She smiled again, wider this time, and he wondered why the hell it mattered that she did. He was beginning to hate it. Something about that tight little grin stretching across her face, the dimple in her right cheek, and those full lips made him feel like a trained lab rat pressing a lever just to get more candy to come down the magic chute.
“Like I said, I’ll get the appraisal and estimate for you,” he repeated. “Then, you can decide what you want to do. But, in my professional opinion, it’s a worthy investment. Where do you live now? Do you own? Rent?”
“I rent a small cottage not far from here. I live there with my pup.”
He nodded. “Okay. Let me help you. It’s the least I can do.”
“For saving your life?”
He didn’t answer.
Seconds passed between them with him looking at her while she kept her eyes busy by taking in the exterior details of the house. She’d rested her hands on her hips which pushed her breasts slightly forward. They weren’t the largest, but they could still fit nicely in the palm of his hand. Plus, he was sure her body had compensated for them on her bottom half anyhow.
“Well, I have to start my shift,” she said after having her fill of the eyesore. “I work down at the medical center, so you can bring me the paperwork there anytime you’d like. Just ask for me.” Her eyes narrowed. “I look forward to seeing you.”
She was challenging him. If he showed up, that meant that he wasn’t out somewhere inebriated to the point of loss of consciousness. They’d just met and she already seemed as though she genuinely cared about his well-being. Then again, she’d said that she was a pediatric oncologist. It was nearly impossible to be a bitch in that field.
“I’ll get right on it,” he promised.
She gave him a final smile before walking back to her car. When the Civic was no longer in view, he went back inside to allow more of the night before to wear off.
First, he would set off to find a location in town where he could clean up and use the bit of cash he had on hand for some new clothes. Then he would do what he promised before washing his hands of the small town and moving on.
-2-
Tayler swirled a piece of meatloaf around in gravy while her two friends talked across the table to each other. The medical center’s usually busy cafeteria buzz was dimming as the five o’clock crowd filtered out.
On her left was Anya Schulz, a tall, blonde-bobbed nurse anesthetist who worked with several different units across the center. Katia Wu, on her right, was a Jersey girl with skin as beautiful as black velvet. She sported a low-cropped cut and specialized in adult oncology, but because of her husband’s last name, everyone had to do a double-take whenever she walked into a room.
The two women had become very good friends in the three years she’d been living in Yearwood, North Carolina. Anya was the sharp and often dissenting voice of reason that was constantly present in her mind whenever the time came to make a less than favorable decision. Katia was more emotional and therefore, often easier to talk to.
Their chatter became muffled as Tayler’s thoughts wandered to the man from earlier. Gage. When his frame had appeared in her headlights in the parking garage, his body stiff and supine, she’d assumed that he was dead. But once she drew nearer to him, she’d gotten a whiff of it. Familiarity. A scent that her father had worn like a second perfume.
She’d placed her head to his chest and registered the faintest of heartbeats, which had prompted her to call Anya, Katia, and Eric, a paramedic on staff who was just ending his shift, to help her bring him inside. Then she’d noticed the labels on his jeans—designer. Not the most expensive she’d ever seen, but men were different from women. An adult male who’d paired an inexpensive t-shirt with a pair of jeans that cost more than ninety dollars was generally a man with a nice nest egg somewhere.
It had only taken them a few minutes to arrive, but during that time, Gage’s eyes had opened to barely slits. Looking into them had reminded her of the emerald city from the Wizard of Oz. His beard, which she was sure looked very nice when it was trimmed, had begun to take root on his face. His hair, a dark blonde, had slicked to his forehead even with the cool spring air that had swirled around them. He’d looked up at her and raised his hand to her cheek as though it had taken a great effort. Then he’d smiled a very slight smile and said, “Just let me die, love.”
Though she’d already been prepared to help him, that declaration had acted like the dart that pierced the bulls-eye. She knew that hurt. She’d seen that hurt. It was her father’s hurt and the struggle that he’d endured for ten years before he’d relearned how to appreciate life.
She couldn’t get that look, touch, or request out of her head. Even when they’d dropped him off at the lake house with a blanket and pillow, she’d gone back to her cottage and climbed into bed so wound up that it had taken her hours to fall asleep. Ares, her eight month-old Rottweiler, had whimpered at her feet, no doubt worried about why she’d failed to play with him before bedtime like they always did. Thinking about it still gave her chills.
“And he looked okay?” Katia asked. “Did he say anything? Where he’s going? Was he upset?”
“No.” Tayler finally popped the piece of meatloaf into her mouth. “Actually, he seemed pretty level-headed. He offered to help me get an appraisal on the lake house property and an estimate for a remodel to see if it’s a worthy investment.”
Anya swatted the air. “Girl, that’s a dump. I’ve been in this town my whole life and barely anyone has spent any time there.”
“But if she could make some money off of it, why not?” Katia asked.
