Risking It All (2 page)

He raised an eyebrow and smirked as he stood.

“Why do you assume I want you to jump into my bed?” he asked, still not releasing her hand.

“Oh, please.” Kennedy smirked and snatched her hand away, hoping he hadn’t noticed how sweaty her palm had become while in his grasp. “Like I said, everyone knows who you are.”

“You make that sound like a bad thing.” He crossed his arms and gave her another pantie-drenching smile. “I wasn’t aware being me was so horrible.”

“From what I’ve heard, being you isn’t horrible.”

“Then there’s no harm in having a little dinner with me since I’m not so horrible.”

Kennedy swallowed back the “yes” that wanted to burst from her lips and shook her head, taking a small step back.

“I’m not interested in being added to your list of women. Ever,” she said.

His grin remained in place as he leaned forward and said, “You’ve just issued a challenge, Kennedy Monroe. I look forward to it.” She opened her mouth to ask him how he knew who she was, but he leaned in even closer, so his mouth was practically touching her ear, and whispered, “Just because we haven’t met doesn’t mean I don’t know who you are.”

Kennedy shivered like she had that day as she remembered their first meeting and the seductive way the words rolled off his tongue when he spoke in her ear. 

She expected him to live up to his challenge and make a pest of himself, but he didn’t. She thought he would conveniently end up wherever she was, trying to flatter his way into her bed, but Kennedy only saw him around campus, watching her but never making a move to approach her. And damn it, even though she had acted cold toward him, she liked the attention he gave her.

A month after her collision with Memphis in front of the dorm, Kennedy had been enjoying an afternoon of no class, strolling along Vancouver’s waterfront, when she spied him photographing the ocean.

She stopped and watched him as he took careful aim with his lens and snapped off a round of pictures. For the past month her thoughts had been consumed with this man, and here he was, on the same waterfront as she was. He paused, lowering the camera to observe a couple strolling along the beach, and then called out to them. Kennedy assumed he asked if he could photograph them because when they started walking again he pointed the lens in their direction.

She stood there for a while, watching as he interacted with people, snapping pictures of random individuals or structures. She tilted her head, smiling as he bent to retrieve a little boy’s Frisbee and tossed it back to him. Seeing him out there, he looked like a completely different person than the one everyone described to her. She didn’t know him very well—or at all, really—but she could tell he was happy in that moment. Memphis was doing something he loved.

She figured the leather jacket, ripped jeans, and motorcycle created the facade he used to keep people from knowing the real Memphis Adams. He only used it to pick up chicks and have a good time, but out there, staring at the water, was the real Memphis.

He didn’t have his armor on out there. The leather was replaced with a gray wife-beater that clung nicely to his upper body and black board shorts hung where his ripped jeans usually rode low on his hips. He was barefoot, and she imagined how warm the sand must have felt on his feet. 

It was that Memphis Adams she decided in that moment she wanted to get to know.

So she approached him. When he saw her, he smiled and slowly lifted his camera, silently asking permission to shoot her. She shrugged, as if to say, “what the hell,” and nodded.

“I didn’t think of you as the artistic type,” she told him.

“Maybe you shouldn’t judge people by what others say about them,” he replied.

Kennedy smiled sheepishly and looked down at the sand, kicking it with the toe of her sandal.

“I’m not going to have sex with you, Kennedy,” he declared out of the blue.

She looked up, surprised and disappointed by his statement.

“Why not?” she asked, and blushed at the way the question sounded.

Memphis chuckled before saying, “I’ve been watching you, and I think you’re too special for that.” She resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the line, and he continued, “There’s something about you that makes me want to know you. I want to be your friend, Kennedy, and if I fuck you, I wouldn’t be.”

Kennedy stared at him, stunned, as the slight wind whipped her hair around her face.

Be friends with the campus Casanova? Was that even possible? Did he have any female friends? Did he even know
how
to be friends with a woman? And how could she be certain this wasn’t some reverse-psychology ploy to get her between the sheets?

She searched his face, looking for something that would trigger her sixth sense and twist her stomach in the way it did when she knew she was about to do something she would regret. 

But she felt none of that. 

The only thing her sixth sense was telling her was, for whatever reason, she could trust Memphis. She wanted to trust him and know who he really was. Wasn’t that the reason she had approached him, after all? 

Finally, she nodded.

“I’d like that. To be your friend,” she added and he smiled.

They had been inseparable from that day forward. Rumors started that they were dating, and the legions of Memphis’s discarded and hopefuls—as Kennedy liked to refer to the women—wanted to know how she tamed the wild playboy. Despite denying there was anything going on besides friendship, her fellow dorm mates couldn’t wait to run back to her when they spotted Memphis with other women, smirking when they tattled on his activities as if to say, “I told you so.”

Kennedy laughed at how petty they were to try and destroy what they believed was a monogamous relationship. Memphis was true to his word and never tried to make a move on her. And buried deep down, Kennedy was more than a little disappointed. But what she gained by being friends with him was much more than what any crush she had on her best friend could have given her. She knew things about Memphis that no one else knew. He trusted her in ways he never trusted anyone. That was worth more than a roll in the hay with her number one forbidden desire.

In return, Memphis taught her things about herself. He showed her it was okay to lose control every once in a while, that flying down a dirt path to a secluded hideaway on the back of a motorcycle was actually fun. He made her open her eyes and see that she didn’t have to pick the safe career her parents wanted her to have; it was okay to choose something
she
really wanted to do and not something they wanted her to do.

Memphis Adams turned out to be the yin to her yang. They were opposites who completed one another.

Even after university they never strayed too far apart. They still lived in Vancouver, blocks from each other, only apart when Memphis was away on a work assignment. He was still the carefree spirit he’d been in college, not wanting to be tied down to one person for too long. 

