Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
Olivia hung up, feeling slightly better. Whatever else came of tonight, her daughter was safe. That was all that mattered. She turned back to find Cillian watching her with an unreadable expression on his face. “Problem?”
“It’s really none of your business.” But she relented almost immediately. He’d bled all over her, and told her about the men who attacked him. The least she could do was answer a question or two. “It’s my daughter. I had to let the person watching her know that I was going to be late.” And make sure Sergei hadn’t done anything shady in the meantime.
He blinked. “You have a daughter.”
It wasn’t quite a question, but she answered it anyway. “Yeah. She’s fourteen months.” This will send him running for sure. In her experience, the best way to turn away a man interested in hooking up was to mention that she had a kid. She didn’t particularly like using Hadley as a barrier between her and those idiots, but it was a foolproof method.
“Cool.” Just that. Nothing else.
Guess he can’t hightail it out of here when he can’t actually walk. Way to go, Olivia. She checked the towel he had pressed against the back of his head. It wasn’t quite soaked through. At least the bleeding was slowing down. “Call your people, please.”
He pressed a button and handed her the phone. “Tell them what they need to know.”
The last thing she wanted was to become more involved, but she couldn’t exactly hand the phone back when a gruff woman’s voice answered. “What do you want?”
“Uh, I have Cillian O’Malley here with a head wound. He needs someone to come get him.”
“Where the hell is here? I’m not a mind reader, girl. Speak up!”
Wow. She was tempted to hang up, but that would create more problems than it would solve. “Jameson’s on Charles.”
A pause. “Hold tight. I’ll be there in a few.” The woman hung up.
Olivia set the phone back onto the table. “Nice lady.”
“Hardly. Doc Jones is as mean as a honey badger and twice as protective.” He shot her a look. “I think you’ll like her.”
What did that say about the way he saw her if he thought she’d get along with that snarly woman? She moved around the bar to fill a glass of water for both of them. It shouldn’t matter that he apparently thought she was mean. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She worked hard to be as unapproachable as possible while she worked. It didn’t affect her tips. People tended to like their bartenders one of two ways—mean as a snake or flirty as all get-out. The former had always come more naturally to Olivia.
So why did knowing that persona worked on Cillian bother her so much?
Chapter Six
Cillian knew he was in trouble the second Doc Jones walked through the front door. She was a big woman who looked like she came from a family of lumberjacks and bench-pressed trees for fun. Her orange-red hair was liberally streaked with gray, but she could be anywhere from forty to sixty. All he knew was that she’d been the family medic for as long as he could remember and, aside from the added gray hair that she liked to blame on the O’Malleys, she didn’t seem to have aged a day in the meantime.
She took one look at him and snorted. “Always trouble with you, isn’t it, boy?”
I’m twenty-six. I’m not a goddamn boy anymore. He bit back the instinctual response. It would only let her know exactly how much she got under his skin. Not that she needed the verbal confirmation. Doc Jones was one of the few people who talked shit to every member of his family from his youngest sister all the way up to his father, all without seeing any actual consequences. Probably because she was excellent at her job—and knew how to keep her mouth shut.
Olivia stood. “It’s not his fault. He was jumped.”
“Who’s this cute little piece of ass?”
She started to bypass Olivia, but Olivia got right in the doctor’s face. Nothing overtly threatening, but she didn’t back up when the large woman got into her personal space. “I’m the one who saved his ass. So maybe before you go dismissing me, you’ll ask me—the one without a head wound—for the details.”
Cillian braced himself to stand and get between the two of them if it became necessary. No one—not even his father—talked to the doctor like that. But Doc Jones just grinned. “I like this one. Try not to fuck it up.”
Right, because that was what he was worried about right now. The only reason Olivia was giving him the time of day was because she was afraid he’d fall down on the sidewalk and bleed out if she let him out of here unsupervised. It wasn’t exactly the suave impression he’d wanted to make. After this, he’d be lucky if she looked at him with anything other than pity.