Chapter 68 Jace
JACE
“Dude, you looked like the Cryptkeeper.” Axel popped another potato chip into his mouth. How the guy managed to keep his physique in check while eating like that was beyond me.
“Can you stop chomping?” I snapped. “I’m pretty sure there are quieter ways to consume food.”
Ryker smirked.
“Thank God you’re getting out today. Hospital rooms make you cranky.” Axel grinned, completely unaffected.
“Listening to your incessant chewing makes me cranky.”
Axel locked eyes with me and, with the deliberate slowness of a man who knew exactly how to push buttons, popped another potato chip into his damn mouth. He crunched it between his teeth with open lips, curled into a smirk that screamed, What are you gonna do about it?
Most days, I adored the man I considered family. But some days, I wanted to shove potato chips down his throat.
“How’s our favorite patient?” Blake strolled into the room.
“Any update on the ETA?” Scarlett asked, her delightful voice full of hope that made something in my chest warm.
“Discharging takes time.” Blake took a stethoscope from around his neck. “Paperwork, signatures, more paperwork …”
“Dude, we talked about this,” I said, batting away his hand. “There are plenty of other doctors in this hospital who can listen to my heartbeat.”
“But none of them are as handsome as me.” He pressed the cold metal against my skin anyway. “Besides, some of your nurses started a betting pool on when you’d finally snap. I’ve got twenty bucks riding on makes it to discharge.”
I glared at him. He was making me sound like a mean patient. I wasn’t. I was just beyond done with this whole stabbed in the jugular, poked and prodded, woken every thirty-four seconds to check vitals situation.
“Strong as a horse,” Blake announced with a wink at Scarlett.
Her smile lit up the entire room. Every time someone came to check my vitals, I could see her tense with fear that this might be the moment they found something bad. But they wouldn’t.
“These bedsheets are uncomfortable,” I grumbled.
Blake tossed his stethoscope around his neck. “You know, for a patient who made a miraculous recovery, you sure find a lot of things to gripe about.”
“What’d you expect? A billionaire probably never endured anything less than thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton,” Axel said, popping. Another. Fucking. Chip. Into his mouth.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
I swore he was amplifying the sound just for me.
“I’ve spent more nights in this hospital bed than I care to. I would like to go home to sheets that don’t feel like they were woven from the hopes and dreams of sandpaper.”
“We’re working on it,” Blake assured me.
“Dakota will be here shortly with your car,” Scarlett chirped.
From across the room, Axel looked up from his chips while I snapped my attention to her.
“You let her drive my Mercedes?” My prized Mercedes. The one I had custom-ordered? The one with hand-stitched seats made from leather so fine, it probably released oxytocin?
“Er … I didn’t want to leave your side.” Scarlett shrugged with a sheepish smile that somehow made it impossible to be genuinely angry.
“Why didn’t you call my driver?” I asked.
“Why would I?” Scarlett replied.
“It’s his job.”
Her mouth fell open. “It … didn’t cross my mind.”
God. Fucking. Dammit. Scarlett wasn’t used to this lifestyle, I realized.
In her world, if you needed a ride, you called a friend, not one of the several employees I kept on payroll.
I’d have to train her how to call my staff—correction: our staff—for help.
But for now, Jesus fucking Christ, her friend was driving my prized car.
As if reading the horror on my face, she assured, “Dakota’s a really good driver.”
“Has she ever been in a car crash?” I asked, sitting up straighter, ignoring the twinge in my side from where Marcus had landed a good blow. “Even a fender bender? A parking lot incident? A near miss that made her gasp?”
“Dakota?” Axel stepped forward, thankfully halting his next round of chip terrorism. His voice had changed, carrying an edge.
“She probably lives downtown,” I realized in horror.
“Does she even have a car of her own? Because if she doesn’t, she probably doesn’t drive that often, which means she could be out of practice with how bad people can drive downtown.
” The thought of my baby in inexperienced hands made my heart monitor beep a little faster.
“What’s her last name?” Axel’s tone was borderline panicked.
But Scarlett was too busy patting my hand to notice. “Relax. She’s a really good driver. She’s doing me a favor so that I can stay by your side and help you downstairs.”
Bloody hell. It was impossible to get mad at Scarlett when she was being this damn thoughtful, but so help me, if Dakota so much as scratched my car … oh, who was I kidding? I wouldn’t do anything. But I would be annoyed. In capital letters. With exclamation points. ANNOYED!!!
