Protecting What's Mine(53)

The kids were as excited as Sunshine was.

“If I can convince Dr. Mack here to go with us.”

They turned their sad, puppy kid eyes on her. Sunshine added weight with her own.

“Please, Dr. Mack? Please?” A boy with goggles over his glasses and a runny nose clasped his hands under his chin.

A lanky youngster with a cute afro peeking out from under his hat cocked his head and shot her a confident wink. A future heartbreaker in the making.

“Please?”

Lincoln Reed did not play fair.

She telegraphed him a look that said exactly that.

He sent her a cocky wink. The man’s confidence was a force of nature. And she found it appealing.

The ghost of that text message floated through her mind and doused the playfulness that was arising in her. She’d never outrun the shadows of her past. And Linc, with his sisters and his nieces and nephews, came from a warm, solid family history. It wasn’t just a mismatch. It was a catastrophe. She had no idea how to be a productive partner in a healthy adult relationship.

She felt sick and sad. As if the toxicity of her past was leaking through her pores to taint the present.

Something wet and fluffy nudged her hand, and she looked down at Sunshine, who beamed up at her with unconditional doggy love.

“See, Dr. Mack? Even Sunny wants ice cream,” one of the very smart, manipulative boys pointed out.

She managed a weak smile. But when she looked up, Linc’s eyes were blazing into her as if he could see beneath this veneer of a competent adult. As if he could see the ugliness beneath her skin.

“Please, Dreamy?” he asked sweetly.

She couldn’t do anything about her past or its effect on the now. But she could say yes to ice cream and steal a tiny moment of fun. Even if it didn’t really belong to her.

“I guess we’re going for ice cream,” she said with forced brightness.

“Yes!” The ice cream celebration was as big as the one for the game.

“Hey, can we ride with you, Dr. Mack?” asked a dark-haired boy with dreamy brown eyes and a Gatorade stain on his jersey.

As a baffled Mack loaded up six baseball players—whose parents inexplicably trusted her with their kids’ lives—Linc pulled up next to her with Sunshine hanging out of the passenger window of his truck. The grin he sent her went straight to her gut.

She wished things could be different. Because she would love a side of big, blond, handsome trouble.





25





Linc watched as Mack powered through another set of chest flies on his weight bench, her walking boot propped up on a crate he’d liberated from his garage. She was a week out from her injury, and once the small-town charm of being looked in on and catered to had worn off, she was going as stir-crazy as his crew at the station.

In a week, they’d responded to four fender benders, three false alarms, and a cat stuck in a drainpipe. They’d completed every training scheduled, a new, boring record. Mack had spent the week pushing paper and wheeling herself around non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries at the clinic on a stool while her health care coworkers kept eagle eyes on her to make sure she wasn’t overdoing it.

But he was picking up on something that ran deeper than just impatience. There was something brewing beneath Mackenzie’s very attractive surface. It felt like a dark cloud of thick, black smoke that hung over them, between them. Obscuring his view.

She blew out a breath at the top, then lowered the dumbbells slowly.

“I meditated today. For fifteen freaking minutes,” she complained.

“That’s not a good thing?” he asked, gritting his teeth and working his way through triceps dips on the rack.

She sat up, let the weights drop to the floor. “I had fifteen freaking minutes to spare because I’ve got nothing else to do. I’ve read every medical journal I’d banked for the last six months. Caught up on all the podcasts I follow. I don’t have any yard work to do because your guys mowed for me again yesterday—thank you again, by the way. I can’t run. I can’t take air shifts. All I can do is stare at those daffodil yellow walls and write prescriptions for UTIs and hay fever.”

“Yeah, yeah. Quit whining. My guys are in the home stretch of their hair growing challenge,” Linc complained. “Al lost another bet and had to shave off one of his eyebrows. The women are measuring leg hair. The guys are looking like the cops from Super Troopers only less well-groomed.”

She stood and he dropped from the bars. Facing each other in the tight space, sweating, frustrated.

He was tired of waiting. Tired of not kissing her. Linc moved in. His hands settled on her hips, and he watched the sparks fly in those eyes. His favorite shade of green, he decided.

His body reacted to hers immediately. Cock springing to life. Pulse kicking up. Every sense was heightened because he was touching Mackenzie O’Neil. He felt like he was walking into a fire.

She was nervous. The pulse at the base of that slim neck fluttered away, and he longed to brush his mouth against it. But his focus was on her mouth. She favored red lipstick. He wanted to see it smeared. To have her step out from behind those barriers long enough to ruin those perfect red lines.

Messing up the outward perfection of Dr. Dreamy was his new mission in life.

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” he stated.