Sexual Healing for Three (17 page)

“You never answered my question. What about your brother?”

“How do you feel about him?”

“I like him okay.”

“Do you
prefer
him?”

“That’s not a fair question, Chance.”

“I know. This isn’t a fair situation to any of us, but I’m asking anyway.”

Donna took a deep breath. “I like you both for different reasons.”

She still wasn’t sure what those reasons were, but from just her brief exposure to Russ, she knew instinctively that there was something unusual about him—not just different from his brother, but from most men she’d ever met—something she wanted to explore. She’d initially thought it was his arrogance that got her excited, but realized it was much more than that, something much scarier, as it forced her to hold up a mirror to desires she had long buried back in her teens.

“Playing it safe. I can respect that.”

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Would he respect her wishes if she asked him to stay away from her? Could she ask him to and still face him almost every day in the hospital? She’d already established that, in her line of work and with her hands-on mien, they were bound to cross paths professionally whether she wanted to see him personally or not. Did she want to deal with that type of awkwardness? How much more awkward would things be if she did decide to see him personally and still have to deal with him on a professional level?

“You’re thinking about us, aren’t you? Weighing all your options, the pros and cons? I can see your mind working a mile a minute.”

“That may be part of the problem.”

His grin fell as he stared at her, and she wanted nothing more than to wrap her arms around him and pull his head close to her bosom, even though that was her problem already, wanting to help and heal the world one bruised and battered psyche and body at a time.

“That was a low blow. I shouldn’t have said that.”

He shrugged. “I’ve heard worse.”

She was sure he had, but she didn’t want to be the source of one more minute of his pain. She knew better, knew how it felt to castigate herself for something beyond her control, and Chance couldn’t control the fact that he had gifts any more than she could control the behavior of her exes, nor would she want to. She was sure she wouldn’t be the person she was, able to sympathize and help so many victims of domestic violence, if she hadn’t been through the pain of it herself. She was just as sure that Chance’s patients welcomed his gifts even if he didn’t always welcome them.

At the thought, she wondered how many patients had benefited from what he could do, how many lives had he saved—lives that had been beyond the boundaries of
normal
medicine and which would have been lost otherwise? Who was she to malign those invaluable gifts?

God, the idea of healing and saving a life with a touch boggled her mind, and just when she thought her mind couldn’t take any more 130

Gracie C. McKeever

boggling or surprises, Russ barreled into the room, a strange man cradling his right hand wrapped in a bloody, makeshift tourniquet in tow.

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“Chance! Great, I thought I’d never find you. We had an accident at the site we’re working on today. I need some help he—” Russ froze when he realized his brother wasn’t alone in the room and finally gaped when he noticed who Chance was sitting next to on one of the room’s bed “What are you doing here?”

“Well hello to you too.” Donna huffed.

“I didn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t matter what you meant. I was just on my way out, so you can have the room and your brother all to yourself.” Donna was up and off the bed before anyone could stop her, though Chance made a valiant effort, reaching for her quickly, receding back, and coming up with empty air before jumping off the stretcher to follow.

“Chance!”

His brother hesitated for only a moment, glancing out into the hall where Donna had disappeared, then back at Russ and Stu Rossman, Russ’s field manager. Russ heard him curse under his breath before he came back to take a look at Stu’s hand, his calling, the need to help and heal, evidently too strong to resist.

Chance quickly and thoroughly washed his hands in the room’s sink, donned a pair of gloves, and unwrapped Stu’s hand. He cleaned away the blood with a swab to get a better look at the injured finger.

After a moment he said, “It’s not as bad as the bleeding is making it look, nothing several stitches won’t handle. I’ll send someone right in to work on it.”

Russ grabbed Chance’s arm before he could leave, but didn’t know what to say, especially in front of Stu. He trusted his friend and 132

Gracie C. McKeever

employee with many things, but his brother’s ability wasn’t one of them. And blurting out, “Do your magic!” didn’t exactly seem appropriate, especially after his and Chance’s little heart-to-heart over the weekend when he’d learned how hard it was for Chance to come to terms with his gifts and use them, even now.

“Russ, he’ll be all right. Trust me.” Chance rewrapped the hand with a fresh bandage and took off his gloves to dispose of them. Russ hadn’t missed the way Chance caressed his fingers over Stu’s hand, though, before he wrapped it and left the room. He hadn’t missed the slight orange glow emanating from his fingers, a glow that an untrained eye might have easily missed or mistaken as a trick of the lights in the room. Russ knew better.

Stu made a fist and rotated his hand, eyebrows lifting. “Feels better already. The throbbing stopped.”

“That’s good,” Russ said, distractedly staring out into the hallway and wondering if Chance had caught up to Donna and why she was at the hospital.

Was she okay? Did her visit have something to do with her job, or was it of a more personal nature and not a medical one? Had Chance shared any of what he and Russ discussed over the weekend?

He thought about his reaction to the sight of her, the keen and possessive sensations that had surged through him in her presence, and realized he had been beyond rude. He hadn’t meant to come at her so gruffly, but seeing her in Chance’s ER—in Chance’s
company
—for whatever reason had just caught him off guard.

“So who’s the skirt?” Stu asked, and Russ turned to him just in time to catch the leer.

Any other arena with any other woman and he might not have reacted so fiercely. But as it stood, Russ saw red at the remark, his knee-jerk response enough to undermine the false sense of security and control he’d been exerting since meeting Donna.

He thought he could handle the scenario he and Chance discussed, but catching sight of Donna in all her fiery temper made him wonder
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if he could share all that feminine energy and heat with anyone, much less the brother he’d always protected and loved.

