by Stacy Gail
On the other hand, there was one thing to be admired about Rude—even back then he’d had the manly balls to say out loud what all the other biological children of foster parents merely thought, so in a weird way she’d admired his honesty. That, and his physical appearance. Even at that time in her life, so entrenched in her Nowhere Place she’d thought she’d never want to come out again, she’d noticed that Rude Panuzzi wasn’t hard to look at.
Like all the Panuzzi children, Rude had those killer Italian-lover looks—curling black hair he kept military-style short, with a widow’s peak that would undoubtedly be as defined fifty years from now as his father’s was. Long black lashes as lush as any woman’s, framing deep-set eyes the color of cognac. He’d been named after the legendary movie star and heartthrob, Rudolfo “Rudolph” Valentino, and Rude could have been considered a heartthrob in his own right. With high cheekbones, straight nose and lover’s mouth with a lower lip full enough to give it a perpetual pout, he certainly looked like the complete package.
His angular jaw was something that fit his Marine Corps background as well, but it was the one thing she’d had trouble with when it came to his looks. Even at sixteen, Rude had been a bundle of aggressive masculinity. His over-the-top maleness had only intensified as maturity carved away the lingering baby fat to reveal the chiseled man underneath.
She didn’t like chiseled, and she wasn’t a fan of aggressive masculinity. Her tastes veered toward the hyper-groomed metrosexual, the kind who’d go shopping with her, and maybe even shared her love of all things purple. That kind of man was easily forgotten when she was ready to move on, and less likely to put her in the hospital when that time came.
Or so she’d thought.
She couldn’t understand why Rude was there now. They didn’t know each other in any real way. As soon as he was able, he’d joined the Marines to finally find the fight he’d always been looking for. From that point, he’d all but disappeared off her personal radar. Every now and then she’d hear that he was in one hellhole or another—Baghdad, Fallujah, Kabul, Helmand Province—along with the speculation of when he might be home next. Then came the worrying over his latest deployment and why no one had heard from him for months at a time. The cycle usually ended with comforting hugs and the reminder that no news was good news.
She was never a part of that cycle, of course. Nor were any of the strays who went through the Panuzzi foster home. Rude was loved by his biological family, naturally. But his foster family… not so much.
It had been a relief when Rude had left her foster parents’ house. As one of the younger fosters the Panuzzis had taken in, Sass had stayed under their roof the longest—which meant she’d endured Rude the longest. But by eighteen she had been ready to be out. The State had given her a few items from when she’d been abandoned in a lawyer’s office as a newborn, mementos no one but Scout knew of and were so eye roll-worthy Sass had stuffed them in a manila envelope and passed them from her mind as she readied herself for adult life.
Once she’d moved out of the Panuzzis, her life had hit a long-belated lucky streak. She’d won a fabulous orphaned-child grant to go to college to become a dietician. While in her junior year, she had written a paper on gluten that sparked the interest of a local paper. That interest had turned into a weekly column on diet and good health advice that had grown in popularity over the years, and was now syndicated in a dozen newspapers across the country.
She’d also started a food blog her first year in college, called Pinch Of Sass. The blog grew over time to become a natural expansion of her career, complete with recipes and step-by-step photos and videos—one of the first blogs to ever do that. To her surprise, her blog was now more popular than anything she had going with the newspapers. With Pinch Of Sass getting around a million hits annually, she made enough money in ad space to pay a monthly mortgage. Then, two years ago, a well-known publishing company had emailed her, expressing interest in putting together a cookbook.
When her cookbook, A Pinch Of Sass, released last Christmas, it had hit the best sellers list in nonfiction, and stayed there for over forty weeks.
She’d made her own way in the world, something that wouldn’t have been possible if the Panuzzis hadn’t taken her in. For that, she would be forever grateful. That was why she was still so heavily involved in her foster family’s lives. She owed them as much as she loved them, and it was a joy to keep those ties solid.
Then Rude had returned.
