Page 5 of The Beast's Betrayed Mate
“About the bite on your hand,” she said. “Just ignore it, and hope it would heal on its own? It looks inflamed.”
“Oh,” he said, shivering where he sat, arms so tightly wound around himself he looked like he was trying to fold himself into his chest cavity.
“Oh,” she mimicked, shaking her head at him. “You work inmedicine, my dude. What the hell were you thinking?”
“I couldn’t remember,” he murmured. “I think something… chased me.”
“Yeah, no shit,” she said, but his eyes were closing again, and fear tore through her at the thought of him slipping away right where he sat. He was an asshole and an idiot who clearly didn’t know what was best for him, but he didn’t deserve to die in the front seat of her car.
“Hey!” she exclaimed again, reaching out a hand and shaking him until he drew a slow breath and pushed himself out of the slouch he’d slipped into. “I’m not losing you, okay? Who am I going to bicker with in the elevator? Hmh? You barely said two words to me this morning. We can’t have it end like that. I won’t stand for it.”
“You won’t, huh?” he asked, a slow smile on his mouth, and his gaze meeting hers in a way that made her heart slow in her chest.
Why the fuck was he looking at her so suggestively? Or was it all in her head? She kept feeling like he hovered near her at work for no good reason but to get a snarky comment from her. Then she rationalized that, as their managing analyst, he had more reason than most to be in every part of the division. She could be rational. She was proving to herself that she could be. That she didn’t let her every impression run away with her. Down that road lay rejection.Hehad taught her that.
Either way, she took her hand off his leg as though the connection had burned her.
Perhaps she still found him intensely attractive, but he had publicly fucking rejected her not that long ago. She had too much dignity to ever forgive him for that. He had also never apologized. He acted as though it never happened, behaving like she was just some old classmate of his and they now happened to be working in the same division of the same department at the same company. Like that was normal.
It wasn’t normal.
It was a travesty.
And she had done everything in her excruciatingly limited power to prevent her move to his division, but it had been out of her hands; that was apparently where she had been most needed. So, there she had ended up. She had spent the past four months getting even with him because what the hell else was she supposed to do? Behave as though he hadn’t humiliated her, suck it up and move on?
Well, she could have done that, but she had been taught at an early age to stand up for what she believed in, and she was of the firm belief that he didn’t deserve her charity. He deserved to know that there was at least one person on the planet who saw him for who he truly was and knew exactly what a horrible person was hiding underneath all that handsomeness.
She pulled into the hospital parking lot, roaring into the space in front of the hospital sliding doors. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she reached over and popped his seatbelt loose as well.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“Of course,” he raised his shoulders in an awkwardly lopsided way, making her think he might not be able to.
She didn’t know what all the signs were for someone being septic, but his paling skin that was bordering on light green couldn’t be a good sign. He really was beginning to look like the living dead.
She managed to signal to the nurse at reception and soon enough a team of nurses came rushing out through the door while Olive was helping Peter maneuver out of the car. He was heavy in her arms, trying to stand on his own and managing to find his balance for a moment, but then he fell forward and she had to catch his weight with her shoulder. He was like a piece of boulder, but he was warm, and he smelled really nice. She clenched her teeth against her own fascination, trying to ignore how she had spent most of grad school wondering what this would be like, to be close to him, wrapped up in him scent. And wasn’t this romantic?
She rolled her eyes at her grad school self, grateful when the team of nurses got him off her and into a wheelchair. She gave them his most pressing information and watched as they wheeled him away.
She knew she should get in her car and leave. She should go back to work and wait for an update from one of the junior managers. They had been informed of why she was leaving and wouldn’t expect her back anytime soon. Or, at least, they wouldn’t know if they should expect her back anytime soon.
She looked back at the closed sliding doors.
“Just go,” she told herself, but his scent lingered in her nostrils. The fear she’d felt when she—for real—thought she’d lose him there for a moment.
She sighed, heading over to the car.
She would park it, and she would go into the waiting room, and she would stick around for the first assessment by a doctor. She wouldn’t be able to concentrate if she didn’t know exactly what was wrong with him, if it was as serious as she kept thinking it was.
***
The waiting room was small, lined with rows of chairs along each wall and through the middle. It smelled of bleach. She wasn’t enjoying herself. She’d forgotten to bring her cell phone when they left work and had little to occupy herself with. A flat screen TV was showing the news, volume muted, on one wall, and a magazine stand sported a fine selection of the ancient magazines, but that was about it.
So, her mind wandered to Peter’s sallow skin and the dark circles under his eyes. And she’d cracked that joke about him looking like he was dying. Who was the asshole now?
Then the door opened, and a white-coated doctor walked through it, heading straight for her. She couldn’t have been there for more than fifteen minutes and didn’t know if the speedy delivery of a diagnosis was good or bad in Peter’s case. She got to her feet.
“You brought Peter Duncan in?” the doctor asked, his nametag proclaiming him to be Dr. Anthony Lewis.
