31. Grayson
31
GRAYSON
T he green curtain that partitioned off various sections of the hospital’s free clinic slid aside, and Harriet’s stressed-out face popped through. “How many more do you want to take? It’s already after five.”
I peered past the “Volunteers Wanted. No Medical Training Required,” sign that we always had up because we were perpetually understaffed, and into the crowded waiting room. “As many as are out there. Nobody gets turned away.”
She shook her head. “You’re always the last one here. Dr. Tahpley bailed an hour ago, and Zigley didn’t even show for her shift.”
I finished up the last of my notes from the patient before and handed the file over to Harriet. She groaned good-naturedly at the essay I’d written on the top page that someone—probably her—would have to transcribe into the system later.
“I’m not the last one. You’re here too. ”
“I’m as big a dope as you are.”
I slung my arm around her shoulder and squeezed it. “But isn’t this so much more rewarding than anything else we get to do here?”
She grumbled about actually getting paid being somewhat rewarding but I knew she didn’t mean it.
I’d meant every word. The hours I volunteered at the clinic were one of the best parts of my week, and I never left until the last patient had been seen, even if that meant I was here hours after closing time.
“Timothy Jones,” Harriet called. “You’re up next.”
Timothy stood from a seat to my left, and I moved to greet him.
But my gaze slid past him to the triage area at his back, and I froze.
The triage nurse, Teri, was battling to get a blood pressure cuff on a blond-haired girl of about five, who clearly wasn’t having it. But it was the two adults with her that had my muscles locking into place.
The man was familiar, and his jacket gave away why.
A Slayers MC patch sat proudly over his chest, and though he was preoccupied with getting the little girl to cooperate, I remembered him from the night at the morgue.
When he’d been protecting a woman I hadn’t been able to stop worrying about since.
Kara.
She stood beside him now, unshed tears glistening in her eyes as she watched on. She said something to the man, and he shot something back at her, but she was insistent, and when he eventually gave a nod, she hurried from the room, disappearing down the hallway .
Without even thinking about it, I followed.
“Gray!” Harriet called. “Where are you going?”
I blinked and turned back.
She had confusion written all over her expression.
The patient looked equally baffled. “Should I sit back down or…”
I was here to do a job. These people, especially these people who couldn’t afford insurance, needed me to be on my A game.
Normally, I was. I was one of the best. I wasn’t arrogant, it was just the truth.
But I couldn’t do my job when she was here. I glanced back at the hallway she’d disappeared down, the sense of urgency to follow her completely overwhelming.
“Just…wait,” I told the patient. “Wait in the cubicle. I’ll be back, I promise. I’ll be back.”
I apologized as I walked backward, until my ass hit Harriet’s desk. She squinted at me with questioning eyes, and I told her the same thing. “I just need a minute. Don’t send anyone home. Just…wait.”
I spun around and sprinted down the hallway.
She couldn’t have gone far.
I glanced at the man and the girl as I passed. He’d pulled her onto his lap and was holding her tight, keeping her calm while the nurse performed the initial basic tests.
That was good. I didn’t feel like getting into a fight with him today. We’d come damn close that night at the morgue, and fighting there would have been one thing.
But here, in the hospital I worked at, where I was supposed to protect my patients, would have been completely unacceptable .
I rounded the corner and stopped in the empty hallway. It was long and had an unobstructed view from where I stood with my heart pounding. If she’d run up there, I’d see her, surely. She was half a foot shorter than I was. There was no way she could be that fast on short legs.
Plus if that child back there was hers, instinct told me she wouldn’t have gone too far.
I opened the nearest door and stuck my head inside. “Hello?”
A sharp gasp from the corner and big brown eyes, wet with tears, locked on mine. Her gaze slid down my face to my white doctor’s coat, and she moved for the doorway I was blocking.
“I’m so sorry,” she mumbled. “I know I’m not supposed to be in here.”
But I was standing in the doorway, blocking it completely.
And I couldn’t move for staring at her.
She was pretty, all that dark-brown hair, pulled back in a simple ponytail that tendrils had escaped. They framed her soft face, kissing her temples and jaw.
