He had eight of them.
Covered, absolutely covered in ornate tattoos. I hadn’t gotten to drool over the abs or the tattoos because of all the blood.
It had been established that I wasn’t ever going to be a doctor, but I was pretty sure ogling a patient’s eight pack was against some Hippocratic Oath.
“Freya.”
I jerked, looking up at the man’s eyes, realizing I had been staring at his tattoo-covered abs. “I didn’t take a Hippocratic Oath,” I exclaimed.
He blinked slowly. Once. “You’re good.”
It wasn’t a question. Nor was it a statement of fact. It was an order. He was ordering me to be good after I’d just nursed his stab wound. Sure, he’d flinched a couple of times while I was cleaning his wound while trying to follow a YouTube tutorial of how to treat a stab injury. Other than that, he’d acted like I was giving him a facial. Here he was, still bleeding—though thankfully the bleeding had slowed—still with a hole in his torso, and he was essentially ordering me to calm down.
“Okay, I’m going to...” I pointed toward my hallway. “Don’t die.”
“Again, not planning on it,” he replied.
I nodded once then pointed to Sirius. “Keep watch,” I ordered.
Then I walked calmly to the bathroom off my hallway and spent five minutes staring at myself in the mirror, willing myself not to have a heart attack.
I almost failed when there was a knock at the front door, but I managed to force myself out of the bathroom in order to open my front door. Other people were good right now. Even if those other people were men who spoke like sex gods and chuckled when faced with a stab wound. The quicker I opened the door, the quicker I got the bleeding guy off my sofa and my life back to normal.
I stared at the two men standing in my doorway in Sons of Templar cuts. They were tall. Really tall. Muscled. Two different versions of sex gods. Totally different than the sex god on my sofa. One was taller than the other, bulkier and older with greys threaded through his dark hair. He had a goatee, and I had no idea how the fuck he pulled it off, but he managed it. The other was muscled and wearing a tank to show off his smooth, ebony skin with muscles carved like they were made from granite. His eyes were liquid hazelnut, lips full and lush. He had a knife strapped to his belt.
Next to them was a petite blonde woman wearing faded jeans and a Green Day tee, a large leather bag slung over her shoulder. She smiled at me.
There wasn’t time for any kind of greeting or pleasantries since they barged right in. “We brought a doctor,” the first one yelled as he strode through my house, presumably in search of his bleeding brother.
I stared out at my driveway, the floodlights illuminating my Range Rover, two Harleys and a Mini Cooper. Cute car for a doctor to drive. And she liked Green Day. I liked her already.
Not what I should’ve been thinking about. And I shouldn’t have been staring at my driveway while there were four strangers in my living room. I managed to close the door and walk down the hall, down the steps and back into my living room. I blinked at the sight of the woman kneeling next to—how had I still not gotten his name?—him, doing her doctor work while the two club members loitered in my living room, not seeming at all concerned about their friend.
“Bro, you went to a strip club and got yourself stabbed?” the ebony-skinned man joked, rubbing Sirius on the head. My dog still hadn’t moved from his spot and was not at all worried by the no doubt deadly men in my living room.
“Did you at least kill them, or were you too busy touching up your lipstick?” he continued, grinning at me as I walked into the room.
The other guy was sitting on the arm of the armchair across from the sofa.
“Paid off, though,” he continued, eyes going to me.
My stomach dipped as his gaze went up and down my body. It wasn’t a leer. I’d had many men leer at me. In fact, it was my job to have men leer at me. I’d actually become comfortable with it. It was no longer a demeaning act, men looking at me like an object, like they had a right to me. At first, for the longest time, it had felt like that. Like I was for sale and cheap. But I’d come to realize that I had the power. I was fucking priceless; no matter how much money men threw at me, they’d never own me. I owned them. Their attention. They were the ones lying to their wives, spending all their money, never taking their eyes off something they could never have.