Sevin: Mythical Ink Series (Book 2): Paranormal Shifter Romance Page 4

  His one good eye cracked open, and his hand squeezed hers. Scooting closer to his bedside, his expression softened and a spark flashed in the center of his eye as if she were the only person in the world he wanted to see. A shot of warmth pegged her in the middle of her chest like she’d been struck by Cupid’s arrow.

  Offering him a reassuring smile, she didn’t bother to resist running her free hand over his silver mohawk. His hair was long where it was left in a wide strip down the center, about six inches in length, and impossibly soft beneath her fingers. Not that she knew him that well, but he didn’t seem the type to use a ton of hair product to spike it up. Probably just ponytailed it to keep it out of his eyes.

  The sides were shaved tight to his scalp. She imagined him standing in front of a bathroom mirror with clippers in hand, maintaining his chosen hairstyle and keeping regular appointments with the hairstylist who had created the unique silver shade. It even had varying shades of gray running through it. He must spend a fortune to maintain it.

  She shook her head over the fanciful thoughts about this complete stranger who somehow felt familiar and continued with her caressing. He seemed to enjoy her touch, tilting his head toward her so she would have greater access to pet him.

  Thoroughly engrossed, the nurse who whipped the curtain back had her jerking in her seat.

  “Alright, you are all set to be discharged,” she smiled at Janie. “Just sign here and here for his prescriptions, and I’ll have an orderly bring a wheelchair around.”

  “Great. Thanks.” Janie took the clipboard and small white bag being held out toward her and signed the places indicated on the forms, then handed it back to the nurse whose eyes were trained on the stranger she claimed to be married to and was about to leave the hospital with.

  Something inside her grew more irritated the longer the nurse stood there, gawking at her man—Okay, what the hell was wrong with her? She didn’t even know the man’s name, so laying claim to him was ludicrous.

  Fatigue had to be the culprit. She’d just pulled an unusually long shift. Ten hours of working in her emergency department, plus another three hours in the emergency room with this stranger had clearly worn down her common sense.

  Setting aside her sense of ownership, she slipped into her coat that had been returned to her after the man was covered with a sheet and blanket as he’d entered the hospital on the gurney.

  As soon as the nurse left, the orderly appeared from around the curtain. Janie laid a hand on the man’s shoulder, speaking softly to him. “Hey, um... sweetie, it’s time to go home.”

  He groaned in response.

  The orderly poked his head out on the other side of the curtain and gestured for another to join them. The two hospital staffers dressed in scrubs lifted the man out of bed and carried him over to the wheelchair, careful not to jostle the thigh-high cast that engulfed his leg.

  Situating him as best they could, Janie helped him out of the hospital gown and into a sweatshirt, covering his bottom half with a blanket she’d bought in the gift shop while he was in x-ray.

  Groggy, he reached for her hand as one of the orderlies wheeled him toward the exit. It was the sweetest thing how he sought her out for comfort.

  The cab was toasty warm as the man was helped inside. Janie thanked the orderly and sat close to the door to give her stranger as much room as possible.

  He sat with his casted leg stretched out on the seat, his back curving forward in a slump until she touched his shoulder and he leaned back against her. Cradling him like a baby, she rattled off her address to the cabby. Soon, they were on their way to her apartment.

  How the hell she was going to get him out of the back seat and inside on her own was a task she had yet to figure out. She hated the thought of having to rouse him from his reprieve from pain to have him help her, but there was no help for it. He weighed a ton.

  He turned his face toward her body as the cab began to move, pulling in deep, even breaths as he rested in her arms. Savoring the moment, she had never felt such a closeness to anyone except her grandmother.

  This sudden intimacy with a complete stranger couldn’t be real. It had to be the result of her ego taking another direct hit after seeing Jennifer and David tonight. That couple was like a living Post-it note, ever reminding her she was never good enough to get the guy.

