Page 13 of Craving Sin

Which is why I hear the soft sound of footsteps before the person enters the room. My gaze flickers toward the door, and just as he rounds the corner, I shiver. That motherfucking feeling back at my nape—one second, two, three, four…and then it’s gone.

But I know it was there. Why the fuck was it there?

I watch as my doctor walks over to one of the fridges and pulls out a sandwich. He gets a bottle of water next, then walks over to the lone employee standing at the register.

As the two of them talk, I stand, pick up my paper cup, and then amble over, lingering by the premade food as though I’m going to buy any of it.

“Busy night?” the cashier asks.

“Yes, it was a busy one. I just have to finish my dictating, and then I can go home, though. How about you?”

I listen as the cashier replies to him, the doc asking questions and holding a conversation with him as though he cares what the man has to say. You can tell when people just talk to a person because they feel like they have to—or at least I can—and that’s not the situation here. He’s asking because he’s interested—this man, who is up in the middle of the night, after performing surgery, is curious about this man’s daughter going off to college and his wife having hurt her back.

When they say goodbye, I set the pack of gum in my hand back on the shelf, as though I’ve changed my mind, then follow behind the doc as he leaves.

His hair is slightly messy, like he’s run his fingers through it a few times.

I toss my coffee into the trash. His shoes make a soft clicking sound with each step he takes.

When he gets to the sliding doors that lead into the surgery department, my gaze flicks toward him again while he presses a code into the keypad.

I don’t know how long it will take him to dictate, or what I expect to gain by continuing to follow him tonight, but I’m going to. I just…need to understand what’s going on, why my body is misfiring the way it is around him.

I sit in the surgery waiting room. It’s over an hour later when the sliding doors open again, and I can tell by the cadence of the walk that it’s him. He passes by, and I wait until the sounds of his footsteps turn around a corner before I get up and head in that direction.

He moves toward the ED, which I think has the only doors open at this time, making it easy for me to keep a distance from him.

He stops to talk to someone outside the emergency room, making me wait by the bathroom, pulse speeding and showing my irritation.

She’s a woman, an emergency doctor by the sounds of it, and she asks about a patient from a car accident earlier that he operated on. He speaks to her the same way he did the man in the cafeteria, despite the fact that he’s been up all night and likely just wants to go home. There’s not a drop of impatience to his tone, nothing to suggest he doesn’t want to have either of the two conversations I’ve witnessed from him.

I’m impatient, though, and it takes everything inside of me not to step in before they’re saying goodbye and he’s leaving…again.

He’s parked farther than I would have thought—the surgeon not looking behind him, or checking his surroundings at all.

It would be so easy to…well, do whatever the fuck I wanted to do to him right now, if I were the kind of man to do something like that—hold him up, hurt him, kidnap him.

He doesn’t know the danger that’s lurking so close to him, because even if I don’t have any desire to attack him, I could. My hands have been the ones to bring about more death than he’s likely ever seen.

I frown when he turns down another row of vehicles, and I keep my distance, focusing on staying in the shadows. Shouldn’t he be parked closer to the front? And in an area of the lot that’s not quite so dark?

When he rounds the front of an SUV, the surgeon suddenly stops, whirling around to face me. I automatically pull my gun from the holster beneath my suit jacket, pointing it at him.

“Why are you following me?” His gaze shoots down to my gun, then back at my eyes. “Jesus, what the hell? Take what you want.” He lifts his hands so I can see them.

I don’t speak at first, honestly surprised that he clearly knew I was there, and then decided to confront me. Probably would have been smarter for him to do it closer to the hospital, but still.

“I don’t carry much money on me,” he adds. His voice is deep, with almost a melodic cadence to it.

“Your money is no good to me. I have my own,” I say. “I’m not a thug.”

“You look like one to me.”

“Well, that’s not very nice,” I counter. “How long did you know I was following you?” Had he known while we were still in the hospital? If so, why did he wait so long to say anything?

His brows draw together. “How long have you been following me?”

“I’m the one with the gun, so maybe you should be the one answering the questions.” The feeling isn’t there…the one I had before, the familiar tickle at my nape. I would think I’d imagined it, but I’d felt it twice.