Vindication: A Motorcycle Club Romance (40 page)

‘Cause being related to
Slade Jarvis? Now that’s a hell I wouldn’t put my worst enemy through.

My father moved to let me pass
without so much of a word. I thought I saw a few gray hairs glinting in the
sun, right around his temples, where there hadn’t been a single one before. I
held his gaze and my cocky grin, savoring my triumph, knowing that I’d done
what I set out to do. That I had
won.

I didn’t let him see it in my eyes or
in my swagger, but at the same time, I wondered to myself: if I’d really beat
my father, once and for all, then why the hell did I feel so shitty?

Why the hell couldn’t I get the look
on Iris Walker’s face out of my head?

~
ONE ~

Iris

SEVEN YEARS LATER

“Dad, come on. You know it’s the
right thing to do.”

My stepfather looked down his nose at
me, the wire frames of his glasses dangling precariously close to the tip. He
looked like he’d aged ten years in the past three days. Ever since Kellan left
home, our house had practically become a morgue.

You would’ve thought my younger
brother died, and maybe for Dad, that was, in a sense, true. He certainly
wasn’t the kid we once knew.

Dad shook his head and fixed his gaze
outside the breakfast nook window again, like staring at the front lawn would
magically make Kellan appear there. This was part of the Waiting Game, the one
our family always played whenever Kellan took off on one of his benders. He was
never gone for more than a week at a time—apparently, that was how long it took
for him to run out of drug money and come crawling back home on his knees,
begging for more. Or he’d call us from the drunk tank at the police station to
plead for bail money so he wouldn’t have to spend the night.

Whatever the case, my little brother
had a self-destruct mechanism set for seven days. No matter what else he got
himself into, we could rely on him to end up at our door a week later, just
like clockwork.

Until now.

Three days ago marked one week since
Kellan left the house. He’d used his usual ruse, promising Mom he was going to
a job interview or the Army recruiter or whatever it was this time. Kellan used
the guise of bettering himself as an excuse to relapse, and when his cellphone
went straight to voicemail that night, we braced ourselves for another week of
the Waiting Game.

But now ten days had passed, and
still no one could reach Kellan. Not even me. And I had one hell of a bad
feeling about this.

“We don’t have any other choice,” I
continued, even as my stepfather looked away from me to his newspaper. “Not one
that I see, anyway. We’ve already called all the hospitals and police stations.
And I doubt you or Mom are going to be able to smoke him out. We need a bigger
gun.”

My stepfather snorted. “Fine choice
of words.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. It had
been seven years since my parents caught me and Slade in the pool house, doing…
what we’d done. Dad had sworn me and Mom to secrecy, along with Slade. Kellan
was never to hear a word of it, and when Dad kicked Slade out the next day, he
used Slade’s going off to Harvard as the perfect excuse. Still, for all his
talk of secrecy, he was so obvious with his disdain for his own son that
everyone knew how he felt. He thought Slade was an asshole. Dangerous. And
maybe he was.

But he was smart, too, and capable.
And there were times were he had been incredibly sweet and kind to me.  I hated
the idea that it was all just an act to screw me, literally and figuratively,
just to get back at his father and my mother.  When he first left I clung to
the belief that those were true parts of him, and that what he’d done at the
end had just been him acting out in… whatever.  But over the years, after never
hearing from him again, I’ve all but lost that hope.  Maybe he was the complete
jerk that his dad seemed to believe him to be.

One thing is for certain, Kellan had
never stopped looking up to him, even when Mom and Dad basically forbade us
from even mentioning Slade’s name. I knew my little brother felt abandoned,
like he’d lost one of the most positive male influences in his life almost as
quickly as it arrived. He’d never been the same after Slade left. That day
marked the beginning of Kellan’s downward spiral.

Slade might be the only one of us who
could bring Kellan home. Knowing that was one thing. Convincing my parents it
was true was another.

My mother sat down at the table with
us, two mugs of coffee in her hands. She handed one to my stepfather and said,
“Kellan’s life is enough of a mess as it is, Iris. Adding yet another unstable
element to the mix… I just can’t see how that would make things any better.”

“Exactly,” Dad said, kissing my
mother’s cheek before taking a sip of his coffee. “Kellan needs roots. He needs
someone who can set a good example.” His eyes darkened and his brow creased. A
shadow of a memory flitted over his face. “Not someone who forces himself on
his own family.”

“He didn’t force me,” I mumbled, and
not for the first time. This was a regular argument, once upon a time, but over
the past few years it became obvious he was never going to change his mind. I
saw my stepfather start to open his mouth and quickly added, “And anyway,
that’s not the point. The point is Kellan doesn’t know about that. All he knows
is that the big brother he looked up to more than anyone else in the world just
disappeared from his life one day, and that you wouldn’t even let him ask why.
He’s not going to come home if either of you go after him. It’s obvious who he
needs.”

