Ryan (The Mallick Brothers #2) Read online

  Yeah, that shit wasn't gonna fly that was for damn sure.

  I put the carrier down and before she could guess my intention and react, I charged across the hallway, bending low and throwing her body over my shoulder. My arm clamped tight around her as she froze for a short second then started struggling, begging me to put her down and leave her there, her voice getting more frantic by the second and, as I grabbed the carrier in my free hand and made a dart for the stairs, you could hear the tears she was crying in her tone.

  My heart had a distinct sinking sensation as I flew down the stairs, understanding that she was having a holy fucking meltdown, but knowing that there was no way I could have just left her behind either.

  I slammed the door for the emergency exit and stepped outside, the December air assaulting me from head to toe despite having long sleeves and pants on.

  And that was when I saw the crowd of people all gathered toward the front of the building, small groups huddled together to ward off the chill.

  As if hearing or just sensing the group as well, Dusty started struggling again, making me turn away from the front of the building and head toward the back where the lot was, finding my car and putting the cat carrier down on the trunk so I could bleep the locks then going around to the passenger's side and opening the door, pulling Dusty down and depositing her into the front seat.

  I bent inward, reaching across her to put the key in and crank up the heat before going to get the cat and sticking his carrier in the back.

  I went back around, squatting down beside her still-open door, like she couldn't focus past the panic to even do anything as basic as reaching and closing it.

  "Breathe, honey," I demanded because the whole time it took me to come to the side of the car and squat down, her chest hadn't risen at all.

  Her eyes snapped to me, her lips parting slightly, as her hand went to her belly and she took a slow, deep breath. Then another.

  "I am going to go see if the super or fire department has anything to say. You just sit and breathe and I'll be right back, okay?"

  Her head nodded tightly as I moved to stand. "Okay," she added and I gave her a small smile and shut the door.

  I walked back around the building, hunched forward to ward off against the cold, wondering how the fuck she managed to even get out of bed in the morning when the entire world filled her with dread like that, put that look of absolute bone-deep terror on her face, made her forget how to breathe.

  I didn't get anxiety. It wasn't a part of my life. Things were too crazy, too hectic from moment to moment. I was raised with constant threats, stress, and uncertainty. It taught me to take everything with a grain of salt, to never let anything get the best of me, to both literally and figuratively roll with the punches.

  So I couldn't relate to whatever it was she had been feeling, but one look in her eyes told me it was a terrible way to have to live.

  "Ryan," the super said, cupping me on the back as the firemen started to file inside. "Sorry for the inconvenience. I know you're a busy man."

  I was a busy man who employed his wife, two of his daughters, and one of his sons.

  He kissed my ass.

  "Not something you had control over, Andrew," I said, shrugging.

  "Don't worry," he went on, looking up at the building. "I told the firemen about your neighbor too. They'll get her a mask and get her out."

  "I carried her out," I said, noticing his head snapped in my direction, his brows drawing together.

  "You carried her out?"

  "Wasn't going to leave her in there to die of carbon monoxide poisoning, Andrew," I snorted.

  "Well, no no. Of course not. I'm surprised she let you is all. I had to come in to replace her stove once; the girl stood with her back in a corner, her hand at her throat the whole time. Shame, that. She's a pretty young thing. Reminds me of my Mandy."

  His Mandy was a spoiled, entitled little brat with a terrible attitude and shrill voice. Fortunately for him and her, she was good with numbers or else she'd have been out on her ass a long time ago because I simply couldn't stand her.

  She was in no way anything like Dusty.

  I was almost offended that he would even suggest it.

  But that was insane.

  We stood there for twenty minutes, every moment that passed had me wondering what she was doing in my car, if she was still freaking out, if she was hating me for dragging her out of her comfort zone.

  The firemen came back out finally and informed Andrew and the rest of us that the idiot twenty year old pothead in 2A left his stove on with the flame burned out and that they had opened all the windows in the halls and it should be safe to return in about an hour.

