Please Don't Die, Alpha! I Can Heal You Every Night novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Terms

In his brewery loft Jude lets her keep the money even if she leaves tonight, and she signs anyway, with one clause of her own, then finds a wound that should have healed.

The brewery was three floors of brick and iron on the river, and nobody had made beer in it for forty years.

Ollie parked in a yard full of black cars and led me through a steel door.

The ground floor still had a copper still the size of a bus.

Upstairs, a loft ran the length of the building, with tall windows and a view of the Cuyahoga going gray in the rain.

Jude Kane sat at a long table in a clean black shirt.

He looked worse than he had in the supply room, and he was trying very hard not to.

"Sit," he said.

"I'll stand."

"Then stand." He pushed the folder toward me. "Read it."

It was four pages.

Ninety days.

I would live in this house.

I would be seen in public as his woman, at the places he named.

Every night I would dress his wound.

The deposit for my father was already paid, and so were the surgery and the hospital stay.

Page three had a line I read twice.

If at any time Sabine Hallett chooses to leave, everything paid stays paid, and no one will stop her.

Page three had another line, in bold.

Nothing in this agreement requires, expects or pays for sex.

I looked up.

"You wrote this yourself?"

"Ollie typed it. I told him the words."

"Ollie typed that?"

"Yes, ma'am," Ollie said from the door, and turned a little pink.

"Why?" I asked Jude. "You could have bought a private nurse. You could have bought ten."

"I did buy one," he said. "She sold what she saw to Merritt Crowe in two days."

"So you want a woman instead."

"I want someone who lives here and nobody asks why. If you're my woman, nobody wonders about the nurse."

"That's clever."

"It's cheap."

"It's both." I tapped the page. "And if I walk out tonight, you eat the hundred and forty thousand."

"Yes."

"You really don't think I'll walk?"

"I think you'll do whatever you decide to do."

He said it plainly.

"That's why I asked for you."

I had expected a lot of things from a man.

I had not expected him to hand me the door.

I should have taken it.

I knew exactly what a smart woman would do with a gang boss, a pen and a stack of paper.

But my father was upstairs on a monitor.

And the man in front of me had a gray tint under his skin.

He had sweat at his hairline, in a room that was not warm.

I'd seen that color on a hundred patients.

"I'll sign," I said. "With one more clause."

"Which is?"

I took the pen from the table and wrote in the margin.

Mr. Kane follows the nurse's orders about his wound, without argument.

I turned the page and pushed it back.

He read it.

The scarred eyebrow went up.

"Without argument."

"Those are the words."

"I'm not good at that."

"I figured." I held out the pen. "Sign."

He signed.

His hand was huge, and his writing was small and neat.

"Shirt," I said.

"Now?"

"You came into my ER bleeding at two in the morning. Yes, now."

Ollie found a reason to be in another room.

Jude pulled the shirt over his head.

I'd seen bodies for four years.

His was still a lot to look at: wide chest, hard stomach, a map of old scars.

I told myself it was clinical and began to unwind the dressing.

The wound sat under his left collarbone.

It was round, the size of a nickel, and angry red at the edges.

Last night I had stopped the bleeding.

I hadn't looked at what was underneath.

I pressed lightly beside it, and he drew a breath through his teeth.

Pus beaded at the center.

"This isn't from last night," I said.

"A knife, last night. A cut across the ribs."

"Not that. This." I touched the edge. "This is a bullet hole, and it's five weeks old."

His gray eyes met mine and gave me nothing.

"Where's the bullet?"

"I took care of it."

"You're lying to your nurse, in your own house, on day one."

"I'm choosing what to say."

"That's what lying is."

For the first time, one corner of his mouth moved.

It wasn't a smile.

It was the place a smile would go, if he had practice.

"Pack it and wrap it," he said. "Please."

I did.

The whole time I felt his heartbeat under my palm, hard and slightly too fast.

When I was done, he stood, and I noticed that he did it slowly.

"Ollie will show you your room. Saturday night we have dinner."

"With who?"

Ollie had come back to the doorway.

His round glasses caught the window.

"With Merritt Crowe, Doc," he said. "At his steakhouse. He asked for the new girl by name."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he already knows you exist," Ollie said. "And he touches people."

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