That car was my baby. My chrome-and-leather firstborn.
“Dude, tell me Scarlett’s friend isn’t Dakota Blackwood.” Axel’s voice had dropped an octave, like he was invoking the name of a demon.
Blackwood. That was why Dakota looked familiar to me when I’d met her and Scarlett that night at the bar. It had been years since I’d seen Knox’s sister, and she’d only seen me in court back then.
Recognition swept through the room. I could feel it in the sudden stillness, see it in the way Blake and Ryker stilled.
How had I missed this? With everything spiraling around us, I should have connected the dots the moment I saw her. That nagging sense of familiarity, the way something about her face wouldn’t let go. I’d brushed it off instead of digging deeper.
It had been over a decade, sure, but still. Dakota Blackwood. The Dakota.
The last name also drew Scarlett’s attention. “How did you know her last name?”
Axel threw his head back and growled, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“You know her too?” Scarlett’s eyes darted between us—from Axel to me. Evidently, Scarlett knew that I’d met Dakota in the past. But based on the shock on her face, she’d been under the impression our history was small. “How do you know her too?”
Before I could reply, Axel ignored her question and said, “Dude.” He tossed his bag of chips onto his chair and brushed off his hands. “Super glad you’re not dead. I gotta run.”
“Wait, you can’t rush off!” Scarlett stepped in front of him, evidently putting a pin in her line of questions to focus on the more pressing matter first. “You guys said you’d help me get Jace into his place.”
“I’ll be fine without him,” I assured her, suddenly fascinated by this development.
Axel, the man who once told a Victoria’s Secret model she wasn’t his type, was practically vibrating with anxiety as he tried to make another break for the door.
“No.” Scarlett planted herself in front of Axel like a tiny, determined roadblock. “You promised to help me. God forbid I get him up to his penthouse and he falls down or something.”
“The guy’s a billionaire. He can probably order a custom robot to lift his ass off the ground and have it delivered within the hour. Now move.” He tried to sidestep her.
“No.” Simple. Definitive.
Axel tried to step around her again. I cocked my head, watching him. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ever seen him this flustered. After his antagonistic chip chomping, it was all sorts of satisfying.
“You promised, and you are not backing out of that promise.” Scarlett put her hands on her hips.
Axel towered over her. He could probably pick her up with two fingers and set her aside if he wanted to, but Scarlett was acting like she was ten feet tall, glaring at him with the ferocity of someone three times her size.
“Yeah, that was before you dropped a little bombshell.” Axel’s eyes darted to the door like he was calculating his chances of escape.
“How do you know Dakota Blackwood?” she asked, not budging an inch.
Axel glared at me. “How did you not tell me about this, dude?”
“I was busy being stabbed in the neck.” I gestured vaguely to my bandages.
“Before. Before you got stabbed in the neck. Why didn’t you tell me that she’s friends with Dakota Blackwood?”
“Didn’t know her last name until this moment.
And even if I did, believe it or not, you’re not the first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning, Axel.
I have other things going on. Like running a company.
And occasionally getting stabbed. Besides, if I tried to connect the dots with all the women you have problems with, I would run out of string before I hit the halfway mark. ”
“She’s not some woman. She’s THE woman. The only one I want to avoid more than I want to avoid the plague, tax audits, and my mother’s date setups combined.”
I arched my eyebrows. “Axel Pierce is trembling at the mention of a woman? How, pray tell, did she work this magic, and more importantly, can she teach me?”
“I’ve been friends with Dakota for a long time,” Scarlett said, a calculating look crossing her face. “She never mentioned you.”
“Bahahahahah.” Ryker slapped his knee, appearing from wherever he’d been lurking. “That’s brutal, man.”
“Shut up, dude.” Axel looked like he might tackle Ryker next.
“Ouch,” I said, wincing in exaggerated sympathy. “That has to hurt worse than my stab wound.”
“Good,” Axel said. “I don’t want her to talk about me because I never want to talk to her again. In fact, I never want to see her again, so if you could just move aside, I want to get out of here before she—”
“Oh. My. God.” Dakota stepped into the room, her eyes trained on Axel with laser-like focus.
Axel shut his eyes, letting out a deep exhale with curses like a man facing execution. “Kill me now.”
“Can someone hand me that bag of chips that Axel discarded?” I smirked, settling back against my pillows. “I think I’m going to enjoy this.”