My Bad- Lani Lynn Vale Read online

  “You should take your break while we’re slo—” I held up my hand.

  “You don’t ever mention that word in my ER,” I told her honestly. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  With that, I turned to the man who was watching it all with amusement written all over his face and gestured for him to get out of my way with a tilt of my chin.

  “I have to pee. Move,” I ordered harshly.

  He moved instantly.

  But he didn’t go away.

  When I got out of the bathroom and headed back into the main ER, he was sitting outside the locked entrance doors with his arms crossed over his chest.

  The minute he saw me, his lips quirked up. “You never said yes to that date.”

  I snorted and walked up next to him, inputting my code and waiting for the doors to open.

  “No, I sure didn’t, did I?” I asked.

  “You just inputted that code in front of me, and now I know it,” he helpfully pointed out.

  I rolled my eyes. “What did you want me to do?”

  “Wait until I left,” he said. “I shouldn’t know the code to get in. I’m a stranger. You barely know me. What if I was some killer, and now I know how to get in?”

  I didn’t know why I’d done it in front of him, honestly. But something about him struck me as trustworthy.

  “It’s being changed after shift today, anyway,” I lied.

  It hadn’t been changed in so many years that I doubted anybody even thought about it anymore. Honestly, so many people needed to know the code—nurses, doctors, paramedics, and technicians. Hell, even the maintenance crew, housekeeping, and the food service needed to know it.

  Changing it would be a pain in the ass.

  Luckily, I sensed no ill will from the man. Not to mention I doubted he’d do a damn thing that would ever bring anyone harm—much like my own father.

  My father had taught me a lot over my lifetime, and a lot of those things he’d taught me were life skills that one wouldn’t think they’d need.

  Like people reading. Who would think that they’d need to know how to read someone?

  Well, I figured out why when I was fourteen and saw a young girl around my age try to get me into a car with her because her foot was hurt.

  I hadn’t gone, and a couple days later, that girl had been arrested for taking part in a gang initiation and killing another girl to accomplish her goal.

  “Good.” He blew out a relieved breath. “Good. That’s good.”

  The fact that he was worried about my well-being made me feel funny. I didn’t like that he cared.

  “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  I didn’t care, of course. But I couldn’t keep calling him ‘the man’ in my head. It was weird.

  “Hoax,” he answered quickly. “Hoax Hudson Hicks.”

  Then he held his hand out to me as if I was asking because I cared.

  “What’s your name?” he pushed.

  I licked my lips, not wanting to say a word, but my mouth opened on its own accord, and words started to pour out before I could stop them.

  “Pru Ember Mackenzie,” I answered.

  He took my hand that I’d seemingly held out for him to shake and smiled. “Nice to meet you, Pru.”

  I felt the edges of my lips turn up in a small smile.

  “I…”

  “MVA, Pru!” Dwight, the doctor that was working with us tonight, yelled. “Multiple injuries. One is a stick shift through a little girl’s chest.”

  I felt something inside of my gut clench, and then adrenaline started to course through my body. All the while the man—Hoax—still held my hand.

  I swallowed but didn’t pull away, and he noticed.

  Eventually, once we could hear the first sounds of sirens, he let me go and said, “Until next time, Pru.”

  Then he was gone, and I was left more confused than ever.

  I wanted him to leave, right?

  Chapter 3

  I just wanted some leggings. Unfortunately, I think I might’ve joined a cult when I purchased them.

  -Pru’s Secret thoughts

  Pru

  I walked into my parents’ house and groaned at the smell of the cookies that were baking in the oven.

  “Oh, God,” I moaned as I followed the smell. “Please tell me you have more than enough for me.”

  My dad, who was sitting on the bar stool next to the counter, grinned at me as I made my way into the kitchen.

  I walked straight to him and wrapped my arms around his large, muscular chest.

  “Bad day at work, baby?” he asked me.

  His chest rumbled with his words, and I closed my eyes as I thought about how awful my day had been.

  Well, not all of it. Just most of it.

  “Mom yelled at me when I told her we needed to change the code to the ER,” I mumbled. “And that was only the best part. The worst part is that a motor vehicle accident came in and not one, not two, but three children were unrestrained in the car doing the shitty driving. The mom was drunk off her ass and hit a parked car. Two kids were ejected. The one that wasn’t was only held inside by the stick shift impaling her in the left abdomen. They’re all in really bad shape.”

  My dad’s arms around me tightened. “Bad day.”

  Seriously. Bad day didn’t even begin to cover it.

  “I made cookies for your mother, but if she’s going to yell at my baby, then maybe you should eat hers,” Dad suggested.

  “I heard that.” My mother, my spitting image, walked through the door off the side of the kitchen that led to their bedroom, and straight to the bottle of Dr. Pepper that was sitting on the counter. She spared me a glare and drank. Once she’d finished, she turned to me. “I also didn’t yell at her. I explained why we didn’t change the code to the ER. Which she argued with me in front of the entire ER. It’s not my fault that I got pissed. She’s supposed to treat me like her boss at work, not her mother.”

  “You’re both,” I argued. “And you know it’s a good idea.”

