Better when He's Bold

If I could rip my heart out of my chest and physically hand it to her for safekeeping, I would. For a long time I had avoided collecting things, avoided feeling attached to much of anything because of the fear that it would get taken away from me. I could tell by the look in Brysen’s eyes and the slant of her mouth that nothing was going to take this girl away from me, and that made risking everything I had for her a no-brainer.

“I’m not going to tell you that I’ll take care of you anymore. But I am going to make it my mission from here on out to see to it that you can take care of yourself. You already have the fight in you; we just need to give you a little oomph and some street smarts to go with it.”

She lifted a blond eyebrow at me and the conversation was cut short as the doctor finally made an appearance. He poked and probed at her until she growled at him, and he told her he did indeed want another CT scan of her head. That knot on her temple seemed to be a concern, but as long as she was awake and looking at me, I wasn’t going to freak out.

Before a couple nurses showed up to wheel her off to radiology, she flashed me a grin that looked an awful lot like the one Dovie had given to Bax and asked me, “Do I get a crown if I get to be your queen?”

That made me burst out laughing, which had the nurses giving me a scolding look.

“I’ll give you whatever you want.” And I would until both the parts of the man I was ran out of things to give.

We weren’t really a good bet on making this work, but I was a guy who liked the long shot, and I always put my money on the long shot. I was hoping the fact that we were undeniably in love with one another put the odds on our side.

THEY WANTED TO KEEP Brysen in the hospital overnight. Her CT scan came back all clear, but that knot on the side of her head was some cause for concern, so they just wanted to keep her under observation. Since there was only room for one of us to stay with her in the room they moved her to, I let Karsen curl up in the chair for the night and wandered off to find out what happened to Booker.

Karsen had informed me that he had taken two bullets in the chest. One went right through his shoulder and the other had lodged somewhere in a rib near his lung. Apparently, since the shots had been fired through the door, the momentum had been slowed enough to prevent the bullets from doing irreparable damage. The hulking giant was going to make it just as soon as he came out of surgery to dig the bullet out of his rib cage. He was still in post-op when I located the wing of the hospital he was in, and since I wasn’t family and he was still unconscious, no one would agree to let me in to see him. I was annoyed by that, but could understand it, and I think I shocked the hell out of the stone-faced nurse I was agreeing with when I told her I needed all his medical bills and expenses forwarded to me.

Ex-cons who offered themselves out to be hired muscle for other criminals weren’t the type of guys that had medical insurance, and even if his actions had been self-serving, Booker had still taken a bullet for my girl when I wasn’t there. There was no way I wasn’t going to repay the guy in the only way I could. Plus I liked him; he reminded me of Bax and I understood his motivations, the things that made him tick. He was the kind of guy I wanted to have on hand moving forward.

I spent the night in the waiting room. I wasn’t ready to leave Brysen alone just yet, even though I knew the direct threat to her was gone. I must have drifted off while I was sitting there, because when my hand that was braced under my chin got nudged, my head fell to the side and I jerked away to find Titus looming over me with two cups of coffee. I blinked my eyes and yawned and took the proffered cup as he frowned down at me.

“Did you sleep sitting like that?”

I yawned again and shook my head a little bit to shake out the sleepy fog that was gathered between my ears.

“Yeah. They only allowed one of us in the room with her and I let her sister stay. What are you doing here so early?”

He took a sip out of his own Styrofoam cup and looked at me over the rim. “Had to get the girls’ statements, and now that Booker is awake, I need to talk to him as well. Seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of attempted kidnapping and attempted murder. I don’t see any issues shutting it down pretty quick as a self-defense shooting.”

I rolled my neck around on my shoulders until there was a pop loud enough that people on the other side of the hospital could hear it.

“Good. He was fixated on her. He blamed Brysen for her mom crashing into his parents while she was drinking and driving. His rage was totally misplaced and misguided. She didn’t have anything do with the reason he was so infuriated.”

Titus snorted and reached up to adjust his tie.

“Someone is always having to pay for the sins of their parents.” I didn’t know all of Titus’s history, but I knew his and Bax’s mom had a major drinking problem and had a history of going to bed with really dangerous men. Bax’s dad was a murderous, cold-blooded mobster, and Titus’s old man was doing life in prison for a killing spree that included three cops as his victims. My own father had left a legacy of deceit and dishonesty that I never wanted to be associated with, so I understood the point he was trying to make.

“It never seems to get any easier, does it?” He sounded gruff and I couldn’t imagine how much harder it was for him, constantly trying to fight the good fight and hold the moral high ground in a place that was steadily sinking into the rot and mire. He had already had to compromise his morals in terms of pretending he didn’t know exactly what Bax and I were up to, and I wasn’t really sure how much more tension could be added to that tightrope he was walking before it snapped under his feet.