She closed her eyes, wishing to be anywhere but there. She’d crossed paths with him only a handful of times since his return, barely speaking more than a dozen words to him, including her shocked, “You’re kidding,” when he’d asked her to dance at Scout’s wedding last week. She hadn’t meant to be obnoxious; she hadn’t been able to help it. From the moment he’d laid eyes on her, Rude had targeted her as a thing to be hated. So dancing with him? No freaking way.
The question was, what the hell was he doing there now?
Maybe he wanted another crack at dancing with her.
Not.
“Sass.”
Her eyes sprang open, and locked onto those familiar cognac eyes.
Chapter Two
Rude stood motionless in the curtain’s gap while every abused muscle in Sass’s body tensed. In silence she took him in—dark jeans, black leather jacket, tight pullover shirt with USMC emblazoned on the front and molded to a combat-ready body.
Aggressively masculine. Her least favorite kind of man, wrapped in a personality that was the equivalent of rusty barbed wire. And he was there just for her.
Yippee.
“Nice to see you, Rude.” The words came out muffled behind the oxygen mask, and only then did she realize her nurse was right. When the pressure was on, she really did say the exact opposite of what she felt. “Thought I’d call you back here to show you I’m fine…” She took a shallow breath while the machine beside her beeped. “And that there’s no need to worry.” Beep. “And that this is no big deal.”
Beep.
Stupid machine.
He didn’t move. In fact, if it weren’t for the glitter in his eyes and a muscle jumping in his clean-shaven jaw, she’d think he was trying to see if a human being could become a statue if he stood still long enough.
“Are you in pain?”
“Nope.” It was sort of true this time around. Either the drugs were starting to work or she was just getting used to hurting. It was hard to tell.
At last he got his feet unstuck from the floor and moved to the machine monitoring her vitals. “Your pulse-ox is at eighty-seven percent. It should be in the high nineties.”
“How do you—” She stopped herself, letting the unfinished sentence dangle awkwardly. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.” The less she knew about him, the better.
“During an emergency staffing situation in Jalalabad I had to train as a medic, though I wasn’t that great at it,” he offered anyway, as if she’d finished her question. “Coughing up any blood?”
“I haven’t coughed recently.” Not since she’d gotten to the hospital, anyway.
“If you had any marked bleeding into a lung, you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from coughing.” Without warning he turned and leaned over the metal railing, and one big hand came to rest with great care on top of her head. It was so shocking she went completely still. Had Rude ever touched her? Ever? She didn’t think so. At the very least she would have remembered a totally wigged-out response, like the one she was having now.
“Who did this to you, Sass?”
It was the softest whisper, the gentlest tone she’d ever heard him use.
If Death had a voice, he’d probably sound just like that.
“I told the Admissions person that I fell down my apartment building’s lobby stairway.” Though of course, the fall had happened after being punched in the mouth and launched off the landing, but no one needed to know that.
“I didn’t ask what you told them. I asked who did t
his to you.”
With his hand cupping her head, she wondered wildly if he could feel the frantic turning of her mental wheels. “I have questions too, you know.”
“Who did this to you?”
“Not to mention my questions are far more interesting than yours.”
“Sass—”
“For instance, why do you care who did this to me? Why are you even here? I gave them your parents’ phone number, not yours.” She didn’t even know his number.
Nor did she care to.
The amber flecks that gave his eyes that cognac color seemed to catch fire. “You know very well my parents are out of town.”
“You’re right, I do know that. I also know you’re a smart guy, so I’m surprised you haven’t figured out that I didn’t want anyone bothered with this.”
The fire in his eyes abruptly vanished. “You care a lot about my parents, don’t you?”
The random change of subject made her blink. “Of course I do. I owe them everything.”
“Then you need to think about how you’re currently playing this.”
“I think I’m playing it brilliantly, thanks for your interest.”
“You need to think about how they’re going to feel when they come back from visiting their newest grandchild, only to find their youngest son in jail for pounding your current boyfriend into the fucking ground.”