“From an alcoholic?” Anya paused as though she wanted the realization to sink in. “Look, Tayler, let’s be real about this. That man is a drunk. A lost cause. He’s probably out getting liquor right now. I guarantee it.”
Tayler shook her head. “I don’t think so, Anya.”
“That’s what drunks do, Tay.”
“How quickly you forget my father.”
Anya’s face blanched. “Oh…Tay…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. But your parents went through a lot. It was devastating.”
Tayler slid from her seat. She loved her friend dearly, but Anya consistently moved throughout life with blinders on. Her upbringing had been perfect. Her marriage was perfect. The possibility that someone like Gage could have redeeming qualities was something that she probably couldn’t fathom even if she tried.
“And who’s to say that Gage doesn’t have an equally devastating story?” Tayler asked, dumping out her scraps. Then without waiting for an attempt at a response from either friend, she headed back to the oncology wing to resume her rounds.
BEFORE LONG, TWO HOURS HAD PASSED of her checking on the progress of her patients, speaking with parents, and meeting with the medical residents that had come over from the Duke University School of Medicine. Needing a quick coffee break, she trudged back to her office, the lack of sleep from the night before finally catching up to her. There was a figure inside, staring out of the east window.
“Gage?”
He turned around. He’d cleaned up.
He was wearing a different shirt from the white one that had barely fit over his massive chest. This one was still plain but a vibrant, royal blue that transformed him into a completely different person from the man she’d spoken to earlier. He’d trimmed the beard and had done something to his hair. She never knew what it was that white guys did to their hair to push it up off their foreheads, but it worked for many of them and Gage was no exception. Even his eyes stood out more clearly now that they weren’t bloodshot and competing for attention with his facial hair.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you today,” she declared.
He held up a folder. “I don’t like to waste time. Care to see what your investment could make you?”
She motioned toward the seating area, and he waited until she took her seat before settling into the leather chair across from her.
/> She took the folder, flipped back the cover, and skimmed through the documents. The first few pages denoted the appraisal of the land, which was sizeable. Then, there was the appraisal of the house which came as a surprise only because she’d assumed that it wouldn’t be worth anything. There were notes scribbled on the side which looked as though they were justifications for the pricing.
“I wrote those,” Gage said.
She nodded and continued to flip until she came to the estimate. Her eyes bulged. It was more than half of her yearly salary as a physician at one of the top oncology departments in the entire state.
“Gage, I—”
“Keep going.”
Her chest prepared for an explosion as she continued to flip through the papers. On the last page was a summary of the appraisal and the estimate. At the bottom was what the house, along with the land, would cost once everything was finished. Immediately, her chest stopped hurting.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I told you that it was a good investment,” he half-gloated, leaning back in the chair. “A house that size right on the lake? It could have been torched to the ground by lightning and I guarantee that you’d still turn a sizeable profit because of its location.”
Tayler mimicked him, easing against the back of the chair. Though it was all outlined in front of her, she still felt the need for additional reassurance. She knew nothing about the man sitting across from her, and though he now exuded an air of confidence, she couldn’t rid herself of the image of the man from the night before. The man who’d been ready to end it all.
“What do you do, Gage?” she asked. “I mean, is this part of your expertise? Property investing?”
He nodded. “I started off with residential but then eventually moved to commercial properties.”
“So is it safe to say that you knew these figures, at least in the ballpark, before you even had these written up?”
“Yes.”
She looked down at the numbers again as if they could walk right off the page.
“Will you do it?” he asked.
“It’s a lot to take on.”
“Are you hesitating because of me?” He was leaning forward now, their knees almost touching. “You don’t trust me, so you don’t believe the numbers.”
“That’s not it, but I won’t lie to you. That image of you from last night, I can’t shake it. You didn’t see how hurt you looked. Gage, you didn’t want me to save you. It’s hard for me to think about anything else sitting across from you.”
He steepled his fingers and placed his chin atop. Then he stared at her as though he could see right through her pupils. It was uncomfortable. On one hand, he was very attractive, and he was staring at her like there was nothing else in the room worth looking at.
On the other hand, she had no idea how stable he was.
“Plus you never thanked me,” she realized. “To me that means you’re not exactly relieved that I didn’t give up on you.”
He continued to watch her without words. She held his gaze for as long as she could until her eyes began to dart to his shoulders, hands, wrists…anything that might indicate that he was upset and could get violent. His eyes revealed nothing. As a matter a fact, they looked soft and calm, but it was common knowledge that the calm eye of a storm often precipitated a violent tail-end.
“There’s a reason you care so much,” he said. “Especially since you don’t know me. At first, I thought that you’d been doing your job, upholding the Hippocratic Oath and all of that. But there’s something else. Why are you so concerned about what happens to me?”
