Bad Cruz

“Of me starting another scandal.” She jutted her jaw out. “They hate it when I’m the center of attention.”

I hate them for making you feel like a burden.

And myself for not taking charge, because God forbid I do something less than pristine and make someone uncomfortable.

“I’m starting to lose my patience here, sweetheart,” I said, dead serious. “I’m not going to chase you forever. I like you, Tennessee, but I don’t like the way you make me feel, and that’s starting to become a problem.”

“I know,” she said firmly, placing her palms flat on my chest.

My heart was beating like mad.

Goddammit, I wanted her. I wanted to run. But her eyes were sincere.

“Just give me a few seconds to make sense of it all, all right? I’ll see you at the rehearsal dinner tomorrow.”

I drove back home, feeling a weird sense of calamity taking over me. When I parked in front of my front door, I realized why.

She was slipping away from me. Letting me down easy, the way I’d let down Gabriella and all the women before her.

I need to think about it.

I need to make sense of it all.

I need some alone time.

I punched the steering wheel so hard, I tore the motherfucker.

I was losing Tennessee Turner, and I felt it.

“You didn’t have to do that, you know,” Trinity told me the following day at my clinic.

She collapsed on the seat in front of mine while I was scribbling some notes about my latest patient. She looked like something that’d been dragged out of a sewer to destroy New York in a climactic sci-fi film.

I didn’t look up from my notes, because I knew eye contact would cause her to lose her job. “Care to be more specific?”

From the corner of my eye, I could see her picking at the tail end of her braid and splitting the fine blonde hairs in it.

“Wyatt. The kiss. The bachelor party. He said you bent his arm to tell me. But I didn’t want to know.”

“Well, I don’t particularly care what you did or did not want, to be honest. It was more about my clean conscience than your comfort.”

“I’m embarrassed you saw it.”

“Really?” I asked casually. “You have so many more things to be embarrassed about, seeing my brother making out with someone else shouldn’t even be in your top one thousand.”

Her eyes darted up from her split ends, widening. “Have I done something wrong, Dr. Costello?”

Yes. So many things, I can’t stop counting them.

“Now, why would you think that?” I closed the file I was working on, stood up, and went to return it to my cabinet.

“You’ve never spoken to me in such a… such a…”

“Candid, no-bullshit manner?” I supplied.

“Yes. It’s like—”

“A slap in the face?” I finished for her again. She made a whimpering sound I took as confirmation. “Shame. You seemed like you could use one.”