Harlequin - Jennifer Greene by Hot Touch (read full novel txt) 📕

“We have to fight dirty, Phoebe. Fox is in real trouble. He was doing fine for a couple days after you left, most of the week, in fact. But now I don’t think he’s slept a wink in the past forty-eight hours. If you’d just known him before this all happened—Fergus was always full of the devil, never sat still a minute in his life. He was interested in everything, active in sports and hobbies and the community. And kids. God, he loves kids. You can’t even imagine how good he is with kids. So to see him sitting in that Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

dark room, doing nothing, not wanting to do anything—”

“Comeon, Ben. If you brothers are close and he won’t listen to you, why on earth would you think I could do anything? I can’t just go over there and bully him—”

“You did before.”

“He had such a bad headache before that he’d have let in the devil if it could have helped him.”

“We tried the devil. We’ve tried everything. You’re the only one who even dented that pain of his.” Ben cleared his throat. “Harry said you had to wash your hair.”

She knew that tone. It was one of those male “I’ll be understanding about this ridiculous female thinking”

tone.

“Harry also mentioned that possibly you might want a year’s worth of free dinners. And I was thinking—I don’t know where you live—but I told you I was the builder in the clan. I never met a woman who didn’t want her kitchen redone—”

“Oh, for God’s sake. This is ridiculous.”

“And while I was fixing your kitchen, you could eat at Harry’s restaurant—”

“Stop! I don’t want to hear another word!”

“Does that mean you’re coming?”

Three

Fox closed his eyes and stood absolutely still under the pelting-hot shower spray.

Maybe he’d given up sleeping and eating and couldn’t get his life back for love or money. But nothing kept him from showering once a day and sometimes twice.

Even after all these weeks, parts kept coming out of him. The doctors claimed that’s how it was with dirty bombs. Something new needled to the surface of his skin every once in a while. In the beginning he’d been horrified, but now he found it amazing—if not downright funny—what terrorists chose to put in dirty bombs. Bits of plastic. Hairpins. Parts of paper clips. Anything. Everything.

Some of the parts hurt. Some didn’t. Some scarred. Some didn’t. Mostly Fox was grateful that nothing had hit his face or eyes—or the cargo below his waist, not that he anticipated having sex again in this century. You had to give a damn about someone to get it up. He didn’t. Still, it mattered fiercely to him that his equipment still functioned normally. Go figure.

His obsession with showers, though, had evolved from a terror of infection. He didn’t fear dying, but damn, he couldn’t face the risk of another hospital stay if any more sores got infected.

When the water turned cool, he flicked off the faucets and reached blind for the towel. He moved carefully, because sometimes his left leg gave out. Technically the broken wrist and thigh bone were both healed, but something inside still wasn’t totally kosher, because one minute he could be standing or walking, and the next his left leg would give out.

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Tonight that wasn’t a problem—but apparently the fates couldn’t let him get off scot-free.

The first step out of the shower, he found himself teetering like an old man, dizzy and disoriented. The same child’s face swam in front of his eyes, drifting in the foggy steam of the bathroom—real, then not real, clear, then not clear. Sometimes the boy turned into one of the students he’d had; sometimes it was the boy in the dusty yellow alley on the other side of the world. He leaned against the glass shower doors and tried taking a long, slow breath, then another.

A headache was coming. A headache always followed one of the flashbacks to the kid. If he ever got his sense of humor back, he’d think it was funny for a guy, who used to dare anything in life, to be this scared of a headache. Of course, that was then and this was now. Before the pain attacked, he had to get himself out of the bathroom and settled somewhere safer.

Abruptly he heard something…the sound of a door opening? Either he imagined the sound—which would hardly be headline news—or it was Harry, coming to restock the refrigerator with another set of dinners he couldn’t eat. Whatever. He leaned over, hands on his knees, waiting for the soupy feeling to pass. Beads of water started drying on his bare skin, chilling him. His hair dripped. The towel…it seemed he’d dropped the towel. He’d get it. In a minute.

“Fergus?”

It was Bear’s voice. Ben’s, not Harry’s. “In here.” Damn, he hoped his oldest brother wouldn’t stay long. Bear hovered over him like…well, like a bear. All fierce and protective. All angry at anyone and anything who’d hurt him. All willing to do anything to make it all better.

Fox had told his brothers a dozen times that nothing was going to make this all better. The wounds’d heal. They were almost healed now. But whatever was broken inside him seemed like the old Humpty Dumpty story. Too many pieces. Not enough glue.

“Fox?”

He tried denying the dizziness, pushing past it, repeated, “In here.”

The denial thing seemed to work. He forced himself to pluck the towel from the tiled floor and straighten before Bear saw him and got the idea again that he was too sick to live alone.

“Hey, Fox, I brought…”

Oops. He’d assumed it’d be his brother standing in the doorway, but his brother was six-three and a solid 220. The intruder had thick, straight, long red hair, almost as long as her waist. Small, classic features. Blue eyes that snapped with attitude, a few freckles on the bridge of a bitsy nose, pale