Lush Curves (Dangerous Curves 8)

Three years ago

The woman flew into the hospital emergency room like a bat out of hell: long, red hair streaked with gray flying out behind her, purse open as she haphazardly threw in some car keys, waitress’ uniform crumpled and creased and stained with splotches of what looked like coffee and ketchup. But for all of that, she was absolutely formidable, and Doctor Sam Innis knew that this was the kind of woman who was going to face it – whatever the hell it was, whatever horrible thing had brought her storming into the E.R. at one a.m. – with all of the ferocity of a lioness.

Sam was standing behind some heart monitor equipment, so she didn’t see him as she hurtled on past, but he suspected that she wouldn’t have noticed him even if he’d been standing smack in the middle of the hallway. Her blue eyes were trained on the large, glowering man with messy dark hair who’d come in with Doctor Shane ‘Mac’ MacIntyre almost an hour earlier.

“Jax!” she cried, and Sam heard nothing but fear and confusion in the utterance of the man’s name. “Jax!”

Jax Hamill got to his feet, and Sam saw him shoot a concerned look at the red-headed man sitting on the sofa next to him. Sam knew that the man’s name was Noah Matthews, and it was clear to Sam that Noah was pretty severely autistic. Sam had been nothing but amazed at how gentle Jax had been with Noah – and not just Jax.

Sam’s attention turned to the mountain of a man holding a stack of baseball cards in his massive hand. Sam had seen plenty of rough types in the E.R., numerous genuinely terrifying people with seriously-worrying reputations – but Matt ‘King’ Kingston took the proverbial cake. By a goddamn mile.

So it had been touching to watch King sit for an hour with Noah, patiently going over the baseball cards, player after player, team by team, letting the younger man just rattle off physical stats after RBI after playoff. It was clearly Noah’s displacement activity, a way to keep him focused and calm, and King had dedicated himself to it with a compassion and almost-sweetness that had made Sam look at the ferocious, ex-military, black-ops badass with a sense of softening.

Not that Sam had spent much time talking to Jax, or King, or Noah. He’d been in the E.R. with Mac for an hour, fighting desperately to save the life of the young woman that these men were here for. Mac was sitting on Noah’s other side now drinking a coffee in preparation for the long, awful night ahead. His blue eyes met Sam’s dark ones, and both men gave each other a tiny head-shake of sadness. They knew what Sam was here in this hallway to do.

Sam’s thoughts went to Sarah Matthews now, and his stomach both sank and tightened in an all-too-familiar feeling of worry and dread. Her head injuries were extensive; they were the kind of extensive that rarely ended well. The kind of extensive that meant that he was almost certain that his next words to Sarah’s stoically-worried loved ones were going to be, “I’m so sorry. We did everything that we could…”

God, he was fed up with having to say those words. Sam excelled at trauma and he knew that he had the temperament and the skills, that he was invaluable to the E.R., that he was damn good at his job. But some days, he just wanted to be a dermatologist, to have sane office hours, to have a little prescription pad for creams – and to never, ever again have to start a conversation with, “I’m so sorry.”

Jax gently took the woman by the elbow now, said something under his breath to her. She looked over at Noah too, and Sam saw that he’d tensed up at the woman’s frantic appearance. Right away, her face softened and she nodded, let Jax lead her down the hallway to a sofa. He gently placed her on it, then knelt down to her level. Sam saw them talking, saw the woman look back at Noah, saw her touch Jax’s hand in a concerned, caring gesture.

That was the thing that got Sam out from behind the heart monitor machine to talk to Mac about the CT scan – that little hand touch. This woman was clearly Sarah Matthews’ mother, and she had to be beside herself with fear and worry… and she still had it in her to offer comfort to a hurting, barely-holding-onto-his-rage bear of a man.

A woman like this was strong, and she was gentle, and God knows that she needed to know things. She needed the worst and she needed the truth – both unvarnished – and she trusted herself to be able to handle things. Sam suspected that she’d been trusting herself and her own judgement for a long, long time, and had long stopped looking to others for solace or salvation. She carried herself like a woman who had vast inner resources, deep wells of strength to draw from. This was the kind of woman that if the zombie apocalypse came, she’d not only survive, she’d blow holes in zombie heads and feed the kids in her charge. Sam would want to be in a group with her, that was for damn sure.

Well, thank Christ for her grit, because she was going to need it for whatever was coming her way – no matter what it was.