Rush - Blue Devils MC Book 2 (Book 1 Included FREE for a short time only!) (9 page)

“Right, we should,” she said softly, and he knew she was remembering those epic make-out sessions too.

He walked out of the garage and into the house, trying to shift his bulge in his jeans without being too obvious about it. He headed into his bathroom and washed his hands thoroughly, getting under all of his fingernails and cuticles. He was not about rescue Blue just to have her die of some dread disease because he couldn’t be bothered to wash his hands properly. She came into his master bath carrying the armload of bandage and gauze he’d dumped on the coffee table earlier and said, “I thought the light was better in here. I’ll sit on the toilet.” She put the gauze down on the bathroom counter and then sat on the closed lid of the toilet, facing away from him so he could get to her wound better.

He pulled her hair away from the wound carefully, swallowing hard as he looked at the reddened tissue on her head.
Goddamn motherfucking
Chupas
. I’m gonna kill every last one of them for doing this to my Blue.
The wound was beginning to heal already, scarring over, but it wasn’t pretty. He wondered if the bullet went so deep that she’d never grow hair there again.

A visual reminder that you should never trust jackasses, no matter how much you love a club
.
If I’d just said no to Brock, maybe…

He smoothed some antiseptic into the wound and then placed the gauze lightly over the wound. “Can you hold this here?” he asked. She reached up and pressed it into place while he unwound some stretchy bandages and then began winding it back up again, this time around her head.

“I think my students would start calling me
momia
instead of Maestra Wright if they saw me in this,” Blue joked.

“
Momia
?” Rush asked. High school Spanish was a long time ago.

“Spanish for ‘mummy,’” she said, and he sensed her smile, even with her face turned away from him.

She was fucking amazing. Blue was a goddamn miracle, making jokes at a time like this. His heart clenched at the idea of her leaving him again.

“Well,” he said around the lump in his throat, “it’s done. I’m not sure it looks as good as what the nurse did, but I think it’ll do.” She patted at it lightly with her hand and then shrugged.

“It feels nice and tight, not like it’s going to fall off at any moment, but not so tight it hurts. I think you did good!” She stood up and turned around, smiling at him. “Maybe you should’ve gone to nursing school!” She leaned over impulsively and kissed him on the cheek as a thank-you but he knew as soon as her lips touched his skin that she hadn’t meant to and didn’t know what the hell she was doing.

And maybe he was going to go straight to hell for taking advantage of a patient with a head wound but he couldn’t make himself care anymore. He couldn’t be the good guy any longer. He turned his head just a fraction of an inch and pressed his lips against hers and pulled her close to him, making sure, even in the haze of lust swirling around him, not to shove his hands into her hair like he so desperately wanted to.

But he could plunge his tongue into her warm and inviting mouth and she moaned and he forgot who he was or where he was and then Turbo whined, scratching against the closed bathroom door.

Son-of-a-bitch, I’m gonna kill him!
Rush thought as Blue pulled away, blushing, to open up the bathroom door. Turbo was sitting outside the door, wagging his tail and whining with delight at having found Blue again.

Rush couldn’t hate his dog then, not really, because he felt the same way. He’d found Blue again, and he too was never going to let her out of his sight.

But he could glare at Turbo because really, he wasn’t above glaring at his traitorous pet -
horrible wingman - we need to work on our strategy together
- as they left the bathroom.

“I was thinking that we should go out to eat at
La Casita
tonight,” Rush suggested. “I figured you haven’t been there in a while.”

“Oh, I love their salsa!” Blue said excitedly. “Let me throw on some shoes.”

As Rush sat out in the living room, petting his traitorous wingman, he made a vow to himself that this time, he wouldn’t fuck up.

This time, he wouldn’t lose Blue.

Chapter Nine

Hannah Blue

As they pulled up in front of
La Casita,
Hannah’s stomach rumbled as she smelled the scent of frying meats and veggies waft out of the restaurant.

She’d been too exhausted and grimy to think about eating but now that she’d taken a shower, her body was screaming for something more substantial than the Jello they’d fed her at the hospital. Truly, who gets full on Jello anyway?

