of Anna, but a genuine one. Then her attention turned to the guy coming down the hall from her bedroom in nothing but boxers, yawning.
“He’s gone, right?” Devon asked, his voice sleepy and thick. “Your brother?”
“Yep,” Anna said.
“You fell asleep on me last night,” Devon said.
Anna let out a laugh that was so completely fake that Grace’s eyes flew to her, and then to Devon. But Devon either missed that fact entirely or didn’t care. He scratched his head, then his chest. If he scratched his ass next, Grace was going to throw up in her mouth a little bit.
“What do you want to do today?” Anna asked him, so clearly wanting him to get dressed and out of the house that Grace nearly shoved him out the door herself. She wanted to tell Anna to grow a set and kick his ass. But when Grace had been Anna’s age, she’d have highly resented anyone telling her what to do. In fact, it would have made her do the opposite, so she bit her tongue, hard.
“Thought we’d go to Seattle and hit some stores,”
Devon said. “The new snowboards are in.”
“Don’t you have physical therapy?” Grace asked Anna, trying to toss her a life preserver.
But Anna didn’t want one. “Seattle sounds great,” she said.
“Cool,” Devon said. “But I don’t have my wallet.”
Anna shrugged. “No problem.”
Okay, that was it. “You,” Grace said, pointing at Devon. “Out.”
“What?”
Grace opened the front door and gestured with a jerk of her chin.
“Dude,” he said. “I’m not dressed.”
“Dude, I don’t care. Come back when you can pay your own way.”
Devon stalked stiffly out, and Grace shut the door on him. Actually, she slammed it.
Anna’s eyes narrowed. “Is this your idea of helping me toe the line? Because it sucks.”
“There’s the line, and there’s common sense. You figure out the difference, and we’ll talk.”
Anna glared at her for a minute, then shrugged. “I’ll need a ride to PT in an hour.”
“I’ll be here.” Grace watched Anna vanish down the hallway, then turned to the little pug demon puppy. “So how do you feel about chocolate pancakes?”
“Arf!”
Chapter 13
Beware of chocolate squares; they make you round.
For several days, Josh was up to his eyeballs in patients with the flu and strep throat. Throat cultures and breathing treatments became his favorite words. By the end of the third day, he was practically swaying on his feet in exhaustion. “We done?” he asked Dee, knowing he still had to face the mountain of paperwork on his desk. “Anyone left to see?”
“No.” She knocked on wood. “Don’t jinx it or someone’ll come knocking. Run while you can.”
“What about Mrs. Porter? Didn’t I see her on the schedule earlier?”
“She was here, but she got tired of waiting. Said you were cute, but not that cute, and she’d see you another day.”
“What brought her in?” he asked.
“Headache. She said it was probably because she’d lost her glasses and would just get another pair from Walmart later instead of bothering you.”
Josh spent twenty minutes at his desk facing the torturous pile of files before he was paged into the ER. One of the on-contract doctors couldn’t show up for the first half of their nightshift, and they needed Josh. He called Anna, who informed him she couldn’t babysit the rug rat because she had a date. So Josh called Grace. “I hate to ask,” he said, “but—”
“I’ve got him right here. I heard your call with Anna. We’re just getting back.”
“Back?”
“I took Anna and Toby to see a soccer game.”
This surprised him. Anna had been a big soccer player before the accident. Ever since, it was as if she’d erased soccer from her vocabulary. “Really?”
“Wheelchair soccer.”
It wasn’t often he was rendered speechless. “She went willingly, or did you have to kidnap her at gunpoint?”
“She went willingly,” Grace said, sounding amused. “And said she could have done better than half the girls on the field.”
An odd emotion blossomed in Josh’s chest. “I owe you,” he said softly.
“Actually, at the moment, I owe you.”
Surrounded by hell, his life completely not his own, he found himself smiling for the first time in days. “I’m open to a deal.”
“Sounds promising, Dr. Scott. Talk to you later.”
Josh was still smiling when he headed into the ER. The shift was a little crazy, but that was the nature of the beast in any hospital. There was a purpose to all of it, to every orchestrated movement, and unlike everywhere else, here he thrived on chaos.
You thrive on the chaos that is Grace Brooks as well…
Grace might think she was winging life at the moment, but everything she did, everyone she helped along the way, everything she said or felt, came from the bottom of her heart.
He loved that.
It was 1:00 a.m. before he left the ER. He had a few hours to get home and sleep before the madness started again.
He was halfway to his car when he got the call.
Mrs. Porter had just come in, DOA.
Josh ran back into the hospital, but of course, there was no rush. Not for the dead. He grabbed the chart. There’d be no official cause of death until the autopsy, but all signs pointed to an aneurysm.
