Chapter 1

If I’m in a parking space about to back out, and you honk at me, you better believe I’ll sit there until I die.

-Fact of Life

Ridley

Two months later

“Goddammit,” I said to no one in particular. “I will take her to another goddamned hospital if you don’t fucking do your GODDAMN JOB!” I finished on a roar, and not one single person in the entire ER was looking at me with anything but fear.

Even the cute little blonde.

A blonde so light it was almost white.

She was about five-foot-six or so, with deep blue eyes and wariness seated deep.

She hadn’t come close to me all night. Not a word was said between the two of us, but I couldn’t help but watch her.

She’d worked on my sister and had been the only one to listen to what I had to say.

Then a bitch of a nurse, who must’ve been the big, bad bully of the bunch, pushed the younger nurse away with an order for her to go restock or something, and she’d disappeared.

I’d seen her a few times since then, each time she’d been carrying boxes instead of working on any patients.

My curiosity was piqued.

“Ridley?” my sister said softly, and my eyes flicked to her instead of where the blonde had disappeared.

“Yeah?” I asked softly, turning so I could see her face.

“Did I hurt your truck too bad?” she asked.

I smiled and stroked my fingers down her face. “It’s not too bad,” I lied.

It was totaled.

For the second time in two months.

“I should’ve never gotten pregnant,” Kitt whispered.

I looked down at my sister, studying her face to gauge the seriousness of her statement.

“You don’t want Emily?” I asked her.

A tear escaped her eye.

“I’m so tired of having this disease,” she whispered. “I’m so fucked up it’s not even funny. I even killed someone.”

I bent forward and pressed my lips to her forehead.

“Then where would Apple be if he didn’t have you and Emily?” I asked her roughly. “Where would I be?”

“Why don’t you call him Core like everyone else?” she laughed lightly.

For that reason, right there.

I liked to see her smile, and if calling the man by Apple made her smile, I would do it. Even if it got me a glare each time I used it around him.

What kind of fucking name was Apple for a man, anyway?

“’Cause I don’t want to,” I told her honestly. “You’re not answering my question.”

She shrugged.

“I love them. I love her. I love him. I just don’t want to be a burden,” she whispered.

She never was.

Kitt had seizures.

She’d been having them since she was a young kid.

They were, however, under control with medications.

But, on her way to the routine appointment with her doctor in Dallas, the one where Capone was killed, the baby’s car seat had hit Kitt in the head.

But that was neither here nor there.

Kitt had been having more seizures than usual since she’d gotten pregnant with Emily. They’d gotten so frequent, in fact, that she’d had to start taking another medication to stop them. A medication that had to be inserted rectally.

And today, on the way to one of her appointments in Dallas, she’d had a seizure in the car.

It’d been weird…which for Kitt was beyond normal.

Normally, when Kitt had a seizure, it was triggered by something. Such as stress or extreme excitement.

Ever since she became pregnant, though, she had them whenever and wherever.

This particular time it happened to be while we were in my truck.

One second I’d been driving along as she tried to get me to listen to something on her phone, and the next she’d stiffened up and started seizing.

While she was seizing, her arm became tangled in the steering wheel, forcing me to either hurt her as I tried to remove it or wreck the truck.

Which turned out to not even be that easy.

I did manage to free her arm, but only after it made a weird popping noise. Then I’d promptly crashed into a semi-truck.

“You’re not a burden, Kitt,” I whispered. “I promise.”

A commotion at the front of the ER had me looking up in time to see Apple barreling in through the door, a look of utter helplessness on his face.

In his arms was Emily.

She looked tiny in the big, tattooed, scarred man’s arms.

“Kitten!” he yelled loudly, startling the whole ER once again when they’d just calmed down from my threats.

The baby in his arms started to cry, and he thrust her into my arms, not caring that I was bleeding all over the place.

I shifted Emily into my good arm, curling her into the crook of it as I stared at the two people in front of me.

Smiling, I turned my head down to look at Emily.

Her blue eyes were open and she was staring at me with intelligent eyes.

I could swear that she knew exactly what was going on.

“Your parents are in love with each other,” I told the little beauty in my arms.

Emily gurgled and drool started to slide out of the corner of her mouth.

I reached for the bib she wore around her neck but froze when my arm started to protest.

“Ouch,” I groaned.

“You need anything?” a soft voice asked.

I looked up to see those pretty blue eyes belonging to the blonde from earlier looking directly at me.

I smiled at her.

“No, not right…” I started, but then stopped short when Emily chose that second to projectile vomit across the room.

And all over the nurse’s feet.

