Fireball (Cheap Thrills #1)(20)

Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times, and then she moved so that her boob was in front of her wailing daughter. Within seconds, the baby stopped crying, started rooting around, and then latched on like… Jesus, her poor nipples.

“Oh my God,” Jose squealed quietly. “She’s doing it, she’s actually doing it.”

“Yeah, she is. See, I told you!” I murmured, still feeling sorry as I watched Olivia go to town. “Christ, doesn’t that hurt?”

I’d tried a diet once, one where you couldn’t have carbohydrates only protein. Even certain fruits and vegetables were banned. For eight days I survived on scrambled eggs, chicken, fish, and spinach. On the eighth day, I went to the store for more eggs, bypassed all the stuff I’d gone in there for, and bought a box with a dozen glazed donuts in it. By the time I got to the checkout I was three donuts down. By the time I paid for them, I was five donuts down. Let’s just say that I had to drive back to the store to get more food, that wasn’t eggs, and spent an hour when I got home appreciating every sinful and delicious mouthful. That’s what Olivia reminded me of right now – me with those damn donuts, jamming them in to my mouth.

“It’s not comfortable,” Jose winced when her nipple popped free, and then snorted. “Hey, we’ve just had our first booby bonding moment, and I’ve just had my first nip-slip.”

Chuckling, I watched Olivia shift and start to get anxious. “I think she wants the other mammaroni.”

Glaring up at me, Jose adjusted her like she’d been doing this her whole life, and repeated the process with the other side. It all went without incident until just as Olivia was finishing up and there was a knock at the door. Fortunately, Jose had her chest covered when the door opened and a male doctor walked in with the Sheriff and Ellis following him, both glowering at his back.

“Sorry, we told him to give you a minute, but the as… doctor wouldn’t listen,” Ellis told us, coming to stand at Jose’s side, not taking his eyes off the man.

“We’re busy here,” the doctor replied, sounding like he was talking to a group of imbeciles. “If we waited for everyone to be decent, we’d get nothing done.”

Oh, there was so much I had to say back to that, but he was here to discuss my sister and niece’s health so I stayed quiet, as did the men who looked like they were fighting the same battle.

“Where’s Glynnis?” Jose asked, and I almost slapped my palm on my head for not picking up on the fact that this wasn’t the doctor who’d delivered Olivia.

“Busy,” he hummed, his finger tapping the screen on his iPad. If he was playing Candy Crush, I’d crush his man candy. “Anyway, everything looks good, we just need the final bits finished up, like her paperwork. Once that’s done, you can go home.”

After that, not even looking up, he turned around and went to leave.

“Yo!” Ellis snapped, beating me to it. “That’s not the way this shit is done. Check her over, check the baby over, note it all down, add it all up, and then you can discharge her.”

The doctor just stared at Ellis as he laid it out, and afterwards stood blinking like he couldn’t believe he’d had the audacity to question him. With the way Ellis was standing at that moment, I wouldn’t have challenged him, plus he had a point. Wisely the doctor must have come to the same conclusion because he pushed past me, making me lose my balance slightly, to get to her.

“Hey,” it was the sheriff who snapped this time. “There’s no need to be a dick, Doc. Say sorry to the lady for pushing her out the way.”

Apparently done with the doctor’s attitude, Ellis spun and walked out of the room, returning minutes later with a nurse who turned out to be his sister.

“This is my little sister Rose, she’ll take over.”

And sure enough she did, and not just because it turned out that doctor wasn’t meant to be working on this floor.





Chapter Six





DB





“I can’t believe the fucker actually texted her this shit,” Ellis growled, reading over the texts in Jose’s phone from Larry. “He told her he didn’t give a shit about the little bastard that had ruined his life and that he’d take her to court if she gave it his last name in this one. Then he sent another one saying he wasn’t paying a penny for it, and that it probably wasn’t even his. What the shit is his malfunction?”

Every accusation and new piece of information had the knot in my gut building.

Jose was fast asleep on the couch, while Tabby rocked the baby in her arms. She hadn’t put her down since we’d gotten back to Jose’s house an hour earlier. After she’d been checked over by Rose, Ellis had gone to get Jose’s car, the car seat, and the other shit she’d asked for, and I’d gone to find out why Doctor Douche had been assigned to them when he wasn’t meant to be on that floor. Come to find out, he was in fact an orthopedic doctor in the second year of his residency, so he was as far away from his assigned department as you could get. We still didn’t know why, and he’d disappeared by the time I’d gotten back, so I still didn’t have those answers – but I would.

We’d driven back to Jose’s house with me leading the way slowly to make sure no one ran into the car behind me carrying the girls. Once she’d gotten comfortable, Jose had passed out leaving us with the baby. That sounds like a bad way to phrase it, but in a matter of hours that little girl had all of us wrapped around her finger, and her mother was exhausted and needed her energy, so it was no hardship.