My stepfather leaned close to me over
the table, lowering his voice and squeezing my mother’s hand so tight I saw his
knuckles whiten. “If you think I’m inviting that…
person
into my home,
after what he did to us, to
you
…”

I furrowed my brow in disbelief.
“He’s your son,” I reminded him. “And he’s a doctor. You don’t know what kind
of trouble Kellan’s into. Mom found pills in his room just the other week. Who
knows how long that’s been going on? He needs
treatment,
Dad.”

My stepfather sat back and his face
fell. He eyed my mother through his periphery. “Is that true?” he asked her.
“About the pills?”

I looked at my mom. She averted her
gaze.
Shit.
I didn’t know she hadn’t told him.

When she failed to answer, my
stepfather let out a long sigh through his nose. He looked out the window again
at the empty drive, at the absence of my brother’s car, at the clouds moving in
over the horizon. A storm was coming. Maybe in more ways than one.

As much as my mother and stepfather
didn’t want Slade here, I didn’t want him around even more. It wasn’t because
he’d “forced” himself on me—I was a willing and eager, albeit naïve,
participant in what happened between us. But being played for a fool, having my
heart torn open, being
used
just to settle some kind of score Slade had
with our parents? I never wanted to see his smug, arrogant face ever again. No
matter how handsome it was.

Slade was the walking, talking
embodiment of everything I’d tried to forget for almost a decade now. I’d done
a lot in the past seven years. I’d graduated from college, started my own
business as an interior designer—no, screw that, I had a
thriving
business, and that was even more impressive than just starting one. I was a
smart, beautiful, self-possessed young woman who didn’t take shit from anybody,
and Slade Jarvis was everything I wanted to leave behind.

But he was exactly what I needed—what
our family needed—right now. And I’d do anything for Kellan if it meant keeping
him safe. Surely, my parents felt the same way?

“Slade stays out of this,” my
stepfather said, and my shoulders slumped. “He’s done enough damage. And if
Kellan needs saving, he’ll get it. Just not from my degenerate son.”

I looked to my mother, pleading with
my eyes, but she only shook her head. My stepfather’s word was law, one of the
many reasons I’d moved out right after high school, and probably one of the
many reasons Kellan dropped out. There was no arguing with him once he’d made a
decision of this magnitude. It was his way, or the highway.

And we all knew what Kellan thought
of that.

I leaned back in my chair, glancing
out the window at the coming storm. Great. Once again, it was up to me to make
the sacrifices and be the adult. Once again, I would have to put myself on the
line, and knowing Slade, I’d be the one who would have to live with the
consequences too.

I had to find my stepbrother, the
last person on earth I wanted to see. I’d have to do it without our parents
knowing, because if they found out, there would be hell to pay. And when I did
manage to find Slade, I’d have to hope that he was different. Selfless.
Grown
up.
And hopefully not so hot anymore, either.

Because that part of me that wanted
answers, the part of me I’d spent seven years trying to hold at bay? Yeah, that
part of me would wake right up with just one quirk of Slade’s full, soft lips.
Lips I knew way too well.

Lips that, if I was being honest with
myself, I still dreamed about.

Here’s hoping this
doesn’t turn into a nightmare,
I thought as I
mentally prepared myself for what I was about to do. One thing was certain: I
was going to need a plane ticket, and balls of fucking steel.

~ TWO ~

Slade

“Mister
Velazquez, what seems to be the problem?”

The
man lying sprawled on the stretcher in front of me was barely out of his teens,
his face still retaining that boyish glow of youth despite how gaunt and
withered he looked. Every inch of him was covered in sweat, drenching his
clothes and making them cling to his frail body.

“Stomach’s
hurtin’ real bad, doc,” he said sluggishly, gripping his abdomen and pulling at
the fabric of his dark, long-sleeved shirt. I watched as he labored for breath,
his chest rising and falling as though it took everything he had just to
inhale.

“Temperature?”
I asked, turning my attention to the nurse standing just off to the side. She
didn’t meet my gaze, her lips drawing into a thin line before she even bothered
to answer. It was hard to keep up with which nurses I’d fucked over the last
few years, and clearly this one had had the pleasure—though from the way she
looked at me, parting clearly hadn’t been sweet sorrow. “Nurse?”

“Ninety-eight
point six,
Doctor
,” she said, adding just a little bit of a bite onto
that last word. I did my best to hide my smirk. Either she had a bone to pick
with me, or she was looking for a good old-fashioned hate-fuck. I’d never
refuse the latter.

