DADDY AT THE ALTAR

by Claire St. Rose

  I slipped my tongue inside her mouth, daring to take more than she was offering.

  She made a small sound and broke the kiss pulling away from me. Her cheeks were flushed red, and it made her eyes stand out that much more. She glanced around the cafeteria, making sure no one saw. I looked, too. We were the only two people besides the staff member behind the counter.

  When I looked back at her, she was smiling. God, she was beautiful.

  “I’m at work,” she said. It was the reason she’d pulled away. It wasn’t because of me kissing her. And I didn’t get a slap. Point for me. “Will you wait for me after work?” she asked. “I’d like to see you again.”

  “What time?”

  She shrugged. “I have a busy shift and sometimes it goes until dawn. I don’t know what time I’ll be out. Will you meet me, though?”

  I nodded. There was no way I was passing this up. She wanted to see me, and it was coming from her. Compared to her hostile reaction last night, I was willing to take anything I could get.

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Even if you have to wait really long?”

  I nodded.

  “If you’re still there, I’ll know you’re really grateful,” she said with that same cheeky smile. It made me want to kiss her again. I nearly did, too. I wanted to launch myself over the table and grab her, doing a lot more than kissing. I didn’t, not even the kissing part. I would wait until afterward, and even just seeing her would be enough.

  She wanted to see me. That was more important than anything else was.

  “You don’t have to bring flowers,” she said. “I have enough to last me twice as long.”

  She smiled, and I groaned. It was another jab at my overeager display last night, but I’d felt bad about making a scene in the hospital, making her uncomfortable, and getting kicked out. It wasn’t my fault that I wanted to ravish her, but I could have behaved.

  And she deserved those flowers.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

  She smiled again, and even though I’d only gotten a semi-chaste kiss and the half-promise of seeing her again, it was enough. Her smile alone was enough. Was it possible to fall for someone that quickly? Maybe it was just lust, but God, she was some kind of woman.

  “I have to get back,” she said and got up, scraping her papers together. I helped her stack them in a neat pile, and she put it back in the file.

  “I’ll see you later, maybe?”

  I nodded. She nodded, too, and walked away. I watched her until she walked out through the cafeteria door. When I looked at the woman behind the serving counter she was staring at me. The leathers? Emily? I didn’t know her reason.

  I shrugged at her and left the cafeteria, too. I headed toward the parking lot, sat down on the pavement next to my bike and pulled out my phone. I started making calls. The boys needed to know what was going around, and now that I knew more, it might be easier to narrow down. An injection with weird stuff in it. Embalming fluid and formaldehyde? I could ask Ruby about that. She did night work at the mortuary from time to time. Maybe she could help.

  I decided not to call her tonight, though. I didn’t want her to suggest I come over and then have to reject her. She would ask questions that I didn’t feel like answering.

  It was going to be a long night sitting here, but I was going to do it. I could do a lot of business from right here in the hospital parking lot, and it was for a good cause, after all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN Emily

  I couldn’t believe I’d just asked Daniel to wait for me outside. I didn’t even know how long my shift was still going to be, and I was going to make him wait for me. Was it wrong? Manipulative? I didn’t even know.

  My job in the ER was exactly what I wanted from life. I mattered. I made a difference. Most of all, considering my position, I was in control. I was the decision maker in a high-stakes game where other people’s lives were involved, and it kept me on my toes. After what had happened with Chrissy, this was exactly what I’d needed.

  To know that if someone died it wasn’t because I hadn’t done anything.

  Asking Daniel to wait for me felt like I was giving up that control. Sure, the actual request was still in my hands and I was on top of it, but once I went to meet him? Where would it go? I had no idea, and it was nerve-racking. Not just because I didn’t know, but also because, in a way, I didn’t want to know. I was giving him the control, and that terrified me.

  An ambulance brought a car accident victim in. Blood poured out of a gash in her head, one lung had collapsed, and she had broken bones and internal bleeding. I didn’t know if I could pull her through. We rushed around her, pricking her with needles, padding her up with monitor sensors. We managed, and after a while, she was taken to the ICU.

  I wiped my forehead when it was done, noticing the blood on my white coat, and sighed. We’d saved her. I’d won. More control. She hadn’t died. What was Daniel going to ask of me?

  How many long-term relationships had I had? Three? And all of them had ended the same. I hadn’t been able to hand over control. They’d called me neurotic, a pain in the ass. They didn’t want someone who emasculated them. I was smarter; I earned more; and I didn’t let them do what they needed to do in a relationship. I didn’t let them be in charge.

  The last time I’d let someone else take charge, I’d lost a life. That was an expensive price to pay.