  Andrew walked off toward 2A to give it to him and I finally got to walk back around the building toward my car. I went to the driver's side and opened the door, making Dusty jerk up from where she had been sitting back in her seat, hand still on her belly, but body a lot less tense than it had been when I left her.

  I slid into the seat, taking a second to let the pumping heat thaw me out before turning to her.

  "2A left the stove on," I supplied, turning slightly to find her watching me intently.

  "The pothead," she said, smile quirking up slightly.

  "The one in the same," I agreed, nodding. "You alright?" I asked when a silence fell between us.

  "Better than I thought I'd be," she allowed with an honesty I found myself surprised by. "Though I think Rocky is going to get payback for this."

  "Looks like he already did," I said, reaching out despite knowing from her interaction with the dirtbag Bry that she didn't seem to like being touched, and ran my finger across the side of her hand where the angry red scratches had blood beaded up on the surface.

  Had I maybe been a little less focused, a little less observant, I might have missed the way her air rushed out from between her lips, the way her fingers twitched but she didn't pull away.

  I might have missed that.

  But I didn't.

  So it wasn't that she didn't like being touched; she just didn't like being touched by guys like Bry.

  "This," she said, her voice a little airy, "this is nothing. He really hates his crate. Or, um, being told what to do at all. You know, being a cat overlord and everything."

  I found my lips curving up at that, unexpectedly charmed as I reached past her for the glove box and flipped it open, pulling out what was a pretty full-service first aid kit. Call it a perk of the job I often found myself in, I was never without some antiseptic, triple antibiotic, butterfly closures, or superglue for makeshift stitching.

  I flipped the top off the tiny squirt bottle.

  "This is going to burn," I warned.

  FOUR

  Dusty

  His hand slid under mine, holding my fingers still as he positioned the travel size squirt bottle of peroxide over my hand. It was the closest thing I had had to holding a man's hand in about three years.

  Three years.

  So that whole burning warning thing, yeah, that was pointless. Because I didn't feel anything but the way his strong fingers curled around mine; the way his palm was calloused which was at complete odds with his usual impeccable suit-wearing appearance. His knuckles and the top of his hand were all marred with too many scars to count, the way they criss-crossed over each other in varying stages of red, pink, and silvery white age making it impossible to even try.

  They weren't the hands of a man in a suit. At least not in the way I understood men in suits. Men who had rough and scarred hands like his were supposed to be construction workers or mechanics or, I don't know, cage fighters.

  Not business men.

  So maybe he wasn't a businessman after all.

  And that, well, it shattered the little origin story I had created for him after so long of seeing him come and go.

  In a way, I was happy for the new story.

  Maybe because I was getting to experience it somewhat first hand, not conjuring up nonse
nse in my head, an overactive mind trapped in a stationary body.

  Had you told me an hour before that I would find myself thrown over the shoulder of a man I had maybe had more than a handful of sexual fantasies about over the past year, his strong arm crossed the backs of my thighs to keep me in place, being carried out of my building like some freaking hero from a romantic period piece, you know back when guys did heroic crap like that, and then deposited into his car and tended to like my tiny little scrapes were of upmost importance, well, I would have had a good, much-needed laugh about it.

  But that was exactly where I found myself.

  I won't lie.

  In the moment, when I found my choice pulled from me, when I was forced out of a place I hadn't stepped outside in years, it hadn't seemed heroic or sweet or romantic.

  In that moment, I had been so desperate to be shut back into my little prison that I had pounded my fists into his back; I had tried to kick my knees into him; I had screamed and begged and, God, cried.

  Because my heart had taken up residence in my throat, beating wilder than it ever had before, making my air get caught, impossible to squeeze past, causing me to get lightheaded as I broke out into a sweat and felt the bile swish around threateningly in my belly.

  Again, I knew it was irrational.

  Of course it was.

  But that didn't change anything.