“All
normal there,” I murmured as I focused again on the scant few pieces of paper
that would pass for Mr. Velazquez’s medical chart until he managed to get
admitted upstairs. So far, nothing actually seemed to be wrong with this
patient, which was either a good thing, or a very, very bad thing.

ER
doctors—and doctors in general—we don’t like surprises. We like routine cases,
night after night, with little variation to bring any undue excitement to our
wards. There’s a saying in med school: “If you hear hooves, think horses, not
zebras.” So either Mr. Velasquez here was a horse whose trouble was probably a
case of gastroenteritis, or he was a zebra. And I fucking
hated
zebras.

“Did
you ingest anything out of the ordinary, sir?” I asked him, almost dreading the
answer.
Don’t be a zebra. Don’t be a zebra.

Mr.
Velazquez stared at me for a long time, mouth open, but offering no reply. He
blinked slowly, as if fighting to stay awake. He scrunched his nose.

“Antonio,”
I said, snapping my fingers to break him out of the stupor he’d fallen into.
“Did you
eat
anything different today?”

“Nah,”
he said, his voice slow and drowsy, “I ain’t had nothin’ all day.” Then he
grinned lazily, one side of his face tilting up way more than the other. “Think
I can stop at McDonald’s?”

I
frowned, taking a step closer to the bedside, tilting the young man’s head back
so that I could get a better look into his eyes. He was disoriented, his
breathing labored, and his skin cold to the touch despite his apparently normal
temperature. I didn’t like this one bit.

“Nurse,
do you have a flashlight?” I asked, looking down into Antonio’s sunken eyes. It
was hard to get a fix on his pupils—I needed to know how big they were.

“I
have my cell phone, and it’s got a flashlight,” she said, narrowing her eyes at
me. “But the problem isn’t with his eyes, it’s—”

“Hand
me your cell phone,” I said, glaring at her as I held out a hand. “I’m not
asking.”

The
nurse’s eyes widened briefly before she dug into the pockets of her scrubs,
pulling out her smart phone and placing it in my open palm. I swiped the home
screen and pressed the stylized light-bulb that turned on the built-in flash on
the back, which made a serviceable light source.

“This
is going to be bright, Mr. Velazquez,” I warned, though I gave him almost no
time to prepare. Using my thumb and forefinger, I pushed both his upper and
lower eyelids up and away from his face, shining the bright light directly into
his eyes.

“Shit,”
I whispered, looking down into a pair of unreactive, pin-point pupils. “He’s
ODing.”

“What?
But we didn’t—” The nurse started to say, but her mouth snapped shut as I
turned toward her. I pulled up the sleeve of his shirt, exposing a pock-marked
upper arm, the scars of needles past.

“I
don’t care what you thought,” I growled. “You’re going to get me two milligrams
of naloxone in a five percent dextrose solution, and you’re going to do it in
the next thirty seconds.”

She
stared at me, jaw still sagging. “Doctor Jarvis, we aren’t approved to
administer naloxone yet. We have a wait before we can use—”

“Either
you’re going to go get me those meds or I’m going to get them myself,” I
shouted, drawing the eyes of everyone in the ER. “One of those options will
ensure this man is going to asphyxiate on his vomit in the next few minutes,
and it sure as hell isn’t the first one. Now go!”

As
the nurse ran out of the room, I grabbed Mr. Velazquez and turned him onto his
side, making sure I had plenty of access to the IV port in his forearm. The man
was so skinny I was surprised the needle hadn’t gone straight through his arm
when they put it in, nor did I understand how he managed to shoot himself up,
for that matter.

“I’m
not…” the patient mumbled, his protests interrupted by the sounds of his own
heaving and retching as he began to vomit. I shook my head in exasperation,
keeping the addict turned on his side to prevent any of his stomach contents
from going down his windpipe.

“Sure
you’re not, Mr. Velazquez,” I said patronizingly, though I knew he wasn’t even
listening. “All that heroin in your system totally got there by accident.”

A
few moments later, the nurse finally returned with a bag of fluids and a syringe
in hand. I took both from her, slipping the needle into the rubbery injection
port near the bottom of the bag and pressing down on the plunger, watching the
subtle eddies whirl inside of the IV bag before I shook it to distribute the
medicine more evenly throughout the dextrose solution.

The
nurse tore open a sealed bag, unraveling an IV line from the sanitary plastic
wrapping and handing one of the ends to me. Working quickly, the two of us
connected Mr. Velazquez’s IV port to the bag as I squeezed on the fluids,
forcing the mixture down the line and right into his veins.

The
effect was just short of immediate as the naloxone worked its way into Mr.
Velazquez’s bloodstream. His vomiting halted in a matter of seconds, and soon
his breathing was back to normal, as well. I felt confident in putting him onto
his back again as he started to groan.

