Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Declan tried to fight the desire that surged through him at the first touch of Fawn’s lips against his own. He really tried. But it was an attraction he had been fighting for the past four days, five including this one, and her lips tasted so delicious.
His arms moved about the slenderness of her waist to pull her body tightly in against his, at the same time as he gave a groan of capitulation and began to kiss her back with all the pent-up desire roiling inside him.
He was hungry, so fucking hungry for the taste and feel of this slender young woman, that those kisses quickly became a heated devouring.
To the point that Declan lost all sense of time and thought as he bent Fawn back over his arm.
Because only Fawn, kissing her, touching her, mattered to him in this moment.
Fawn returned those kisses with the same passion, lips tasting, teeth biting, her tongue a hot caress against Declan’s as he plundered the burning inferno of her mouth.
But it all came to an abrupt and painful end the moment Declan placed his hands on both her bottom cheeks and tried to lift her off the ground to bring her closer still.
“Fuck!” He reared back as intense pain shot down his back.
“Oh dear God,” Fawn gasped, staring at him in horror as she pulled out of his arms. “What am I doing?” Her hands lifted to cradle either side of her face as she stared at him with self-recrimination in her face.
“You’re my patient, and you’re still recovering from two gunshot wounds.
What I just did was so unprofessional?—”
“Calm down,” Declan interrupted once he had caught his breath enough to be able to speak. “You might have initiated the kiss?—”
“Exactly!”
“But I immediately kissed you back.” He would have done more than kiss her if the pain in his back hadn’t reminded him he was a forty-three-year-old man who no longer bounced back as quickly from injuries he’d received.
“Not because you kissed me,” he continued, “but because it’s something I’ve wanted to do since the moment I first met you and looked into your teasing amber eyes. ”
She stilled. “It is…?”
“Yeah,” he admitted self-derisively. “But I’m also aware that I’m what? Nineteen years older than you?—”
“Age is just a number.”
“That it is,” he allowed. “But translate that number to years and experience, and it’s also a lot of my life when you weren’t even alive. I think it’s time we both went to bed, don’t you? Separately,” he added so that she didn’t misinterpret his comment to mean something else.
“I— Yes. You— I—” She closed her eyes as she shook her head. “You go through now. I’ll just make sure that the kitchen is tidy before I go to my bedroom.”
Declan looked at her searchingly for several long seconds.
The bright color in her cheeks and the darkness of her eyes told him that she was still mortified by what she had initiated.
“Fawn.” He waited until she looked up at him from beneath long lashes.
“If I didn’t hurt like hell, because I’m an old man and need some more painkillers, the two of us wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation. ”
She swallowed. “What would we be doing?”
“We would both be lying naked in my bed as I made love to you until you passed out from all the orgasms I’d give you.”
Fawn gave a choked laugh. “Modest much?” she finally managed to taunt.
He shrugged. “I prefer to think of it as being truthful.”
Fawn knew, from the steadiness of Declan’s gaze, that he meant every word he said.
Even the thought of Declan making love to her, giving her orgasms, lots of orgasms , was enough to send a thrill of pleasure coursing through her body.
Her previous boyfriends had been the same age as her, with little experience or inclination to ensure that the women in their bed experienced the same release they did.
Fawn knew instinctively that Declan wouldn’t be that sort of selfish lover. That he would want the woman in his arms to experience the gamut of physical pleasure before he even thought about his own release. “I’ll bring your pain meds through to your bedroom in a moment.”
He looked as if he would like to return to their previous conversation, but instead, he nodded abruptly. “Just leave them on the bedside table.”
“Where will you be?”
“In the bathroom taking care of this problem.” He glanced down pointedly at the huge bulge at the front of his jeans.
Her cheeks burned merely from thinking about Declan, alone in his en suite bathroom, “taking care of” his engorged cock. “Do you want me to?—”
“No!”
“Okay.” She nodded. “Can I trust you to take your meds?”
His jaw tightened. “I believe we just established that I’m far from being a child, let alone one who needs to be watched twenty-four-seven to make sure I take a couple of bloody pills.”
“So we did,” she acknowledged lightly.
He nodded. “Don’t forget, you aren’t to leave the apartment for any reason. And I do mean, any reason,” he added darkly.
“River—”
“Might be your little brother, but he’s also a grown-arse man who can look after himself.”
He really wasn’t, but Fawn wasn’t about to get into that conversation right now. If River needed her, she would go to him.
“I want your promise on that before I go to my bedroom.” Declan had obviously picked up on something in her expression that made him doubt he could trust her without that promise.
She chose her words carefully. “If I need to go out, for whatever reason, I’ll make sure to tell you first.”
Again, he studied her through narrowed lids. “Make sure that you do.”
“Sir. Yes, sir.” She stood to attention and gave him a mocking salute.
“Little girl, if you were under my command, you would spend more time outside doing punishment press-ups than you would on duty.”
The imagery was so vivid that Fawn found herself smiling. “I’m sorry to say that I’ve only ever managed to get to the count of eight.”
Declan’s brows rose. “You counted them? Well, of course you did.” The frown lifted. “You have a younger brother who has no doubt challenged you to a contest a time or two.”
“When we were younger, and which he always won,” she confirmed before sobering. “I… Declan, are we okay?” She looked up at him imploringly. The last thing she wanted was for those kisses they had shared to make things awkward between them going forward.
“We’re fine,” he dismissed without hesitation. “Another thing about no longer being a teenager is that I don’t spend all my waking hours lusting after women.”
