by Amy Faye
Rough Hand
Bad Boy Fighter Romance
Amy Faye
Published by Heartthrob Publishing
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Here’s a preview of the sexy love story you’re about to read…
"Have you ever been fucked before, Caroline? Have you ever had a man take you?"
"No," she said. There was more to it, when she'd planned the response in her head, but when her mouth started moving it came out short and didn't have the protest that she'd intended.
"But you wanted to. You've been wondering what it's like for so long that you don't even remember when you started. Tell me I'm wrong. Tell me I'm wrong, and I'll stop."
He rounded the sofa, his cock starting to grow. Even flaccid, he had a size that was a little bit intimidating, but as he stared at her it grew. He seeming to see right through her defenses and into a private world where she had wondered very much what it would be like to have him take her. It made her shiver.
"You should go get dressed," she offered. It wasn't a refusal, though, and deep down she knew it.
"I could do that. But I don't want to disappoint you."
"Who would be disappointed?"
He leaned down over her, his face filling her vision and the rest of him filling her mind. Her body tingled, every nerve in her body waiting for him to touch her. She held herself still, held her body stiff and forced herself not to reach out to him. But she desperately wanted to.
"Touch it," he whispered. "Touch me. You can, you know. Nobody would have to know. Nobody would judge you."
"You're a tenant, and I'm saving myself."
Shannen didn't scoff at her. He didn't laugh. He didn't even smirk. He pressed his lips against her jaw and she didn't pull away. Then he put those same lips, surprisingly soft for a man who was, in so many other ways, so hard, right by her ears.
"Are you sure? Think about it. Think hard. Think about what you're missing. About how good it would feel to have this cock inside you, fucking you, filling you up in ways that you never even dreamed of."
"You're very full of yourself," she said. The defenses were crumbling, and it was all that she could do to keep her hands pressed hard into her own hips.
"I can back it all up, if you'll let me," he purred, and Caroline shivered. God, the offer was tempting.
"You'd better," she breathed.
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1
Caroline's third day at the hospital wasn't all that different from the first two: crazy, way over her head, and yet, for the third day in a row she seemed to be almost keeping up.
Her supervisor was a matronly woman named Sarah. She looked like a nurse was supposed to look. No, that wasn't quite right. She looked like a nun was supposed to look in an old-fashioned hospital, like you saw in paintings.
The similarities to what nuns were supposed to be like ended approximately there. On the other hand, Caroline's experience with nuns in Catholic school had taught her that some things weren't what they seemed; Sarah may not have been what nuns were supposed to be like, whatever that meant, but she was a dead ringer for every nun that Caroline had actually met.
She had sharp senses, so that any little thing Caroline let slip or said out of turn seemed to make her supervisor prick her ears up. Of course, with Caroline being a student, and as new in the hospital as she was, she was never out of Sarah's earshot, which meant that she heard nearly everything.
More than that, her supervisor had a bedside manner that was as polite as could be; at least, on the surface, which was where it really counted. Below the surface was another matter entirely, and she wasn't afraid to show her hand if she thought that someone was talking back.
She would put on a sweet smile, and then call them 'dear,' and then remind them who decided which needles got used when it came time to draw blood or give injections.
That had a tendency to shut people up real quick, Caroline noticed. She wasn't sure how much of Sarah's attitude was because of who she was and how much was the result of the job, but she had no trouble believing that the older woman hadn't exactly struggled to get 'into character', so to speak.
So when her face darkened as they walked down the hall, Caroline picked up on it because for all of Sarah's skills, abilities and experience, subtlety wasn't particularly one of them.
"Is something wrong?"
Sarah's face brightened for the exact span of time that it took to turn to Caroline and answer. "Nothing at all, dear. You're doing fine."
Caroline wondered if she was starting to pick up on some of Sarah's sharpness of hearing when she heard the older woman mutter softly to herself. "You'll see soon enough."
Whatever it was that she was going to see, it wasn't hard to figure out what it was going to be. Sarah stopped outside of a patient room and held herself upright with one hand on the wall, and took a breath.
"Ready?"
Caroline nodded and followed her supervisor inside. The bed was empty, which was a surprise. This was intensive care; most of the patients here were too injured to move, and if they could, then they rarely made any effort to do so.
Sarah sucked in air through her teeth and bit off a curse that began with "God." Then she turned and looked at the bathroom. The door was open and the lights turned off. She pressed the intercom button by the bed and spoke into it with her voice hard and frustrated.
"Has anyone seen the patient in 314-A?"
A moment passed before there was a response. "Mr. O'Brien has been in his room all day, as far as I know. Why, is he not there now?"
"No," Sarah responded, as if that was a curse word, too. "Let's go look for him, I guess."
Caroline watched Sarah leave. There was something about the room that was setting her on edge. Something she couldn't quite place. She swept aside the curtain. An elderly woman slept in the bed beside the missing patient's.
