Page 16 of Twisted Lies
“Thanks… but I’m more a gin and tonic type of girl,” I gabber out when I recall how long it’s been since I’ve had alcohol. My life is so hectic these days, I can’t remember the last time I had a glass of bubbly. Before Cedric entered my life, a glass of wine and a bubble bath was a once-a-week necessity, but he hogged all the spare time I had, which wasn’t much, but still, it could have been better spent.
JR shrugs as if to say,suit yourself, pulls out the dining room chair he ruined by stealing half its padding, then plonks his backside on it. After pulling out the cork in the bottle with his teeth, he shoots it across the room with a spit-free pot shot, then takes a generous chug of the dark liquid inside.
“Not a fan of blood?” I ask, confident that his scull was a sign of a man needing a nip of liquid courage.
His eyes bounce between mine for two painfully long seconds before he shakes his head. Our conversation is extremely one-sided, but the fact he can understand me and is replying soars my pulse to a never-before-reached level. And don’t get me started on how I’m now seeing him as more my savior instead of his captive, or we will be here all night.
“Is that why this is so thick?” I tug on his beard during the ‘this’ part of my comment like my hands aren’t as shaky as my insides. I’m not shaking in fear. It’s from remembering how he freed me from the wreckage using nothing but his bare hands and a chunk of wood. Even if his thoughts are a little warped, that level of determination deserves recognition. “Are you afraid of a little razor nick?”
Any confidence our interaction gained me flies out the window when he digs the needle he fetched from the kitchen drawer into my skin without warning.
“Ouch!” My squeal makes it seem as if I’m three, but I don’t care. I wasn’t lying when I said I hate pain. “That hurts!”
Before I can yank my hand out of his grasp to inspect it for a gaping wound, JR tugs it back his way, then does the last thing I ever thought would be erotically stimulating, but somehow is.
He spits on my hand.
The alcohol mixed with his saliva adds to the burn of my sensitive skin, but I don’t have an excuse for the warm slickness it coats my panties with. We don’t sterilize wounds at my place of employment like that, but JR could be onto something. Imagine how revolutionary it would be for woman’s health if they were excited to seek medical assistance instead of being scared. There’d be lines stretched for as far as the eye could see—perhaps even across the globe if ruggedly handsome men like JR were responsible for the sterilization of their wounds.
Although that could also cause a lot of self-harming, so I guess the right thing to do is for me to keep this medical marvel to myself.
In the silence of numerous thigh presses, I watch JR suck the excessive liquid off my no-longer-shuddering hand before he inspects the microscopic nick in my thumb to make sure all the splinter of wood is gone.
Once he’s certain it is, he releases me from his strong yet painless grip, then snatches up my medical bag from where he dumped it on the floor. He pushes aside a set of stethoscopes, the birth control sample Isaac was adamant Isabelle will never take, and the magic pink pill I was telling you about earlier until he finds a suturing needle and a ream of medical thread.
“Oh no, you don’t need to stitch up my foot again. It’s just a scratch. I’m sure it will hold out until after the blizzard.”
I whine like a child when he ignores my assurance by jerking up his chin with a grunt, wordlessly suggesting for me to scoot back.
I’m about to tell him to go to hell, but my words trap in the back of my throat when he places my injured foot onto his thigh. Our contrasting heights are extremely apparent, but the difference in our builds is even more obvious when you take in how tiny my foot looks on his thigh. He has those thick chunky thighs men who do a lot of squats have. They’re the size of tree trunks, and I’ve seen enough of them the past thirty-plus hours to confidently declare that.
When JR glances at me over the needle and thread, his expression abstruse, I twist my lips, acting unimpressed about how faultlessly he threads the cotton through the needle’s eye.
It’s all for show. Just the seamless way he stitched me up the first time around reveals he knows what he’s doing. I’m just not known for praising people who confuse me as much as they fascinate me.
JR’s appearance is extremely rough, but when you exclude his grunting and remember how he kept me alive for three days, he doesn’t seem nearly as daunting. He pulled me out of a dangerous wreck, kept me alive during a medically challenging concussion, and is so in touch with his femininity, he knows when a woman needs space.
He only approached me once while I was sitting at the window for the past three hours and that was to hand me the banana.
The remembrance of his nurturing way does little to settle the nerves fluttering in my stomach when he careens the needle toward my foot, though.
“I really don’t think this is a good idea. I can’t tolerate pain. I’m a wimp.” This is proven without a doubt when he rips the suturing needle through my unnumbed skin in the middle of my wound. “Ouuccchhh!”
With his facial expression hidden by his scruffy beard and angled head, JR nudges the bottle of alcohol to my half of the table with his elbow before he returns his eyes to a wound in need of over a dozen stitches.
“Can you at least wait until I’m tipsy before you torture me?” I plead before snatching up the bottle and downing two generous mouthfuls. “Sweet lord.” I cough through the burn stretching from the back of my throat to my stomach. “What the hell is that? Unvented isopropyl? It tastes like pure alcohol.”
It’s hard to see JR’s mouth through his thick beard, but I swear his lips are itching to furl into a grin. His twinkling eyes give away his smile even more than his mouth.
“You won’t be laughing when I hurl on your fur rug. As far as I am aware, I haven’t eaten today, and we all know what happens when a once-a-year socialite drinks on an empty stomach.”
It dawns on me that JR has more personality than his outer shell lets on when he tosses the banana I refused earlier into my lap. After arching a brow as if to say,there’s your solution, he returns his focus to my foot he’s only just started to suture.
Although his next three stitches are nowhere near as painful as the first two, I swallow numerous mouthfuls of the mentholated spirit-inspired drink over the next twenty minutes.
It hits my head faster than the bottle of bourbon I borrowed from my parents’ liquor cabinet when I was sixteen and makes my words slur when I stammer out, “Do you think Cedric ever loved me? Or was it just about the sex?”
I balk more than JR.
