Making his way to the bar, Rad picked up the black desk phone from a shelf under the taps and dialed the clubhouse. Delaney answered on the first ring. It was coming up on midnight, so Rad knew the president was expecting to hear his voice.
“Me, Prez.”
“Sit rep.”
“Ox, Eight, and me are whole. Simon took a blade to the side. Gun’s a fuckin’ mess. Might need the hospital. Definitely need Griff. Ox is on his way back with ‘em.”
“Fuck. Griff dropped acid with his chick tonight. He called in crowing about the stars in the grass or some psychedelic crap. He’s no good to us. Hospital means questions. You sure they need it?”
How the fuck should he know? Gunner had taken a bad beating, and Simon had been stabbed in the gut. But Simon said he was okay. And Gunner had been laughing until he’d passed out. Not that that meant shit—Gunner would laugh that crazy laugh hanging from a noose.
“I don’t know, Prez. But…” He stopped. The idea he had was a shit idea. Right? A terrible idea that could blow up in about six ways he could think of.
“But what?”
Shaking his head as he said it, he told Delaney, “Willa. The woman at the wreck. On the sportster. She’s a nurse.”
“That’s right. Dane said you bagged her.”
Ignoring the defensive bolt of anger those words sent up his spine, Rad said, “I’ll call her. See if she can help.”
“Do it. Bring her in.”
Before Rad could say more, the line went dead.
From his jeans pocket, he fished the card on which he’d written Willa’s number, and he dialed.
She answered on the third ring, and her “Hello?” sounded equal parts curious and suspicious.
“It’s Rad, darlin’.”
“Hey.” He heard relief and concern now. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Got a couple brothers hurt, though. Need some medical attention.”
Silence on the line.
“Willa?”
“Are you taking them to the hospital?”
“That’s a little complicated in this situation. I need you.”
“I don’t have a medical bag like a doctor, Rad.”
Griffin, their medic when he wasn’t riding the LSD train, had been a vet tech. A registered nurse was a big upgrade. “We got supplies. Can you do a decent stitch? And make a good guess how much hurt they got? Know the meds they need?”
She sighed audibly. “Okay. Where?”
He could hear her reluctance, and yet she hadn’t offered much resistance. “The clubhouse. I’m comin’ for ya. Be there in five.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you, baby,” he said, but the line was dead already.
Everybody was hanging up on him tonight.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rad’s truck was a big, lifted black GMC, with a heavy grille guard and a big light bar on the roof. Willa was surprised; it seemed a flashier truck than she would have expected. More demonstrably macho.
Then she shook that surprise away. He was a big, muscled biker covered in ink, with shaggy, undercut hair. And he wore a Brazen Bulls kutte with a Sergeant at Arms flash. The man was demonstrating his macho all over the place.
The lift was fairly high, and with her leg sore and stiff, Willa wondered, as Rad opened the door for her, how she’d get in.
She needn’t have worried. He picked her up and set her on the seat. As she shifted to settle more comfortably, he took her hand and squeezed.
“Thank you.”
On her nod, he closed the door and went around the front to the driver’s side.
Alone in his truck for those few seconds, Willa had just enough time for shock to turn her stomach again. The past two days—less than that—had been an unimpeded rush down a twisting mountain road. The wreck that had sent Rad barreling into her life had happened at sunset the day before.
Now it was just midnight, only thirty or so hours later, and she was on her way to the Brazen Bulls clubhouse to sew up a guy who’d been stabbed? Another who’d been beaten? Because Rad had asked her to? And who was Rad to her? A man named Radical, whom she’d first laid eyes on at the wreck so few hours ago, who’d left her barely an hour before and had returned with bloody hands and a swollen lip, with blood spattered and smeared on his clothes.
She felt close to him. She had already told him her hardest truth. She’d told him all of it.
Who the hell had she so suddenly become?
Or had she always been this person?
No. She was no longer the Willa from Duchy, Texas. The Willa who’d stayed with Jesse was not the Willa sitting here now.
Or was she? Was she riding, in the middle of the night, with a near stranger, to the clubhouse of an outlaw MC because she was still the same dumb, naïve girl who’d let an unstable man run her life for years? Who was still hiding from the same man? Was Rad already running her life? Is that why she’d told him about Jesse? Is that why she was in his truck now?
Jesus Christ.
He stopped at a red light, and Willa put her hand on the door handle, charged with the idea that she should get away now. But what—did she think she could hop out onto her bum leg and limp home? Did she think he’d just drive on and leave her to do it?
“Rad…” she said, without knowing the words that would follow.
He turned and smiled. Reaching across the bench seat, he picked up her hand. His smile sagged, and his brow creased. “You’re shakin’, baby.”