The nurse laughed, but that laughter abruptly cut off when the nurse that’d told this one to go gather supplies showed up.

“God, you’re a mess. Get out of here and go clean up. Make sure you clock out while you do it,” she ordered, pushing the pretty nurse.

My brows furrowed.

“You’re going to make her clock out for something a patient did?” I asked shortly.

“You did this?” bitchy nurse asked.

I shook my head. “No, my niece did it. However, that’s not something you can clock her out for when it happened on the job.”

The cute nurse, Freya C., as it read on her nametag, looked at me with gratitude in her eyes. That name sounded so familiar.

Thank you, she mouthed.

I winked and turned back to the bitch.

“Yes?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Freya, clean up this mess,” she ordered then walked away.

“You’ll have to forgive Annette,” Freya murmured softly. “She’s had a rough time of it lately.”

I didn’t say anything; instead, I took the paper towels she’d handed me and started to wipe off Emily’s chin.

“Oh my God,” another nurse said, pushing in close so she could get a better look at Emily. “She’s so cute!”

Freya was pushed aside, lost her balance and swayed to the side.

To save herself from falling on her ass into the vomit, she had to throw her hands out to her sides in an attempt to catch herself.

I scowled at the woman.

“Move,” I ordered.

The woman, startled by the abruptness of my words, quickly backed away. Right into Freya.

This time Freya really did fall.

“Ahhh,” Freya cried, planting her entire leg into the throw up.

I winced and hopped down off the cot, my body protesting as I did.

“God, you’re such a mess,” the new nurse said to Freya. “And so clumsy.”

And that’s when I realized I was on the set of Mean Girls.

“Get the fuck away from me,” I snapped. “Now.”

The woman left, tossing a nasty look at Freya, as if this whole predicament were her fault, while she made her way back to the nurses’ station across the room.

She strode right up to the bitchy nurse from earlier, and they huddled together, whispering, as they pointed at the poor girl at my feet.

“Here,” I offered my hand. “Let me help you.”

She wouldn’t take it since it was my injured hand; instead she levered herself up and hurried over to the sink where she started to viciously wash her hands.

Her shoulders hunched in, and I could tell she was only a short minute away from crying.

The poor girl’s ugly red shoes with the holes in the top probably weren’t feeling too good, either.

Freya slipped on some gloves, then went about washing her shoe, being sure to get into each and every crevice of it.

Then she took out the little plug things. One was a Santa Claus, the other was a gingerbread man.

On her other shoe she had a Christmas tree and a candy cane.

“You like Christmas?” I asked her.

She looked over her shoulder at me.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I do.”

“I can tell,” I teased her.

She even had Santa Claus earrings on.

“Freya!” the rude cow from the nurses’ station called. “I need you in room four for a linen change. Mr. Anderson had another accident.”

Freya’s shoulders slumped, and it was then I realized that I couldn’t watch those two bitches do this to her.

I couldn’t let her go do this with vomit still in one shoe.

Except the little girl in my arms started to cry, and I looked to the parents to my right and saw Kitt crying with Apple holding her and talking to her softly.

“Fuck,” I sighed. “Fucking fuck.”

“Language!” my sister managed to cry through her tears.

The bitchy nurse who was so rude to Freya the first time came over, carrying a tray in her hand.

She set it down on the rolling table at my bedside and started to unfold a package.

Dr. Carrolton came up beside her and started to pull on some gloves.

“I’m thinking you need about fifteen or so stitches on this one,” he said as he studied it. Peeling back the bandage on my other arm, he looked at the wound there and pursed his lips. “This one will probably take around ten or so. If you’re lucky.”

“You want me to hold her?” the nurse offered.

I looked at her, then down to her name tag on her shirt.

“Lucy M.,” I said. “There’s no way I’m going to let you hold her. Your bitchiness might rub off on her.”

Lucy M.’s eyes went wide at my words, and she started to say something cutting, but Carrolton stopped her with a raised hand.

“Why don’t you go help Freya clean up Mr. Anderson’s fifteenth shit in the last hour? You know it’s goddamned c-diff. I can smell it. You can smell it. She can smell it. He’s your patient today, Lucy, so no more pushing him off on Freya,” Carrolton warned.

I was irrationally angry as I stared at the woman.

I wasn’t completely sure what ‘c-diff’ was, but I gathered that the man was contagious. And this lazy bitch was sending the pretty nurse in there to care for her seriously ill patient, possibly endangering her health in the process, just because she didn’t like her.

I didn’t like that, not one bit.

This bitch was not going to get away with it, and I would make sure of that.