Page 2 of Viper's Desire
If he confronts me later, I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear him. I’m very good at pretending.
The back roads past the county line don’t have streetlights and don’t have anybody on them. And that is exactly what I want, to be alone.
The saguaros stand black against a sky going from orange to nothing. Out here, I don’t have to be gentle. I don’t have to be quiet. I can say every single thing I swallowed at that table, out loud, to no one, at whatever volume I please.
So I do. I’m halfway through screaming that I am twenty-two years old and I do not need anyone’s permission to be a person, when my headlights catch a shape in the road.
My foot is on the brake before I fully process what I’m looking at.
The car stops crooked. Gravel sprays under the tires. My hands are locked at ten and two, and my high beams are pinned on the object. But it’s not an object at all.
It’s a man lying in the middle of the road.
I should drive on. That’s what a girl does out here alone at night. She locks her doors and calls in the authorities. And under no circumstance does a practical girl get out of the car.
I get out of the car.
He’s big. That’s what stops me halfway, the size of him taking up the road. His body is all muscle, and if I had to guess, I would say he’s a couple of inches taller than six feet.
He has black hair, and his beard has gone red down one side from a cut above his eye. His shirt is black, and there’s a long, wet stripe across his ribs. The stripe is growing. He’s bleeding.
Twenty feet behind him, a motorcycle lies on its side in the gravel, one wheel turning lazily in the air.
There’s a snake inked up the side of his neck and script down one forearm I can’t make out, and a leather vest half off his shoulders. I can’t see the patch, but he’s likely a part of the Hellborn Kings motorcycle club. This is their territory, and I’ve been warned multiple times by my father to stay out of their way.
But I have to wonder what my father would tell me to do now. Should I be like the Good Samaritan, or look the other way? My father is a hypocrite. I know what he would tell me to do.
But that doesn’t matter. I’m going to be a nurse, and the right thing to do is help this man.
I’m at the trunk of my car in no time, reaching for my first-aid kit. I have what I need—gauze rolls, saline, disinfectant, and a suture kit. I carry the kit over to the man and drop to my knees in the gravel beside him.
His dark eyes open.
“Wrong place,” he rasps. “Get in your car. Go home.”
“I’m going to help stop the bleeding, then I’m going to call 911.”
“No!” he practically yells, and it takes a lot out of him. “No cops.”
“Okay, no cops,” I say calmly. “But I’m still going to stop the bleeding.” I peel up his shirt.
“Girl—”
“Hold still.” I’ve got the saline open, and I’m flushing the cut along his ribs.
He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t make a sound, and he keeps those dark eyes on me.
“You’ve got a laceration about four inches long, and it needs to be closed,” I tell him. “The one above your eyebrow can wait. Were you stabbed or did you fall?”
“You always ask so many questions?”
“I only asked you one question.”
He doesn’t respond. The needle is threaded now, and my hands don’t shake. I feel more sure of myself in this moment than I ever do in my father’s house. And that says something, considering I’m out on a desolate road in the dark beside a man twice my size.
“This is going to hurt,” I warn. “I don’t have anything to numb it.”
“Do it.”
