Fear the Beard (The Dixie Warden Rejects MC Book 2) Read online

  Chapter 6

  Women remember stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.

  -Fact of Life

  Tommy

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “I thought I told you not to come to clinicals today?”

  The woman who hadn’t strayed far from my thoughts winced.

  “I don’t have clinicals today. I have a shift,” she reminded me. “Remember?”

  No, I didn’t remember. I tried not to think about her at all, but that was becoming harder and harder to make happen.

  Just yesterday I’d gone out to lunch with her, and I had thought of nothing but her for the last eighteen hours. If it wasn’t her fucking eyes, it was the way she parted her lips while she was listening intently, or the way her teeth would worry the inside of her cheek while she was thinking.

  “Did you hit any water on your way?” I asked.

  It’d been raining for days, and the entire freakin’ county had been under a flood warning for the majority of the week.

  She winced.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “Though most of it was by my house. My mom and dad own a few dogs that they breed, and they live out in kennels. The kennels were starting to flood, and I had to stop and help, which is why I’m late.”

  I looked at the time, realizing that if she was on shift, she should’ve been here over an hour ago.

  “The dogs okay?” I asked as I picked up a chart and started to jot down my orders and notes.

  “Yes,” she said. “Though, I’m glad we found it when we did, otherwise they would’ve had a ton of water in their kennel with nowhere to lie down. It was about halfway up the plastic pool they use to drink out of.”

  My brows rose.

  “That’s not good,” I told her. “They ever need any help again, let me know. I got a few guys that have soft spots for dogs.”

  She smiled timidly. “Thank you. I’ll let my dad know.”

  I wanted to laugh. Her father was a freakin’ judge, and though he knew of The Dixie Wardens MC, knew that most of us were public servants, he also wouldn’t call upon us to help him in any way unless it was truly bad.

  We were known as the Rejects because we were all a little bit broken and sometimes skirted the edges of the law.

  “Who’s watching your girl?” I found myself asking, wanting to hear her voice a little too much.

  She grinned, her face taking on a wistful look as she thought about her daughter.

  “She’s at daycare,” she smiled. “My dad will pick her up on the way home from work, and I’ll get her when I get off.”

  “Your dad watches her a lot?” I asked.

  “Mom and dad,” she nodded. “My sister and brother take turns, too. I wouldn’t have been able to make it through nursing school without them.”

  I couldn’t see how she’d done it, either. If my math was correct, her child was around six to eight months old. That would mean she had the kid in between breaks, and then had an infant throughout her school year—while getting her bachelors of nursing. Now that was impressive.

  I had a damn dog during med school, and I’d forgotten to feed him multiple times. How she was able to get her schoolwork done while caring for her child, not to mention holding down a job, was fucking amazing.

  “You’re with me today,” I said. “Dr. Wild is on call, but he’s spending time with his wife who just had surgery on her thumb that she broke two days ago.”

  She frowned. “That sucks.”

  My dick hardened in my scrubs, and I cursed myself for wearing the snug ones.

  This was going to be a long goddamned day.

  ***

  The day continued to get longer as the flooding got worse.

  The water was getting higher everywhere, and roads were now starting to flood.

  Ambulances were having trouble getting to the scenes of accidents, and it wouldn’t be long before they couldn’t get there at all without risking their own safety.

  “My boat’s in storage on Pine Street,” I was saying into my speaker phone to Ghost, my club brother. “It’s not locked up during the day. The key to the motor is in the glove box towards the left side.”

  “All right,” Ghost’s deep baritone filled the area surrounding me. “We’re gonna start looking for anyone that needs help. Get them where they need to go.”

  Meaning the shelters or higher ground.

  The water was flooding the lower half of the city, and it was slowly creeping up into dangerous territory.

  It wasn’t there yet, but it would be soon.

  “Sounds good. I’m here for the long haul, so don’t expect me to come help. The other doctor that was on call is stuck outside of town thanks to the officers refusing to let him in due to a power line being down and threatening the immediate vicinity. He’s pissed, but that’s probably for the best since they’re not letting anyone else in anyway. It could get dangerous.”

  “Agreed,” Ghost said. “Over and out.”

  I hit the end call button but shouldn’t have bothered because when Ghost was done talking, he was done. There were no niceties or quick goodbyes with him. He was short, abrupt, and I wouldn’t have him any other way.

  “He sounds rough,” Tally said as she made her way up to me. “Did he gargle with gravel or something?”

  I snorted, surreptitiously adjusting my cock underneath the desk.

  Why, at thirty-three, I got a hard on just at the sound of her voice, was beyond me.

  God, I was going to hell.

  “No,” I shook my head. “He had some smoke inhalation damage to his throat and lungs a few years back. Makes him sound rougher…though he looks like a tough son of a bitch. The voice is just icing on the cake.”

  She grimaced. “I lost a brother to a fire.”

  I blinked, then cursed.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I apologized. “I didn’t realize that you had any other siblings besides your brother and sister.”

  She shrugged.