I raised a hand on autopilot to tuck the stray strands behind her ear.
She flinched away.
I blinked. Realizing what I’d been about to do.
Fuck.
The expression in her eyes instantly changed to one of fear, and horror rocketed through me. Scaring her had been the absolute last thing I wanted.
I drew my hands back, putting them up, fingers open, palms facing her, as nonthreatening as possible. “Please don’t go. I came in here to cry too, and it would be nice to not be the only one.”
She stopped. Blinked. But at least she didn’t seem so scared anymore. She’d also stopped crying. “Really?”
I gave her a half-smile, just relieved the fear had disappeared from her expression. “Okay, no. But I swear, I’m harmless.” I picked up my doctor’s badge. “I’m a doctor. Dr. Grayson. See? But you don’t have to call me that. Most people just call me Gray. Or you can call me Fred, if you want.”
She blinked. “Um…I think Dr. Grayson is fine.”
I let out an overexaggerated sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God. Because Fred gets shortened to Red, and then to…” I gave a fake shudder. “Ed.” I screwed up my face at her. “I cannot pull off Ed.”
A muscle near her mouth twitched, and something inside me celebrated like I’d just made a touchdown from the twenty-yard line.
If she thought I was even remotely funny, then my entire day was made.
I wanted this woman to like me. I could already tell she wasn’t the type to care about money or the doctorate I’d worked my ass off for.
Which only left me with funny. And sweet.
Or whatever the hell else she wanted me to be. But I was betting on funny and sweet for right now at least.
“Maybe you should just stick to Dr. Grayson,” she admitted.
I dropped my mouth open in mock outrage. “You mean you don’t think I can pull off Ed either? This is very upsetting.” I picked a glove from the box mounted on the wall and breathed into it like I was hyperventilating.
Then winked at her and blew one long, deep breath into it, inflating the glove into a balloon and tying it where it would normally snap around your wrist. “That’s your daughter out there, right?” I jerked my head back toward triage.
Her mouth pulled into a straight line. “Yes.”
“With your husband?”
She shook her head quickly. “Oh, no. He’s just a friend.”
Interesting. There was no wedding ring on her finger, but that guy out there had protected her like she was his.
I’d always respected marriage vows. I’d never once hit on a woman wearing a ring. Never had any desire to try to tempt one away from their partner like some of my college roommates had made a sport out of doing. It had been a whole thing. Picking up lonely wives in bars whose husbands ignored them. Young college guys and lonely wives went together like peanut butter and jelly.
Just not for me.
But this woman, hell. Maybe I would have been tempted. But all the better if she was single.
I hid a smile and picked up a Sharpie from the container of pens and markers on the exam room table, scribbling some little marks over my makeshift balloon.
Then I flipped it upside down and presented it to her. “It’s an elephant,” I explained. “See? The thumb is the trunk…”
She cocked her head to one side, studying my creation, clearly trying to decipher my squiggles and lines .
Clearly, I wasn’t as clever as I thought.
“I promise, I’m a much better doctor than I am an artist.” I pushed it toward her again. “Maybe your daughter will like it though.”
She took it from my fingers, holding it gingerly, carefully, like it was breakable. “That’s very kind of you. Thank you. I should get back to her.”
I didn’t want her to leave. Not because I liked the way her lips softly curled into a smile when her daughter was mentioned. It wasn’t even that she reminded me of someone else. It was that she was in danger, and I didn’t want to see the pink in her cheeks replaced with the bluish tinge of her sister’s in the morgue.
The tinge all dead bodies had once the life had been strangled out of them.
“Can I make a suggestion?” I asked her. “As a doctor who has studied psychology.”
She paused. “That’s your specialty?”
I frowned at her. “No, my specialty is glove balloon animals. Was that not obvious?”
She let out a small laugh. “Right, of course. My mistake.”
I moved out of the doorway, so she didn’t feel caged in, and leaned my ass back against the bed. “You’re clearly upset, and kids feel that, even when you think you’re hiding it well. I’m a good listener. It’s kinda what I get paid for, and people generally feel better when they share what’s on their minds.”
