Rock Me Faster (Licks of Leather #4) - Jenna Jacob Page 0,78

you’re done checking on Harmony, go out to the waiting room and tell the others I said to sign your coat.”

“I will do that.” She grinned excitedly. Then as if flipping some internal switch, the doctor went from happy and carefree to serious and professional.

I stepped back to give her room to check Harmony over. I wasn’t ready to see the injuries to her body yet. Didn’t want to fall apart again in case Harmony might be able to hear me in her drug-induced sleep. I wanted to be strong for her. Strong enough to help heal her bones the way she’d begun healing my heart.

It was nearly three thirty in the morning as I sat in a chair beside Harmony’s bed in her private room. The others who’d held vigil in the waiting room had come and offered words of support, encouragement, and love, but Harmony slept right through them.

Burk tried to convince me to return to the hotel, but I refused. I wasn’t leaving Harmony’s side until she opened her eyes and looked at me again…said my name in that sweet southern drawl. A strange longing to see her mountain crept through my brain. I knew what the big cities of Kentucky looked like. I’d seen the mountains from the highways, but I’d never trekked up to the top of any to see the world from Harmony’s eyes.

I wanted her to wake up, was desperate for the drugs to bleed from her system.

Maybe it was lack of sleep, my endless worry about Harmony, or the residual trauma of the accident, but a crazy idea flashed in my head. Lifting my cell phone from my back pocket—that had miraculously survived my double-door demolition ordeal still intact—I pulled up the old Elvis song she’d been singing on her terrace, just last night.

Keeping the volume down on both my phone and my voice, I started singing to her, hoping to draw her mind from the sweet oblivion, and back to the real world.

Sang to her about reaching out one night to find her gone.

About wanting to bring her home.

Home. No, not to her mountain in Kentucky but to the home in my heart.

“Kentucky rain keeps pouring down,” I crooned, willing her to open her eyes and let me sing the rest of the lyrics to her. But she didn’t, so I kept right on singing about the cold Kentucky rain.

Still nothing.

“Finally got a ride from a preacher man who asked—”

“Where you bound on such a cold dark afternoon?” A man with salt-and-pepper hair, wearing faded blue jeans and a dark button-down shirt, finished singing the verse for me as he stepped into the room.

I stopped the song and rose to my feet, eyeing him suspiciously.

“That’s my little girl’s favorite song,” the man announced. Bodhi. “I know from the photos that Harmony showed me on her computer, you’re Ross Walker.”

“Yes, sir. I am. And I’m pretty sure you’re her dad, Bodhi.” I smiled, extending a bandaged hand.

Instead of shying away from the unknown injuries beneath the gauze, he gave me a firm shake. When I didn’t cringe or flinch, or try to pull away, a flicker of acceptance, as if I’d passed some kind of test, skimmed over his dark eyes. Clearly, Harmony’s unique blue eyes had to have come from her mother.

Then without a word, Bodhi strode to the side of Harmony’s bed and stared down at his daughter. A look of sheer pain creased his sun-kissed face as he shook his head and sucked in a ragged breath.

“I was trying to get her to wake up by singing—”

“Her favorite song.” Bodhi arched a brow. “It appears you two have learned a lot about each other in a very short time.”

“A bit. There’s still a lot we haven’t learned yet,” I replied, dragging the bulky recliner from the corner over to him.

Bodhi glanced at the chair and nodded his thanks, then pinned me with a probing stare.

I knew what he was thinking.

It was written all over his face.

And like all male animals, asserting their dominance to capture prime pieces of hunting ground or something even more coveted, a mate, I wasn’t about to roll over and give up any information. Bodhi was going to have to assert his dominance as a protective father and fucking ask. Acknowledging my challenge, his lips twitched.

“Is my daughter still a little girl or have you made her a woman?”

“She’s still your little girl, sir.”

But if we hadn’t been in that wreck, I’d still be making