  “It was before we moved here,” she explained. “Or, more correctly, it was why we moved here.”

  “What happened?” I asked, leaning back in my office chair at the nurses’ station and staring at her as concern started to roll through me.

  “Mom and Dad used to live in California,” she explained. “In the hills. A wildfire swept over the mountain and started burning hot before we even had a chance to react. Phillip was out with friends. He and the entire car of boys got caught up in one of the fires. They burned alive.” She licked her lips. “I was five. Morgan was ten. Brett was Eleven. Phillip was sixteen.”

  My heart started to ache.

  “That’s terrible,” I murmured. “I’m so sorry, Tally.”

  She looked at me, those green eyes of hers so wide and filled with pain, and I wondered how the hell I’d missed the sadness before. I could see it clearly now, the heartbreak that lived inside of her.

  “Tallulah, the poor girl, was stuck with a mouthful of a name, since I ended up naming her after him.” She smiled wistfully. “Tallulah Ophelia Slater.”

  “Not too bad. You could shorten it to Lula,” I grinned. “Though, I sense a touchy subject there, seeing as every time one of the nurses asks about ‘Lula’ you get all stony faced.”

  Apparently, her mother called Tallulah ‘Lula’ at work when she spoke of her, causing the other nurses to refer to her as that.

  It was clear after the first four times that someone had called her Lula that Tally didn’t like it, and I’d been wondering why ever since the first time I noticed her reaction.

  “I don’t like the name,” she admitted. “There’s really nothing to it. I just don’t like it. I named her Tallulah because that’s what I wanted her to be called.”

  I grinned.

  “It’s a mouthful, as you said. Gotta be hard for her to say,” I informed her.

  She sighed.

  “I’m sure it will be,” she confirmed. �
��I just…”

  The ER doors opened, and a soaking wet Seanshine, another member of the club, came barreling in with a patient. Seanshine was a medic, and he was damn good at his job. I’d work with him at my side any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

  Seanshine walked past me, not even acknowledging me, and headed straight back for the room that he’d been instructed to use while en-route with the patients. Once he’d transferred over care to one of the nurses, he came back out, a thunderous scowl on his face.

  “What’s up?” I asked him as he made his way in.

  He growled at me, walking straight past me and to the refreshment room for the paramedics.

  I got up and followed, curious now as to the reason for his anger.

  I found him muttering obscenities to himself.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Someone took the last Dr. Pepper,” he grumbled. “Who’s the chick?”

  I turned to see Tally in the seat I’d vacated. “Tally,” I answered, not giving any more information than that. He didn’t need to know that she was my student, and I was having some very not-so-teacher-like thoughts about her.

  “Fuckin’ A,” he grumbled. “We lost an ambulance.”

  I blinked.

  “What?” I barked. “How the hell does that happen?”

  He glared at me as he pulled out a Mountain Dew and started chugging it, all the while keeping angry eye contact with me.

  “I mean,” he said once he was finished, “that we parked it to go to a scene. Got as close to the accident as we could, but ended up having to walk to the scene where some dumbass tried to drive into high water and got carried off. Just got to the car when I hear a god-awful crash and look back to see the ambulance floating away down the fucking creek-turned river.”

  I blinked.

  “Ummm,” I stifled my laughter. “How the fuck does that happen?”

  He glared.

  “A semi slammed into the back of it—flashing lights on and all—and pushed it into the water. We got the guy out of the car, and I hoofed it all the way here from Tenth Street.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “That woman is hot as fuck. Have you fucked her yet?”

  I turned to find him staring at Tally.

  Then burst out laughing.

  “Uh, no,” I said. “She’s a nursing student.”

  I refused to admit that Tally was my student, though. Not to him.

  I was about two seconds away from breaking the goddamned law, not to mention the moral code, when it came to Tally Slater, and I’d rather not admit it out loud.

  Because if I didn’t admit it aloud, it didn’t really count…right?

  ***

  The first part of my long day started not long after she arrived.

  One second we were sitting at the nurses’ station, and the next we were at a woman’s side whose daughter was having an asthma attack.

  I was practically on top of Tally, my body pressed to hers as we worked.

  “Have you been able to get anything in her?” I asked the woman.

  “No,” she frantically replied. “I tried to give her meds in her spacer when I realized what was going on, but by then she was already too far into it.”

  I nodded and started to work, as Alessandria, the other nurse who Tally was shadowing, was helping me.

  Tally stayed at the girl’s side, speaking to her as she tried to calm the child down.

  The mom was on one side, holding her hand, bent down talking to her as well.

  I spared one quick look at the soft, not panicking smile on Tally’s face, and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Twenty minutes later, the little girl was breathing, I was no longer pressed against Tally’s ass, and I was trying to contain the adrenaline rush that always ran through me in emergencies.

  My cock was still fucking hard, I had the smell of Tally clinging to my body, and I was heading to the bathroom.

  I was a sick mother fucker, but I couldn’t deal with this hard on for the next ten hours. I had to get it under control, and in my mind, there was only one way to do that.