“I’m scared.” The baldness of the truth she’d spoken stunned her.
The light switched to green, and Rad drove on, but he kept hold of her hand. He turned into an empty parking lot and stopped under a sodium arc light, reaching across the steering wheel with his left hand to throw the shifter into park. With his right hand around hers, he turned on the seat and faced her.
“Talk to me.” As he spoke, his eyes shifted a fraction, and his frown deepened—he’d seen her hand clutched around the door handle. “You afraid of me?”
She let go of the handle. “I’m afraid of this. Everything that’s happened since yesterday. I feel like I got knocked out of my own life when I dropped my bike. I’ve done so much work to protect myself and be smart and safe, but here I am. I feel so deep in with you, and I just met you. You weren’t anywhere near me on the highway, but you crashed right into me anyway. I’m freaking out.”
It seemed an impossibility to be anything but open with him. He was impervious to her self-guards.
He studied her quietly. The eerie whitewash of the parking lot light drew his face against stark shadows.
“You want me to take you back home?”
Willa tried to read something in his expression, in his tone, but she couldn’t. He was, again, inscrutable. She had opened wide to this stranger, yet he remained a stranger.
She didn’t want him to take her home. That was the scariest thing of all, the thought that she might want this man to slam into her life and take it over.
No. No. That wasn’t it. No.
“I don’t want to give myself up again.”
Rad shifted toward her on the seat. He leaned in close and caught her chin between his thumb and the loose curl of his fist. “I’m not lookin’ to take you over. I don’t know what’s goin’ on here, either, but I ain’t afraid of it. Seems like it might be a great ride, you and me. Don’t ya think?”
She did. Since she’d ridden home from the wreck on the back of his bike, her body and mind had hummed with a steady charge of excitement. Whatever was going on between them, something physical and instinctual in her craved it.
She didn’t want to fight it. Rad made her feel safe, even as she fretted. Jesse had never made her feel safe. Maybe she was still the stupid girl she’d been. Maybe she wasn’t.
Maybe, maybe. But for sure she was lonely. Trying to make sure she was strong and ready if Jesse found her again, she’d walled herself up alone with her dog. Rad was tearing all that down.
And she wa
nted him to.
When she gave her answer with a nod, he slid his hand from her chin and around her face, into her hair. He kissed her—mouth closed, touch light, but he lingered there, and when he finally moved away, he turned his head so that his beard swept over her lips. A shaky breath left her chest, and she couldn’t stop her hand from coming up and following the same path.
He saw and smiled. “Which way, baby? Backward or forward?”
“Forward.”
With a wink, he slid back to the wheel and continued on to the clubhouse.
~oOo~
As Rad pulled up to the clubhouse, somebody ran out of the shadows and drew the chain-link gate open. He sent the guy—balding and skinny, not wearing a kutte—a nod as he drove through and parked.
When he came around to help her out of the truck, his kutte was on. He’d taken it off when he’d gotten into the cab in front of her house, and he’d put it back on as he’d climbed down.
He lifted her and set her carefully on the gravel lot, then took her hand. She must have been shaking a bit yet, because he squeezed. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Okay.”
He led her into a side door of the brick block of a building. The door opened onto two short sets of steps, one leading up and the other down. They went up.
At the top of those few steps, they were in a kitchen. Not a fancy or commercial kitchen. Just a kitchen, one that hadn’t been updated in twenty or thirty years. The one thing that separated it from any other kitchen in a working-class house was the second refrigerator standing next to the expected one.
Two young women, scantily clad in short shorts, high heels, and tight tops, were doing dishes at the sink. They gave Willa a bored once-over and both smiled at Rad like they’d been waiting all day to see him.
Rad nodded back and pulled Willa on through. He took her through a hallway into a big room that seemed to take up most of the floor they were on.
This room was full of people—men in kuttes, women dressed to impress the men in kuttes, and a couple of older women who seemed in charge in some way.
In a tattered leather recliner rested a man who’d obviously taken a terrible beating. Another man lay on a pool table that had been covered with a blue tarp. He was shirtless, and his belly was wrapped in bloody gauze.
Willa had no idea what they thought she could do, but the man on the pool table was unconscious, and the man in the recliner was awake and holding a beer, so she shook her hand free of Rad’s and went to the pool table.
One of the older, in-charge-looking women gave her a hawkish look as she approached. She was wearing latex gloves and wiping the blood around the bandage. Without speaking to Willa, she turned those sharp eyes on Rad.
“This your nurse?” She had a hint of an accent. Willa tried to place it, but those three words hadn’t been enough.
“Yeah. Willa, this is Mo, our president’s old lady.”
Mo tipped her head in a regal nod. “Mo’s for family. You can call me Maureen, love.”
Irish. Her accent was Irish.