He didn’t know what to say to Stu that wouldn’t trigger his suspicion and didn’t want to give away just how important Donna was to him when he wasn’t sure how she felt about him. He knew she wanted him, but her actions in the last couple of weeks, her avoidance, told him she was willing to deny that desire. He wondered at what cost to her.

“She runs a battered woman’s shelter,” Russ said by way of explanation, but knew he wasn’t really explaining anything at all. He didn’t want to share anything about Donna with anyone unnecessarily.

“Oh. I thought she…”

Russ slowly turned to Stu, and when he saw the uncommonly flustered expression on Stu’s face, he could only imagine the grimace on his own—one that he was sure plainly said Donna was off limits—

because Stu didn’t get easily flustered.
Russ
had been sicker at the sight of Stu’s injury than Stu had been, and Russ was a vet who’d seen his share of blood and gore in the trenches.

“Thought she what?”

Stu threw up his hands. “No offense, man. I just thought she belonged to you.”

Russ just wished. In his mind, he already considered her his—his to protect and his to discipline. Problem was, Donna didn’t consider herself to belong to anyone except herself.

Russ wasn’t sure where her relationship with Chance stood. Had she been avoiding his brother as much as she had been avoiding him?

Or had they been in contact since the barbecue and taken their relationship to the next level, beyond that kiss Russ witnessed? Was that why she was at the hospital? She’d come by for a social visit with her new lover?

He couldn’t blame Chance for taking advantage of any and all opportunities to get closer to Donna as they presented themselves.

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Russ knew he would. And he knew neither he nor his brother had any serious claims on Donna yet, not from the way she had left the room in such a mood. Despite the conversation he and Chance had had about their little threesome, no boundaries or rules had been set, especially not with Donna absent. In Russ’s eyes, this all left her affections and loyalty up for grabs.

When a young female doctor came in to take care of Stu’s sliced finger, Russ took the opportunity to go track down at least one of the pair in question and find out where things stood between them all.

* * * *

He watched her leave the hospital emergency room through the pneumatic doors in some sort of tizzy and thought,
So this is the
woman who had Russ walking around the office lately with the
unaccustomed hangdog look on his face when he wasn’t in a complete
fog.

In the time since he’d been working at Merrick Outdoor Designs, he had never known the man to bring his personal life to the job, had never known him to be so unfocused on what he was doing. He had fully expected something like the accident that had happened to Stu to have happened to Russ instead since the man’s mind just hadn’t been on the job the last two weeks.

Of course Stu wouldn’t have had
his
accident either without a little help, he thought.

He sneered, leaning back against his truck at the sidewalk and watching the small band of people loitering outside the hospital’s granite façade on their cigarette break.

He thought it was funny that a bunch of people who worked in the health industry engaged in such an unhealthy habit. He almost laughed at the hypocrisy of it, but didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself than he already had, so he settled for a disapproving smirk.

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Looking at the source of Russ’s recent agitation and melancholy now, he couldn’t figure out what the big to-do was surrounding the heifer.

So she hadn’t exactly been beaten with an ugly stick. He supposed she was eye-catching, but then his dick hadn’t found a female fetching in a long time, not since his epiphany five years ago. Two legs, two breasts, childbearing hips, big ass, soft curves, and skin—

none of these screwed his bulb in anymore. He wondered if they ever really had, or had he just been going along with the flow, forcing a set of preferences, values, and aesthetics on himself because it was what was expected of him, because they were the acceptable and
normal
things for him to lust after and chase? Hadn’t his mama and daddy proved that there was nothing remotely acceptable or normal about him, that he didn’t have any redeeming qualities to qualify him as a worthy human being, much less a normal one?

He could pursue who and what he wanted now, didn’t have anything to prove, no one to answer to except himself. The only person who would have stood in judgment of and punished him for his actions, punished him for the things he liked, was thankfully long dead, taken out of the equation by his own hands. Good riddance to so much trash, as his mama would say.

Well who was the trash now?
he wondered, mentally spitting on her ashes as he flung down the stub of the cigarette he’d been smoking and snuffed it out under his work boot.

He pushed up off of the side of his truck, ready to follow the heifer when that pretty-boy brother of Russ’s came rushing through the pneumatic doors in his fancy-schmancy, pristine white lab coat to catch up with the heifer.

Didn’t they make a perfect couple? So good and pretty and smart, the exact type of people his mama had always rammed down his throat as a standard he should strive to be, knowing in her eyes he would always come up wanting no matter what he did.

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Gracie C. McKeever

But these two? They were respectable people, normal, acceptable,
good
people.

He had already given up on attaining any of these ideals for himself. He was what he was, what his mama had bred him to be, what society had deemed a degenerate and a sociopath. He just called it doing what he had to do to get what he needed and wanted out of life, and fuck all who had a problem with it.

He just wished there was a way that these two would become and stay a couple without involving Russ. If there was a way he could ensure this, he would, but he wasn’t what anyone would call a matchmaker. The only match he was interested in making was a match between him and Russ. Maybe, though the idea sickened him, if he let Russ get as close to the woman as his pretty-boy brother seemed,
then
took her and the brother away, Russ might be more open to turn to someone in his time of grief.

He was determined that someone be him.

* * * *

Chance caught up with Donna outside the emergency exit, where she was standing with her arms wrapped around herself, looking simultaneously annoyed and lost. He smiled as he approached with her handbag tucked under one arm.

“I didn’t think you’d get too far without this.” He held it out to her, watching as she glared at him before unfolding her arms to take the bag from him.

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

“You should come back inside, unless you want to leave against medical advice.”

“I know I’m fine, and AMA is just a technicality. Especially in this case, isn’t it?”

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He bristled under the accusatory look she gave him, as if she blamed him for healing her. “A little gratitude wouldn’t be too much to ask for.”