Ch. 19 – Prem
P rem had questions.
Mostly about the penis tattoo stamped on Layla’s forehead. That, and the tantalizing scarlet corset laced up over her white tank top.
But first order of business: Save the camel.
As soon as he’d pulled his SUV up the long, gravel road, Layla had waved him over to the camel’s pen situated on the far side of a small ranch house. She’d pointed out a patch of foxglove she’d discovered half buried under a mound of hay just inside the pen. Most animals instinctively avoided the poisonous plant with its telltale pink bell flowers, but Claude could have accidentally clipped it up in a mouthful of hay.
Now, Prem moved into the large pen, his eyes quickly adjusting to the dim light coming from the nearby house. One look at the camel’s dilated pupils, swollen face, and twitching muscles told him that Layla’s intuition was spot on, as usual.
“Foxglove poisoning,” he confirmed.
“Is Claude going to die?” asked a tiny, trembling voice. Prem looked up surprised to see a small, dark-haired girl hanging on the outside of the pen. A muscled man, his arms sleeved in tattoos, stood next to the girl, his large hand splayed protectively on her back.
In a moment, Layla was next to the father-daughter duo. She stroked the young girl’s curly hair. “It’s okay, Esme,” she murmured. “Dr. Dhawan is an amazing veterinarian, and he’s going to do everything he can to help Claude.”
“I d…d…don’t want him to die,” the girl whimpered.
A woman entered the pen. “How bad is it?” she asked.
Prem barely recognized Valerie Tanner. Just a week ago, the stern, collected woman had bargained him nearly into the ground on treatment fees for the animals at the Yucca Hills Animal Rescue. Now, her frizzy hair danced around her shoulders, and she sported a crooked penis tattoo on her neck.
“Don’t bullshit me,” Val added as she stepped over a pile of dung and made it to his side.
Okay, so she hadn’t actually changed so much.
“It’s bad,” Prem told her bluntly. “Foxglove contains a substance called digitoxin. It’s a cardiac glycoside.”
“English,” Val demanded.
Prem nodded. “It can cause an irregular heartbeat, arrhythmia, and even cardiac arrest if he ate enough.”
“Shit,” Val hissed. “Can you reverse it?”
“Maybe.” Prem knelt next to the camel and dug into his medical bag.
“Maybe’s not good enough,” Val snapped at him. “Claude is family. You’ve got to save him.” It was an order.
“I’ll do everything I can.” Prem refused to offer false hope to his clients. They deserved the truth of his limits. The only promise he could ever make was to do his damned best.
The two stared each other down.
“Claude’s gonna die!” the girl wailed.
“EEE-OOOO” honked an agitated donkey who shared the pen with the camel.
“Let’s go inside,” the man said to his daughter in a deep, rumbling voice. “Let the doctor do his work.”
“I’ll move Reginald,” Val said.
Prem quirked an eyebrow.
“The donkey,” she clarified. She stood, swaying slightly in her strappy sandals as she hustled the donkey out of the pen and around to the back of the house.
After the man—Prem hadn’t gotten his name—lifted the sobbing girl in his arms and carried her to the house, Prem refocused on the task at hand. Layla had texted him as soon as she’d found the foxglove, and he’d been able to swing by the clinic to quickly gather the materials needed.
After snapping on a pair of gloves, Prem poured a bottle of water into a sterile container and mixed in activated charcoal powder to make a slurry. While he’d prefer to insert a nasogastric tube into the camel, given the circumstances, he chose the simpler method of using a dose syringe.
“Okay, Claude, you’re not going to like this,” Prem informed the camel. He was right. Even in his weakened state, Claude resisted as Prem struggled to pry the animal’s mouth open.
“I’m…trying…to…help,” Prem gritted as Claude clamped his mouth shut and dragged Prem forward.
“Shhhhh,” a quiet voice spoke. “It’s okay, Claude. It’s okay.”
And there she was, backlit by the lights of the ranch house. An angel with a penis tattoo on her forehead.
Layla crouched next to Claude and held his neck in her arms. “It’s going to be okay,” she murmured again.
Maybe it was the simple beauty of Layla’s voice or, more likely, her surprising vice-like grip on the camel’s neck, but Claude stopped resisting. Prem wrenched the animal’s mouth open and pushed in the slurry through the syringe.
“There you go,” Layla sang, rubbing Claude’s throat to encourage him to swallow. Magic and magnificent, Prem couldn’t help but think again.
He cleared his throat. “The activated charcoal should bind to the digitoxin, helping to lower its toxicity,” he told her just for something to say. They repeated the process several times, Layla seeming to enthrall the creature with her soothing voice while Prem forced down several syringes of the slurry.
