Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 117992 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 590(@200wpm)___ 472(@250wpm)___ 393(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 117992 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 590(@200wpm)___ 472(@250wpm)___ 393(@300wpm)
Liar.
My fingers ran up his hairy calf, round with muscle and warm with body heat, until I encountered more scarring.
“What happened to you?” I murmured under my breath.
The last time I’d seen Zach, I’d had the pleasure of inadvertently walking in on him while he’d been getting dressed. It’d been the catalyst for me hatching my plan to finally confess my feelings to the older man. I’d drooled over his gorgeous body for a good fifteen seconds before he’d even realized I was there. And while he’d borne the scars of war on parts of his body, I most definitely would have remembered the damage to his leg that I currently felt.
I silently blamed the medic in me as I stepped out of the room long enough to set my phone’s flashlight on the lowest setting. When I returned to the room, I pulled up his pant leg to reveal heavily scarred skin from ankle to knee. The joint itself was covered with both jagged and straight scars. The skin was pink and raw looking—proof that the injury was fresh and probably still healing. Someone with a mangled knee like this wouldn’t have been able to fight Davis in the parking lot. Or race over with his gun drawn when he saw me freaking out by the car.
Unless he was a stubborn-assed army soldier.
Had he been in a combat incident? Was this the result of an IED? The marks on his lower leg definitely looked like the result of shrapnel but the knee itself looked like it had sustained more damage. Gunshot maybe? Or maybe it was both gunshot and shrapnel? The surgical scars surrounding Zach’s knee were clear enough.
I ran my fingers over the twisted lines, trying to imagine the pain of an injury like this. If his brother had been notified of a combat injury, Jake would have told the rest of us because we’d become a family over the years. Even if Jake had decided to keep it to himself, we would have known something was wrong beyond the regular amount of worrying Jake always did about his brother after he left for his latest deployment. The way we all worried…
Zach shifted in his sleep, pressing his leg further into my touch and letting out a breath. I wanted to stay connected to him, lie next to him and wrap my arms around him to hold him tight and keep the pain away. But I was nothing to him. No one. The child of a friend, that was all.
After taking his vitals as gently as I could, I forced myself to pull away and tuck him under the covers. The one indulgence I allowed myself was to strip his holster, belt, and pants off so he would be more comfortable. If I snuck a peek at the way he looked in tight boxer-briefs, well, it was part and parcel of being a paramedic. No one needed to know. I shoved my equipment back in the bag and kicked it under the bed in case I needed it again when I checked on him in a few hours, but when I walked out to the family room to make a bed out of the old sofa for myself, I saw Min and Leah in the middle of a hot and heavy make-out session there.
I turned back to my room to wait them out, taking a seat on the other side of the small bed from Zach. I didn’t dare turn on a light or even use my phone for fear of waking him, so it shouldn’t have surprised me that I fell asleep.
What did surprise me was waking up with my face pressed against a warm T-shirt that smelled like heaven and my arm wrapped around a firm body. My leg was thrown over one of Zach’s, and if I hadn’t woken when I did, I’d probably have been humping his thigh soon enough.
I heard my phone beeping and without thinking, I leaned across Zach to grab it off the nightstand. In my haste to silence it, my fingers hit the switch for the lamp instead. I tried turning it off but managed to jar the entire nightstand instead, causing one of my textbooks to hit the floor with a resounding thud. Before I could even react, a heavy arm was pressed against my throat, pinning me to the mattress. I gasped as my airway was cut off.
“Who are you?” Zach snarled at me. I didn’t recognize his voice, and for the first time since I’d met the older man, I was afraid of him. “Where are the others?”
I shook my head because I couldn’t draw in enough oxygen to manage any words.
“How many are there?” Zach demanded as he looked frantically around the room. The harshness in his expression was crippling. My heart felt like it was going to pound out of my chest as I realized he wasn’t seeing me at all.