Tayler shrugged. Part of it was because of what had happened with her father. She’d seen him at his lowest, but he was also living proof that it was possible to defeat any obstacle life tossed at you, even if one of those obstacles resulted in the loss of your ability to use your legs. The other part was just that nothing added up. Gage was a good-looking man. Even now, he wasn’t violent or reactive. Right before he’d said what he’d said, he’d stroked her cheek with a look in his eyes that wasn’t indicative of a man that was angry. He’d been hurting. He was hurting, and she wanted to know what had hurt him.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“You do know.” He stood. “You just don’t want to tell me.”
He started toward the door, a certain finality in his stride that told her if she let him leave, she would never see him again. It wasn’t until she popped up and called out to him that it dawned on her that she wanted to.
“You touched my face.”
He stopped in the doorway.
“Right before you said it, you stroked the side of my face. It was almost like you were touching a lover. You looked at me like you were seeing me for the first and last time. Then, you smiled.”
“And you care because of that?” he barked.
“I care because you don’t want to die, Gage.” If they’d been anywhere other than her office with staff right outside, she would have been shouting. “That look you gave me…you don’t want to die. You didn’t see it.” She motioned to the door. “They didn’t see it. I saw it. I was there. I could have been the last person to ever see you alive. Do you know what the odds are that I’d worked that late, parked in that spot, and found you? Do you think you would have been alive if it had been someone else?”
He stalked toward her, his tone sharp and teetering on the edge of anger. “You don’t even know me. Why the fuck do you care?”
“Why the fuck shouldn’t I?” He was more than a foot taller than her, but she was in his face, hands balled into fists, “whispering” at the top of her lungs. “Just because I don’t know you doesn’t mean that you don’t matter. I was supposed to be there last night. I was supposed to save you. Gage, I won’t let you die.”
The tension between them evaporated in an instant. His squared shoulders went limp, and he looked at her in that way again, as though he believed staring directly into her pupils would lead him to her thoughts. However, this time the cause of her discomfort was clear—he was too close. He smelled like masculine soap that had no clear distinction of scent, but it somehow made her imagine lying on his chest and taking whiffs of his t-shirt or the crook of his neck.
“Where the hell did you come from?” he suddenly asked, although the question didn’t feel as though it was being directed toward anyone in particular.
She dropped her defensive stance. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I was leaving today. Leaving town.”
“And what’s changed? You’re no longer leaving?”
“No.” He slowly shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
Goosebumps teased her skin, and she rubbed her arms to coax them away.
“Are you going through with the renovation?” he asked.
“Will you stay if I do?”
“Is that what you want?”
“Yes.”
A brief flash of surprise moved over his face, and she caught it before he could replace it with his natural, brooding expression.
“Okay.” He moved back to the doorway. “I’ll oversee the project and make sure everything goes smoothly. That’s how I’ll repay you. After it’s done, I’m leaving.”
From what she knew of renovations, they could take weeks. With the shape that house was in, maybe it would even take months. It would give her enough time to find out what she wanted to know; what mattered to him. Who mattered to him. What had gotten him to the point where she’d found him and what could pull him back.
“I can live with that,” she said.
He left. Her gaze fell to the papers. Hopefully, she wasn’t getting too far in over her head, but if everything did work out, it would mean finally owning a house and having more space for Ares to run about. He’d outgrown the backyard at the cottage by the time he was three months old. It would also be nice to wake up to the fresh lake air and have her coffee with her toes in the
sand.
She heard knuckles rapping on wood. When she looked up, Gage was back in the doorway.
“By the way…thank you, Tayler,” he said. Then he was gone again.
Her cheeks grew uncontrollably warm. She grinned, tossed the folder on her desk, and helped herself to a mug of hazelnut coffee that tasted significantly better than the serving she’d had just a few hours earlier.
-3-
Good morning, Tayler.
I’m thinking about you.
Another note. Another nuisance. It hadn’t been there when she’d walked through the door the night before, but when she’d gone out for the newspaper, it was handwritten on a post-it and stuck to the flag on her mailbox.
At first, they were sporadic messages that would appear every once in a while on her windshield or on the cottage’s small front porch. Then they began to show up once a month. Now this was the second one she’d received in the past two weeks. She was facing the most persistent secret admirer she’d ever come across, but in such a small town, time was the only barrier preventing her from figuring out who the note-writer was.
Ares was sitting in the doorway watching her with his leash in his mouth. At eight months old, he was technically still a pup, but his weight had already surpassed the eighty-pound threshold, and his neck and her thigh were close in circumference.
“I’m okay, Ares,” she said, waving. “There’s no danger.”
She crumpled the note in her palm and reflexively looked around. It was unusually balmy for a spring morning in North Carolina. The sky was streaked by red-orange light breaking through the clouds, and it was the first time in a long time she was excited about starting her day.
First, she’d be meeting Gage at the house for a consultation with the contractor who would be transforming her home. Then she hoped he stayed around long enough to talk to her. She wasn’t a counselor by any means, but no one had been there to see the look in his eyes. Although the sight was beginning to heal over like a scab, she was certain the scar would always remain.
Angels & Assassins: BWWM Romance Page 2