As they walked into the restaurant, their old classmate, Javier, greeted them. “Hannah!” he exclaimed, giving her a flamboyant hug. “It’s so good to see you! After all of the stories on the news about you, I was worried that you’d been hurt or something. Oh, but you still have a bandage on your head!” He pulled back and patted the bandage, luckily not on the injured side of her head, and Hannah could only grin at him. It was hard to be a gay Mexican man in a small town, but somehow, Javier was well-loved by all, even those who looked down their bigoted noses at the lifestyle he lived.

“I heard about your encounter with a guy who pulled a gun on you when he thought you’d overcharged him?”

“Yeah, that wasn’t a very good night,” Javier said, “but would you believe, our business
spiked
after that? Everyone in town wanted to support us and so they all came out to eat here. Asshole. I have a restraining order on him now. He doesn’t get to enjoy my famous chips and salsa anymore, which I think is fair punishment. And anyway, he was never a very good tipper.” He winked at them.

“Now! I’ll put you two over here, in the corner. That plant makes a nice shield from prying eyes.” He led them over to a table that was partially shielded from the rest of the restaurant, and left, promising to return with chips and salsa.

Hannah glanced up at the TV hanging in the corner and her eyes widened when she saw herself on TV, eyes closed, unconscious in the hospital. A red banner was scrolling across the bottom, “Gang member found in hospital - attempt on Hannah Wright’s life,” over and over again.

“That’s the picture I saw yesterday when I first heard about you being hurt,” Rush said softly, interrupting her thoughts. She turned to look at him, surprised. Seeing herself like that was…freaky. Scary.

“It was terrifying to see that,” he said, echoing her thoughts. “I couldn’t think of anything except driving to Tucson to protect you. I was on my bike within minutes of that first news story.”

Rush looked at her, eyes haunted with the pain and panic of that day. “I thought you were going to be dead by time I got there, Blue. I drove and all I could think about was how we’d met at your dad’s wedding. Do you remember us sneaking off back into the garden, and how I sat you down on that wall?”

Javier placed chips and salsa in front of them but left again without saying a word, discreet as always. Hannah barely registered his presence.

Her cheeks pinkened. “Oh yeah, I remember that. Even as drunk as I was, I’d
never
forget that. I’d never had a guy do that before, and you literally made my world explode that night.”

Sparks arced between them and Hannah tried to catch her breath. Rush was so damn sexy, it was hard to think straight. His gorgeous dark blue eyes were searching hers, and…she didn’t know what they were hoping to find. What he was hoping to get out of this.

Rush reached out to hold her hand and she deftly grabbed a tortilla chip with it instead. Dipping it into the salsa, she said a little too enthusiastically, “I’ve eaten a lot of Mexican food, but the chips and salsa here is the best!”

Rush’s eyes became guarded, hooded, and he pulled back, relaxing casually in his seat as if he didn’t have a care in the world. As if he hadn’t just tried to make a move on her and had it rebuffed. Cool as ever.

“Are you ready to order?” Javier reappeared, rescuing Hannah from having to figure out how to patch things over, without making promises she couldn’t keep.

“Hi, yes!” Hannah said brightly. She really did sound like an idiot but she apparently couldn’t help it. “I’ll have the veggie fajita, please. Corn tortillas.”

Rush ordered a double enchilada, and as Javier was walking away, he cocked an eyebrow at Hannah. “Still a vegetarian?” he asked.

In high school, she’d gone through a virulent vegetarian stage, where she refused to eat anything even cooked in animal fats, and her dad had humored her, having the cook only prepare vegetarian meals when she was there.

“Eh,” she said, shrugging. “There have been a lot of places around the world that I’ve gone that being a vegetarian simply wasn’t a lifestyle choice I could make. Especially Mexico - good luck being a vegetarian there!” She chuckled at the thought. “But I do like meals with lots of veggies and when I am in a place to eat that way, well, why not, right?”

They chatted then, about stupid, inconsequential things, as Rush caught her up on what all of their classmates had been doing since high school graduation. They ate their way through too many platters of food, and laughed, and everything was light and superficial. Just as it should be.

Finally, they left, Hannah giving Javier a hug on the way out. Rush thoughtfully suggested a stop at a local Walgreens for her to pick up some toiletries. She was too exhausted to go clothes shopping that evening - that was an ordeal that required all of her energy on a good day. It wasn’t easy to find cute clothes in the Tall section that fit her non-supermodel hips and ass, but toiletries…
those
sounded heavenly.

