Talkin' Trash
Page 30

Then again, he barely looked my way half the time while we were working, and I was beginning to wonder if maybe my stepfather had overreacted. But, then I went back to the fact that Steel wasn’t the type to overreact. Not even a little bit.
I assume that was why it was so baffling to me.
It was a really odd feeling to know that something was wrong while everyone around me acted like everything was fine.
Hell, Tyson hadn’t so much as looked at me again other than to address me when we were both looking after the same patient.
It was eerie.
“That’s very cool,” Linc said, cuddling the baby close. “Why are y’all here?”
Their daughter has a chest cold that’s threatening to put her in the hospital, yet her parents passed her off to practical strangers who hadn’t washed their hands.
It was no wonder the little girl was sick.
Hell, I’d seen their baby in five different sets of arms in the last hour that she’d been my patient, and only one of those people—me—had actually washed their hands first before touching her.
Nothing against Linc and his hygiene habits, but seriously. You never knew what germs were on your hands. That’s why you always washed them before meals, after you went to the bathroom, and after you touched stuff that other people touch a lot—like grocery carts or door handles.
“All right,” I said, smoothly interjecting myself into their conversation.
A, the baby had a blood draw that I needed to add on to what we already drew, and B, Linc looked incredibly uncomfortable holding a sick little baby that was hooked up to an IV.
“Do you mind holding her for just a second longer?” I teased, eyes shining with mirth.
Linc’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t say a word. Instead he just nodded his head.
“I’m going to draw a little blood. It’ll take me just a few seconds,” I explained to the parents, who didn’t seem to care what I did to their child. They were too busy being starstruck by Linc’s presence in the vicinity.
“Sure, that’s fine. Do you mind if I take a picture?”
I ignored them and Linc as I did what I had to do, feeling awful when the little baby started to cry.
Five gut-wrenching minutes later, I was walking away with Linc in tow.
“That’ll be on social media within the hour,” I told him as he walked away with me.
Linc snorted. “Fuck an hour. I’ll bet it’s viral in about five minutes flat.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re not that cool.”
He winked down at me. “Bet you fifty bucks.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Make it a piece of chocolate cake from Dusty’s, and you have a deal.”
“I can’t have chocolate cake. My part of the deal will have to be something that isn’t going to cause me to have to run an extra mile tomorrow morning,” he countered.
My grin spread. “Anything you want.”
His eyes lit. “Anything?”
I winked. “Anything.”
“What are you telling him anything for, woman?” Pru asked.
“We made a bet that the picture the mother over there just took will be viral in five minutes. Though, I guess we’ll have to set some ground rules on what exactly viral constitutes. Say, one hundred thousand likes?”
Linc shrugged. “Sure.”
His cocky smile told me that he fully expected it to get more.
“Fine, half a million,” I offered.
“Why were you even holding the baby in the first place?” Pru asked. “What the fuck? If that were my kid, I wouldn’t give half a shit who you were. Not when my kid could barely breathe, and we were taking them to the hospital at two weeks old.”
My sentiments exactly.
“I had a newborn put in my arms—like two days old—when I walked in to visit a sick little kid in Maine. He was in the cancer ward, and I was on the way in when the parents with the newborn—they were on their way out of the hospital—saw me and begged for me to hold him so they could get a picture. Then there was this one time that I signed a pregnant woman’s belly. And another time—”
I interrupted Linc and rolled my eyes for good measure.
“You’re six-foot-four-inches and over two hundred and fifty pounds,” I muttered darkly. “You have tattoos covering most of your body, you have a scar on your face, and you’re wearing your cut. Seriously, I would never approach you. Never, not in a million years. I don’t care how big a name you are in football. And those people just put that baby in your hands like they knew you.”
Linc’s lips twitched. “Not everybody’s scared of people in motorcycle clubs.”
“Yeah, as long as they’re good motorcycle clubs,” Tyson muttered, coming up to the nurses’ station and dropping a clipboard onto the desk next to the computer he used. “I have a brother that’s a pain in the ass like that. He joined a motorcycle club and everything. It’s not one of those good clubs, either. It’s one of those really bad ones who do illegal shit. My brother’s been to jail eight times. Let’s just say there are some bikers that you really should be wary of. He looks exactly like me, has no visible tattoos and doesn’t even wear that motorcycle thingy all the time. Yet, he’s worse than you.”
Annnnd that was when everything started to make sense.
“You have a brother in an MC?” Pru asked, sounding surprised.
Which, I suppose, was surprising information to her. I, on the other hand, wasn’t surprised per se, but I was taken aback that it was Tyson’s brother, not Tyson, who was the bad guy biker in the dirty club.
But, it was all starting to make sense now since they couldn’t locate anything at all on Tyson himself.
Had we known about him, we’d have been looking into his brother, and that obviously would’ve been a different story.
“So,” I said, leaning closer to Linc without actually touching him. “Has your brother been in that MC long?”
“For at least a couple of years now, I guess. I don’t talk to him much, but we’ve been trying to mend fences lately. I followed him to town because he decided he was going to hang his shingle here for a year. He got a new job at the refinery plant just outside of town. He’s making pretty good money…or so he says. When our mother died last year, she begged me to take care of him, so that’s what I’m doing.” He sighed. “But Andy has never really been the kind of guy who liked being taken care of, so I have to be careful, or I’ll make him pissy…why am I telling you this?”
I laughed, hoping that it didn’t sound half as hysterical as I felt.
Tyson made a weird face and then looked over to Linc. “Don’t you ever have anything else to do?”
Linc shrugged. “I like to eat lunch with her because it makes me happy. Is that wrong?”
Tyson frowned. “No, I guess not. And since she’s pregnant, it’s definitely something that you need to make sure she does for the health of the baby.”
When had Tyson turned into such a mother hen?
I wouldn’t go into the fact that the reason Linc kept making appearances was because he was worried that I was here getting attacked—or worse—by the man who was currently fretting over my food intake for my non-existent baby.
“Uh, that’s what I’m trying to do,” Linc smiled.
“Yes,” Pru said, eyes shining with mirth. “You wouldn’t want to get faint. Make sure that you take care of that baby of yours.”
I had to find a way to get out of this lie.
“How far along are you?” Tyson asked, leaning back in his computer chair.
I felt my face flush as I tried to come up with a good lie.
“Well…” I hesitated.
“Let me guess.” Tyson shook his head with a small smile on his face. “You haven’t gone to the doctor yet to see.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it.
I really and truly had no clue what to say.
Just when I was about to blurt out everything, Linc put his hand over my mouth and pulled me into his side. “She’s scared of the doctor. The last time she went, they tried to do knee surgery on her wrong knee. She’s semi-freaked out and paranoid.”