Page 86 of Bad Attitude
“We should slow down.”
“No.”The word comes fast and terse.“If we slow, I’ll still be bleeding. I need to get… back.”
We both know where ‘back’ is: my apartment.
He’s pushing with the kind of desperation that takes over when the body just wants somewhere safe to be, to get off the bike, to be home.
Before the night’s out, Declan Hale is going to be in my bed, bleeding on my sheets. Worry for him mingles with the arousal as I think of him there, naked and hurt, my own guilt topping off that emotional cocktail. He wouldn’t be injured if he hadn’t protected me.
“Why did you do it?” I ask. “Why did you get in the way?”
“He shot at you twice.”Declan’s voice becomes a growl.“Next one could’vekilledyou. Fucking jumped-up security guard with no goddamn training. A goddamnliability.”
I don’t disagree. My arm still burns where the bullet skimmed me. “He could’ve killed you just as easily.”
“But he didn’t.”
Bullet in the kidney and not his side? Maybe. That thigh bullet two inches farther in? Definitely. How long to bleed out from a femoral gunshot? Five minutes, max? I shudder at how close Declan came to dying.
I don’t want him to die.
Go away? Leave me alone? Yes. Die? No.
“You’re annoying, do you know that?”
“Why, because I stopped you taking a bullet?”
No, because I can’t stopthinkingabout him.Fantasizingabout him.Worryingabout him.
Like he worried about you, my inside voice reminds me.
“No,” I mutter. “Because you’reyou.” Most aggravating man alive.
He chuckles.“I’ll take it.”
We swing onto the 101, riding east down the freeway, the traffic light. He doesn’t slow, and I don’t make him talk over the wind. It’s twelve miles to the turn for Tujunga, but at our speed, we do it in under eight minutes. He doesn’t slow for the long, curving interchange, and that tells me he’s getting worse, his risk proportional to his need to be back.
“Declan, are you hanging in there?”
“Doing fine.”I can barely hear him over the wind.
“Would you please slow down?”
In answer, he goes faster, zipping past the few cars on the road.
Stubborn bastard.
“For fuck’s sake, Declan. We’re carrying bags of stolen jewelry on our backs, and you want to riskgetting stopped? For what, two minutes longer?”
That works where my pleading hadn’t. He drops down to a sedate eighty. Still illegal, but not worth a cop’s time, not at ten thirty at night.
It doesn’t take long to make the interchange with the 210, but this time Declan swerves on the bend, the bike sliding out. I stop breathing as he fights to recover, his hand clutching at the handlebars, his grunts of pain sounding in my ears.
“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” I tell him, unable to think of anything else to say. “Hold on, okay?”
He’s quiet, his breathing heavy over the mic. Then,“I’m sorry about this.”
He sounds fatalistic, like he’s not sure he’ll make it, and that scares me more than anything. “Don’t be sorry. Nothing to be sorry for.” He took the bullets forme. It’s me that should be apologizing. “We’ll be back soon.”