Fawn wasn’t sure whether she felt reassured or insulted by that remark. The plural Declan had used, women instead of woman specifically, certainly displeased her.
But she couldn’t have her cake and eat it too. In other words, she couldn’t want Declan to lust after her, specifically , at the same time as she requested their relationship remain on a professional level of patient and nurse.
Even if the latter wasn’t really what she wanted.
By the time Declan reached the privacy of his bedroom, after checking through the rest of his apartment—even with all the high-tech security in place, he still felt compelled to ensure Fawn’s safety by checking out the whole space himself—the idea of taking his own pleasure had faded into more of an ache than the demand for immediate release.
Instead, he sat on the side of the bed and did what he did every night before getting into bed.
Normally, the photograph of Connall would be sitting on top of the bedside table. But Linus had done a good job earlier of putting away all the photographs Declan kept around the apartment of his son. He had slipped this one into the top drawer of the unit.
It was of Connall and Declan, the two of them lying on the floor after having set up the train set he’d given his young son for Christmas.
Connall would have been about three at the time, with curly blond hair and huge blue eyes set in a laughing face not yet formed into the man he would become— Should have become, Declan corrected himself achingly.
Declan had been only twenty-five, and he only had to look in a mirror to see the differences in himself from then to now.
The young man lying next to the enthralled little boy, as they watched the red train circle the track, still had thick, dark, curly hair, and the lines beside his eyes were from laughter and happiness, not age and sadness.
If Declan was feeling generous, nowadays he would call himself craggy. On the days he wasn’t, he would just call it like it was: he was middle-aged, and looked it, and any hint of real happiness had eluded him for a very long time.
He raised his head to look across the room in the direction of the bedroom across the hallway.
He’d meant what he said earlier; he had wanted to kiss and touch Fawn from the moment he first saw her.
Trouble was, he didn’t have anything else to offer her other than passion.
He had loved once, unwisely, and he associated losing his son with that ill-fated love.
The number of times he had asked himself if Connall had been with him that day, instead of with Bridget and her husband, whether his son would still be safe and here with him.
The answer to that question was always the same. Connall wasn’t here, safe or otherwise. He never would be.
After one last lingering look, Declan put the photograph back in the drawer before closing it and turning his attention to taking the pills Fawn had left on the bedside unit, along with a glass of water.
He’d barely had time to swallow them down when the vibration of his cell phone in his pocket told him he had an incoming call.
A glance at the screen identified that caller. “Linus,” he greeted tersely.
“The one and only,” the young man came back unabashed.
Declan released a heavy sigh, knowing he was redirecting his current frustration onto the other man. “What can I help you with?” he returned in a pleasanter tone.
“Just reporting in. I thought you would want to know that the man your pretty nurse shares her apartment with?—”
“Is named River Meadows, and he’s her younger brother.”
“She told you, huh?”
“She told me, yes. And she might be pretty, very much so, but she isn’t mine.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Looked like she could be to me,” Linus murmured speculatively.
“What else do you have, if anything?” Declan prompted when the other man made no move to end the call after relaying this information. He certainly wasn’t about to get into further conversation about Fawn.
“The thing is…much as I’ve searched, and I really have, I couldn’t find a registration of birth for either the brother or the sister.” Linus sounded deeply puzzled by this anomaly.
Declan recalled Fawn’s remarks from earlier, especially the one about her parents not wanting any “government interference” in their lives. Which, it seemed, had also included registering their children’s births.
“But presumably, they managed to get the necessary paperwork because Fawn works?” Fawn had mentioned that her brother also worked in bars and coffee shops, although both of those businesses could be paying him off the books.
But somehow, Declan didn’t think that would be acceptable to Fawn. She might have loved her parents, but she gave no indication of wanting to live as irresponsibly as they had.
“Brother and sister both applied for a National Insurance number and signed on with a doctor, dentist, etc., when they reached the age of eighteen,” Linus confirmed.
That pretty much tied in with what Fawn had told Declan. To him, this amounted to gross negligence on her parents’ part, but to Fawn, it just seemed normal, probably because it was the only situation she had known growing up.
“What about Koslov?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Still looking for him.”
“Isn’t this taking an unusually long time for you?” Declan knew that Linus was usually able to find whoever he was looking for within hours. Koslov had now been missing for half the afternoon and the whole evening, with Linus apparently no further forward in locating where he was now.
“It happens sometimes, especially if the person I’m looking for is as wily as this guy,” Linus dismissed. “But I will find him, never fear.”
“Maybe ask Nikolai if he’s seen him?” Declan drawled. “He seems to have a way of finding and eliminating any members of the Koslov family who annoy him.”
Lucas gave a snort of laughter. “Already asked and been told, in no uncertain terms, that this member of the Koslov family is of no immediate interest to Nikolai or the bratva.”
As Declan had guessed might be the case. “Did he say when or if it might become so?”
“Nope.” Linus popped the p noisily. “But as Nikolai isn’t one for sharing information, until he decides otherwise, I’m just going to accept his word for now that he hasn’t seen Koslov and keep up my search for him. Let’s face it, he can’t have gone far.”
“Let me know when you find him.”
“Will do.”
“And Linus… Thank you. I appreciate your help on this.”
“Anytime,” the other man assured.
“Thanks,” Declan said again before ending the call.
By which time, his engorged cock had definitely deflated and required absolutely no attention from him!