Normally, I was more calculated than to needlessly poke and humiliate people who didn’t deserve it.
Normally, I didn’t handle Aisling Fitzpatrick.
She brought out the worst in me. I was borderline allergic to her. So sweet, so innocent, so accommodating. Still living with her fucking parents.
And really, rejecting her was doing her a favor. I was going to have her father’s head on a platter in about two seconds, when I exposed him for everything he was and squeezed the truth out of him.
See? Even I had my fucking limits.
They were few and far between and faded, but they were, apparently, in existence.
Then there was the oath part. Even though I was a world-class bastard, I wasn’t a dishonorable one. The Fitzpatrick men paid me good money not to touch Aisling, which meant I needed to at least make a half-assed effort to keep my word.
“Perhaps you could—” Dr. Holmberg started, but I’d already hung up the phone and was calling Sailor to ask for Aisling’s number.
My sister and Nix were good friends. The wallflower and the lady.
“Does that mean you are finally going to ask her out?” Sailor asked on the other line. I heard her washing something in the background, probably Xander’s bottles.
I threw a glance to the back of the van, where Becker was bleeding out—possibly parts of his lungs—and Angus looked like his arm had been screwed into the rest of his body by a blind toddler.
“Are you fucking high?” I scowled at the road, talking to my sister. “She’s a child.”
A child I’d done some pretty grown-up shit to.
I didn’t think eight years were a big deal in terms of an age gap. I slept with women who were in their mid-twenties sometimes, although I naturally gravitated toward women my own age. But Aisling wasn’t only eight years my junior. She also had that pure as the driven snow halo of a blue-blooded angel.
A blue-blooded angel who sucked your balls like the future of the country depended on it then proceeded to take it up the ass like a pro.
“High? Oh, I wish. I can’t do shit while breastfeeding. Not even drink a glass of wine.” Sailor sighed wistfully, reminiscing about times when she didn’t have a husband to knock her up as soon as she pushed out a baby.
“If you want sympathy, I suggest you talk to someone with a heart,” I grumbled.
“Oh, really? So what’s the thing beating in your chest?”
“It’s not beating. It’s ticking. Probably a bomb.”
She laughed heartily. “Don’t be too harsh with Ash. You know she is a gentle one. Love you, asshole.”
“Bye, shitface.”
I hung up and called the number Sailor had given me. Aisling answered on the fifth ring, just as I was about to hang up and make a U-turn, delivering two, sweaty, injured beefcakes straight to her manicured front lawn.
“Hello?” Her sweet voice filled the van, flooding the goddamn place like an overwhelming perfume.
“It’s Sam,” I hissed in annoyance.
“Oh,” was her response. It was a response I was familiar with as she’d often used it when people told her things she did not like. But she’d never used that ‘oh’ with me before. “How can I help you, Mr. Brennan?”
I was Mr. Brennan now?
Being an asshole certainly had its cons. I trudged forward with my request.
“I have two injured soldiers. I can’t drop them at the hospital for obvious reasons. If I bring them over to Badlands, could you get a triage kit and treat them? You’ll be paid handsomely.”
I hated asking for favors and could count on one hand the number of times I had to do so. Usually, I had some kind of leverage over people, something they wanted back from me, hence the luxury of not ending a demand with a question mark.
“What are their injuries?” she asked, cold and quiet. “Give me the physical description, please, not your medical assessment, unless of course you went to med school without my knowledge.”
For the first time in my life, I got the ice princess treatment everyone else received and not her unabashed adoration.
Not that I could blame her, after shoving her pride into a blender and setting it on high that night at Badlands.
“One has a broken arm. The other was shot in the chest.”
“Where about in the chest?”
“Lungs. Meet me at Badlands in thirty.”
She was going to ask me if she was still banned from the nightclub, and I was not going to lift the ban. Nothing was going to lift the fucking ban, Jesus himself included.
If it were up to me, Aisling Fitzpatrick wouldn’t be allowed near a red-blooded man who wasn’t a relative until the end of her days. Not to mention a fucking herd of them, drunk and sweaty, in my club. The memory of her being yanked by that asshole in my club scorched through my brain. I’d almost killed the kid. The only thing that stopped me from slashing his throat in a room full of people was I didn’t know it was Aisling at the time.