  Anxiety wasn't rational.

  I barely understood it myself and it was impossible to explain to others.

  I had heard it all over the years.

  You're so obsessed with your mental illness.

  Maybe because it impacts every single part of my life.

  It's all in your head.

  I know, right? It's sort-of like it's a mental illness.

  Why do you let it stop you from doing everyday, normal things?

  Hmm, maybe because a mental illness is an actual illness.

  After a while, you stop defending it, you stop talking about it, you shut it all up inside like everything else, letting it drive you just a little more crazy every single day.

  Until one day, it was all there was left- the crazy, the unstable, the unstoppable wave of adrenaline that you couldn't even fight. Because it isn't just mental. The anxiety causes a physical reaction that causes endless symptoms in the physical body that you literally can not control.

  I read in one of my many self-help books that the adrenaline released during a panic attack was linked to a biological fight-or-flight instinct and that those who were more inclined to anxiety attacks came from a strong lineage of people who trusted on those instincts and acted accordingly.

  I had ancestors who ran away from their problems.

  And that left me with the need to stand and fight my invisible ones.

  Too bad I was a crappy fighter.

  But once he had deposited me into his seat and turned over the car and reminded me to breathe, the lightheadedness started to pull back slightly. Then when he left me to go check on things, I had managed to pull myself back mostly and get a hold of myself. The car wasn't so bad. It was warm. The seat even warmed up behind and under me. It had a somewhat soothing vibrating as it idled, reminding me of my life before when I had loved endless, pointless joyrides when I had a long day and needed to unwind.

  In the backseat, Rocky had accepted his imprisonment and stopped shrieking and thrashing.

  And that helped lessen the anxiety as well.

  By the time he climbed back in, I felt mostly myself again. I was a little frazzled. My skin felt tingly and my heart was still beating a little hard and I was a bone-deep kind of exhausted from the aftermath of the adrenaline surge, but I wasn't freaking. Much.

  "You alright?" his voice asked, unexpected. It had been so long since there was any other voice around me except for my uncle's visits and the scheduled appointments with Bry that it was startling to hear it.

  I jerked slightly, my fingers involuntarily tightening on his, as my gaze flew up to his face. "What?" I asked, blinking twice as his piercing blue eyes pinned mine.

  "The peroxide," he explained, making my gaze fly down to where my hand was somehow dripping, though I hadn't felt the spray at all.

  "Oh, ah, yeah," I said, looking back up, giving him a somewhat clumsy smile. "Didn't even feel it," I explained.

  And it was right about then that I realized my fingers had relaxed on his from their little involuntary spasm, but his were holding mine tightly.

  My heart, yeah, it stopped pounding so damn hard for a second so it could do a strange, delicious little flip-flop thing that made an unfamiliar warmness spread across my whole chest.

  Human contact. I had forgotten what it was like.

  I felt the peroxide bottle slide down on the seat along my thigh to rest near my butt as a crinkling sound made my brows draw together for a second before he brought up a little round packaged roll of gauze up to his mouth and nipped the side, ripping it open.

  So he didn't have to release my hand to use it to open it.

  "I, um, I don't think gauze is necessary," I forced myself to say though the larger part of me really, really wanted him to wrap my hand for reasons I was choosing not to analyze.

  You have to actively make an effort to stop the swirling thoughts, Dusty.

  That'd be my therapist, Amy, talking.

  She insisted I call her that too- Amy. Not Dr. Robertson. I guess it was some technique they were taught at school or something to help patients feel more at ease. Kind of how she didn't call us "patients" either, but "clients". Why, I wasn't sure. I was definitely sick. I was absolutely a patient. It was a completely appropriate term. But maybe it was easier for people stubbornly stationed in denial to accept themselves as a client instead of a patient.

  So, I was going to try to follow her advice. I wasn't going to overthink anything that happened in his car.

  You know, at least until I was shut in my apartment again.

  Then, oh yeah, I was going to analyze it to freaking death.