Josh stared down at Mrs. Porter’s body in disbelief. The possibility of an aneurysm had never been on his radar. It was a silent killer. So of course he hadn’t seen any signs of any impending illness, and it certainly hadn’t been in her patient history, which he knew by heart. Over the years, he’d probably spent a total of months talking to her. He knew she liked her margaritas frozen, her music soft and jazzy, and was a secret office supply ho. She didn’t have much family or any pets, she’d always said she was allergic to both, and she’d never missed a single episode of Amazing Race. She’d planned on someday being the oldest winner.
Soon as she could get over her fear of flying.
And now she was dead.
It wasn’t his fault. Logically, he knew this, but he felt guilty as hell, and sick. Sick that he hadn’t moved his patients along faster earlier in the day so that she’d have waited for him. Because if he’d seen her, maybe there’d have been signs, maybe he’d have somehow known that today was different, that she’d really needed medical care and not just a little TLC.
“I’m sorry,” he said, touching her hand, tucking it under the blanket alongside her body. “So damned sorry.”
Only utter silence greeted him. Devastated him. Still in his scrubs, he drove home in a fog and found Grace asleep on his living room couch. She sat up, sleepy, rumpled, an apologetic smile on her face. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she said.
He helped her to her feet, then pulled his hands back from her warm body and shoved them into his pockets, not trusting himself to touch her right now. He felt her curiosity but managed to walk her to the guesthouse without a word.
“Josh?” Standing at her door, bathed in the moonlight, she touched his face. “Bad night?”
Her eyes were fathomless, and as always, he knew that if he looked into them for too long, he’d drown.
But he was already drowning.
She shifted closer and brushed her willowy body against his. Soft. Warm. He could bury himself in her right now and find some desperately needed oblivion.
But taking his grief out on her would be an asshole thing to do. “I’m fine.” Still numb, he waited until she went inside to go back to the house.
Not to bed, though. No, that wasn’t the kind of oblivion he planned to settle for. He went to the cabinet above the fridge for the Scotch, and then to the couch where Grace had fallen asleep waiting for him. It was still warm beneath the blanket from her body heat. And it smelled like her.
He inhaled deep and poured himself a few fingers.
He’d lost track of the number of shots he’d drunk by the time someone knocked softly on the glass slider. When he didn’t move, Grace let herself in.
Josh wasn’t drunk but he was close as he eyed her approach. She was wearing a camisole and cropped leggings. No shoes. Her hair was down. No makeup. He wanted to tear off her clothes, toss her down to the couch, and bury himself so deep that he couldn’t think.
Couldn’t feel.
He watched her cross the room, and some of his thoughts must have been obvious because she stopped just short of his reach and gave him a long, assessing look.
“Saw that the lights were on,” she said. “You can’t sleep.”
He shrugged and tossed back another shot.
“I’m sorry about Mrs. Porter.”
He went still, swiveling only his gaze in her direction.
“Since you were doing your impression of the typical tall, dark, and annoyingly silent male,” she said, “I went to the source. Facebook.” She paused. “Mrs.
Porter was very sweet. And I know she adored you. You’re a good man, Josh. A good doctor. Don’t blame yourself for her death.”
Too late.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
Maybe not. But plenty of other shit was his fault. Anna, still floundering in her new life. Toby thinking he had to be a Jedi warrior to warrant his mother’s return. His dad’s practice getting too big for its britches and losing the personal attention each patient deserved…
And Grace—the last lethal shot to his mental stability that had come out of nowhere.
She stood there, his own personal, gorgeous goddess, running his world in her own way along with her huge heart. She looked so soft and beautiful in the ambient light. So…his. His heart revved at just the sight of her, so he closed his eyes and let his head fall back to the couch. “You need to go.”
“Can’t.”
He didn’t ask why not, but she told him anyway. “I think maybe that’s the problem,” she said softly, and he could feel her leg brush his now.
She was getting braver.
“People go away in your life, don’t they, Josh?” she asked. “You get left, abandoned, whether by choice or through no fault of anyone.”
He heard more movement; then she tugged off one of his shoes. She was kneeling at his side, a position that brought dark erotic thoughts to mind. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
“I know.” Having gotten his shoes off, she rose up on her knees. “But you aren’t okay. And I’m not leaving you.”
He stared at her, ashamed to feel his throat tighten. “Grace. Just go.”
“No.” She lay her head down on his thigh and stroked his other with a gentle hand. “Tell me what to do to help you.”
She could start by moving her mouth about two inches to the right.
She didn’t. What she did do was take the shot glass dangling from his fingers and set it on the coffee table. Then she stood and pulled him up with her, hugging him.
His throat tightened beyond use as he buried his face in her hair and held on to her hard.
“You’re going to be okay,” she whispered.
No. No, he wasn’t. But rather than admit that, he took a deep breath. He didn’t want her concern.
