Jacked (Trent Brothers #1)(58)
She was tickling the inside of my palm with her fingertip, and hell if I didn’t feel that in other places again.
“I’m glad I amuse you,” she said teasingly.
“You do.”
“I can’t help it,” she admitted to the tabletop. “I’m a worrier. Always have been. Sometimes I can’t sleep, knowing that I have people’s lives at stake with my decisions. I try to be sensitive to the person I’m treating, but sometimes when it’s crunch time and seconds count, I have to just detach and view them as nothing more than live human anatomy models and figure out why they’re broken or else I drive myself mad. Oh God, I’m rambling.”
“I like when you ramble.”
She measured me, feeling me out. “Seriously?”
I nodded and took a sip of my Coke.
“I’m usually the poster child for controlled composure,” she admitted.
I crossed my arms, resting them on the table. “Sounds like we have that in common.”
Erin’s head tilted. “You too?”
Totally, sweetheart. You have no idea. “Your mistakes could cost a life. Mine could cost the lives of innocent civilians, my team members, and myself. I take my job just as seriously.”
She blew out a relieving breath. “It’s like we have to be on our game twenty-four/seven. Sometimes it’s utterly exhausting. Not too many people understand that.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, I do. Very much.”
Her glowing grin fell. “I’m sorry you had to experience that firsthand.”
I was starting to think this woman was going to kill me with compassion. Wrap that around the notion of her f*cking me to death and I couldn’t think of a better way to go.
Even thinking about that day Tom took a bullet brought ugly pain back up in me.
“Something tells me there’s more to it than that, but I won’t ask.”
Huge understatement. The fact that she was reading me so easily was also very unsettling. It was like she was tapped right into my thoughts, picking through the shit pile with effortless ease. I’d been out with plenty of girls in my time and none of them, not a single one of them, ever looked at me as if I were so transparent.
I could tell she wanted me to tear another patch off my inner festering wounds but I wasn’t going to give it up. Not yet, anyway. I had to remind myself that Doctor Erin Novak’s healing ways would have to endure some additional testing. We barely knew each other. But looking in those gorgeous sea-blue eyes and seeing my reflection bouncing back at me told me what I wasn’t quite ready to face. I was a goner.
All through dinner I had to fight the urge to kiss her. The way she laughed at my lame recollections of the trouble my brothers and I had gotten into when we were kids, hanging on to every one of my words and giving me words of her own back, sharing those memories of skinned knees and adding gray hairs to our parents… It was all so easy and effortless that I felt like I’d known her a hell of a lot longer than a couple of days.
And when she talked about her sister, Kate, glowing with pride at her accomplishments in veterinary medicine, made me want to dial up one of my brothers and tell them to get their heads out of their asses and take the girl out because she, too, sounded amazing.
I’d never had a French fries with gravy sword fight before, but heck if she didn’t make that one of the highlights of my month as well. Everything was just so… effortless. I didn’t feel like I had to be on guard or measuring my words or pretending to be something I wasn’t. I was just—me. Free and able to breathe again.
Even after three years, Nikki never got me. She tried to understand what made me tick, but so many times I knew with every fiber of my soul that the girl and I were on two very different pages most of the time. I’d try to explain and she’d only hear what she wanted to hear and then we’d argue.
But Erin was Nikki’s polar opposite. She was funny and bubbly, teasing and playful, and just so down to earth that I found myself thoroughly at ease enjoying her company. I had gone into this worrying that she’d turn out to be somewhat of a snob; after all, she did go to several expensive colleges and was a trauma doctor for Christ’s sake. I figured she’d be a bit more straight-laced and uppity, even when she let her guard down.
Instead, she was quite the opposite. For as obviously smart as she was, she was a bit insecure and unsure of herself around me, which was cute as hell. I liked it. I liked that a whole hell of a lot.
That meant she wouldn’t treat me as if she were better than me, which was something—though I’d never admit it out loud—that passed through my mind while I helped her devour a plate of gravy fries and hot wings. Little by little I felt her wiggling her way into me.
I TIGHTENED THE last bolt holding her new license plate on the back of her car and gave it a tug, making sure it was on tight, and breathed out in relief that it was done. Now she could drive back and forth to the hospital without either one of us worrying about her being pulled over again. I put my tools back in my toolbox and locked them up in my truck, feeling satisfied. The anal part of me checked one more time to make sure the plate was securely fastened and that I had placed the new registration card in her center console. Things were golden when I saw it folded up with her insurance card.
I let myself in through her front door after knocking to announce my entry and found her in her kitchen, making what looked like a sandwich. I felt my breath stutter at the sight of her, that golden hair that was caressing a bit of cleavage that was peeking out from the white top she’d been wearing during our dinner, the way she was softly humming a song playing in her head. The entire package looked soft to the touch and completely consuming.