White-hot pain burned through me, eclipsing all else. I didn’t think. I couldn’t even react. It was almost like I was paralyzed for long moments. The pain began to ebb away, and I stared up at the bright lights in the ceiling as numbness overtook my body.
I knew I should be hurting more, but I couldn’t seem to summon up the amount of worry that I needed to lift my head and look.
A flurry of movement surrounded me, and the guy whose name I couldn’t remember appeared over me, clutching a gun and assessing me with a tight mouth.
One of the thieves pressed a gun to his head and his eyes narrowed.
“No,” I gasped, the motion hurting me, and I moaned.
“Give me the gun or I’ll shoot her again,” the thief told him.
I watched him debate for a long moment, and I wondered what the hell made him hesitate. But then his eyes slid back to mine. His stare reminded me of freshly brewed espresso, dark and intense. The kind of eyes that could stare right through a person.
He put the gun down and shoved it away from us.
Part of me was disappointed, but the other part of me was charmed he would do something like that in an effort to help me.
The gun held against his head was removed and the men stealing the money started moving around a bit more. I didn’t pay attention to them though because his dark, intense stare leaned closer.
“Stay with me, Taylor,” he said, reaching out and wrapping a hand around my upper arm. It hurt and I cried out.
“You were shot. I’m applying pressure to the large artery running inside your arm below your armpit in an attempt to slow the bleeding.” He spoke calmly, like I wasn’t bleeding all over the place.
“Do you feel pain anywhere else besides your arm?” he asked.
“Is that where I was shot? My arm?”
He glanced at me. “Yes, your upper arm. I don’t think it hit an artery because the pressure I’m applying is slowing the blood flow.”
“It hurts,” I told him.
“I know, sweetheart,” he murmured, letting go of me. Pain began to throb and I felt my arms and legs begin to shake. I watched as he stripped off the flannel shirt he was wearing and draped it over my torso. It was warm and I sighed because the heat was so welcome.
“What’s your name?” I asked, needing to know the name of the man who was trying to help me.
“Brody,” he said as he yanked off his T-shirt, pulling it right over his head.
“This might hurt,” he warned and used the T-shirt to apply renewed pressure to my arm.
He had tattoos. A lot of them. In fact, his completely shredded body was covered in them. They ran over his chest, down the impressive wall of abdominals, and across his shoulders. He had a vine that wrapped all the way down one of his arms and ended just above his wrist.
It was sexy. Probably the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. So sexy that it distracted me from the bleeding gunshot wound in my arm.
He grunted, applying more pressure, and I hissed a breath between my teeth. Sweat broke out over my forehead and my body resumed shaking.
“I’m going to get you outside¸ to the ambulance,” Brody said as I watched the way the tattoos rippled when his muscles shifted.
My vision dimmed for a second, his figure swimming before my eyes. His fingers wrapped around the underside of my chin and he held my face, staring down. “Taylor, stay with me. Look at me.”
“That won’t be very hard,” I murmured.
He smiled.
His body was shoved from behind and he jerked forward, slamming his hands into the floor on either side of me, using himself as some sort of defense for my injured form. Brody’s entire body was like a solid piece of granite caging me in, protecting me.
“Look at this,” one of the men called out.
Brody swore softly and I glanced up, meeting his eyes. “Call me Slater,” he whispered.
Didn’t he say his name was Brody?
Several of the men (including the one who shot me) leaned over us, staring down intently at something.
“Where’d you get that tattoo?” one of the men demanded.
The muscle in Brody’s jaw jumped and a sort of coldness cloaked his body. He didn’t give me another look when he pushed up and around to face the question. “I earned it.”
“If you earned it, then why haven’t we seen you around here before?”
“Because I earned it down the coast, not here,” Brody replied.
What the hell were they talking about? I was lying here bleeding, these men were trying to steal millions, and here they were taking a timeout to discuss a tattoo?
Maybe blood loss was making me delirious. Or maybe these men were world-class idiots.
“Where?” demanded the man with a gun.