  Shifting her eyes from the road to the man lying in her lap, she smiled. Tonight he had chosen her above all others—looked to her for comfort and companionship. Once his pain no longer clouded his judgment and the drugs wore off, would he continue to turn to her? Swallowing hard, she pushed all the uncertainties aside. There was plenty of time to sort through all of that.

  Making the next right, she was sad to see her building come into view. Her time in the cab with this man was coming to an end.

  Closing her eyes, she focused on every detail of the moment—the weight of his torso cradled in her lap, his heavy breaths that warmed her as he exhaled, the fullness of her heart over his need for her—solidifying it all to memory, so she could draw on it when she needed to feed her occasional loneliness.

  What she had to remember was his was a temporary need. After he was lucid enough to call his people, they would come claim him, taking him back where he belonged, and most likely, she would never see him again. Once he got a good look at her, he wouldn’t be as enchanted as he was now. It was fun to pretend he was hers if only for a little while.

  As the cab drew closer to her building, it slowed and eased over to park on the edge of the sidewalk. Turning in the seat, the driver looked at her and the injured man she had cradled in her arms, and his eyes softened.

  Shutting off the engine, he hopped out from behind the wheel and walked back to her door. Opening things up, the unexpected help was appreciated as the driver helped get her new friend out of the back seat and into the building lobby. Once inside the elevator, he turned loose of her stranger. Still loopy from the morphine, her back bowed under his immense weight as he leaned heavily on her, but she managed to pay the cabby, throwing in a large tip for the kindness.

  The elevator dinged them up and opened onto the fifth floor. Janie tried to budge the weight of the man draped around her, but before she could take more than a few steps, the elevator doors closed up tight, and they were on their way back down.

  She wanted to cry. Her apartment was located right next to the elevator. They had been a mere handful of steps away from her front door.

  “Hey,” she said trying to nudge him awake. “I need you to wake up just a little bit and help me get you inside. Come on, sweetie. Please, I need your help.”

  Her pleading somehow got through to him. Lifting his head from where it hung off his heavy shoulders, he gave her a sloppy grin and a nod, easing some of his weight off of her.

  As the doors to the elevator opened onto the lobby floor, an occupant she recognized stepped into the car and pressed the number three button.

  “Would you mind pressing five for me,” Janie asked the girl with the familiar face.

  “Oh, sure.” After the girl pressed the five, she turned to the side, just enough to outright ogle her stranger. That feeling of possessiveness came back in a rush. It took every ounce of self-control not to tell the girl to keep her fucking eyes to herself.

  Whoa!

  She was out of control. She rarely cursed even in her private thoughts and never anything above a hell or damn—most definitely not a fuck.

  Keeping her lips tightly compressed the entire trip up, the girl finally disembarked on the third floor. It was a good thing Janie had the weight of her stranger holding her in place. Otherwise, she would have been sorely tempted to snatch the bitch bald-headed. Janie all but growled as the girl took a last look at him before the doors shut them in together.

  Now the other woman was gone, Janie relaxed her stance. This was craziness to be acting this way about a man she had just met. She still didn’t even know his freaking name.

  Up two more floors and she was using soft, encouraging words to coax her stranger out of the elevator. It was a slow hop on his good leg with her bearing most of his weight. Thankful to have made it off the elevator and into the hallway, she had all the patience in the world as he made one agonizingly slow hop after another to reach her front door just a few feet away.

  Struggling with her purse hanging off one shoulder, she fished around in the black hole until her fingers grazed the cold, metal bundle. Pulling the set free, she disengaged the locks and swung open the door. This was the first time she was glad her space was small.

  Kicking the door shut behind her, she struggled with holding him while locking things up and aimed them toward her one bedroom.

  “Alright, sweetie, let’s get you in bed.” A hot flush washed over her. Why did that sound naughty? Shaking her head, she regained some forward momentum and was finally at the side of the bed, pulling the covers back to make a place for him.

