PLAYED - A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE (8 page)

Whimpering, he clutched himself and collapsed down to his knees. Lex
lifted his foot and delivered another kick, this time straight to the side of
the guy’s head.

“That’ll teach ya,” he muttered to himself.

He whirled back around and untied the restraints on my wrists. Finally,
I managed to tug the gag from my lips, gasping in fear and breathlessness.
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed. “Holy fucking shit, oh fuck, oh god…”

“It’s okay now,” Lex whispered, drawing me close. His toughened fingers
held my cheeks, and he gazed deeply into my eyes. “I’m here now. They won’t
hurt you. I’ve taken care of them…”

The one of the ground had risen up again, and loomed menacingly behind
Lex. He was ready to end this, once and for all…

“Lex,
wait!
” I fearfully
gasped, staring over his shoulder at the attacker.

He turned, but it was too late. Lex took another solid blow to the head
that sent him clattering against the wall, where his head collided with a sick
thud. My rescuer crumped to the pavement uselessly, knocked completely out
cold.

In that instant, my fingers graced a glass bottle. Before the thug could
turn his attention to me, I snatched it up, smashing it upside his head. He
took a step back in surprise as I lunged forward with the broken glass, but his
foot caught, and he slipped backwards, smashing into a dumpster.

He had just started to get up when I saw it. The gun they’d held on me
sat at my feet. I swept it up into my hand, pointing it at the asshole and
screaming for him to stay on the ground. Bending over, I shook Lex by his
blazer, smacking his face with my free hand. He was out cold, but blood was
pooling from his head.

Oh fuck. Oh god, no…

“HELP! “ I screamed at the top of my lungs, clutching desperately to any
semblance of hope. “CAN ANYBODY PLEASE HELP ME?!”

Chapter 6

Lex

Being a world-class football player meant that waking up in a hospital
bed was not
exactly
a foreign
experience to me. I’d taken my fair share of blows during the sport, on
and
off the field...

The first thing I noticed was that I was disoriented by the amount of
space I had. The kind of treatment I was used to in England would have been cramped
at best. Hospitals in London aren’t known for their open floorplans.

Here… I had space.

The room was fairly large by my standards, although the huge bed took up
a substantial portion of it… but I had it all to myself.

A small television was mounted up on the opposing wall, and there was a
wide window to my right, letting in some light to chirp up the place. To my
left was a door, leading to either a closet or a bathroom – and beyond that, a
larger door, naturally to exit the room.

That’s when I spotted the other human being in the room. Riley was fast
asleep, curled up on some sort of padded storage bench beneath the window. As I
shifted around in bed and found a way to raise the incline to my back, she
stirred from her slumber.

“Oh! Lex! You’re… you’re awake,” Riley murmured, stifling her surprising
burst of enthusiasm with a yawn. “How are you feeling?”

“My head’s a little off, but besides that, I’m chipper as ever,” I
groggily answered, scratching my chest. I felt round things attached to my
skin, connected to wires – so, the doctors had given me electrodes.

“You won’t want to mess with those,” Riley warned, her eyes drifting
down to my scratching fingertips. “They were rather adamant about that.”

“
They
being
who
, exactly?”

“The doctors,” Riley told me.

“Right. Speaking of, what am I doing in a hospital, precisely?”

Riley looked saddened. “You… took a few blows to the head, and you were
knocked out.” Her eyes glanced down to her lap, where she wrung her hands
together while adding: “There was a lot of bleeding.”

“For a head wound? Not surprising at all,” I commented, feeling for the
lightly throbbing gash on my scalp. My fingertips grazed it – not too bad, all
things considered. “I’ve taken a few before. They always look far worse than
they actually are. Lots of blood with those buggers. Scares the Devil right out
of you.”

“Well… we’d better wait to see what the doctor says, anyway.”

I nodded absentmindedly, considering those words. “Where is the doctor,
anyway?”

