“Excuse me?”
“You never miss your mark.”
Although he couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark, protective glasses they both wore, he noted how her brows lowered briefly before they lifted, understanding dawning. “Oh, you mean the laser? No, no. This is an Nd:YAG laser. It follows the ink. Kind of…ah…hunts it down.”
“So what happens if you accidentally get yourself?”
“Nothing,” she said with a smile, tugging off her glasses and revealing those eyes again. “And the treatment gets easier as we go. The less ink you have, the less pain. Next time, it won’t hurt as much.”
“Good deal,” he said before she tightened her lips in a smile and moved on to his face—the numbers on his lids that weighed on him the most, that made him a target, that meant he could no longer do his job.
The ink he hadn’t agreed to.
“How’s it feel?”
The air was thick with the stench of singed hair and maybe burning flesh too. He swallowed and stretched out his fingers. “Burns, I guess.” Understatement of the year. But better than Ape doing it. Anything was better than Ape with his tattoo machine.
“Okay. Let’s do the eyes now, Mr. Blane.”
“Sounds good.”
“This is dangerous. And without the anesthesia, it won’t be easy.”
“I get that, Doc. But I was told you’re the only one around who’ll do the eyes.”
“That’s true.”
“It’s why I came to you,” he said with a big, fake grin. Anything to put them on even footing. What was it about this woman that made him so off-kilter?
“Good.” Her smile echoed his, only it looked real. It shamed him with its warmth.
When the doctor slid the eye shield things in, they were uncomfortable and almost impossible not to blink out. His eyeballs felt strange—thick and paralyzed and blind. Worst of all, it reminded him of corpses, those cotton balls morticians slid under the lids to make the eyes look full and alive again.
Full and alive. With a detached, self-deprecating sort of humor, he wondered how that would feel.
* * *
In the short time it took to do the eyelids, the man on George’s examination table transformed…or went somewhere. She could see the moment it happened. The moment his soul left his body, she thought, before realizing how absolutely odd that was. He wasn’t dead after all. He was just…gone. Narcoleptic, perhaps? She’d gone to school with a man who suffered from that.
Narcoleptic or not, she couldn’t imagine falling asleep mid-treatment. She’d undergone it herself and knew exactly how painful that laser could be. And on the eyelid… Not something she could imagine sitting through without proper numbing.
After finishing up, George removed the eye shields and applied a thick layer of petroleum jelly to his eyes and hands, up to his wrists. After a brief hesitation, she cleaned up around him, ignoring the strange brew of feelings that had replaced her initial wave of fear: curiosity, empathy, and attraction that worked away inside of her as she wondered how on earth she was going to get this big, slumbering man out of her clinic.
Finally, she laid a palm to the warm flesh of his shoulder with some notion that she’d shake him awake. Fast and hard, his hand gripped hers, squeezed, held her there, and his eyes opened, cold and unfocused but violent. Oh, she could feel the violence in that hard, shaking grasp, see it in those cloudy eyes.
For a split second, she froze, eyes glued to his unseeing ones, adrenaline coursing through her.
“What the fu—”
Her squeak interrupted that no-nonsense snarl, brought his hard gaze to hers, and as she watched, the man came back, his return as clear as his leaving had been.
His eyes took a quick inventory of the room before landing on his hand trapping hers. Finally, his hold loosened, his confusion disappeared.
“I…I’m sorry I frightened you. I’ll give you a minute to…” She let her words trail off, extricating her hand from his before rushing out of the room, her heart too big for her chest, her skin hot where he’d squeezed her. What if he hadn’t let go? A man like that—so big and rough, his body packed full of muscle—could do whatever he wanted to someone like George. What had she been thinking coming back here alone with him? She stopped in the hall and leaned against the wall, working to catch her breath.
He could have hurt her badly. He hadn’t looked like someone who wanted to hurt her, though. More desperate, like that initial instinctive response that made dogs or bears attack at the first hint of a threat. What kind of life made a man react like that?
By the time he emerged, Andrew Blane appeared to have recovered.