She turned. There was no use in looking blindly, she'd always felt. When you looked, you should look someplace specific. The place that you most expect to find someone. In this case, she expected that he couldn't have gotten far. The bedpan by the bed seemed to confirm this idea, if the nurses didn't expect him to get up to use the bathroom in the night.
She wet her lips with her tongue and closed her eyes a moment and thought. Where would she go? And why? If he was a prisoner then there should at the very least have been a policeman guarding the door. If he wasn't, then he was, in theory, free to leave any time.
Why would he go out of his way to escape in secret? She frowned. Because they wouldn't let him go, maybe? Why would that even be?
There were a thousand reasons, she knew. The nurses wanted the doctor to release any patients that were outgoing. If he were at risk, or his wounds hadn't healed properly, then the doctor would refuse. If he had indicated any intention to harm himself, then he wouldn't be allowed to leave until a 48-hour observation period was up.
She didn't think he would kill himself, though. Nothing about the man had seemed suicidal. The thought suddenly occurred to her, all at once.
There was still a stack of personal belongings on the bedside table. Which meant, wherever he'd gone, he hadn't gone far. She frowned and walked over. A phone, plugged into the wall as if he weren't worried about it.
A western novel, the spine broken in so many places that it was a wonder that it had managed to stay together this long. And beside it, a clipboard. She frowned. The clipboard seemed odd.
She took a deep breath. Odd, indeed. That one was an easy problem to solve, though. She turned it over, and confirmed what she already expected to find. It was a hospital clipboard. She couldn't read the initials, but that was typical. The nurses scrawled rather than wrote them half the time.
She took a deep breath. So he was gone with a nurse, then. At least he wasn't at risk of hurting himself. S
he went to the locker room. It was only a few rooms down, and there was a map on the wall. The layout of the hospital was still new, and she didn't really know the quickest route to the nurse's station.
As she opened the door she heard the noise before she realized what it was, and her momentum carried her inside, the door closing behind her. Whatever noise she made, which sounded impossibly loud to her, it didn't interrupt the hard, husky breathing coming from further inside. Breathing punctuated with a woman's voice, hoarse and muffled.
The woman was another newbie, Caroline thought. She'd been there longer than Caroline, but she wasn't anywhere near an institution of the hospital. And as her breasts swayed forward with every thrust of the man's hips behind her, Caroline thought that she wasn't likely to become one.
He was wearing nothing at all, a hospital gown discarded on the ground, and it gave her a view that she didn't want to see, and one she couldn't look away from. He was tall, with dark hair that glinted the bareliest hints of red as it moved in the light, his cheeks high and defined, a well shaped mouth, and a jaw that narrowed to a square, blocky chin.
Not only that, but he barely had an ounce of fat on him; she'd seen less-defined physiques in anatomy textbooks. Every muscle tightened and relaxed in concert as he moved. His fingers dug into the nurse's hips, his arms nearly pulling her feet off the floor with every thrust.
The nurse yelped, and Caroline yelped too, in surprise as much as anything.
The door hadn't gotten their attention, but that had. The nurse scrambled to cover herself, but the man behind her, his chest wrapped up in thick gauze bandages, thrust again, and the nurse let out another hoarse moan. The man's pace never slowed as she watched. Caroline realized dimly that her mouth had dropped open but she couldn't stop.
Then he pulled himself free and let out a groan as he spent himself on the nurse's backside.
"I know," he said, his voice conversational and not at all embarrassed as far as she could detect. "I need to get back to my room right away, and I've been a very bad boy."
Caroline swallowed and stared up at him, and tried to ignore the tingling in her lady parts. She raised her voice enough to be heard from, she hoped, quite a distance.
"I've found him!"
2
Caroline's eyes scanned over the bills, strewn out across what was supposed to be a dining table. She hadn't eaten at it in some time, and she wasn't sure when she was going to.
Dad had always insisted on sitting to eat, on the two of them eating together, sitting, like a proper meal, like a proper family. Maybe Mom would have joined them too, once, but if she had then it was a long time ago. Too long for anything but vague memories that were long past faded, like every memory that she had of Mom except for little snippets.
A day where she'd been making eggs, and they'd been wildly out of date, and the stench of sulfur filled the tiny apartment that she remembered, in some dim part of her mind, having lived in when she was not only too young to recall her age, but at an age where numbers still lacked meaning.
Memories of Mom giving her un-toasted Pop Tarts because that was how Caroline preferred them, and it was how she still preferred them. Memories of a Christmas tree too big for the little apartment.
The other things Caroline remembered weren't memories, so much as they were recitations of facts she believed to be true, though she couldn't say where she might have heard any of them. Dad certainly never spoke about Mom, after she'd passed away, but Caroline couldn't remember her smile; only that she remembered Mom smiling a lot. She couldn't remember what her cooking had tasted like, only that aside from that one morning, she was quite a good cook.
Dad was in the hospital now, and in another twenty years, maybe he would be relegated to similar patchwork memories and lists of facts that she believed she had known about the man who had been with her and taken care of her since she learned her first words.