“I
think you can handle it from here,” I sighed, looking over at the nurse as she
took Mr. Velazquez’s vitals. She barely even turned to me as I made my way out
of the room, though I couldn’t help sneaking a glance at her pretty, round
backside just before another group of nurses rushed into the room.

Too
bad they already missed the show
, I thought.

After
all that excitement, I took the first chance I could get to duck out of the ER
for a minute, gladly handing over what few cases I had to one of the residents.
Not too long ago I was the one who had to take crap like that—other doctors
shoving their cases onto me and calling it a “learning experience.”

It
feels good not to get stepped on
, I thought,
chuckling as I stopped at the elevators to head down to the cafeteria. Saving
lives was hungry work, especially when you were as good at it as I was.

“Hey
there, stud,” came a sultry purr from near to my ear. That husky voice was
accompanied by the sensation of nails gently raking down my back. “Last night
was
fun
.”

“Shauna,”
I said, grinning as I turned around to face her in all of her womanly glory.
Those gorgeous, viridian eyes of hers stared at me from under a curtain of
bleach blonde hair, accompanied by a ruby-lipped smile that had more than once
begged to be wrapped around my cock. “I thought you didn’t work today.”

“I
don’t,” she giggled, stepping closer as she rested her hand over my chest. “I
came here just for you, babe. After the work-over you gave me last night, I
thought I’d surprise you with a little treat at work.”

Shauna
slowly walked her fingers up my arm. “How does that sound?” she asked. “You?
Me? The on-call room?”

I
heard the soft
ding
of the elevator car reaching the landing. It was so
tempting—one last round with one of the sexiest doctors in the hospital. But
there was one very big problem: Shauna wanted more than I could give her.
Seemed like they always did.

“Listen,
Shauna,” I began, backing up a step as the doors to the elevator opened behind
me. “You and I were having a really great time, and if I was any other guy, I’d
drop everything in a heartbeat just to keep you under lock and key.”

“What’s
the matter?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. I watched her perfect lips turn
down in a mask of confusion, maybe even a little suspicion. “Is this about what
I said last night?”

“Yes
and no,” I said, taking yet another step back into the elevator proper. “I just
don’t think I’m the right guy for you, that’s all. I don’t do the whole
‘dating’ thing.”

“What,
am I not
good enough
for you?” Shauna asked, her voice rising, her
confusion turned into anger as she took a step toward me. “Who the hell do you
think you are?”

“Slade
Jarvis, one of the best emergency doctors in this entire hospital—maybe even
the whole city, or possibly the state,” I said, shrugging as the elevator doors
began to close. “But hey, we had fun, right?”

“Don’t
you walk away from me, Dr. Jarvis. I—” Her anger was cut short as the heavy
metal doors slid closed and I began my descent toward the cafeteria, putting an
entire floor between the two of us.

She’s
much better off
, I thought, listening to the low hum
of the motors lowering the metal elevator car down to the cafeteria. I didn’t
like attachment, to put it mildly. More accurately, I hated the thought of
anyone getting too close to me—and vice-versa. Attachment only led to one
thing, as far as I was concerned: pain for everyone involved.

I’d
had more women than I could possibly count, all of them willing to spread their
legs for a brilliant doctor like myself, but once the promise of commitment
reared its ugly head, I was gone faster than a bat out of hell. I knew the
agony of loss. It was torture. I never wanted to feel—or make someone else
feel—that kind of pain ever again.

Keeping
everything casual meant there was less of a chance of anyone getting
truly
hurt. Sure, there might be some bruised egos, like in Shauna’s case, but I knew
she’d get over it. After all, she came into my life knowing the kind of guy I
was, how I operated—I had a reputation. But all of that seems so small when a
girl gets it into her head that she can
change
you, make you into the
kind of guy she can show off to her folks.

I’d
never be that guy, not for anyone.

The
elevator door opened as the car finally came to a stop, a soft chime resounding
from the speakers as I stepped out into the laminated tile hallway. I hated how
clean
everything looked in hospitals. All of the painstakingly
cultivated order seemed so forced and contrived—which is why I loved the
emergency department, the definition of controlled chaos. I loved the lights,
the sound, the shouting and the occasional fist-fight that would break out
between the paramedics and some of the more unruly patients. It felt like all
of humanity was focused into a single spot for everyone to see, the very best
and the very worst.

I
passed a couple of new nurse interns and flashed them a winning smile and a
wink. Both of them smiled, biting their lips and hoping that I’d been looking
at one and not the other. I loved having that effect on women, the power to
make them practically shout, “Pick me! Fuck me!” It made me feel like a god—as
though I didn’t get enough of that from actually
being
a doctor, holding
a person’s very life in my hands day in and day out.