Page 2 of Savage Proposal

“Mr. Smith?” I asked.

That seemed to jolt him back to himself, and he broke our staring contest. I watched his jaw, nearly hidden beneath a well-maintained beard, clench, like he was grinding his teeth. “That’s me,” he said, voice like gravel.

I nodded. “Uh-huh.” A few seconds later it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually started the initial work-up. “Oh, uhm, sorry about that,” I said and ignored the heat in my cheeks. I looked down at the chart. There wasn’t a complaint written on the form. “What brings you in today?”

“An accident,” he said. He sounded totally calm, but something about the way he said it sent a shiver down my spine.An accident?There was no urgency, no concern. Just a statement.

“What kind of accident?” I asked, looking him over and seeing nothing immediately wrong.

He didn’t answer my question right away; instead, his eyes dragged over my face, my body. He was looking at me like he’d seen me before, but I would have remembered a man like him. “The kind you don’t call 911 for,” he finally said.

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or evasive, but something about him put me on edge. “So, you injured yourself?” I asked. My patience was wearing thin.

His eyes flicked to mine, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “Why else would I be here?”

My jaw tightened. Hewasplaying with me, and I didn’t like it. “Mr. Smith, if you don’t tell me what’s going on, I can’t help you,” I said, keeping my voice steady despite the irritation churning beneath the surface.

“Help me?” he echoed, almost amused. “I wasn’t aware that you were my doctor, Ms.—?”

“Rossi,” I said, forcing myself to stay professional. “Isabella. You’re right, sir, I’m not your doctor. I’m the nursing assistant, which means I do the intake paperwork and prep you for the doctor.” I held up his chart and tapped it lightly with my pen. “So, what happened?”

There was a long pause; his eyes were on me longer than necessary, as if weighing whether to answer. Then, finally, he said, “I cut myself.”

My grip tightened around the pen, pulse skyrocketing. “Where did you cut yourself?” I asked, keeping my voice controlled.There’s no reason to be scared, I reminded myself.He hasn’t done anything to you. “Are you still bleeding? How long ago did this happen?”

His gaze lingered on me, unreadable, before he pulled his shirt over his head. All I saw, at first, was the kind of chest I wanted to put my mouth on, and then I saw a bandage on his pectoral muscle. He grabbed the edge of the tape and pulled it off: the cutwas clean, controlled. Not the kind of wound from some random accident.

My stomach twisted in on itself. The rest of his torso was covered in scars, some older and some still pink and new. This was a dangerous man. Cosa Nostra, probably, from the looks of him. And he’d come into the urgi-care for a cut that looked like he’d done it himself.

I swallowed hard. “That doesn’t look too serious,” I said, but my voice sounded hollow in my own ears. Something wasn’t right here.

He smirked, like a shark smelling blood in the water. “No,” he said softly. “It’s not. Not yet.”

My teeth ground together, trying to keep the smile on my face. “Well, you might need stitches,” I said. “I’ll go ahead and set up the suture tray, and then I’ll grab the nurse practitioner for you.”

“You can’t do it?” he asked.

I had before, even though I wasn’t necessarily supposed to…but we were often short-staffed, and busy people didn’t always want to wait. Today, though, I shook my head. I wanted out of this roomnow. “Sorry, I’m a CNA. I’m not licensed to do sutures.” I opened the cabinet over the counter and reached for a suture kit. “Can you tell me how you got that cut?”

“I told you it was an accident.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But we’ll need to clean the wound before we close it, and it would be good to know if you had cut yourself with something rusty or anything like that.”

The man, who I was sure wasn’t actually named “John Smith,” scoffed. “It happened in the kitchen. The blade wasn’t rusty.”

I hummed as I pulled down the suture kit and put it on the tray. Keeping my back to him, I opened the kit and laid everything out like I normally would, but I slipped the scalpel up my shirt sleeve. “Well, I think I’ve got everything that I need,” I said. “I’ll just pop out and grab someone who can get that closed up for you.”

I kept my shoulders straight and tried to look casual as I moved toward the door. “Isabella.”

Keep going. Don’t look back. “I’ll be right back, Mr. Smith. No worries.”

A firm hand closed around my arm before I could open the door, and I was wrenched around.Fuck, he was big. He had put his shirt back on, and the way it clung to his arms and chest that I’d found so attractive before emphasized just how much bigger he was than me now. My breath shuttered in my lungs.

“I think we can stop playing this game, don’t you, Ms. Rossi?” he asked. I wanted to scream. I tried to. But the sound got caught in my chest. “We’re going to walk out of here together, understand? And you’re not going to scream, or I’ll be forced to make sure that youcan’tscream.”

His voice was coaxing, almost soothing, andthatwas what snapped me out of my fear-driven paralysis. “Fuck you,” I spat at him and let the scalpel slide out of my sleeve into my hand.

I swung my arm out with a scream, and he swore out loud when the scalpel sliced through his forearm. I went for the door and pushed hard, screaming my head off, expecting security to come running…but there was nothing. Everything was eerily quiet; the nursing station was empty.

---