For only a moment she froze before she realized he was bluffing. “Good luck with that. I don’t have a current boyfriend. I haven’t had anyone in my life for the last three months or so.” She shrugged, then winced. The machine beeped. “Dry spell.”
“So, your last boyfriend was that Jonas guy, right? Did he do this to you because you dumped his worthless ass?”
If the mask hadn’t been clamped over mouth, she was sure it would have fallen open so hard her chin would have bruised her already-bruised chest. “How do you know his name? How do you know anything about him?”
He straightened away, and the place on her head where he’d rested his hand suddenly felt cold. “So it was him. Got it.”
“No, it wasn’t… stop.” He’d made a move toward the curtain gap, like he planned to hunt down every Jonas in Chicagoland, and it sparked a surge of panic. “It wasn’t him. That guy’s ancient history.”
“If that’s true, he’s going to be the unlucky bastard whose ex-girlfriend didn’t give a shit about him to save him from me.” Once again he made a move toward the gap in the curtain, and she lunged forward to grab his jacket sleeve. Pain exploded in her left side and right shoulder where she’d smashed against the stairs, and nothing could have stopped her broken groan from escaping.
Ow.
Worse yet, it now hurt everywhere. How was it possible that her points of pain were increasing when all she was doing was just lying there?
Squeezing her eyes shut, she held onto his jacket and curled into a tight ball while the machine hooked up to her lost its shit and let out all sorts of beeps. She didn’t care. She was holding her breath because movement of any kind—even breathing—would make her pass out. She didn’t need to breathe. Breathing was for wimps. What mattered now was that she stayed awake. She needed to make sure Rude didn’t blast off like an unguided missile to destroy hapless Jonas and break Mama Coco and Papa Bolo’s hearts by landing his idiotic ass in jail.
As the sounds around her began to fade into a weird, ringing darkness, she had to wonder why Rude would do something like that in the first place. As far as she knew, defending the honor of a Panuzzi “stray”—the name for a Panuzzi foster child—wasn’t high on his list of priorities.
“Breathe, Sassy.” From far away a deep voice came, as did a hand that rubbed her back with such soothing gentleness it managed to unlock the death grip that pain had on her. “Nice and easy now, purse your lips and breathe in and out through your mouth, okay? It’s a little trick asthmatics use to open up the bronchioles to get that extra bit of oxygen in.”
“It. Wasn’t. Jonas.” Her fingers had lost all feeling as they gripped his jacket. They were so frozen in place she probably couldn’t let him go now if she tried. “Not. Him.”
“If you don’t want me to take my military-trained, hand-to-hand combat skills out into the streets to fuck up every man you’ve ever had in your life, then you need to tell either me or the police who did this. Because make no mistake, whoever fucked you up needs to answer for it.”
At last she lifted her head, the ringing fading as her head cleared, and she couldn’t help but wonder how he knew she had expressly avoided talking to the police. Then she glimpsed movement at the curtain gap, watched her nurse peek in on what was happening, and the dim bulb in her brain went on.
Oh.
Of course.
Rude wasn’t interested in defending her honor, and he sure as hell wasn’t so riled up he was going to turn the streets of Chicago into rivers of blood. He didn’t care. He was just helping out with the hospital’s rules and procedures like the good little soldier he was.
Embarrassment burned like acid through her, mortified that she’d allowed herself to believe he’d been moved to action on her behalf. Wow. Talk about stupid.
When she refused to break the silence, he shook the arm she’d latched onto. “Have it your way. Tell my parents I’m sorry I disappointed—”
“Fuck you, Rude.” Ignoring his sharp glance and resigned now to her fate when all she’d wanted to do was forget this night had even happened and move on, she let him go and dragged the oxygen mask from her face so she could be heard.
