Zack
This time, I agreed to head to Justine’s place.
And after how last time had gone, it was probably for the best. I didn’t want her to associate us hooking up with bad memories from the past, from the time she and Brock had done anything. I wanted her to think of us as something distinct and separate from that, and going to her was best.
But it was also because I just wanted to see her as quickly as I could. For her to go from distant to suddenly asking to me was, yes, arousing, but it was also concerning. Something had to have happened beyond just her having a dream about me.
I pulled up to her house—it was a pretty nice home, but then again, everything compared to the Bernard Boys’ home was probably nice—and knocked at the front door. Justine answered with a glass of wine in her hand.
“Hey, come on in,” she said. “Boots off, though.”
Like I said, anything compared to the standards of our house was probably nice.
I reached in to hug her, and she hugged me back. It was, frankly, pretty damn awkward. I tried to hold her for a while, and she seemed to want to pull back, but after a certain point, I tried to pull back…yeah, it was indicative of two people that had gone on a date the weekend before but who had disparate viewpoints on how it had gone.
“You OK?” I said as she led me to a couch. “You sounded worried in your text.”
“Yeah, remember the rich guy I told you about?”
I nodded. How could I not? If I suspected he was connected to King, the worst thing I could do was to pretend like he didn’t exist.
“Well, he came by the hospital again today. Tried to bribe me with the promise of a million a year to help him.”
“Did you?”
Justine…hesitated.
“No, but, well, I suspect that, um, he’s not going to let up. There’s nothing to it for at least a week, so there’s that.”
Now I knew Justine was hiding something. I didn’t think it was malicious. I just thought that this asshole had threatened her, and she was debating if it was worth sharing.
If I ever saw this guy, I wouldn’t give a fuck if he was related to King or not. He’d suffer for what he’d done to Justine accordingly. It was just a question of how, not if.
“And what happens in a week?”
“He told me to go someplace, and if he didn’t, he’d find me.”
She sighed. She took a big gulp of her wine. I put my hand on her knee, attempting to provide some level of comfort.
But instead, it gave Justine pause. The right kind of pause.
“If someone is threatening you, you let us know,” I said. “We’ll make sure this asshole knows who he’s fucking with and that he stops accordingly.”
“I know,” she said, looking down at my hand. I couldn’t see closely enough, but I could swear that she had goosebumps all over her body. “I just wanted to stay out of this fray. I just wanted to do my job and not worry about what happened outside the hospital walls. And now…”
“We can’t avoid it,” I said, squeezing her knee. “But we will protect you. I don’t care how you feel about me or how whatever this is…whatever we have turns out. We’re not letting innocent people get put at risk, let alone anything more.”
Justine looked at me, and for what felt like an eternity by gazing standards, I thought she’d just move on to a sip of her wine or say something more. But she didn’t. Her eyes, those beautiful, sweet, yearning brown eyes burrowed into mine, as if trying to analyze how genuine I was.
She’d only find that I was real and serious about it. We didn’t posture in the Black Reapers. We took our jobs too seriously and were too blunt and brusque to ever be confused for not being honest to a fault.
She put her wine on the table. A warmth spread through me as I had a feeling for what was coming.
“You’re sure of it,” she said, less of a question and more of a statement.
“Absolutely,” I said. “We protect those who need it. And if that means you, that means you.”
Justine’s eyes narrowed on me. She didn’t have to say a word, and I knew what was about to happen. I closed my eyes well in anticipation.
