Page 75 of Business vs. Pleasure

Ricardo’s eyes were glassy as he looked at August. He reached out with shaking hands and cupped August’s face, turning it a little like he was looking for damage.

August smiled. “It’s okay, I’ll live.” He grabbed one of Ricardo’s hands and kissed his palm. “Which is more than I can say for that asshole. You’re welcome.”

“Mm.” Ricardo opened his mouth, and August readied his heart to hear a much-deserved declaration of love. “I shot him. You just finished him off.”

August knew slack-jawed was one of his least attractive expressions, but for the love of God—“Are you fucking kidding me?” he exclaimed. “You winged him! I’m the one who actually killed the guy!”

“Mm-mm.” Ricardo shook his head minutely, his eyelids heavy. “Was a… a perfect shot.”

August huffed. “Then why did I just spend five minutes finishing him off?”

“Cuz you’re… little slow.”

He had to breathe through the urge to start screaming. “Says the man who delivered a gut shot in a hospital.” August scoffed. “You know how long those can take to bleed out. It’s like you wanted NightPigeon to survive.”

Ricardo’s reserved expression crumpled. “Best I could do,” he whispered. “S’rry.”

All August’s anger bled out of him. “Oh, honey.” He relaxed against the bed, close enough that he could touch their foreheads together. “You’re so high right now, aren’t you?”

“Mmm.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” He kissed Ricardo’s forehead. “It’s all right, sweetheart. You can relax now. We got him.”

In a few minutes, this place would be flooded with people—nurses, doctors, hospital security, probably cops. They would take NightRaven away, clean up the mess, and then the questions would come. August was going to have to do a hell of a lot of bargaining in the hours ahead, when all he really wanted to do was take a hit of his husband’s morphine, lie down on the bed beside him, and sleep for a hundred hours or so. Maybe a hundred years.

No rest for the wicked.

“August.”

He sighed and met Ricardo’s gaze. “Yeah?”

It was clear he was fighting off unconsciousness to speak. “’m sorry.”

Oh, baby. “It’s all right.”

“No. I’m sorry.” There was a lot of meaning being shoehorned into those two words, but August took it the way he thought his husband meant it.

“I know,” he said. “We got through it.” He pressed their lips together. Ricardo’s were trembling. “We’ll talk about it later, okay? We’re all right.” They were more than a little broken, but there was never going to be any other option for him outside of Ricardo. No one else could come close, and August wasn’t stupid enough to let him go.

Besides, L’Avia would hunt him down and murder him herself if he broke her favorite grandson’s heart.

Oh. Fuck. He’d have to call them. Elodie was already on her way—he’d called her after the helicopter ride—but now he had to get in touch with Eve and Ricardo’s extended family and Heidi and…

“¡Dios mío!”

August kissed Ricardo one last time, then lifted his head and looked over at the charge nurse, who was standing in the door with a look of horror on his face. “Don’t worry, the blood’s not ours!” he called out cheerfully.

“Señor, your chest!”

He looked down and—oh, yeah. The scalpel had gotten him out by the elevators. And come to think of it, his right thigh and hip were aching in that sharp, very specific way that meant they’d probably been perforated a few times. “Okay, so some of it’s mine.” He glanced at Ricardo and was grateful to see that the morphine had finally carried him off to dream land. “Let’s take care of it before he wakes up again, hmm?”

CHAPTER 23

“What the fuck do you mean you needed seventy-eight stitches?” Ricardo eyed the bandage sticking out from beneath his husband’s scrubs. “What did I miss?”

August huffed a laugh. “You missed plenty, darling. Especially that nurse’s suturing skills.” He made a chef’s kiss gesture. “They say six stitches per inch, but an expert does ten, and she was clearly an expert.” He paused. “And she did a much better job than you did. Oh, and she resewed the two stitches of yours that came undone. So.”

Ricardo was in too much pain to do math, even with the morphine cloud long since cleared, but he still managed to crunch those numbers. “Fine. What the fuck do you mean you had a cut that was almost eight inches long that needed stitches?”