Next up, Prem pulled a clean syringe from his case and filled it with a liquid paraffin. It wouldn’t be pretty, but the paraffin would help the camel pass more of the digitoxin out of his system.
He and Layla were a well-oiled team by now. Her soft murmurs of encouragement floated above the cricket songs and frog croaks as Prem gave several paraffin syringes to Claude. The exhausted camel barely resisted the medication. Finally, Prem inserted a saline IV into Claude to further dilute the toxin.
The whole treatment process took less than 30 minutes, but by the end of it, sweat glistened on Prem’s forehead and his armpits were damp even in the chill of the night. As if sensing his fatigue, Layla gently took the IV bag from his hands and held it up.
Carefully, Claude lowered himself to his knees.
Prem patted the camel’s side. “Good boy,” he said. He looked at Layla. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” she replied as if jumping in to assist life-saving camel treatments were all part of a night’s work.
“How’s he doing?” Val asked, startling Prem. The older woman seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. She strode into the pen and made her way over to them. She’d switched out her shimmery dress and sandals for a jacket, jeans, and calf-high rubber boots and held out a thick wool sweater to Layla.
“We’ve done all we can for the moment,” Prem answered. “We should know within the next 12 hours whether Claude will pull through.”
“What can I do?” Val asked immediately. She’d pulled her hair into a loose bun, but curly wisps still framed her concerned face.
“Nothing, right now,” Prem told her. “I’ll continue administering the paraffin and switching his IV solution every few hours. As much as he can take.”
“I’ll stay up with you,” Val said. “Keep you and Claude company.”
Prem shook his head. “That’s not necessary. There’s no reason both of us should lose a night’s sleep. Just give me your number. I’ll call if his condition changes.”
Val laughed. “That’s cute. You think I was giving you the option. I’m staying.”
A loud wail erupted from the house. Val frowned. “Esme’s really upset,” she admitted. “She loves Claude.”
“Go,” Layla instructed Val. “Take care of Esme. I’ll stay out here with Claude until you get back.”
“You sure?” Val looked between the camel and the house.
“None of this is necessary,” Prem repeated. “I’m fully capable of caring for a camel on my own.”
The women ignored him.
“Esme needs you,” Layla said gently to her friend.
Val nodded. She grabbed Layla in a tight, fierce hug. “Take care of him. I’ll be back out as soon as I get Esme to bed.”
She tossed a quick look to Prem. “You know, when you raised all your treatment prices, I thought you were the world’s biggest asshole.” She shrugged. “I might’ve been wrong.”
“Those were Dr. Goldman’s prices I had to raise,” Prem grumbled after her. As soon as the front door of the house closed behind Val, Prem turned to Layla. “You really don’t have to stay.”
Because now that he didn’t have an immediate camel emergency on his hands, Prem couldn’t help but notice the pink flush of Layla’s cheeks, how her eyes shone like midnight sapphires in the darkness. And he couldn’t stop imagining what that laced corset might look like against her skin instead of over her blouse.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Layla stated as she pulled the heavy sweater over her head. At least the bulky wool covered the corset and the gorgeous curves of her body. Didn’t do a thing to stop his dirty imagination, though. Now he just had one more layer to peel off her in his fantasies.
Prem ground his teeth.
In the quiet, Layla settled next to the resting camel’s hip, unperturbed by the dirt caking her jeans. With a sigh of resignation, Prem sat down next to her. Together, they listened to the frogs and the crickets.
When Prem couldn’t take it any longer, he broke the silence. “So, you have a fun night?”
Layla huffed out a laugh and leaned her head against the camel’s massive body. “What gave it away?”
“I don’t know,” Prem mused. “Probably the tattoo on your forehead.”
She squawked, her hand flying to her face. “Oh my gosh, I forgot all about that!” She ducked her head into her hands. “Don’t look!”
The sleeves of the sweater flopped over her hands. She was thoroughly, utterly adorable.
“I guess Claude interrupted quite the night.”
Layla was silent for a moment, then dropped her arms from her face. “It was my bachelorette party,” she admitted. “Well, actually, my ex-bachelorette party.”
Back away, the HR angel on Prem’s shoulder whispered. This is too personal. You can’t cross this line. But his brain and soul were exhausted. This was shaping up to be his second all-nighter in a row, and he felt drunk on sleep deprivation.
And drunk on something else.
Her.
Layla’s sweet face had lifted his heart this morning after he’d failed to save Odds on Red. As he’d struggled all day to contain his fury over the racehorse’s needless death, Layla had only further muddled his feelings.