  With so few men in my life who were willing to stick through the bad, it also meant that there was little good that had come of it. Sure, I’d had sex. I wasn’t a virgin. But I wasn’t what I would call experienced. I wasn’t comfortable enough with the idea of giving up control to just get into bed with anyone.

  What plagued me was the fact that, with Daniel, I wanted to do exactly that.

  A kid with a cut on the back of the head came in. He’d fallen out of bed, apparently. The cut wasn’t deep, but he needed stitches to stop the bleeding. We had to shave a patch of his hair to get to the wound. A lot of screaming and fighting about it later and they left with a stitched up wound and a lollipop.

  Daniel was in the parking lot out there somewhere. They would probably walk past him on their way out. If he was still there.

  I felt like an idiot hoping that he was still there. When I checked the time it was already two in the morning, and it had been hours since we’d spoken. But I wanted him to be there. I wanted to… what was it that I wanted?

  The answer was simple. I wanted him to want me. I wanted to be able to give over to him. He was a force of nature, walking around with that don’t-fuck-with-me face and that look that made me wet in my panties. When I thought about it, thought about him, my body grew warm.

  I wanted that. I wanted him to make me feel like that. I wanted him to take control, to take away this feeling of having to be in charge and to take care of whatever needed to be taken care of. I wanted to be able to switch off, just for once, and enjoy myself.

  Most of all, I wanted to stop punishing myself for what had happened.

  I realized with a jolt that I was expecting him to save me. I was the doctor in the ER who saved lives every day. He was the no-good, leather-clad son of a bitch, who walked in here and took what he wanted, and I wanted that. I wanted him. I wanted him to save me.

  A headache started throbbing dully between my temples. It had been a long night. I’d only gotten off this morning at four after an eighteen-hour day, slept six hours, and then this shift had already lasted another thirteen hours.

  Maybe all of this crazy thinking was because of a lack of sleep. God knew that there couldn’t be any other reason I was this Jacked up about a guy.

  Another case came in, a domestic fight that had gone bad with an apologetic woman and a man with a broken finger. When they left, I shook my head. Some had the strangest relationships.

  “Emily,” Hamilton said behind me. “You can go. You’ve had a long day. We’ve got it from here.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “T
here’s nowhere else I need to be.”

  Except in the parking lot with a really good-looking guy who looked at me as if I was going to be his next orgasm.

  “Positive. You need a break. Go on.”

  I nodded. I checked on the woman in ICU before I signed out and made my way to the staff locker room. I took my phone out of the locker and texted Sarah.

  I’m meeting Daniel now. He’s waiting for me outside. Help! What do I do?

  It was the middle of the night…three in the morning to be exact. The chances that she was going to answer were slim. My phone pinged with a message.

  Fuck his brains out.

  I shook my head. Sarah was vulgar and to the point, but sometimes it made me uncomfortable.

  Are you kidding me?

  She replied almost immediately.

  You know you want to. No reason to say no. Come on, E, live a little.

  I took a deep breath and put my phone in my pocket. Live a little.

  Right.

  If he was still outside… Half of me hoped he wouldn’t be, and then my internal conflict would be solved. Half of me hoped he would be so that I could do what I’ve been thinking about doing for most of the night.

  CHAPTER EIGHT Daniel

  The last time I was this anxious to meet a girl was in high school, before I’d lost my virginity, before my life had been turned upside down, before I’d started seeing them as pieces of ass that could serve as a stress release.

  That had been years and years ago. I’d forgotten what it felt like to want a girl’s approval, to hope that she wouldn’t ditch me, to wonder how to please her so that she wanted to speak to me again.

  And that didn’t even boil down to sex.

  With Emily, it was all that. It was as if I was teenager all over again. Except this time if she rejected me it wouldn’t be because I didn’t know how to speak to a woman or because I wasn’t charming or good in bed. If she rejected me this time, it would literally be because she just didn’t like me. I didn’t know if I wanted to face that kind of rejection. The only other person I’d worried about what she was thinking of me was Ruby, and that had only lasted a short while before it faded.

  Maybe it had had to do with the fact that she’d been a colossal disappointment, and at some point in our relationship, I’d stopped caring because it never really felt like I could do right by her.

  With Emily, though, I had a chance. Or at least, I wanted one.

  I walked to my bike after talking to her in the cafeteria and watched the traffic coming in and out. Twice an ambulance came in with tires screeching and sirens wailing and I knew what kind of night she would be having. Her hands would be full of blood and her hopes would be as high as her expectations were low. I knew exactly what her eyes would look like. Those gunmetal gray eyes would look like slate, and they would be so determined to save a life that she could almost will it to happen.