Rude made a move toward it. “Don’t—”
She smacked his hand away hard enough to sting her fingers, all the while keeping her eyes glued to the nurse in the curtain gap. “You want to play me like a chump just so I’ll talk to the police? Fine.” She had to pause to take a shallow breath. “I’ll do it on one condition—get Rude Panuzzi the hell away from me.”
All in all, he’d had better nights, Rude thought, stifling a yawn before jogging up the concrete steps to the front of Sass’s apartment building. He’d left the ER under protest. The way he saw it, he’d had every fucking right to be bent out of shape about getting tossed out. He’d done the hospital’s dirty work by cracking the stubborn nut that was his former foster sister. And how had they thanked him? They’d showed him the goddamn door.
Unsurprisingly, Sass had given them boatloads of trouble by giving them nothing at all. Also unsurprisingly, she’d drop-kicked his ass the second she’d figured out he was working an angle. Never mind that it was for her own good. No, as smart as she was to cotton on as quickly as she did, her thought process obviously didn’t go so far as to acknowledge he’d done what had to be done.
That had left him outside the hospital, waiting to see if Sass was allowed to get back into her car—a purple Mini he’d parked his SUV right next to—or if they would admit her for an overnight stay. He wouldn’t have been surprised if they had decided to keep her. She’d looked like shit. The first sight of her, lying so still on a gurney with an oxygen mask strapped to her face had just about stopped his heart. Then she’d opened those large, espresso-dark eyes filled with such pain, it sparked a dangerous fury inside that went so deep it had no end.
Unless he could make someone pay.
He hadn’t been kidding when he’d tried to leave in order to track down that worthless fuckwad he’d seen with Sass a few months back. Jonas. That was his name. The pretty boy who paid as much attention to the sculpted line of his waxed eyebrows as he did to Sass, except when posing for selfies with her, when he’d slop his greasy tongue all over her neck or ear. That alone called for a rearranging of his face and potential ripping out of said tongue. At the very least Rude had been looking forward to hunting that little man-bitch down. But she’d caught onto his arm and wouldn’t let go.
Sass might be fun-sized, but she could be fierce when she wanted to be.
When she’d walked out of the ER a little after two in the morning, he’d gotten out t
o talk with her, trying to be magnanimous by not pitching a thoroughly justified fit over how she’d gotten him kicked out. But she’d walked straight to her car, tugged the door open, paused just long enough to flip him the bird, and drove off without uttering a single word.
Of course, when she had that kind of sign language working for her, there wasn’t that much left to be said.
But that didn’t mean he’d said all he wanted to say, he thought, jaw knotting as he pushed the button to her apartment. No way. Not by a long shot.
“Yes?”
He quirked a brow at her fast response. “I thought it’d take you a lot longer to answer, Sassy. Guess you’re moving around a lot better this morning, yeah?”
There was such a long beat of silence that he figured he’d have to knock the rust off his lock-picking skills to get inside, before the intercom hummed to life. “Rude?”
Honest to God, there wasn’t anyone on the planet who made him inwardly swear more than this woman. “You know it’s me. Who else calls you Sassy?”
“No one who wants to live.”
Nice. “You gonna let me in?”
“Let me think. No.”
It was almost sad, how she continued to not surprise him. “Then I guess I’ll go and have breakfast with Anthony, Gino and Frankie, like I’d originally planned.”
“Great. Buh-bye.”
“Since you get along with all my siblings, I’m sure they’ll want to hear about what happened to you, so naturally I’m going to tell them the whole sorry tale. Frankie loves you to death, so she’ll probably blab to Izzi about it. Izzi and Gino are a lot alike, and neither one of them ever grew out of the tattletale phase. No doubt Izzi will tell Mom and Pop about you getting busted up by some unworthy jackhole, but even if she doesn’t, Gino will. Approximately one hour from now you’ll be hearing from them as they freak out from thousands of miles away, their time with their newest grandchild ruined because you wouldn’t—” The door buzzed and he caught it up fast before she could change her mind. “Let me in,” he finished under his breath.