As she browsed for makeup and hair products, Rush casually wandered off, giving her plenty of space and time to find what she needed. He really was the perfect boyfriend.

Hannah’s hand stopped, hovering over mascara. Rush? Boyfriend? Since when was he her boyfriend??

She couldn’t let herself even contemplate such a thought for even a moment.

A bird may love a fish, but where will they live?
One of her favorite lines from her favorite rom-com movie in high school,
Ever After,
flashed through her mind, unbidden.

She quickly stuffed the rest of her items into her basket and walked up to the front. Rush met her at the cash register as she paid and then they left.

Silence hovered over them, smothering them.

She didn’t know what to say. What to do.

What the hell had she gotten herself into? They got into Rush’s truck and drove home, without a word spoken. She was lost in her thoughts, in the never-ending doubts pounding at her.

Then she realized they were in the house and she looked around, surprised. There was Turbo, nudging her hand, whining, tail wagging, delighted to have her home, and Rush was walking back from the bedroom. She looked at him, bewildered. Was she starting to sleep walk? Was she that deep in her thoughts? She was so
tired
…

“Come on,” he said gently, holding out his hand for hers. She took his hand, warm, calloused from years of work, and he walked them over to the couch. He sat down on the couch and pulled her up against him.

“I think you need to just relax for a bit,” he said, quietly, gently, like he would talk to a spooked horse. Why was he talking to her like that? She felt weird. Disconnected. Cottony.

And then it was the opening scenes of
Princess Bride
splashing across the TV and she smiled. And as the movie progressed, she laughed, belly laughed, like she hadn’t done in what felt like years. And at the end, as they were riding off into the sunset and Fred Savage was begging his grandfather to come back the next day to read it again, she was asleep, curled against Rush.

Finally safe.

***

Rush pulled Blue tighter up against him, looking down at her, eyes closed, lashes laying in a perfect, dark fan on her lightly freckled cheeks. He hit the power button on the TV, shrouding the room in darkness. Turbo, on the other side of Blue, curled up on her side, lifted his gray speckled head, looking around the living room in disinterest at the sudden light change, and then settled back down, happy to go back to sleep.

Rush stared ahead blindly and thought back to the restaurant. When he’d attempted to take her hand and she’d not-so-subtly dodged it by grabbing a chip instead.

He couldn’t push her. She wasn’t ready, and really, could he blame her? Just yesterday, she was in the hospital, just coming out of a coma. Today had been a damn long day - days usually were when they started at three in the morning - but it was still just one day. She’d been gone for 13 years. They couldn’t just pick up where they’d left off, no matter how much he wanted that.

Carefully sliding out from underneath Blue’s weight, Rush twisted and scooped her up in his arms, sliding her out from beneath Turbo’s weight. Turbo whined at the disturbance to his sleep, but padded along behind Rush as he carried Blue to the bedroom.

Trying to juggle Blue and the covers, he finally got her into the bed, pulled off her shoes, and pulled the light blanket back over her. She slept through it all, exhausted. He should’ve insisted that she go to sleep as soon as they got home from the store, but he’d known she needed some time to just laugh and relax. As he pulled blankets out of the linen closet to make his bed on the floor next to her, he thought about how weird she’d gone on him. In the car, he’d tried to talk to her, but she didn’t even seem to hear him, let alone respond to him. She was stone quiet, staring off into the distance, and he’d thought that if he’d snapped his fingers in front of her face, she wouldn’t have blinked.

He’d gotten her inside of the house and had thought about just leading her to bed then, but there was something about her that was just screaming out for joy. For fun. For something to take her mind off what was happening to her and who was after her.

Something to bring a smile to her gorgeous face.

As he wiggled around on the floor, trying to find a comfortable spot - why people did this on purpose on a regular basis when they went camping was beyond him. He made a mental note to buy a twin bed for the guest bedroom. Soon. He’d held off, saving that money for other projects around the house, but if he was going to give away his bed every night, he had to replace it with something a little more…cushiony.

Or maybe a rollaway cot. That way he could stay here and watch over Blue but be more comfortable. The
Chupacabras
could find him and despite the…

three men out…

outside, they could attack…

And then he joined Blue in dreamland, a place where Turbo had gotten to long before, happily snuggled up at Blue’s feet.