  She growled in frustration. “I do know it’s a good idea! I’ve brought it up to the freakin’ hospital board multiple times, yet they still haven’t quite figured out how to pull their heads out of their asses. They argued about what the code should be changed to, who should have access to the code, where the code would be stored and how much money it was going to cost them to change it. At the end of the day, the goddamn code never gets changed.”

  “Maybe you should tell ol’ Fat Bastard that he needs to stop fucking himself with his thumbs and make that hospital safe for y’all,” my dad muttered. “Jesus, I hate that guy.”

  ‘That guy’ was actually the board director, Kelley Lowe. And Kelley Lowe wasn’t fat. He was actually quite skinny—well, fit was more the word I was looking for. He definitely wasn’t a ‘fat bastard’ though my dad liked to call him that because he talked like the guy from Austin Powers and made my dad think of him every single time he opened his mouth.

  I tended to agree, but this was one argument I definitely wasn’t going to get into the middle of. Especially seeing as if we gave him any attention at all, my dad would go off on a tangent.

  Apparently, when the hospital my mom and I were working for merged with a different hospital a few years before my tenure there, my mother almost lost her job because she was very vocal about the lack of safety in the hospital itself. Then, she’d been a charge nurse just like me, and hadn’t had the reach. But, when I took over her job for her, and she moved up to the director of the ER, she slowly started to implement new protocols. Kelley, the douche canoe, didn’t like that she was taking initiative. He also didn’t like her, my father, or me.

  Well, I had a feeling he liked me. He’d asked me out once, and I hadn’t been able to decide whether it was to piss my parents off or because he truly had feelings for me. Regardless of his motives, I’d said no and had made it a hobby to stay as far away from him as
possible.

  But, unfortunately, there were days like today where I had to see him.

  He felt it was his God-given right to be up in the middle of the ER and doing shit that he had no business doing because he was the head of the board. Apparently, that included inspecting the drug kiosks, making sure we didn’t have our phones out, and making sure that anything else wasn’t going on that he could scream at us about.

  Honestly, he was a real dick.

  “Let’s have cookies,” my mother suggested seconds before the timer went off. “But if you want some, you have to be eating them off your dad’s half. I’m going to eat all of my half. I think you gave me a new gray hair today.”

  I snorted and let my father go, walking to the fridge to get the jug of milk out and then pouring four glasses.

  “Why are you pouring four?” my father asked as he walked to the counter next to me.

  “Phoebe is on her way,” I said. “She had some questions about her homework for class, so I told her to come over here because I wasn’t going home.”

  He grunted. “She still mad at me?”

  I grinned. “From what I hear, yes.”

  He scoffed. “She has no reason to be mad.”

  “You stole her car and had it crushed,” I said. “And it had all her stuff inside of it.”

  “It had all her trash and bullshit inside of it. I made sure to take out everything that looked to be of some value. But Jesus Christ, there was so much trash in there I have no clue how she’d even know,” my dad argued.

  “I had forty dollars in a small coin purse on the floorboard.” Phoebe came rushing in, looking harried, tired and stressed out. “I also had a new pair of tennis shoes in the back seat.”

  “I got those out,” he pointed out. “Along with all your books. Plus, I gave you another goddamn vehicle. Most people would say thank you.”

  “You gave me a new car that was your style, not mine,” she argued. “And you know how I hate Fords.”

  Which explained why she wasn’t driving said car and was driving my mother’s old vehicle that was older than she was.

  I snickered. “You do know how she hates them.” I felt it prudent to point out.

  “Jesus.” He threw his arms up in the air. “After your accident, I wanted to make sure I got you the one that helped park itself, as well as give you that all around lane warning when you drifted, or something came too close. It even had adaptive cruise control!”

  He did have a point.

  “Why did she get a new car and I didn’t?” I pushed.

  He looked at me. “I got you a new car.”

  “You got me an old car,” I said. “Not that I’m complaining or anything. I love it. But still.”

  “Why are y’all such ungrateful little shits?” he countered.

  My mother, God bless her soul, didn’t burst into laughter, but she did chuckle. “You made them this way, Sam. What did you expect would happen when you gave them everything under the sun that you never had?”

  A wave of sadness rolled over me at the thought of my dad not having what we had. But, the older we got, the more I was able to understand why he didn’t have it.

  When he was young, his mother was married to a man that was undercover in a motorcycle club—a motorcycle club that was the complete opposite of the club that I knew today.

  Back then, that club was hard. That club was dark. That club was everything that you didn’t want to be near…which was why my grandfather, Silas Mackenzie, did everything in his power to make sure that his son wasn’t around it.

  The only problem with doing that? In the process, he’d alienated my father, and made him feel like he wasn’t worthy.

  In a hasty attempt to shift the focus of our conversation, since we all knew where it would lead if we let it continue, Phoebe hastily changed the subject. Of course, it was something that I didn’t want to talk about, but anything was better than seeing that faraway look on my dad’s face.

  “So, who was that guy that you were talking to today?” Phoebe asked. “I had to come up and use Mom’s computer for patient care reports. The one that was in the old band t-shirt that Dad likes.”