  Carefully, she came around in front of him to wrap her arms around his wide chest, just under his arms. Her shift in position had him hugging her back and nuzzling her neck, his soft breath tickling her ear.

  Giggling, she guided him down. “Just lower your weight, I’ve got you.”

  It was slow going with a lot of grunts and groans from both of them as she eventually got him situated. A few pillows propped up his upper body, so he wasn’t lying completely flat. Gently lifting his casted leg, she made a soft elevation out of a stack of pillows. Pulling the covers up to his chin, she tucked him in before heading for her tiny kitchen to make ice packs for the swollen half of his face and his broken leg.

  Returning to him with a pail full of ice packs, she noted as she placed one of the ice packs over his eye how impossibly thick his lashes were resting on his cheeks. He groaned as she moved the covers to expose his leg and packed his leg in ice, making shushing sounds to try to comfort him.

  Stepping back, she looked him over. There was so much about him she didn’t know and needed answers to, but it could wait until after he got some rest.

  Now that he was settled, she was in desperate need of a shower. Double checking her door was locked and grabbing a change of clothes, she was in the shower and under the hot spray. Arching back into the water as it beat against her tired muscles, she didn’t linger. A quick wash and rinse, and she was out, not wanting to be away too long, in case her stranger needed her.

  Standing beside the bed as he slept, his large body seemed to swallow up her queen-sized mattress. Dragging her favorite chair from the living room, she parked it close to him. Covering up with a blanket she’d snagged from the linen closet, she made herself comfortable, deciding to read an eBook on her Kindle she had meant to finish.

  Fatigue had other plans for her. As soon as she was situated, her eyes slammed shut.

  Floating on a puffy cloud, Sevin was vaguely aware of his surroundings. A murky recollection of an elevator ride in a strange building and using a lushly scented woman as a crutch skittered through the fuzzy cotton that was his mind.

  He felt delicious. Every inch of his skin was basking in the blissful numbness that could only be achieved through heavy duty painkillers. Given the excruciating pain he’d been in before he’d passed out on the street, it was a welcome place to be, but an urgency to know his whereabouts was a niggling alarm clamoring to be heard from a great distance away.

  Using his facial muscles, he failed at an attempt to pry open his eyes. His lids felt as if they’d had tiny sandbags attached to the ends of each eyelash.

  Filling his lungs with a long pull from the air that filled the room, it lacked the medicinal flavor of a hospital. A light and clean fragrance washed over his sinuses just before he caught the scent of the woman he had met in the alley and was eased with an instant sense of safety.

  Where am I? The question never coalesced into a spoken thought, just evaporated like a puff of smoke in a windstorm.

  Jesus-fuck, he was exhausted.

  Now that he knew he was safe from discovery and away from nosey humans at the hospital, he slapped the alarm in his mind into silence and decided he’d just lay here a little longer and rest. Drifting off into the light and airy nothingness of his thoughts, he pondered how strange it was he’d placed absolute trust in a woman he had just met.

  His dads had drilled into his head never to trust humans, but here he was feeling all comfortable, letting all kinds of guards down.

  Sometime later, he became aware of his body in varying degrees of discomfort. His head had a hard pulse on one side. It wasn’t the most horrible pain he’d ever experienced, but it wasn’t exactly a party either.

  He could move his right leg just fine, but his left leg was elevated and felt as if it were trapped. What really got his full attention was when he tried to move it and a spear of pain Rocked-His-Fucking-World.

  Holding his breath as the pain steamrolled its way over him, he let it out slowly, hissing between his clenched teeth. Only able to crack open one eye, he scanned the unfamiliar surroundings. Blurry at first, he blinked away the distortion.

  The room was on the small side, sparsely decorated, but everything screamed femininity. Neat and tidy, the walls were painted a pale green that matched the vine interwoven with the little flowers on the bedspread that covered him.

  Definitely not a male’s room.

