Lover Undercover (18 page)

“Oh.” That rang a bell. Maybe her father or, more likely, one of the handful of former classmates she’d run into had mentioned something about Tyler starting a construction company several years back.

He stood in the middle of her tidy kitchen, looking incongruous and extremely masculine next to her lemon-yellow curtains and matching dish towels. Heavens, he was…something. The mature, logical voice in her head momentarily regressed to high school and squealed,
Oh. My. God. Hell-raising, cherry-popping Tyler Longfoot is standing in your kitchen, about to drop his pants
. Then she remembered why. Shaking off the disturbing mental lapse, she inched toward the door. “Let me get some supplies. I’ll be right back.”

Get a grip, Ellie. He’s the one who should be feeling light-headed, not you
. She hurried to the hall closet to retrieve her medical bag.

Slightly winded, she skidded into the kitchen and saw him standing with his jeans undone and hanging low on his hips, hands propped on her solid, butcher-block table.

“This work for you, Doc?”

Depending on the caliber of the bullet and where, exactly, he’d been hit, she could have a comparatively easy extract-and-stitch job, or something requiring sedation, an MRI, and a couple hours of intricate surgery. Better to keep him upright and theoretically mobile until she determined the severity of his injury.

“Yes, that’s good,” she replied in her best calm doctor voice. After scrubbing her hands in her deep farmhouse sink, she took a pair of rubber gloves from her bag.

She snapped them on, moved a chair into position behind him with her foot, and sat. Then she dug around in her bag and placed supplies on the table. When she had everything organized, she said, “Okay, I’m going to lower your jeans and shorts as gently as I can, but you might feel some tugging if any fabric adhered to the wound.”

“Well, Doc, I’m behind on my laundry, so it’s just jeans tonight. Hopefully that simplifies things.” He twisted to look at her as he spoke, causing the jeans to sink lower. A heartbeat later she heard his quick intake of air as she pulled one side down to give her better access to the wound.

“Sorry. This could be painful. We should probably stop right here, slap a pressure compress on and call an ambulance.”

“I’m fine, Ellie,” he insisted through a clenched jaw. “Just do what you gotta do.”

“Okaaay. Face front and be still.” He turned around, and she concentrated on the matter at hand. Within a moment, she’d carefully probed the thin, fairly shallow line of the wound and located the…bullet? Pellet? She was no munitions expert. It was a small metal projectile, embedded about a quarter-inch deep in the spectacularly carved indentation of his buttock, between the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. But when she gently separated the margins of the wound for a better look, her patient sucked in a harsh breath.

“Son of a— Are you amputating half my ass back there?”

“Not yet. Don’t distract me.”

“Take your time.” His clenched jaw didn’t quite muffle the sarcasm.

She loaded a syringe with local anesthetic. “Can you count to three for me?”

“Sure. One, two—”

Ellie jammed the needle in and depressed the plunger.

Tyler swayed like a palm tree in a high wind. “Jesus
effing
Christ! What happened to three?”

Ellie pulled the needle out and placed it on the table. While waiting for the anesthesia to take effect, she explained, “Three is where you tense up and a little shot ends up feeling like a knuckleball hitting your muscle at ninety miles per hour.”

“Oh, well, thank you very much. That felt like eighty-five miles per hour, tops.”

“You’re welcome.” Using gauze, she dabbed blood away from the injury. “Let’s give it a minute to work, and then I’ll remove the bullet and you’ll be as good as new in no time.”

A skeptical grunt served as his reply.

She selected a long, slender pair of tweezers from the table and lightly touched the wound. No reaction from the patient. “Want to tell me how this happened?”

“Would you believe, self-inflicted?”

She laughed. “Not a chance. Nor will I believe your dog, cat, bird, or iguana accidently discharged your gun. Nor, at this hour, will I believe it was a hunting accident.”

“Worth a try.”

“Try the truth,” she recommended, enjoying a moment of triumph as she snagged the small metal round between the tweezers and extracted it. She flushed the wound and pressed more gauze to the site.

He sighed. “I was down at Rawley’s Pub, having a drink and, um, let’s say
chatting
with Lou Ann Doubletree.”

Lou Ann had been a year ahead of Ellie in school, but she remembered the tall, sandy-haired blonde well enough. The older girl boasted two particularly unforgettable features. “Lou Ann Double D?”

“For a girl who’s not fond of her own nickname, you’re awful quick to toss out someone else’s.”