  Those eyes were what had gotten me in the first place. I could imagine what it would be like if her eyes were turned on me, staring into my soul. They were a barrier; she had walls up so high it was almost impossible to scale. But I was willing to try.

  There hadn’t been a woman since Ruby who had really made me want to try the way I did with Emily. Even with Ruby, the need hadn’t been so strong because she’d been willing to throw herself at me.

  There was something I had to admire about the fact that Emily was so reserved.

  I checked my watch a couple of times throughout the night. I knew that she’d been joking about knowing how grateful I was if I actually stuck around and waited for her, but in a way it was how I felt. I wanted to show her that I felt I owed her a lot. I didn’t think she understood how important Taylor was to me. He was literally all I had.

  Sure, there was the gang. But they hadn’t been there through my parents’ drug years. They hadn’t been there when our belongings had been sold off, our cars repossessed, and when our mom died.

  They hadn’t felt what it felt like when my dad had left us because he’d been too drugged up to notice anything other than his own sorrow. I’d raised Taylor by myself. He’d been sixteen at the time. I’d barely finished school.

  If I lost him, I didn’t know what I would do.

  The time ticked away, and with it the night chipped away at my anxiety. I couldn’t be on such a constant adrenaline high, and it started fading as the time dragged on. Fatigue started tugging at my conscious mind, and I made myself comfortable, leaning my back against the wall, blocked off from the road by my bike so that most cars driving past wouldn’t see me.

  I started dozing off. When my head tipped forward, it jolted me back to an awake state, but only just. I faded in and out of a light sleep every now and then.

  At some point, sleep took over and I was gone. The moment it sucked me under she was in my mind. Loose hair. A short dress that showed off her spectacular legs. Curves that the white doctor’s coat hid. And she was beckoning to me, asking me to come to her. I couldn’t reach her, there were so many people between us, but it was definitely her, and she was definitely calling me.

  “Daniel,” she was calling. “Daniel.”

  I jerked away and felt like an idiot for sleeping on the pavement like a bum. I rubbed my face with both hands, trying to shake off the sleep, and shook my head to wake myself up. I looked up and saw her.

  She was walking toward me. Not the dream, but the real live version. Her hair was still tied up, but she wasn’t wearing that coat anymore. Instead, it was folded over her arm, and for the first time I could see her body properly.

  And she was as good-looking as I’d imagined. She was thin at the waist, but her breasts and her ass balanced out in the perfect hourglass figure. Holy shit. I wanted that. She smiled when she reached me, a shy smile as if she knew what I’d been thinking. I got up, pushing away from the wall. My body was stiff from sitting on the cold hard concrete for so long. I stretched, and my joints popped.

  “You’re here,” she said when she reached me. I was taller than she was, and now that I saw what she looked like, I realized that her personality made her seem like a much taller person than she really was. She was such a slight thing, but then such big things came from her.

  I nodded. “Where else would I be?”

  “I didn’t think you were going to wait this long.”

  Oh, it was only four hours. I was willing to do that for her. I didn’t say it though, because it sounded creepy even in my head and she knew exactly what time it was.

  “I’m sorry it took so long,” she said.

  I shook my head. “It’s okay. I had some business to catch up on.”

  And some sleep.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. She looked nervous. She fiddled with the collar of the coat over her shoulder and kept looking around as if she was looking for something. I didn’t feel nervous anymore. I felt big and strong and able to protect her. She was a hell of a character, but she was a small woman, and I could keep her safe if I had to.

  I wanted to keep her safe. That was the genetic makeup of a male. I wanted to take care of my woman.

  I shook off the thought that she was my woman. I had no claim to her. She’d asked to meet me after work, but that was. Tonight had been the first time we’d even spoken civil words to each other. Our first meeting hadn’t exactly gone smoothly.

  It was hard to think that it was just over twenty-four hours ago. So much had happened since then that it felt like days had passed.

  “So…” I started. She just smiled. “You wanted to see me?”

  She nodded and looked to the side again. I was starting to think that her averting her eyes bought her time to think of something to say. It happened more now that she was out of her environment, out of her coat, and our meeting had nothing to do with a patient. I was willing to bet she was out of her comfort zone.

  “Do you like me?” she asked.

  “What?” The question was so direct and out of the blue that I wasn’t sure what she
meant by it.

  “Do you like me?” she asked again.

  “I heard you the first time,” I said. “I was just surprised that you asked. I do like you, yes.”

  She nodded as if confirming something to herself. “Okay. Look, I know that you’re the kind of guy who has a string of girls to turn to,” she said. I felt uncomfortable when she mentioned it, because it was true. “But do you have someone permanent?”

  I frowned. “Like a girlfriend?”

  She nodded. “Or a wife, or something.”

  “God, no,” I said. “Do you?”