I shrugged.
That would be the smart thing to do.
But I never was good at taking pills.
Hadn’t been since my foster father forced half a bottle of Xanax down my throat when I was twelve.
The act of swallowing anything when I didn’t have to was abhorrent to me.
“You won’t, will you?” he asked.
“I…” I began to form an excuse, but it died on my lips when he stiffened.
Zakelina’s cry of pain had Zach standing and hurrying toward the sound before I’d even finished my sentence.
Zakelina’s chapped lips had cracked, and a drop of blood leaked down the length of her chin, causing Zach to stiffen.
“Crockett,” Zach said quietly. “Can you get her to the bathroom? Get her cleaned up? That’s a white shirt, and you know how she loves it.”
That white shirt being one that I’d bought her the day that I’d seen her with her eyes open the first day after her surgery.
She’d hugged it to her like it was the best gift in the world when in reality it was only a plain cotton t-shirt that I’d had in my saddlebags that’d not had a slit up the back.
Zakelina now wore it every single day and refused to take it off.
Crockett rolled her eyes and held out her hand. “Come on, baby. I’ll help you.”
The two of them disappeared into the bathroom, then Zach’s narrowed eyes went to the woman.
“Maybe if you were paying more attention to my girl and not how you have the hots for some man that doesn’t reciprocate, you wouldn’t be hurting your patients,” Zach snapped.
Words that didn’t even make sense, yet Zach said them anyway.
Damn, he was off his fuckin’ rocker.
Catori’s eyes went from me to Zach and narrowed.
Oh, she was pissed.
Pissed as hell.
“I’m doing my job.” She calmly stood up, gathering her things. “My job is to help that little girl get better. To help her to learn to speak and eat normally again. Now, you need to work on her opening her jaw all the way. She’s spent weeks with it wired shut, and I’m sure, as an ex-doctor and all, you know what’ll happen if she doesn’t use those muscles, correct? Or did you forget your medical knowledge when you killed that patient?”
Shots. Fired.
Oh, shit.
Zach took a threatening step toward the young woman, her eyes going hot when he did, and I decided to intervene.
The woman, though, held her ground.
“I’m here to do my job. I’m not here to be her friend. I’m here to make sure that she can live the rest of her life as a normal person. Now, she needs to open her mouth as wide as she can. And repeat. All the damn time. Then she needs to actually get back to eating real food. Chewing and swallowing. I’ll be back tomorrow.” Catori gathered her things and shouldered her bag.
Zach’s eyes were spitting fire. “Not if I can help it.”
She smiled sweetly at Zach. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 3
Do not Google where natural vanilla flavoring comes from.
-Text from Cat to Laric
CATORI
One hour earlier
“What are you doing today?” my mother asked me.
I looked up at the house that I was dreading going into.
“I’m going to go into that scary guy’s house and treat that little girl,” I muttered darkly.
That ‘scary guy’ had been the guy that’d taken in a young girl that’d been shot in the face by her father. Her father who’d fatally shot her mother, and then himself, leaving the girl, Zakelina Tombolo, without anybody to call her own in this world.
Though, by shooting Zakelina in the face, I knew he’d thought he’d killed her. But obviously, fate had intervened and found a way for the girl to survive.
The ‘scary guy’ wasn’t really a scary guy, I guessed. He was just stressed. Zakelina had been his neighbor, and he’d taken a liking to her and fought to get custody of her when no other family for Zakelina had been found. He had been engaged to be married, and that woman had been hit by a car, but he was still all surly, glared a lot, and apparently somewhat related to me. Or, at least to someone I knew. Possibly. I wasn’t sure of the actual connection. All I knew was that it was there.
Which made it worse because he knew that I knew my parents knew him. I’d, supposedly, known him as well, but we hadn’t seen each other in years at least. There was no familiarity about him at all.
Anyway, the little girl was slowly getting better, her fine motor skills were coming back, and the wound on her face was healing nicely.
I had a feeling that I wouldn’t be seeing much more of her after this next week.
“Be nice,” my mother, Winter Stoker, warned. “Zach’s a good guy. He’s just stressed. His charge was shot in the face, his wife was hit by a car, and there was a bunch of other crazy stuff that happened right along the same time. You would be stressed too in his situation.”
Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t.
But my stomach was always in knots when I went to their house because I knew how men like him were.
I’d dated, agreed to marriage, and broken up with one. One that now stalked me, wouldn’t leave me alone, and honestly scared the shit out of me.
Hell, even my father had tried to warn him away, and he was still trying to insinuate himself back into my life.
Not that my father knew that. Because if my father knew that, he’d recruit his buddies and together they would take care of Thor.
“I gotta go,” I said as I watched the man on the motorcycle walk into the house without closing the door behind him.
Obviously, he’d seen me, known that I was coming there, and had left it open for me to come in on my own.
I hated that.
I hated walking into unknown situations. Hated even more that I wouldn’t be able to knock to announce myself.
“Love you, baby,” Mom said. “I hope that your day gets better.”
It would. This place, and Zakelina, was my first patient of the day. The rest of my patients were all great, and their parents were nice to me.
Grumbling, I got out of my car and cursed before dropping back inside and grabbing my bag off the seat.
Once I had it, I got back out of the car all over again, hefted the heavy bag onto my shoulder, and closed the door of the pinkest car I’d ever seen.
I didn’t bother locking it because there was nothing in the car to steal. Then again, the neighborhood we were in was full of rich bitches. There was no way in hell that anything would get stolen out of this neighborhood.
Now, my next neighborhood? It was in the middle of a bad part of the area, and I would be locking my car. Not because I was worried about anything getting stolen, but because I was worried about getting into the car and finding someone in it with me.
Heading up the front walk, I admired the perfectly edged grass along the sidewalk as I moved.
I loved perfection.
I loved the way a fresh cut of grass looked on a lawn. I loved it even more when the edges were cut with an edger instead of a weed eater, making it even more perfect.
My favorite thing in the world was to cut my lawn. It was always so therapeutic.
Sadly, the sidewalk ended and dumped me right into the front door, leaving me with no other choice but to announce myself.