but do your best to stay calm. Rapid heart rate increases blood flow too.”
“And let me guess, speeds up venom getting to my heart?” I asked dryly. “Good thing it’s cold and black then, isn’t it?”
His eyes went hard again. He apparently wasn’t happy with me joking at a time like this—when he was trying to show off all his badass macho-man skills. Well that was just too damn bad, since it was my body and all.
“Here you go, hon, thought you might need this,” Harriet said, holding out a shot glass. I hadn’t heard her come in since my mind was split between focusing on Duke and the possibly fatal snake bite. My mind should’ve been focused on the latter, but I was getting more and more aware that even the prospect of imminent death didn’t dull the man’s effect on me.
If anything, it intensified it.
“You can’t give her booze,” Duke snapped. “It’ll thin her blood.”
“And calm her nerves,” Harriet retorted, shaking the glass at me.
I took it and drank it quickly, not putting it past Duke to snatch it from my hands. It burned going down, but did give me something else to focus on rather than the hot, tight pain in my leg.
Harriet grinned, doing her own shot. “I’ll get more.”
“Don’t you—” Duke started to say, but the woman was already gone.
“Fuckin’ hell,” he muttered.
“How do you know about all of this?” I asked, trying to distract him and me both. “Were you a medic or something?”
I knew he was former Army. I couldn’t remember how I knew it. Did someone tell me? Or did it just make absolute sense considering the way he handled himself, spoke, and worked for a security firm?
He glanced back to me. His hand was still on my leg. Not on the swelling, hot, painful part, but up higher. Like on my thigh. That burning had nothing to do with snake venom.
“A medic?” he repeated.
“In the Army,” I clarified, forcing my attention away from the hand on my thigh.
He blinked a couple times. “No, I wasn’t. We learned basic shit but what I know about rattlesnakes comes from life here.”
Oh. Made sense.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Confused. Suffering from emotional whiplash. Scared. In pain. Slightly turned on. “I’m doing okay, but I need you to distract me until the doctor gets here,” I said.
He tilted his head, regarding me. “Distract you?”
I nodded. “I’d do better thinking about something else.” Like something that wasn’t his hand on my thigh despite no one being in the room to witness the gesture.
“Did you love him?”
The question caught me off guard, which I guessed was the point. For a second, I couldn’t figure out to whom he was referring. Surely not Kieran. I didn’t peg Duke as a gossip hound. Then it clicked, he wanted to know about the man who I’d been sleeping with who’d I’d also watched die.
Yeah, that made a lot more sense. It also said a lot about me that I hadn’t thought of him much at all since I’d been in Duke’s presence.
“No,” I said truthfully. But that was only after a pause. I considered lying. That would make me look better, wouldn’t it? Not that it mattered. Duke had already made up his mind about me and he didn’t strike me as a man who changed it easily. “We both knew what the score was. Neither of us were interested in anything more than...physical.”
Duke regarded me, face unreadable. I didn’t know if this answer made him like me more or less. Or maybe he was indifferent at this point.
His hand was still on my thigh.
“Have you loved anyone?”
The question hit me square in the chest. My breath caught in my throat. It was a confronting question, bordering on cruel. Because to ask that question, Duke would have to consider me inherently unlovable—or a total psychopath.
“All right, David will be here in five and I intercepted Harriet with the bottle of tequila,” Anna said, entering the room and saving me from the question.
But it had already found its way to my heart, faster than venom.
Thankfully, Duke and I weren’t left alone for the rest of the evening. Tanner and Andrew quickly arrived since the news had somehow spread. Everyone hovered, offered words of encouragement and expressed genuine worry.
I tried to let that bounce off me, the fact this family who barely knew me—and what they knew sure as hell wasn’t the real me—had dropped everything to make sure I was okay.
Which