  Closing the door of the private physician’s bathroom, I yanked my pants down, fisted my cock, and started running my hand up my shaft furiously.

  It took less than forty seconds before I was coming all over a paper towel I’d grabbed just in time, and I couldn’t help but growl Tally’s name.

  ***

  I didn’t know what I was thinking.

  Throughout the night, the weather had gone from bad to worse, and we were now staring three o’clock in the morning in the face.

  “We can sleep in the same room. And you should sleep while you can, because if things keep going like they’re going, we’re going to be put to work sooner rather than later.”

  “There’s only one bed,” she said. “I can’t take your bed.”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s not technically mine…” I made a point of telling her. “And the bed is big. You just sleep on your side, and we’ll be fine.”

  She gave me a skeptical look, then held up the pillow at the top of the bed, and then pointed to the lamp beside the bed. “This screams ‘you’,” she informed me. “And I saw you wearing that shirt yesterday.” She pointed to the corner of the room where my Grunt Style t-shirt laid in a dirty heap against the wall.

  “Well,” I shrugged. “It’s not, technically, like I said, but I am the main one who uses it, though.”

  “One of the nurses told me that you threw a bitc…uh, I mean, you complained when one of the other doctors used it to sleep in,” she amended quickly.

  I sighed. “I did…but there was more to it than that.”

  “Enlighten me,” she ordered, fidgeting slightly as I gave her the weight of my eyes.

  “A med school shit came in here, took a nap, and then took it over for himself,” I explained. “When I went to use it, the motherfucker had left a fuckin’ jizz towel on the floor, thrown underneath the bed as if he hoped it wouldn’t be found, and the entire room smelled like he’d fucked for hours in it. Took me ten minutes to find that shit, and I wasn’t happy when I did find it.”

  She grimaced. “Boys are gross.”

  I laughed, sitting down on the chair across from the bed. “Needless to say, nobody wants to fuck it up because they’re scared that I’ll give them a dressing down that they’ll deserve, so it’s mostly not used by anyone but me.”

  She smiled, following suit by taking her own shoes off.

  “Should we leave the door open so they don’t think that we’re...you know...” She cleared her throat.

  I grinned. “Fucking?”

  God, I really was going to hell.

  The act of saying that word to her was enough to make my dick lengthen as blood rushed to it.

  My lips tipped up into a grin when I got a look at her socks.

  “Another present from your mom?” I guessed as I studied her dainty feet.

  She rubbed her feet with her hands, and I wanted to push her hands away and take over for her…but I didn’t.

  “Yep,” she smiled. “Though, she says they’re from Tallulah.”

  I grinned. “I’ll bet she likes when you wear them,” I bent forward and fingered the small flap of fabric off the back of one ankle that looked to be a cape. “Does your daughter like superheroes?”

  Tally nodded hurriedly. “That she does. Her room right now is decorated in Batman and Captain America.”

  I grimaced. “That’s sacrilege.”

  “What is?” she asked as she started to scoot back, making room in the bed for me and moving until she was practically snug against the wall.

  I got up, keeping my arm down to shield my dick from her view, and flipped off the light.

  The room plunged into darkness except for a slight illumination that lit the area around the bottom of the door.

  “The fact that you’re putting a DC comic book hero in the sam
e room as a Marvel comic book hero,” I told her, stopping at the side of the bed to remove my shirt.

  Once it was free of my body, I tossed it in the direction of the chair, and took a seat, the softness of the bed inviting me.

  The cool sheets hit my back and I tensed for a few seconds before finally scooting myself all the way into the bed.

  And I realized my mistake.

  All the other times that I’d been close to her, felt her against my body, we’d been in public places.

  Now, we weren’t in public.

  Now, I was shirtless.

  And now, we were in a goddamned bed.

  Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  Chapter 7

  Whenever I feel down, I just put my hand on my vagina for a few short seconds. Holding that much power always cheers me up.

  -Hadley to Tally

  Tally

  I lay in the bed next to Dr. Tommy, straight as a board.

  I didn’t move. I didn’t dare.

  If I moved, I might touch him.

  If I touched him, I might not be able to stop myself from running my hands along his abs.

  Abs that I knew he had. I’d felt them up against me that day in the exam room while we were working on that little girl.

  I’d felt all of him.

  Every hard inch, and I’d loved every single bit of it.

  Dr. Tommy shifted, and I nearly groaned as his elbow grazed my sensitive breast.

  Biting my lip, I rolled, putting my back to him, and faced the wall.

  The move put my backside up against his knee that was hitched at the side, and I froze, wondering if I should move.

  Or should he move?

  Certainly, I was taking up less space than him, but talking to him would only force me to listen to more of that deeply intoxicating voice of his. In the dark. With his smell surrounding me.

  So instead I chose to stay still. I stayed like that for a long time, so long, in fact, that my back started to get stiff from lying so rigidly.

  At some point in the last however long it’d been, Dr. Tommy had fallen asleep. His soft, even breathing filled the dark room around me, and I finally thought it was safe enough to roll over.