But because of him she was different. Kennedy didn’t settle for less than what she wanted now. She went after it and refused to give up until she got it. There was no second-guessing if what she was doing with her career was really the smartest decision for her to make. She still carried with her the lesson he had taught her long ago about being who she wanted to be, not who people expected her to be. 

He had been a part of her life for almost twelve years, and she couldn’t picture a life without him in it.

Kennedy sighed, snapping herself back to the present as she pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and grabbed a hoodie to throw on over top of that to keep the chill away. She took her phone off the nightstand, brushing her fingers along the bottom of the picture frame that held the photo of her and the other man in her life.

Ian Brooks was the opposite of Memphis in so many ways. Brooks, as he was known by all his friends, was the head neurosurgeon at Vancouver General Hospital. Both men were hardworking and passionate about what they did, but Brooks played it safe. He was focused on his career and had made it his life since he entered med school. At forty-two he was thirteen years older than Kennedy and one of the most respected doctors in his field.

They had met two years ago when Memphis had been brought into the ER after skidding out of control on his motorcycle while driving too fast in the rain. Thankfully, he hadn’t been badly hurt, a few minor scrapes and bruises and a concussion.

It had been the most terrifying moment of Kennedy’s life—receiving the call the night Memphis had been in the motorcycle accident. He had put her down as his emergency contact person years ago, but until that night Kennedy never thought she would ever need the title. Memphis was invincible, or at least he was to her.

She had rushed to the hospital that night not knowing any details of his condition until she arrived and found him charming the nurses with his charisma. Very typical of him.

Suddenly the knowledge that Memphis, not only her best friend but the only person in her life she ever completely trusted and needed, could have been seriously injured hit her hard.

And that had been when she fainted.

When she had come to, she was in lying in a hospital bed. She had sat up too quickly and the blood had drained from her head and she’d grown dizzy again, but two strong hands had steadied her before she fell back onto the bed.

“Whoa, there,” said the tender masculine voice. “You need to take it a little slower.”

She looked up, startled that the voice didn’t belong to Memphis like she had expected.

The man was dressed in a white coat with the name Dr. Brooks scrawled in black lettering over the breast. She slowly raised her eyes back to his and swallowed, nodding slowly. What she was nodding to she couldn’t remember, but she felt like it was the right thing to do, like he was expecting some kind of reaction from her.

Dr. Brooks smiled back at her and explained that he had been walking by the nurses’ station when she fainted.

“You’ve given your boyfriend quite the scare,” he said, checking her pupils with a penlight. “If we hadn’t threatened the use of restraints on him when he wouldn’t stay in bed, I’m sure he’d be in here now.” He grinned, letting her know he was teasing about the restraints.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she replied. “We’re friends.” And then she remembered why she was in the hospital in the first place. “Is he okay?” she asked, suddenly feeling frantic.

Dr. Brooks pulled away from examining her and nodded.

“He’s fine. Little bumped and bruised, probably will be sore for the next few days, but he’ll be fine. He’s very lucky,” he added.

“Fucking motorcycle,” she mumbled, and blushed at her use of foul language in front of the attractive doctor.

He laughed and Kennedy smiled at the sound. She peeked at him from the corner of her eye, trying to check him out discreetly. She guessed he was a little shorter than Memphis, maybe five-ten or so. He kept his chestnut-brown hair short and had green eyes. She noticed a small scar above his top lip and wondered how he got it. And glancing at the way he filled out his white coat, she could tell he probably worked out. She quickly peeked at the chart he was writing on and saw he was left-handed with a bare ring finger.

Dr. Brooks dropped the pen into the pocket of his jacket and handed the chart to the nurse.

“I would have to agree with you, Kennedy.”

Her nipples hardened at the way his husky voice said her name and her blush deepened. She wrapped her arms around herself, hoping he would think she had a chill and not notice how her body reacted to him.

“You’re free to go see your . . . friend,” he told her. “Hopefully, we won’t have to run into each other again under these circumstances,” he added with a charming smile, and left.

Kennedy still got butterflies when she thought of that night and meeting the handsome Dr. Brooks. Two days later flowers had arrived at her apartment with an invitation to dinner the next night. When she first found out, she had been a little surprised and unsettled by the age difference, but Brooks had way of putting her at ease in a way that only Memphis had ever managed, and she quickly forgot about the age gap.

Brooks wined and dined her when his schedule allowed it. Every moment he wasn’t at the hospital he was calling her to make plans of some kind: a picnic in the park, a weekend sailing, a day touring museums. The beginning of their relationship had been fun and exciting. But it wasn’t just the places Brooks took her or the expensive gifts he bought her that made her fall fast and hard for him. It was the little things. 

Kennedy smiled as she remembered one night four months into their relationship when she called him in tears, panicked and terrified because she had spotted a mouse in her kitchen. Usually it was Memphis she would call but he was away on an assignment and she was terrified to spend the night alone with the rodent hiding somewhere in her apartment. She felt foolish and knew it was such a girlie thing to get upset over, but Brooks arrived—mouse traps in hand—and went about setting them up. From her perch on the couch she listened as he called out where he was placing them so she wouldn’t accidently trigger one with her toes. 

The next morning she was cooking breakfast when she felt something scurry over her bare foot and looked down just in time to see the little white fur ball hurry across the floor. Her scream probably woke the neighbors, and Brooks came bounding into the kitchen, half-dressed and half-asleep with her umbrella poised as a sword ready to defend her honor against the intruder he assumed was after her. 

Seeing him standing in his boxers, hair standing on end, eyes wide from fear of the unknown with that damn purple umbrella struck her as funny, and she burst into hysterics, doubling over as the laughter rocked her body and made it almost impossible to breathe.