Page 7 of Bad Blood Wolf

He stopped, but he didn’t turn around. “None of your damned business. But I’ll give you a heads-up. It won’t be pretty.”

Silence. He started walking again.

“You need to get that ear stitched up before it starts to heal, or it won’t reattach. Want me to do it?”

He stopped and touched his right ear, which burned like fire. Fucking Bastian really had torn it half off, and she was right—shifter healing was awesome, but his ear couldn’t knit together flapping around like that. And by the time he got one of the Nashville healers to look at it, the edges would have healed over and it would be too late.

Not to mention having to explain what happened to him.

He turned around. “Unless you carry a med kit in your pocket, Demazon, I think I’m shit out of luck.”

She just rolled her eyes and walked over to an old beater truck parked a few spaces away. She pulled open the passenger door and dragged a battered tackle box from behind the seat.

“Sit,” she said, jerking her head at the truck seat.

Dammit. With a sigh, Brody walked over and parked his butt on the edge of the seat, legs splayed out into the parking lot with his bag between them. Jasmin was already rooting through the box, which did in fact look like a full med kit.

“You carry that everywhere?” he asked.

“I’m Bad Blood,” Jasmin said absently, tearing the wrapper off a gauze pad and soaking it with disinfectant. “We don’t have a terrifyingly over-decorated mansion and our own clinic. We have six fucked-up brawlers, four of us dominant, and one a newbie with a hair trigger. We bleed each other a lot.”

She started wiping the blood off his ear with the gauze. He flinched away. “Shit on a stick!” he ground out. Whatever she put on it stung like a mother.

“Sheesh,” she said. “White Tornado, the mighty cage fighter. Don’t be a—” She grabbed the back of his neck and held his head still. “—baby,” she finished.

She dabbed at his ear, careful not to pull on the torn flesh. Her hands were strong, but her touch was surprisingly gentle. He felt warmth spreading through him, and the pain seemed to lessen.

“I thought you were going to say ‘don’t be a pussy,’” he said, giving in to the urge to mess with her.

The illumination from the dome light was pretty dim, but he could have sworn he saw the faintest smile touch the corner of her mouth.

She guided his hand to the gauze and had him hold it around the wound while she threaded sutures onto a surgical needle. “If only you were,” she said. “Then you wouldn’t be such a fucking crybaby.”

She moved his hand with the gauze back down to his lap, and he felt her line up the pieces of his torn ear. “You know what they say,” she added. “Balls are fragile. Pussies can take a pounding and come back for more. So try to be a pussy, okay?”

He snorted, but he held still, clenching the bloody gauze in his fist while she sewed up his ear. He was almost painfully aware of how close she was, the warmth of her taut muscular body, the wild musky scent of her, overlaid with blood and sweat.

And her hands, gentle and sure, her whole attention on getting the stitches just so.

“There,” she said, leaning down and biting off the thread. He felt an overwhelming desire to turn his head and capture her lips, to see if she tasted as sweet and wild as she smelled.

Then she stood up and the moment was gone, but he still felt an uncertain ache in the center of his chest. Like he’d lost something important.

She stood back and looked at him. “A day or so, and you’ll be as pretty as ever.”

Did she really think he was good-looking? Nah, not with that scar on his face. It was just something to say.

“That’s not saying much,” he grunted. He stood up. That place in the middle of his chest still ached, worse than the rest of his wounds because it felt so empty. Lonely.

She was still looking up at him, her eyes uncertain.

Ah, hell. His whole life was going to be destroyed anyway. Might as well go out with a bang.

He slid his hand around the back of her neck, and leaned down to taste her lips.

Wildness rose in him when they touched hers, and he angled his head to taste her better, kiss her more deeply. Heat rushed through him, and he felt that fire he’d been longing for.

It was so hard to pull away, but this wasn’t something that could ever really happen. He brushed her lips once more and pulled back, resting his forehead on hers. “Thanks for fixing me up,” he said softly. “Sorry I yelled at you about the money.”

He shouldered his bag and walked away, not looking back. He wanted to remember that moment, the way it felt. And if she was going to rip his throat out for touching her, he didn’t want to see it coming.

But when he got to his car and walked around to open the driver’s door, she was still standing there silhouetted by the dome light of her truck, staring after him, her eyes glowing green in the dark.