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.