  A slight movement caught the edge of his periphery. Letting his head fall to the side, he spied a small, slender foot with adorable toes tricked out in glitter nail polish. His eye roamed higher. The ankle, attached to the rest of the woman he couldn’t see the whole of, was delicate with a tattoo of a geometric design. Higher still, the slender ankle gave way to a curve and a swoop that ended with the swell of a lovely calf encased in form-fitting leggings.

  Mmmm... he liked tattoos and shapely legs—

  His cock came awake in a rush. Swiveling his hips into the intense heat, he pushed his unexpected erection against the slight weight of the bedding that covered him. The pain he was feeling dimmed, taking a back seat to the throbbing need he now had between his legs—all because of a pretty ankle and the natural perfume of a woman. He’d always been a horny motherfucker, but he’d never popped wood over something as basic as the turn of an ankle for fuck’s sake.

  Groaning, he squeezed his eye shut, hoping his erection would soon shrink on its own. The damn thing was rocking a strong pulse, doing a slight bounce with every one of his heartbeats.

  “Are you in pain?”

  His cock jumped at her sweet voice.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  He was thankful the small brain between his legs didn’t come equipped with a voice box of its very own because it would be telling her to hop her sweet ass up on this bed and ride him like a two-dollar whore until every drop of semen in his balls was pumped into her.

  “You ready for some pain meds?” Janie asked, hopping up from the chair she had been lounging in.

  With the heady effect she had over his libido, he didn’t trust himself to speak, so he kept his trap shut and settled for nodding. Coming over to the side of the bed, she appeared before him. Thank fuck he was already lying down, or she would have knocked him on his ass. His memory of her was sketchy because of the pain and panic he’d been in, but now he was able to focus on her better.

  Her dark hair was piled high in a messy knot on top of her head, leaving her elegant neck exposed to his view. She wore no makeup to diminish her natural beauty, but the kindness that shone out of her ginger eyes was what really got to him. Even though she was pretty in the simplest of ways, the beauty that lived within her was a slow reveal. The longer he looked, the more layers were peeled away, leaving him stunned and breathless.

  She was simply divine.

  “I’ll be right back. Stay right there.” She paused in her exit and whirled back around. “Oh sorry, that was a stupid thing to say.”

  He raked his gaze over her with his one eye as she turned away from him again, the distance she put between them gifting him with a full-length view as she disappeared into the next room.

  She had fit perfectly underneath his arm. His fritzed-out recollection reminded him of that. He recalled his head in her lap at some point. She’d leaned forward, brushing his face with the fullness of her lush, heavy breasts… Or maybe that had been part of a pain-induced delirium or a daydream prompted by his cock refusing to deflate.

  Back in the bedroom, she set a full tray on the table next to the bed. She was speaking to him again in that wonderful voice of hers—so soothing. He closed his eye so he could focus on the rhythm of her words. As her last sentence was spoken, it came across his slippery mind as a question.

  Peering up at her, the only thing that registered was how wonderful she would feel beneath him. She was just tall enough he would be able to pump into her and still remain lip-locked which was critical if you were fucking a woman who had a mouth as sumptuous as hers.

  “A simple no thank you would suffice. There’s no need to growl.” She stepped back and crossed her arms over her chest. “If you don’t want any crackers, all you have to do is say so, but I suggest you try to put a little something in your stomach when you take this, otherwise it might make you nauseous.” Reaching down to the tray, she came back with a small, white pill and a squat glass of water.

  Dragging his mind out of the gutter it was festering in, Sevin opened his mouth to speak... and squeaked, a sound so emasculating, it cut the blood flow off to his other brain. Deflating like a balloon that hadn’t been tied, he focused on the throbbing that was his left leg. Touching the hard cast at the top of his thigh, it extended the full length, and he could feel the edge of the plaster against the backs of his toes.

  The memory of being struck by a car came back to him with sickening clarity. He’d been badly injured—make that was badly injured. Now that his mind was clearing of drugs and sex, he began to assess all the aches and pains competing for his attention.