  "Better safe," he said, shrugging, giving my fingers one last small squeeze before releasing them so he could use both hands to wrap me up. My gaze went down, not wanting to be a creep who kept staring at his face, and watched as he quickly, but super carefully wrapped me up. "Ryan," he said a moment later as he stuck the little metal doohickey on to hold the gauze together.

  "I'm sorry?" I asked, looking up to find him watching me.

  "Ryan Mallick, my name," he said with a small nod.

  Right.

  I knew that.

  Because, like I said, I occasionally watched him. And that meant I also saw his brothers sometimes and they called him Ry and Ryan and also, I once got a letter in my pile of his. So I had shot it across the hall and under his door because I couldn't bring myself to hand it to him.

  "And you're Dusty," he said, my name in his smooth voice sending a weird shiver across my skin. "Interesting name."

  "My mom was, ah..." what was a nice way to say it? "A bit of a hippie. So I got branded with Dusty Rose Sunshine McRae."

  "Sunshine, huh?" he asked, smile teasing up in a way that made his very stern face seem warm and inviting. "I guess I can see that." Then, before I could fall half in love with him right then and there, he moved backward, settling my hand onto my own thigh, and completely cutting off all contact.

  I was unreasonably sad at the lack of it as I reached for the bottle of peroxide and found the cap, just to have something to do.

  "Sorry I dragged you out of there," he said a while later as I completely reassembled the contents of the first aid kit he had made a mess of, crumbling up the used wrapper for the gauze and sticking it in my pocket, then slipping the whole kit back in the glove compartment.

  "Yes, how dare you not leave me there to die," I said, shooting him a saucy smile over my shoulder as I closed the glove box.

  "I'm not sorry about saving you, honey. I'm sorry I, ah, made you so uncomfortable."

  Uncomfortable.

  Th
at was a delicate way to phrase it.

  "It's not your fault," I offered, because it was true. "Besides, I'm fine now."

  And, surprisingly, I was.

  I was used to giving platitudes to people, especially my uncle and therapist. I was always fine. Even when I wasn't.

  But sitting there in a car I had never been in before with a man I had been creeping on somewhat for a year, outside of my apartment for the first time in about two years, yeah, I found I wasn't lying when I said I was fine.

  I was.

  Not great, but that was asking for too much.

  But fine.

  "How long has it been?"

  My eyes snapped to his face, seeing him watching me again and I got the strong impression that he was seeing more than I thought I was giving him. He had those kinds of eyes, the ones that read into you.

  "Two years," I admitted.

  "Can I ask you something that I've been wondering since, fuck, I don't know... I moved in?"

  "Sure," I said, belly tightening slightly at knowing I just agreed to answer whatever he might ask. Things that were completely unanswerable like: why are you an agoraphobe anyway?

  "How the hell do you get the mailman to bring your boxes up to your door? If my box gets too full, he starts leaving me those 'Sorry We Missed You' notes and makes me drive my ass to the post office to pick them up."

  I smiled at that not only because it was a funny visual, but because it was so much like him. Not Ryan, Uncle Danny. "My uncle is our mailman," I supplied with a laugh. "He, well, he mostly raised me so we're close and he, sort-of, understands my issues so he helps me out by putting my packages outside my door."

  My therapist would get those disapproving lines between her brows at the word "helps", choosing instead to say "enables". But screw her.

  "That explains it. How did he mostly raise you?" he went on and where it would normally feel invasive for a casual acquaintance to ask that, it was so nice to talk to someone who wasn't taking notes that I didn't mind at all.

  "Like I said, my mom was a bit of a hippie. She drifted. Never settled down and when she did, it was usually with a man. Sometimes, those men didn't want a kid hanging around so I got dropped off in Navesink Bank and she went off... wherever for a while. Eventually, she'd kick him to the curb or, more often, he would dump her and she'd feel guilty and come back for me. We're, um, not close."