“Hi, Maureen. Rad asked me to help.”
“That’s good. I’m shit with a stitch, and I don’t like what this looks like.” She eased the bandage up and showed a long, deep, nasty gash that had opened the man’s side. It had gone almost clear through the muscle. No wonder he was ashen and unconscious. The wound hadn’t pierced any organs, but it was serious nevertheless.
The clubhouse was as dim as any dive bar, illuminated mostly by beer signs and novelty lights. “I need more light.”
“Slick!” Rad yelled. “Bring that shop light over here and set it up.”
A young blond guy in a much plainer kutte than the others carried over a strange floor lamp. When he set it up, it shone a bright beam on the pool table.
While Slick was doing that, Willa took her stethoscope—the one medical device she owned—from her purse and cleaned the chestpiece and eartips with alcohol.
Seeing a box of latex gloves on a rolling table—it looked like a microwave cart but was doing this job just fine—that held a tackle box full of medical supplies and a shelf full of bottles and jars, Willa let her training take over. She pulled a pair of gloves on. Then she uncovered the wound again and palpated it. Blood still seeped freely with pressure, but it wasn’t gushing. The evidence around her—piles of blood-soaked gauze, pools of blood on the tarp, the man’s clothes, his pale complexion—said that blood had been running at a stream, if not a gush, for a long while.
“You couldn’t have stitched this. It needs two layers of sutures.” She looked over her shoulder at Maureen. “You have suturing needles?”
Maureen turned and pulled a package of the needles she needed from the tackle box.
“How about Novocain?”
Maureen shook her head.
“Shit.” The man was unconscious, but unless he was deep under, Willa poking around in his muscle and tying it shut was going to bring him up. “He needs to stay still for me to get this done. If he wakes up…”
“I got him.” Rad went around to the head of the pool table, near his friend’s head.
“I gave him a couple of Percodan while he was still awake,” Maureen offered.
“He was awake? He lost consciousness here?”
The president’s ‘old lady’ nodded. Willa closed her eyes and thought. Maybe the pills had just put him to sleep. If he was truly unconscious, then he’d lost a lot of blood. Fuck! A pool table in a clubhouse was not where this guy needed to be.
But this was where he was. And she was all he had.
She put the stethoscope in her ears and listened to his heart—a little quick, but strong. Good enough.
Okay, then. She took a deep breath and started sewing. Maureen assisted, and she did a decent job of it, knowing what Willa asked for and getting it to her. Willa could feel the woman studying her work, trying to learn from it.
Which was how Willa had gained most of her own knowledge of this type. Doctors did the suturing. Nurses assisted. She’d been watching this work and providing its tools for her whole career, but she was not a doctor.
She hoped no one had noticed her shaking hands.
Five stitches into the first, deeper layer of sutures, about halfway through it, her patient stirred slightly and groaned. When the needle pierced his muscle again, he flinched and groaned more loudly, ending with a barely muttered “Fuck!”
Willa tied off the sixth suture and stopped. “He’s waking up. Hold him down.”
“Get his legs, Slick,” Rad commanded, and the kid climbed up on the table and did what he was told.
The man groaned and fought harder as she started the seventh stitch. She finished it as quickly as she could, then turned her attention to the man’s face. He was blinking and shaking his head, but not yet fully conscious.
“What’s his name?”
“Simon,” Maureen answered.
Willa moved toward his head and leaned close. Rad, holding down his upper arms, loomed above her. “Simon,” she said, at the man’s ear, making her voice as sweet and soothing as she could. “I’m Willa. I’m making you better, but what I have to do is going to hurt a little. I need you to stay as still as you can. Can you do that?”
It was something she’d learned in her job: the calming power of a kind word. Even the most horrific pain could be eased, if only just the tiniest bit, by the thought that somebody was trying to help. Sometimes people just needed to know there was someone there to care.
That was what nurses did, first and foremost: they were there, and they cared. For all the skills and knowledge she had, all the technical things she could do, the most important thing was to be someone who was there and would help.
His brow furrowed. “Hmmm?”
“Shhhh,” she soothed. “Be still, and it’ll be over soon. Be still for me.” He nodded, and she brushed the back of her wrist gently over his forehead. “Thank you, Simon.”
When she stepped back, Rad was staring at her with da
rk, surprised eyes. She didn’t have time to wonder what he was thinking.
Simon groaned with every pierce of his muscle, and then his skin, as Willa finished two layers of ten sutures each. By the time she was finished, he’d woken fully, and each groan had been punctuated by a curse, but he’d never moved again beyond the involuntary twitches of muscles trying to flee pain.
He’d have a nasty scar—the sutures weren’t even, and they probably weren’t close enough—but she didn’t think scars were much of a concern among these men.
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 10