“He’s supposed to be making his rounds in thirty minutes,” Riley
responded, rising from the bench, “but I’ll go check with the nurse’s station
anyway. You’ve been out for a while, so we didn’t know when you might come
back.”

“How long’s
a while?
”

“A day and a half.”

I grimaced. “Oh boy.”

Riley stepped out, and I reached over, digging around the items
scattered across the end table for my phone. I didn’t see it, which concerned
me – particularly since I knew that Jess was going to be
pissed.

I spotted my blazer, hanging with my pants on a nearby wall. Shrugging
off the blankets, I was able to barely reach it with my electrodes in place,
and fished around in my blazer pocket.

There you are…

I slunk back into bed and began to text Jess. My eyes fell upon the logo
for the hospital, which had the words “Saint Peter’s General Hospital”
emblazoned around the edges, and notified her where I was, and that I was fine.

I hit
send
and slipped the
phone back onto the end table before Riley popped back into the room.

“Doctor Wright will be with you shortly.”

Shortly
apparently meant
later than
originally told
, because it was almost forty-five minutes before he finally
appeared. A comforting man in his mid-thirties, Doctor Wright apologized for
the delay and began to examine me during some small talk.

I kept my answers brief, and my tone even.

“Everything
seems
normal,” he
commented finally, wrapping up his investigation. “Looks like you lucked out.
Minor concussion, and you’ve got that gash there, but I don’t see why it won’t
heal up nicely. You don’t even need stitches for it. I’m going to go ahead and
clear you for release. Shall I go ahead and file for the paperwork?”

“Please do so,” I agreed.

He left us to our devices, and I turned to Riley. “How long have you
been here?”

“Since you saved me.”

“Saved you?” I didn’t remember much saving.

“The… rapists, in the alley,” she cautiously reminded me. “I was going
to be assaulted and probably left for dead, but you found me… you came for me,
and you rescued me from them.”

I faintly remembered something like that, but it was incredibly faint.
Did I?
I flexed my knuckles, feeling
them ache. It was the kind of ache from battering them against the skulls of
predatory, low-life scum.

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

Riley smiled softly. It was maybe the first genuine, sincere smile that
I’d seen out of her. “Yeah. I think I’m pretty great.”

“Fantastic to hear, love,” I smiled back.

“Listen… how long are you going to be in America?” Riley asked me,
hovering near the edge of my bed. She looked pensive, tentatively awaiting my
answer.

“You know, I’m not quite sure… weeks, probably. I can’t stay too long,
the season starts back up in a month and a half… and I’m going to have to keep
in shape, regardless of where I am.”

“Oh. I see.” She looked crestfallen.

“Listen, a month and a half, that’s a long time, right?” I replied,
sensing her withdraw back into herself.
Dammit,
it took
this long
to get her to
retreat out of that shell… the last thing I need is to lose her now.

“Well, not really, when you think about it,” Riley told me. “I’d
actually say that it’s not a whole lot of time at all.”

“I want to see more of you,” I blurted out, surprised by myself. Riley
was apparently startled as well, as she looked at me curiously and with a
rather analytical gaze.

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” I reiterated. “Only if you think you can handle it.”

“I can handle myself,” she retorted, “with the notable exception of last
night. Call that the exception that proves the rule.”

“You know… I like you,” I confessed. “The other night was fantastic, and
I hope to experience more of those… And less nights that end in a hospital bed…”

Riley hesitated, looking at me with a clear conflict of emotions in her
head. Finally, she looked me in the eyes with a startlingly vulnerable gaze,
and she spoke: “…Yeah.” Adding a nod, she continued: “I think I’d like that.”

I nodded back, letting a small grin curve up the corners of my lips. “I
think I’d like that too.”

The door popped open not five seconds later, and a very flustered Jess
was upon me like wildfire.