She let out a long breath and wrote the number at the bottom of the letter down on a lined legal pad, and then folded it back into threes, and moved on to the next sheet in the unread stack.
The stack wasn't high; now that she lived alone (temporarily, she reminded herself; Dad was going to get back out of the hospital any day now) she had no problem keeping the bills minimal.
At the very bottom of the sheet she tallied up her numbers and frowned at the total with a vague sense of dissatisfaction. She wasn't making much money from the hospital; most of her income was in the form of college credit and in the form of being work towards her degree, which would eventually pay for itself on some level. That was the idea, at least. She hoped that was how it worked.
As it stood, she had $1500 a month coming from Dad's social security, another $1200 a month, before taxes, coming from her time at the hospital, far too much of it for such a small sum. After taxes were removed it was barely $900 a month.
$2400 was enough to do quite a bit, when it was on its own. In less than a year, she'd be able to buy a brand new car, if she were thrifty. In a year and a half, she might be able to buy one that was quite attractive.
The problem was that between now and then she would have to eat at some point. She would have to keep the electricity running, she would have to keep her cellular phone connected, and more than anything she would have to find some way to keep the hospital from kicking Dad out on the street for lack of payment.
Once all those bills were accounted for, she had almost $50 for paying the rent, which was enough for a night at the movies and not much more, because if she actually tried to pay that money to the landlord she knew that he'd laugh in her face.
There were answers, of course. There were always answers. For example, she could cut down on food costs. It was far too convenient to buy food while she was at work, rather than bringing food in. It would change the numbers quite a bit if she were more careful with food. That opened up her income.
Then there was the cell phone. She had already been doing the math on it, and now that she'd quadruple-checked her numbers, it was clear that was going to be reduced, as well.
They were little things, here and there, and with all of it together she could make it work.
Well, that wasn't accurate. She could make it work… if her rent were only half what it actually was. If her electricity bill were only half what it was. Water and heat were covered by the apartment.
She smiled to herself, glad that the answer was obvious. The weight on her shoulders lifted a little bit. Long enough that the rest of her almost threatened to forget about how worried she was going to have to be about work the next day, because 12-hour shifts were hard no matter how much you thought that you were catching on.
She could post an advertisement, and after her shift tomorrow, she'd get a nice long rest and make some calls the following morning. Easy as can be. She sidled up into her chair, started typing out an ad for a roommate. She wasn't much of a photographer but she could at least take a few shots with her phone to give people an idea of the space.
Then to post, nice and easy. She laid her head back for only a moment before she threw a tray of quesadillas onto a tray and put it into the oven. When they finished she should try actually sitting down at the table for something that wasn't completely miserable, she thought. It would be a delightful change of pace from the TV tray in front of the couch.
As she waited, standing by the oven rather than finding a better seat in spite of the fifteen minutes it would take, her phone buzzed in her hip pocket. Probably spam, she thought, but she checked it anyways. She wasn't going to get many chances tomorrow.
Caroline's eyebrow raised. She'd expected some takers, but she'd expected them to filter in over the next day and a half. Not one within ten minutes.
She opened the email and scanned over it. The image of a thick-skinned Irish girl, tough and streetwise, immediately flashed in her head as she read through. The name at the top fit perfectly. Hell, it almost single-handedly created the image.
Shannen O'Brien sounded like ju
st the sort of woman that Caroline could get along with. Independent, tough, and no-nonsense. Which was why, against her better judgment, she agreed to meet in the morning before her shift. The sooner that she had someone else paying rent, the sooner that she could breathe easy about the dwindling numbers in her bank account.
The sooner that they came and saw the place, the sooner that she could start making friends with this girl, and the sooner that she could start thinking beyond just solving the little day-to-day problems like money.
The timer on the microwave beeped loudly, and she sent her reply before pulling the food out. There was a lot to look forward to. Things were finally looking up. The boorish patient had been ejected and wasn't on her route any more. Sarah was beginning to treat her a bit less like she was a small, skiddish animal. And she was finally going to have a roommate, after distantly imagining what it might be like for all this time.
Things were looking up so much that she forgot to turn off the oven until she started to notice the smell as she went through the house flicking off lights. So perhaps not everything was looking up.
But at least it was only a very small fire. Nobody would notice, and nothing seemed permanently damaged, she hoped. She was pleased, though, with one thing at least. It didn't damage her attitude one bit, because tomorrow morning she'd meet her new room-mate, and Shannen was going to be her new best friend.
3
Caroline's night wasn't as grand as she might have hoped for. She rarely hoped much at all; it was the same most nights. Come home, from class or from the hospital, the sun already down and dinner barely an afterthought in her mind. She just wanted to sleep, and after sucking down a remarkably unhealthy microwaveable meal, complete with enough sodium to fill a salt shaker, she would pass out on the bed.
It was small, for anyone, but for her it almost worked. She was not a tall woman, and at only five-one she was able to fit without her legs dangling uncomfortably off the end of the bed.
