started, her nerves jangling. It was the E.R. nurse who’d first met them. She was exiting the treatment room.
Nurse Norma McGregor smiled widely at her. “Not that you were almost kidnapped, but that this god happened by and swooped in to save you.”
She barely remembered Rashid’s version in time. “Uh… that isn’t what happened…”
“Oh, I know what he said happened, but I’ve seen the men he ripped apart. That had to be to punish what he’d consider a far more serious crime than attacking him. Attacking you. I also don’t buy that story about your bruise. You two don’t feel like you know each other enough for basketball. But don’t worry. The boys in blue will swear on his version, so we can discuss the truth.”
Laylah released the air trapped in her lungs. “You’re uncanny at reading people.”
Nurse McGregor tinkled a laugh. “Comes with the territory.”
“I didn’t want him to give the police a false statement…”
“But he insisted,” Nurse McGregor put in. “And it makes him even more of a god. Shouldering this for you will save you no end of aggravation.”
“Yeah. And he’d already saved me from far worse. If not for him, I would have been somewhere in the underbelly of Chicago by now, wondering if I’d survive. Instead, it was he who… who…” She had to stop as the tears finally began to flow.
Nurse McGregor frowned. “Hey, easy, girl. This is going to hit you hard when you process what happened and what could have happened. So don’t fight it. Seek help.”
Laylah wiped away her tears. “This isn’t about my reaction. It’s his wound…”
“Seeing that much blood disturbed you, huh?”
She shook her head. “I was a volunteer paramedic in my country. I’ve dealt with all kinds of injuries. But to see him hurt because he came to my defense…”
Comprehension dawned in the woman’s blue eyes. “So it’s because he’s your knight in darkest armor that his superficial injury is making you so upset!”
“What superficial injury takes this long to take care of?” Laylah cried.
The woman waved. “Oh, his wound is long taken care of.”
Laylah frowned. “So why are doctors rushing in there and not coming out?”
Nurse McGregor grinned. “That has nothing to do with how he is and everything to do with who he is.”
“Huh?”
“You can’t tell me you didn’t notice the women fighting to take his case?”
She hadn’t. With Rashid around, everything else in the world became inconsequential, almost invisible.
Nurse McGregor chuckled. “Well, they did, when normally they wouldn’t be caught dead with such ‘first-year-intern’ injuries. Then Doctor Vergas threw her weight around as E.R. director and snapped him up.” Laylah had noticed that. “Boy, did he give us a hard time, ordering us to get him sutures, saying he had more experience suturing wounds than all of us combined. But Doc Vergas convinced him to let her do it using the one thing she figured would get through to him.”
“And that was?”
“You, of course.”
“Huh?”
“She said if he didn’t let her suture him, she’d have you come in to talk sense into him. He allowed her to sew him up without further resistance.”
Oh.
He’d conceded only when threatened with the prospect of seeing her?
Was that good, bad or terrible?
Nurse McGregor sighed dramatically. “Even when he caved, he wouldn’t take his sweater off, just raised it. But the inches we saw of him were… whoa.” A hand frantically fanned her face. “Maybe we wouldn’t have survived seeing the whole package, after all.”
TMI, Laylah almost blurted out. TMDI. Too much distressing info. She could do without more stimulation of her fantasies starring Rashid. Coupling concepts like “‘all the way”‘ and “‘the whole package”‘ with him wasn’t good for her psychological health.
The woman went on. “Man, it’s like he isn’t human. First that body, and then he didn’t make a sound as we stitched him up when he’d refused local anesthesia or painkillers afterward. Then there’s that presence, even when he didn’t look at us or say a word.”
Layla was intimate with Rashid’s influence from lifelong experience. But…”All E.R. personnel have come out, including you. So who are those people who keep pouring into the room? What’s going on?”
“That’s what I meant when I said it’s all about who he is. After we were done, he said he’d make a donation to the department. Then he mentioned a number. That’s when we E.R personnel stampeded out, to spread the word and investigate him on the internet And we found out exactly who we have in there.”
That must have been a shock. Rashid was worth a few dozen billions. Men of his caliber had entire hospitals at their beck and call and health insurance that would airlift them anywhere in the world if they sprained their ankle. It was actually odd that he’d consented to go to a regular E.R., even for a “glorified paper cut.”
Nurse McGregor flicked her head toward the room. “So those illustrious figures you saw storming in there? They’re department heads, each trying to sell him on a project that needs funding.”
He was in there talking business? Leaving her out here going out of her mind?
With a smile that must be as brittle as her nerves, she said, “Thanks for the recap and everything else, Nurse McGregor.”
Then she marched into that till-now off-limits room.
Sure enough, Rashid was swarmed.
Not that he appeared concerned. Even surrounded by people like a rock star by groupies, he towered a head over everyone, that vast energy he emitted engulfing the scene. He was wearing only his bloody slate-gray sweater. His coat was hooked carelessly from a finger over his back.
She’d thought that coat had made him more imposing. But stripped of its obscuring folds, the symmetry and strength that infused his every line, the power and perfection that filled and strained against the cashmere, ruined as it was, were…
What had the nurse said? Yeah. Whoa.
No wonder god had been the only word the woman had found to describe him. He did look the part, presiding over his worshippers with all the contained might and forbearance of one.
He saw her the second she entered. In fact, his gaze had been pinned on the door.
Had he been expecting her