Whenever she’d entered a room, jolts of electricity zapped through his veins. Even without trying, her smile, her voice, her unabashed goodness had cut through the darkness inside of him.
She was his hope. His rock. His proof that the world wasn’t just a steaming pile of shit. And all day long, he’d forcefully pushed those feelings away. He’d ignored her. Snapped at Deja and Kate. Tried so damn hard to focus on his work and be professional.
But he just couldn’t do it anymore.
Here, under the stars, in a dusty camel pen, Layla offered him a sad, uncertain smile.
And it fucking broke him.
The testy HR angel on his shoulder disappeared. And, for only the second time in his life, Prem let his heart win over his rational mind.
“What happened, Layla?” he asked softly.
She stayed silent for a long, long time. He watched her pick at the sleeve of the sweater.
“My fiancé cheated on me.” The words were a whisper. Her eyes didn’t lift from the sweater.
Prem’s hands curled into fists. “Asshole.” The word was a primitive growl.
Layla’s eyes snapped to his, her brows lifting. “Cal’s not a bad person.”
“He damn sure is,” Prem insisted. “And blind, obviously. And an idiot. And an asshole. Did I say that already?”
“He helped me and my family a lot when we needed it.”
“Why are you defending him?” A sick, horrifying thought sparked in Prem’s mind. “You’re not thinking of taking him back.”
“No.”
“Don’t you fucking dare take him back,” Prem ordered.
Layla turned toward him, the penis tattoo scrunching between her furrowed brows. “You don’t have the right to say that.” Her voice hardened. “You don’t know anything about my life or my relationship.”
She was right, of course.
Didn’t matter.
“I know you obviously have no clue what you’re really worth,” he retorted.
Layla gasped. “How dare you!”
She scrambled to her feet, swayed, and stumbled. Prem was up in an instant, catching her by the shoulders. They stood face to face. He’d already said too much. Crossed any decent boundaries between employer and employee.
But he couldn’t stop himself. His heart had chosen.
“I know what you’re worth,” he said.
Her eyes grew wide as twin full moons. Those rosy lips parted, and her hands wrapped around his forearms.
His eyes asked the question.
The world seemed to freeze around them. Seconds slowed to hours, then years. Prem felt the pressure of her fingers on his arms. Saw the quiver of her lip. The stray piece of hay caught in her hair just above her ear. He felt her balancing on a knife’s edge of fear and uncertainty.
Layla nodded. A single up-and-down jut of her chin.
That was all he needed.
Prem Dhawan always toed the line. Always followed the expectations set for him. Always rigidly held his passions at bay.
Until tonight.
He took possession of Layla’s mouth in a fierce and feral kiss. A shudder ran through her body, and then she wrapped her arms around his neck. Her mouth opened to his in giddy submission. He plunged deeper, thrusting his tongue through her lips. She tasted like wine and honey and forever.
Their kiss held no gentleness. Only desperation. They kissed like their lives depended on it. Maybe his did.
When they parted, Prem gasped for breath. His lips throbbed. As soon as his lungs refilled, he made to reclaim her mouth. Layla’s hands shot out, slamming against his chest.
“Oh my gosh, April!” she cried.
“April?” Prem’s heart clamored in his chest, and his penis pressed painfully against his jeans.
“OhmyGod, ohmyGod, ohmyGod!” Layla whimpered. She looked up at him in horror. “What about April?”
Then, he understood. April. His April. Prem smiled. “April won’t mind. Trust me.”
She shoved him away with such ferocity that Prem stumbled back.
“You’re just as bad as Cal!” she screamed, her face crumpling in anger. “You disgust me!”
Vague memories flickered in his mind. Layla filling out his calendar. Her asking a question about a girlfriend. His casual answer.
Fuck.
“Layla, I can explain,” Prem began. “Just give me—”
“No!” She whirled away from him just as the front door of the ranch house swung open.
“Sorry for the delay,” Val said, her voice hushed as she made her way toward the pen. “Esme’s finally asleep.”
“That’s… that’s great.” Layla’s voice trembled, and she scrubbed her face. “If you’re good staying out here with Pr— Dr. Dhawan, I should get going.”
“Layla,” Prem said, still rubbing his chest.
She practically fled from the pen and into the house.
“Looks like you two are getting along,” Val said, eyebrows rising above her glasses.
Ten minutes later, an Uber pulled into the driveway, and Layla dashed inside it without a word. Prem watched the small car back down the driveway then disappear down the gravel road.
He stroked the camel’s muzzle as he collected his thoughts. First, I’m going to save this camel, he vowed to himself. And then, sweet Layla, I’m coming for you.