LITMIR.BIZ

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cook with some medical skills that might come in handy for a group of people who didn’t want the authorities looking too closely at their activities.

      “Doesn’t matter now.” He took a long drink of coffee.

      “You still don’t want to call the police?”

      “No.” He set the coffee cup on the table. “I should probably get out of your hair, though. If you can just point me toward the nearest town.”

      “Southeast,” she said, keeping her tone light. “If you were in any condition to walk across the room, much less three miles over the mountain.”

      “I’m tougher than I look.”

      She couldn’t stop a smile. “Right.”

      “You could say that with a little more conviction.” With a sigh, he rose from his seat and turned to look out the frosty window.

      Nicki sucked in a gasp at the sight of a streak of blood staining the back of the borrowed jersey. “You’re bleeding.”

      He turned his head to look at her. “Where?”

      “Your back.” She got up and started to tug up the hem of the jersey.

      He turned quickly, putting his hands out to stop her. “It’s nothing.”

      “Let me look.”

      He closed his hands around her wrists, his grip unexpectedly strong. Tension rose swiftly between them, electrified by Nicki’s sudden, sharp awareness that beneath the facade of weakness, Dallas Cole was a large, imposing male with chiseled features and deep, intense eyes that made her insides liquefy with appalling speed.

      Desire flickered in her core, and she tugged her wrists free of his grasp. She took a step back, swallowing the lump that had risen in her throat. “I’m pretty good with a first-aid kit.”

      He probed behind his back with one hand, his fingers returning bloodstained. He looked at the red wetness with dismay. “Damn it.”

      “I should treat that. Don’t need you bleeding all over everything.”

      “No,” he agreed, reaching for the back of the chair as if his legs were ready to give out beneath him. “Can you do it here?”

      “Of course. I’ll be right back.”

      When she returned with the first-aid kit she kept in the hall closet, she found him shirtless. He’d turned his chair around and sat hunched over the curved back, his arms folded under his head. An alarming Technicolor map of scrapes and bruises crisscrossed his back, including an oozing arch of abraded skin just across his left kidney.

      She kept her horror to herself as she unpacked the supplies she needed to treat the wounds. “This is going to hurt.”

      “What’s new?” he muttered against his arms.

      She pulled up a chair and sat beside him. “I’m going to clean everything first, then put antiseptic in any open areas.”

      “Are you going to do a play-by-play of your torture?” he muttered.

      “Only if you keep up the surly attitude,” she retorted, pressing a disinfecting cleansing pad to his back.

      He sucked in a sharp breath at the sting.

      “Sorry,” she murmured, wincing in sympathy. There’d been a time when she had considered a career in medicine. Well, of sorts. She’d been a licensed first responder when she was living in Nashville a few years back. But she’d found herself ill-suited for the job. Other people’s pain bothered her too much, making it hard to stay objective and focused.

      Even now, acutely aware that the battered man sitting before her might be a very bad man indeed, she couldn’t help but feel twinges of empathetic pain as she cleaned the abrasions that marred the skin of his back.

      “You seem to know what you’re doing.” He turned his head toward her, peering at her through one narrowed eye. “You a nurse?”

      She shook her head. “Used to be an EMT, though.”

      “Used to be?”

      “I gave it up for a career in the hospitality business.” She smiled at his arched eyebrow. “I’m a fry cook at a place called Dugan’s in town.”

      “I see.”

      “No you don’t. Nobody ever does.” She probed gently at his rib cage, feeling for any sign of a fracture.

      He sucked in another sharp breath. “Couldn’t stand the sight of blood?”

      “Too many whiny patients,” she said lightly. “Gave me headaches.”

      “And restaurant customers are a step up?”

      “Fry cook, not waitress. I only deal with whiny servers.” She blotted the oozing scrape over his kidney. “Any idea what made this wound?”

      He didn’t answer, and her imagination supplied a few answers she would have given anything not to visualize. But she’d already seen some of the brutality members of the Blue Ridge Infantry could mete out. Some of them enjoyed inflicting pain a little too much, as a matter of fact.

      “You must’ve really pissed somebody off,” she murmured as she covered the raw scrape with sterile pads and taped them into place.

      His back arched in pain as she pressed another sterile pad into place. “I have a bad habit of doing that.”

      “What are you, a tax collector?” she joked.

      Before he could respond, she heard the trill of the telephone coming down the hall. For a moment, she considered just letting it ring, but it might be the call she’d been waiting for.

      “Wait right here,” she said and headed to the bedroom.

      It was Trevor Colley on the phone. He was the manager at Dugan’s. “Can you work the morning shift?” he asked. “Bella’s stuck over in Abingdon looking in on her mama because of the snow.”

      She paused, torn. Normally, she jumped at working as many hours at the diner as she could, both for the money and for the opportunity to rub elbows with the militia members and their wives and girlfriends who frequented the diner on a regular basis. She’d made friends with some of the women already, and an incident a few weeks ago had even earned her the respect of a couple of the men.

      “Del McClintock is here.”

      She straightened. “Yeah?”

      “He asked if you were coming in.” Trevor kept his voice light, but she heard a hint of disapproval in his voice. The militia men might be good-paying customers, but the manager had never seemed particularly happy about their patronage. He took their money, of course. He’d be a fool not to, given that in this impoverished part of the county, paying customers could be hard to come by.

      But he wasn’t exactly happy about his best fry cook befriending members of the Blue Ridge Infantry.

      Nicki did her best to straddle the line between her manager’s feelings and her own need to make inroads into the BRI’s inner circle. It could be a delicate dance at the best of times.

      But even Trevor, as much as he disliked the hard-eyed men who ate daily at the diner, wasn’t above using her interest in them to get his way. “Should I tell him you’re coming in?”

      She pressed her lips together as she considered her options. Del McClintock’s sexual interest in her presented a very tempting opportunity to get a little closer to her target.

      But what was she going to do with Dallas Cole while she was working a shift at the diner? The last thing she wanted to do was leave him here on his own while she worked a few hours at the diner.

      No telling what kind of trouble he could get into.

      * * *

      THE MURMUR OF Nicki’s

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