“She
liked
hers. She was proud of the body parts inspiring it.”

“They are inspirational, you gotta admit.”

“So I’m told,” she said, doing a mental eye roll. What was it with men and mammary glands? She tied off the thread on a surgical needle and prepared to start stitching. “So, you were at Rawley’s, chatting with Lou Ann, and…”

“She’s on-again-off-again with Junior Tillman. Remember him?”

The name sounded familiar. Her memory called up a wide, burly guy with a booming voice and a proclivity for smashing empty beer cans on his forehead whenever the Buffalos scored a touchdown. She completed the first stitch. “Beefy guy. Your year. Had a voice like a bullhorn?”

“That’s him. Anyway, according to Lou Ann, they’re currently off, but Junior showed up tonight with his drink most definitely on, and a slightly different recollection of where they’d left things.”

“So he
shot
you? I can’t believe you haven’t already called the cops.” Despite her agitation, she added another small, tidy stitch to the meticulous line. It would be a travesty to scar such perfection.

“No need to get all worked up. He went after me with the coon chaser he keeps in the gun rack of his pickup. He wasn’t aiming to kill me, just stake his claim.”

“Stake his… Oh my God, you’re all hopeless.” She tied off the final suture, cut the thread, and tossed the scissors on the table.

“Not my way of thinking, Doc. I’m just trying to explain what was going through Junior’s half-rocked mind. He’s going to feel real bad about this once he sleeps off the booze.”

“He can sleep it off in a cell,” she said firmly.

Tyler made a negative sound. “Junior’s a damn good builder, plus he’s got a four-year-old boy with a baby mama over in Ashland. If he’s in jail, it’s going to be real tough for him to make child-support payments. Then the kid suffers for Junior’s bourbon-fueled bad judgment.”

“He
shot
you. I’m obligated to notify the authorities. It’s nonnegotiable.” Considering the matter settled, she affixed a bandage over the stitches. “You’re done.”

He craned his neck to look at his bandaged cheek, then hauled up his jeans and turned around. Those hypnotic green eyes captured hers. His lips curved up in a slow, simmering smile. “Everything’s negotiable.”

Melody’s words from the diner floated through Ellie’s mind.
Roger’s ideal woman has a whole lot of experience and very few boundaries.

Practicing medicine wasn’t a gig for the easily shocked, so she didn’t see boundaries as an issue. But experience? That was another matter. Maybe the answer stood before her, in the form of a walking, talking wealth of sexual know-how? Medically speaking, he also qualified as a walking, talking female libido enhancer.

“C’mon Doc, what would I have to do to persuade you to keep this between us?”

Acknowledgments

Getting this book ready for publication was like that reality show where the woman doesn’t know she’s pregnant and then, BAM! She’s havin’ a baby, and it’s a mad scramble for everyone to get where they need to be. Big, huge, eternal THANKS to Heather Howland, editor extraordinaire, for being so steady, and dang-it,
cool
, when things started to move fast. Same to Sue Winegardner. Not sure what I did right to score you as an assistant editor, (or, hmmm…what you did wrong), but I thank my lucky stars and offer you my condolences.

Another round of thanks to…

My sister, former LAPD and Irvine PD officer, and my LAPD homicide detective brother-in-law, for answering my questions about police procedure and homicide investigations, and not cringing too badly whe
n I took unbounded creative license with all of it.

Maggie Kelley, for encouraging me to enter this story in the Cleveland Rocks Romance Contest, and the contest judges, for liking it.

Author Lynne Marshall, my amazing, talented writing mentor, who gently and patiently critiqued this story into something submit-table.

My husband, for responding, “I don’t know, honey, I’ve never been,” to all my strip-club questions. You, sir, are a keeper.

Fellow Entangled authors Robin Bielman and Hayson Manning, for letting me hang with you and pretend some of your awesomeness rubs off on me.

About the Author

Award winning author Samanthe Beck lives in Malibu, California, with her husband, their son, Kitty the furry Ninja, and Bebe the trash talkin’ Chihuahua. When not writing fun and sexy contemporary romance, or napping on her beach towel with her face snuggled to her Kindle, she searches for the perfect ten dollar wine to pair with Lunchables.

Connect with Sam via
Facebook
,
Twitter
, or through her website at
www.samanthebeck.com
to check her progress on that never-ending quest, or to get the latest on her upcoming Brazens!

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