She touched her face self-consciously. “Is it that bad?”
Not a thing about her face was bad. “You just seem like you’re having a rough day.”
She plucked at the trunk of my balloon elephant, squeezing the tip between her fingers. “It’s not just today. It’s every day.”
I frowned, concerned again for her, but this time for a different reason. “Your friend out there…he’s not hurting you, is he?”
She shook her head quickly. “No. It’s not him.” She looked up at me. “Have you ever lost someone close to you?”
The question took me by surprise. I wasn’t used to having patients question me about my thoughts and feelings, and it was oddly uncomfortable.
The urge to make a joke came on strong, but there was a pleading in her eyes. A desperate need for her to not be the only person in the room going through something.
One I recognized because I saw it often in patients.
Even though I saw their pain, it had been easily kept away from my own.
But Kara’s pushed past the barriers I’d put up in an instant. In the same way she’d gotten under my skin the very first time I’d laid eyes on her just because she reminded me of someone else.
I found myself saying, “I lost my wife. It was a very long time ago. But she was murdered.”
Kara gasped. “My sister was murdered too. Just a few weeks ago.”
I swallowed hard. I didn’t want to lie to her. “I know. I saw you at the morgue the night you identified her body.”
She blinked, and then recognition settled on her pretty face. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even recognize you.” She bit her lip. “And I’m sorry for the way Hawk spoke to you that night too. You didn’t deserve to be attacked like that for just doing your job.”
I didn’t tell her I hadn’t been there on the hospital’s dime. It was understandable why she’d assume I might be. Medical professionals weren’t completely out of place in morgues, and I didn’t want to get Ron in any trouble for letting me in.
I cleared my throat. “Have you talked to the police about your sister? About the way she was killed?”
Kara nodded. “They have some suspects.”
“Did they mention the possibility of a serial killer by any chance?”
Kara looked at me sharply.
That expression was all I needed to know they had. She had that fear in her eye again, and so I spilled forth details I hadn’t said out loud to anyone in a very long time. “My wife was killed in the same way your sister was.”
Kara shook her head. “The police said that was a possibility, but there are other people…people much more likely to want her dead.”
I wanted to reach out and squeeze her fingers. Reassure her in some way, except there were no reassurances here.
I stared into Kara’s worried eyes. “I don’t want to scare you. Truly, that’s the last thing I want. But my wife had a sister too.”
Kara stilled in front of me. “Why are you telling me that?”
I didn’t want to tell her, but for her own safety, she needed to know. “Because she was murdered too. Just a few weeks before my wife. ”
She shook her head, stepping backward toward the door. “That doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
Except it did. My gut instinct swore that this was history repeating itself.
But this time, I had the ability to stop a woman from dying. I’d failed once before, and I didn’t want to do that again.
I couldn’t stop myself reaching for her hand, stopping her from walking away. “It does, Kara. I’m sure of it. I saw the marks on your sister’s body. They’re nearly identical to the ones that were found on my wife and her sister.”
She tried to pull away, but all I could see was my wife’s cold, dead, strangulated body. Her eyes no longer warm and brown like Kara’s. Her cheeks no longer flushed pink with good health.
All I saw was the deathly blue tinge in her lips. The waxy sheen on her skin. The heart-stopping knowledge that no matter how many times I pumped her chest, no matter how many breaths I breathed past her cold lips, she wasn’t coming back.
“No!” Kara’s voice held a hint of panic. “No! Let me go!”
I blinked, staring down at where my hand held hers.
My fingers were wrapped around hers. Horror filled me at the realization I was scaring her.
Hurting her.
I instantly let go.
Hawk’s fist connected with my face. Something cracked, though I wasn’t sure if it was my nose or his knuckle. Pain exploded in my face, and I stumbled back, my vision blurring and blood pouring.
I hadn’t even seen him coming .
I smacked into the counter, catching myself before I could hit the floor, and blinking rapidly, trying to shake off the fuzziness in my head.
By the time it cleared, Hawk was gone.
And so was Kara.