Unexpected (The Protectors 10)

And his father’s bodyguard.

I shook my head at the thought.

Leave it to me to have gone years without feeling any kind of connection with any guy and in one fell swoop, I found myself inexplicably drawn to two men.

At the same time.

Two men who were presumably connected at the hip, considering their respective roles.

While Everett had been an open book, Nash had been quite the opposite. If his eyes hadn’t lingered on me in that moment after Everett had given me permission to address him using his first name, I wouldn’t have noticed the faint spark of interest – and confusion – in their dark, storm-cloud-colored depths. I couldn’t say for sure that Nash had a physical interest in men, but he definitely hadn’t liked the way I’d looked at Everett.

But there’d been something else there too. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

I’d never been someone who had a particular “type,” but I could say without any kind of hesitation that both men ticked all my boxes, though for different reasons. While I’d instinctively felt the need to shelter Everett, I hadn’t been interested in anything remotely like that when it came to the stunningly good-looking Agent Nash. No, with him I knew it would be a battle.

Of wills.

Of bodies.

And hell if I didn’t want to engage in that battle… and not care if I came out the winner or the loser. I highly suspected I’d win either way.

Of course, I was assuming a lot. I considered myself pretty well-versed at reading people, but I certainly could be off the mark when it came to Agent Nash.

I let my thoughts about both men fade as I reached Reese’s room. I considered the younger man on the other side of the door a friend and he deserved my complete attention. I knocked as I opened the door. Reese looked much like he had the day before when I’d left. His gaze was on the window, but I wasn’t sure he was actually looking out of it. He was alone in the room.

“Hey,” I said as I entered. The padding that had been lodged around his arms to keep him from moving them too much while he was waking up from the anesthesia the day before had been removed, but otherwise he looked the same.

He turned to look at me, his eyes shrouded with pain. “The mark?” he asked.

“Terminated.”

He nodded. “Good.”

I saw that he already had water, so I grabbed one of the visitor chairs and took it over to the bed and sat down in it. “How you feeling?” I asked.

“Like a fucking invalid,” Reese responded. “Since that’s what I fucking am.”

I ignored the snide remark. I’d already gotten an update from Ronan this morning that the paralysis hadn’t resolved itself yet, so I didn’t bring it up. “Ronan says they’ve scheduled surgery for the day after tomorrow to do the skin grafts.”

“Yeah,” Reese said with a sigh.

While several of the worst of the wounds on Reese’s chest would be covered with skin grafts using skin harvested from his back and legs, the ones on his arms wouldn’t need the same level of treatment. But the burns were bad enough that Reese would be spending at least some time in the burn unit so the wounds could be monitored and debrided as needed. His chest would eventually look somewhat normal, but the scars on his arms would be horrific. I hated that he’d be left with a constant reminder of the pain he’d be forced to endure over the coming weeks, but I also knew it could have been much, much worse.

“Did Ronan talk to you about moving you to Seattle for treatment?”

Reese nodded. “He wants to hire an air ambulance to fly me out there a few days after the surgery if I’m stable enough.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I don’t give a shit,” he muttered. “If I can’t fucking walk, what’s the point?”

“You’re going to walk,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No, but I believe it and that’s enough for now. And even if you don’t, it doesn’t mean your life is over.”

Reese let out an ugly laugh. “Yeah, because chasing down the bad guys in a wheelchair works really well.” The sarcasm left his voice completely as he bit out, “I can’t even keep from shitting myself, Gage. You get yourself attached to a bag of your own shit and tell me if life is still worth living.”

Since I doubted Ronan or Reese’s doctors had started discussing things like colostomies with him before knowing if the paralysis was even permanent, I had to guess that Reese had made use of his tablet and the hospital’s Wi-Fi while I’d been gone. I let the issue go and said, “I want to talk to you about what happens when you get discharged.”