  “Van Halen,” my mother drawled, rolling her eyes. “Jesus, Phoebe. You make me feel fucking old.”

  I snickered. “You are old, Mom.”

  She pointed her finger at me. “Take that back!”

  I bit my lip as laughter welled inside of me.

  “Mom,” I said teasingly. “You’re a spring chicken. You’re not old. In fact, everyone at the hospital thinks you’re hot.”

  Dad’s eyes flared at that, causing my mom to narrow her eyes at me.

  She knew what I was doing—which was changing the subject again.

  I did not, under any circumstances, want to talk about that man in front of my father. Why? Because my father was extremely overprotective.

  Over the last year or so, some of the Free kids had started to find their happily ever afters. Dad had watched from the sidelines as first Janie, our cousin, had met someone. That had been quite hard on him because Janie had been a baby when my parents had met. Dad felt like it was only a matter of time until we started following in their footsteps.

  Sure, there’d been a boyfriend here and there for the three Mackenzie girls, but none of them had been serious, and none of them had the balls to stand up to our father.

  I had a feeling that Hoax not only had the balls, but he had the desire, too.

  “What’s she talking about?” my father asked.

  “She’s making shit up so we don’t focus on the fact that she met a man that she liked,” my mother turned the tables. “Wouldn’t you like to know why she’s changing the subject, dear heart?”

  Dad turned his eyes to me, and I hastily stole a cookie off the plate that my mother had finished divvying them up on and shoved it in my mouth so I wouldn’t have to answer.

  Then I groaned at the taste of chocolatey goodness that burst like a flavorful explosion in my mouth. “Ohhh, these are good today, Dad.”

  My father had perfected his cookie recipes years ago for my mother to satisfy her sweet tooth, which had then turned into the Mackenzie girls’ sweet tooth. Nowadays, since his girls no longer lived with him, he didn’t make them as much. Which was one of the downsides of moving out.

  An upside, though, was that I was able to go out on a date or bring a man to my house, without worrying that the men of Free were going to take him to the back room and give him their own special brand of interrogation. The kind where waterboarding wasn’t off the table.

  My father grunted. “So, who is the man that they’re talking about?”

  I sighed and licked my lips, taking a sip of my milk before I turned and rested my ass against the counter so I could see him better.

  “I met him today. He asked me out on a date. I said no. That’s all I know about him,” I answered honestly.

  “Huh,” Dad said. “Why’d you say no?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Because he’s military, and you know how I dislike those military men. They’re all players.”

  My dad snorted at my comment. “You’re so full of shit.”

  “Dad, I was cheated on twice by a military man.” I felt it prudent to point out. “That seems like enough of a reason not to date one, don’t you think?”

  “I never cheated on your mom,” he said. “And none of the men on this compound did, either.”

  I smiled at him sweetly. “That’s because y’all are a different breed of man. Men these days don’t have the same ideals that y’all did and do.”

  “She thought he was cute,” Phoebe interjected. “And he looked like he wasn’t the type to give up easily. I’ll bet he comes back.”

  “He’s not going to come back,” I denied, picking up another cookie. “Besides, even if he does, I’ll just tell him no then, too.”

  All three of them looked at me like they didn’t believe me.
r />   Chapter 4

  You really don’t get smarter when you get older. You just run out of stupid shit to do since you’ve already done it all.

  -Hoax’s secret thoughts

  Hoax

  I didn’t mean to find her. Really, I didn’t. I was going to respect her wishes and stay the hell away from her…then I saw her across the street from Bayou, and I caved.

  It was the flash of blonde hair that had me nearly crashing my bike into the mailbox.

  I was so surprised to see her that I didn’t pay attention to where I was going.

  It was when my tire rubbed the curb that I turned sharply and corrected the bike before I could come face to face with Bayou’s brick monstrosity of a mailbox.

  Heart pounding—and not because I nearly needed facial reconstruction—I leaned the kickstand down on the bike and shut it off. Moments later I pocketed my keys and swung my leg over to come to a stand beside my bike, staring at the woman working in her yard.

  She was wearing a pair of tight black jeans, a really old t-shirt that had cracks in the vinyl declaring her a Kilgore Bulldog, and a pair of motorcycle boots.

  Sweet baby Jesus. She was like a dream come true. All that was missing was her pressing up against me on the back of my bike.

  “Yo,” someone said from beside me.

  I turned to see Wade and Castiel, both Bear Bottom Guardians and cops, staring at me as if they’d said something and were waiting for me to reply.

  “What?” I asked. “I didn’t hear you.”

  Castiel and Wade’s eyes went to the woman across the street, and wide smiles tipped up the corners of their lips.

  “That’s Bayou’s nurse neighbor,” Castiel pointed out.

  I narrowed my eyes. “How do you know that?”

  Cast’s eyes went wide. “Because I’m a cop, and I know almost all the nurses at both hospitals on either side of us. Then again, they’re both quite small, so it’s not like that’s a really impressive thing.”

  I grunted and returned my eyes to the woman, and nearly groaned.

  She was bent over, fussing with the flowers that were around her door.

  Her ass was heart-shaped, and looked like it’d take some really good poun…