“Lex, what the
fuck?
Can I not
leave you alone for
fookin’
five
goddamn minutes without you disappearing on me? And this time… this time,
you’re in the
hospital?
”

“It was for a worthy cause,” I replied, taking Riley’s hand. Her fingers
flinched, but she kept her hand in mine.

Jess glanced back and forth between us. “So… are one of you going to
start talking about why my friend is in a hospital bed right now, or am I going
to have to threaten to beat him halfway to death with a brick to get answers?”

“Riley was cornered by a spot of trouble,” I answered simply. “I took
care of it. Might have gotten a few scrapes in the process.”

“He’s being modest,” Riley elaborated.

“Am I… am I hearing that right?” Jess laughed as she turned back to me,
almost in hysterics. “Modest?
You?
Do
you even know
how
to be modest? You
couldn’t even find it in a dictionary, yeah?”

“I was dragged into an alley,” Riley told her with complete conviction.
“There were two of them, and I couldn’t fight them off. Lex found me and fought
them off. If he’d been fifteen seconds later…”

Jess went completely silent, staring at me. She looked a very compelling
mixture of shocked, appalled, and downright horrified.

“Lex… is this… is this
true
?”

“More or less,” I shrugged.

“
Cor blimey,
” she muttered,
holding her head in her hand. “I’m gonna need a stiff pint after hearing
that…
” She turned to Riley again,
looking at her as if for the first time.

I had to remind myself that, besides a fleeting occasion, it
was
the first time.

“You look like hell,” Jess finally told her. “You look like you haven’t
had a good night’s sleep in… a day? Two? What, have you been
here
the entire time?”

Riley nodded. “Yeah.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I didn’t know how to reach you, I don’t know where he’s
staying, and I didn’t think he had anyone else nearby who could care for him.
Besides… he’d just saved my life.”

Jess tried to hide it, but I could see how she beamed. She couldn’t
resist making quick, fleeting eye contact with me.

“Listen, I know that it’s been a rough couple of days for you… Riley,”
she started. “But I thought my only friend in this country was laying dead in a
ditch somewhere. If it’s not too much, can I have a couple of minutes alone
with him?”

Riley turned to me. I halfway expected her to be indignant, but she
looked somewhat relieved. “I could use a bathroom and some coffee. Do you need
anything from out there?”

“I think I’m good.”

“Alright. I’ll be back in ten.”

She nodded cordially to Jess as she left us in the room alone. As soon
as the door clicked, I tossed the bedding off and made my way towards the
connected bathroom.

“This is perfect,” Jess commented over the sound of my filled bladder of
piss hitting water. “She adores you now. Not hard to see why.”

“Why do you sound so pleased with yourself?” I asked warily, washing my
hands in the sink.

“You saved her life, Lex. This is
exactly
the kind of publicity we need you to have. I’m already writing the bylines
now… maybe I can whip up something to send over to the boys tonight…”

I popped the door open and began walking uneasily back across the room
to my clothes. “Absolutely not.”

Jess reacted as if she were a behaving child, and I’d just ripped her
favourite toy from her and slipped it well out of reach. “But why not? Surely
there’s a police report or something, I don’t even really need to ask her
anything else. She just told me everything I needed to know to finish your
write-up…”

“You’re not exploiting what happened to her in order to make me look
better,” I explained sternly.

“But
nothing
happened, thanks
to your timely and heroic intervention,” Jess protested. “And besides, where
the fuck is
this
Lex coming from?
Used to be that you’d take
anything
that
made you look better.”

“I don’t follow,” I replied, slipping some of my possessions into my
blazer and slacks pockets.

“The Patrovo Corporation contract, you
ruddy
idiot,” Jess hissed. She nodded towards the door. “You
need
shit like this to make you look
better in their eyes. Has Alistair Pritch ever saved anyone from rape? Who
knows! But now
Lightning Lex Lambert
has!
All of a sudden, you’re right at the top of the pile, where we both know you
deserve to be.”