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But I would protect myself. I would talk to Kian about it tonight. Get a training schedule set up. I was a decent fighter to begin with, but I was like Fang. No style. All scrappy fury. It hadn’t been enough against Caleb.
The nurse behind the plexiglass raised her head when we reached the top of the line and did a double take at Fang. “Oh my. I mean, can I help you?”
I almost laughed. It was the way so many women in the bar and at the clubhouse reacted to Fang. I wasn’t sure why I never had. Maybe because I’d seen plenty of truly scary men over the course of my life. I knew a legitimately bad man couldn’t be figured out because of what he looked like on the outside. Caleb was a truly bad man, and he looked anything but when he was dressed neatly in a suit and driving around his hundred-thousand-dollar car.
Fang seemed scary, but there was a gentleness about him that most men didn’t have. I’d seen it from the minute he’d walked into the bar on my very first shift there.
Fang held up his mangled fingers. “My girl says I need an X-ray.”
The nurse glanced at me with huge eyes. “You’re his girl?”
I could tell what she was thinking. How did we even fit together?
Wouldn’t she like to know.
Maybe it was that, her staring at me with such incredulity, that had me saying, “Yeah. I’m his girl. I think he has a few broken fingers. Possibly a concussion too, though he seems a bit better this morning.”
“Take a seat, and we’ll be with you when we can.”
Fang put his good arm around my neck and guided me over to a seat. He didn’t move away once we were sitting, and I found myself cuddling into his side, warm and fuzzy feelings tingling their way through all the places we touched. I was surprised at how much I liked hearing him declare me his. He dropped a kiss on my head absently, and it lit up a part of me I hadn’t known would react like that.
Shit. I had the sudden realization this man could turn me into a snuggler if he kept up this behavior.
The thought was a little scary. I’d never known much affection. I’d never really had a proper relationship, and I’d never known my father. My mom had loved me, but she hadn’t been much of a hugger. It was a dangerous loss of control to let someone touch me freely.
But one that maybe I was willing to take with Fang, because of every man I’d ever met, he was the one I trusted most.
We’d see. We weren’t there yet. But sitting with him like this, just enjoying the feel of him beside me, made me want to try.
“Lucy Tinsdale?”
I jerked my head at the voice of a doctor calling his next patient. He searched the waiting room with a roaming gaze, one that finished on me.
Horror froze me to the spot.
Recognition dawned in his eyes, but he quickly moved on, ushering Lucy through security doors for her assessment.
I couldn’t move. It took every ounce of my being not to scream in terror when his gaze returned, before the door slammed shut behind him, the locks automatically engaging.
Like some spell had broken, I slumped forward, elbows to my knees, sucking in deep breaths. For the minute he’d been there in the waiting room, just feet away from me, I hadn’t been able to breathe.
Fang’s warm hand came to the center of my back. “Pix, you okay? What just happened?”
I couldn’t talk. Fear had wrapped itself around my throat and was squeezing the life out of me.
Fang became frantic, twisting in his seat, trying to get a look at my face. “Tell me what to do. Do I call a nurse?”
I shook my head frantically and forced myself to sit up straight. The room spun, but I managed it.
He dropped his hand to my thigh, squeezing reassuringly, and I focused on that. On him. On the fact that with him beside me, that fucking asshole would never get to lay a finger on me.
Not again.
“Please talk to me,” he whispered. “I don’t know what’s happening, but you’re fucking scaring me, Pix.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Don’t apologize. You have nothing to be sorry for. One minute you were fine. Better than fine, actually. The next you’re frozen and hyperventilating.”