The King (The Original Sinners: White Years, #2)(47)

“I don’t care. See one anyway.”

“You forget I’m your boss. Not the other way around.”

“And I’m your assistant. I’m assisting you. You need to see a doctor.”

“I’m leaving now. Goodbye.” He patted her on the shoulder as he walked past her.

“I’m making you a doctor’s appointment,” she called out after him.

Kingsley paused in the door, turned around and came back to her.

“You are insubordinate,” he said.

“You hired me to help you,” she said, turning her bright eyes up to him. “Let me help you.”

Kingsley sat on the edge of his desk and looked down at her.

“I could align the planets using your nose as a sextant,” he said, tapping the end of it. “It’s that straight.”

“It’s the only straight part of me. Now stop trying to distract me and tell me how I can help you.”

“Stop dressing like that.”

“I dress like a man. No apologies. I don’t feel like myself in skirts and dresses. Okay?”

“I don’t care about that. I don’t care if I never see you in a dress or a skirt as long as I live.” He waved his hand to indicate his own attire of jeans, T-shirt and jacket. “But you dress nicer than I do, and I’m your employer. You’ll have to tone it down.”

“Maybe you should tone it up.”

“Tone it up?”

“You said you wanted to be a king of your own kingdom, right? You should dress like one.”

“I’d have to dress in a top hat and tails to outshine you.”

She tilted her head back and looked him up and down.

“You’d look incredible in a tuxedo.”

“You think?”

“Like a sexy French penguin,” she said.

“I’m leaving.”

“Bon voyage,” she said. “I’ll make the appointment.”

“No doctors,” he called back.

“I meant with my tailor.”

Kingsley had a smile on his face as he left Sam in his office. The smile faded by the time he exited the house. His driver, Gia, waited for him with the car, but he waved her off, telling her he’d rather walk today. It was a nice May day after all. The walk would do him good. Of course the real reason he didn’t want Gia to drive him was because he didn’t want anyone knowing where he was going. He walked four blocks and then caught a cab. He still couldn’t believe S?ren had talked him into doing this. He hadn’t belonged to S?ren since he was seventeen, and yet, here he was, following S?ren’s orders like those eleven years had been eleven days. It had been so long since he’d felt as if it mattered to someone whether or not he lived or died that he couldn’t help but give in when S?ren pushed him to come here.

The cab let him out in front of a two-story Brooklyn brownstone with nothing to distinguish it but the brass plaque on the front door. He paused at the steps and heard the roar of an Italian motorcycle engine. Of course. Of course he’d be here.

“I told you I would do it,” Kingsley said to S?ren as he pulled off his helmet and stepped onto the sidewalk. “You don’t have to babysit me.”

“I’m not babysitting you, and I knew you would do it if you said you would do it.”

Kingsley wasn’t sure about that, but he appreciated the vote of confidence.

Thankfully, S?ren wasn’t in his clerics today. He looked like any other six-foot-four twenty-nine-year-old blond god out for a sunny late-May motorcycle ride.

“Then, why did you follow me here?”

“Even a deviant like you needs a priest sometimes. Especially a deviant like you.”

Kingsley’s throat tightened. He swallowed the knot.

“Fine,” he said. “You can come in. But don’t embarrass me in front of cute nurses.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

He strode up the stairs, S?ren at his side.

Once inside Kingsley gave the nurse his name. She handed him a clipboard covered in forms.

“I don’t fill out forms,” Kingsley said.

“Give them to me,” S?ren said with a put-upon sigh. The nurse raised an eyebrow and led Kingsley back immediately. Without Kingsley asking him to stay or go, S?ren followed him inside.

What a ghastly place—posters covered in dire warnings and pictures of people with diseases hung on the walls.

“I wish I had a medical fetish,” Kingsley said, looking in horror at the décor of the doctor’s office. “Then I might enjoy this.”

He opened a drawer at the end of the examining table.

“Oh, speculums…”

“Will you please behave?” S?ren said as he took a seat in a chair under a Warning Signs of Lyme Disease poster. Kingsley sat on the examining table feeling as if he were a boy again, at the doctor’s with his father to get vaccinated. He remembered how proud his father had been of him, not once f linching at the needles. He was more scared today than he was twenty years ago. And he missed his father.

“When was your last physical?” S?ren asked.

“Two years ago. And what the hell are you doing?”

“Your intake form.”

Kingsley ripped the clipboard from S?ren’s hand. In his neat, Catholic school handwriting, S?ren had not only filled in most of the blanks on the form, he’d filled them in accurately. Full name, height, age, birth date, address, social security number…