The McClane Apocalypse Book Five (8 page)

“No, that’s no problem, Reagan,” he tells
her. “I don’t need help, though. I can probably do it myself.”

“I can help!” Sam offers with a bright
smile.

She’s
obviously
overheard their conversation, as usual.
He should’ve known. She’s never far from him. Simon grimaces and
walks away.

“I’m going over to the wall where John
and Kelly are working. I want to check
on
an area where I think we can make an
improvement,” Paige says.

“Ok, well, you guys work it out,” Reagan
says. “I’m headed back in to get my last patient.”

Doc also leaves, Jackie hangs around with
Cory, and Simon prepares to clean rooms.
“I’ll walk you over to the build site,” Cory says to Paige.

She retorts with, “No thanks.”

Simon barks testily, “Paige! Just let him.
Good grief, we don’t have the wall done yet. You know the rules.
None of the women in our group just go bee-bopping around town
without one of us. You don’t even have a weapon today.”

His sister looks offended, which makes Simon
feel like crap. He’s not as frustrated with her as he is with
himself.

“Fine,” she mumbles.

“Can you guys drop me back at my new house?”
Jackie asks kindly.

“Sure thing,” Cory says to her, grinning down
into her brown eyes. “Then I’ll escort the beanpole over to the
work site.”

“Ugh,” Paige complains and storms out the
front door.

Cory and Jackie follow after her, also taking
her son and Damn Dog.

“I’ll
take
room three. You can have room
two
,” he grumbles.

“Ok,” Sam perks up and bounces off to
clean the exam
room
.

As he sanitizes and re-organizes the room,
stacking equipment and storing things away, he has time to reflect
on his friend. Cory has been leaving every night after dark and not
returning until nearly dawn each morning. When he’d questioned him,
Cory had told him not to worry about it. He doesn’t know where his
friend is going at night when he leaves, but soon he plans to
follow him and find out for himself.

“Need help? I’m all done,” Sam offers from
the open door a short while later. She’s usually faster than him at
sanitizing the rooms.

“No, I’ve got this,” Simon tells her.

She ignores him, comes into the small
exam room and helps anyway. When they finish, they go to the
storage room to collect the basketsful of items that get taken back
to the farm for safe keeping. The light is the dimmest back in this
space, and they usually need to use flashlights to better see. The
solar power at the clinic is not as
powerful
as the system that fuels the big house
back at the farm.

Sam bumps into him occasionally, which does
nothing to calm his nerves around her. He reaches over her head to
a shelf above her and pulls down a basket of syringes.

“Excuse me,” he tells her cordially. Simon
has been trying his best to keep things light and emotionless
around Sam ever since she’d drawn that picture of him in the woods.
That had been too intimate, too much of a personal examination of
him. He has no idea why Sam would draw pictures like that of him,
but he hopes it doesn’t happen again.

She just chuckles at him, “No problem, Dr.
Murphy.”

Sam uses his last name and this
ridiculous title when
she’s behaving
impertinently. She knows that it irritates him.

“Sam,” he reproaches. “You know I’m not a
doctor. Don’t call me that.”

“Close enough,” she argues and tugs her
ponytail free of its rubber band. “Phew, that was giving me a
headache. I try to wear my hair pulled back when we’re at the
clinic, but it makes my head sore after a while, ya’ know?”

Simon just shakes his head at her with
the usual amount of confusion and frustration he has where she is
concerned. Her head gets sore because she has a thin little neck
and too much hair. No wonder she gets headaches. Her thick, lush
locks have grown
completely
out
again after the butchering she’d given herself four years ago to
make herself unattractive. She could shave her head bald and she’d
still be just as demure and appealing although she doesn’t know it.
He places the emptied basket back above her head on a shelf and
tries not to think of her soft hair that had brushed against his
bare bicep when she’d pulled it free of its
snare
.

“Simon’s new friends seem nice, especially
Jackie,” Sam remarks.

“Yeah, sure,” Simon agrees.

“Where are the trays?” she asks, mostly of
herself. “Oh, found them.”

“They don’t have very many young people with
them, though,” Sam says as she places sterilized surgical
instruments back into the metal tray.

“Why would you care about that?”

She shrugs and says, “I don’t know. Maybe I
was hoping they would’ve brought a truck full of cute boys!”

Simon stops dead in his tracks.

“What? Is that supposed to be funny?” he
demands.

Sam chuckles at him arrogantly.

“Why would you care?” she asks as she stacks
more items on the shelf beside them.

“Stop trying to antagonize me, Samantha,” he
reprimands.

Sam just laughs at him again.

He’s moved to the shelving unit behind
them and is taking gauze and bottles of herbs and placing them in
the basket at his feet. Sam
scoots
around him and drops more bandaging and syringes into it.
They both reach for a package of sterilized instruments at the same
time. Her small hand lands on top of his. Her soft touch leaves a
burning sensation on the back of his hand. He can’t believe she
would actually want a truck full of cute boys to come to their
town. That’s not like her at all. She’s afraid of most men. But
something about her saucy attitude and insinuation grinds at his
nerves.

“Oh, you’ve got that one? Sorry,” she
needlessly apologizes.

Before she can remove her hand, Simon flips
his over and holds onto her fragile wrist. The intensely sweet
smell of her rushes at him in a wave. It is likely from her
recently freed hair that is perfumed with the scent of the clean,
herb-tinged soap from the farm. Maybe it’s the poor lighting or the
contrast of her black hair and pale skin, but when her eyes meet
his, they seem on fire. The bright blue color of her eyes
positively glows in the dark, bleak room. Long strands of her black
hair have fallen forward and cover her shoulder and hang down
almost to her breast.

Simon takes a deep breath and tries to
keep himself in check. It doesn’t help when she’s staring at him
with that puzzled, innocent look and
parted,
dewy lips.

“What is it?” she inquires so
unknowingly.

He swallows hard and shakes his head. His
resolve is gone, long gone. The beating of his heart is as loud as
a group of tribal drummers on a deserted island. Very slowly, very
calmly, Simon releases her hand, placing it for some absurd reason
back down at her side as if she couldn’t have managed to do so on
her own.

“Simon?” Sam asks.

Then she wets her bottom lip with her
tongue, not suggestively, not in a way that would be lascivious
because he knows that she does not think that way. But it’s more
than he can take because he
does
think that way. He thinks that way about Sam all the time.
Lately, that’s all he does. He thinks about Sam when he’s studying
medical journals. He ponders her soft curves when he’s supposed to
be on patrol in the middle of the night at the farm. He
examines
the soft shapes of her delicate
face while he’s milking a cow and she’s yammering away beside him
about who knows what. When they ride together, he finds himself
staring at her thighs gripping the horse’s sides or her small hands
that are so soft yet firm on the reins. He can’t even let himself
think about the flirty arch of her black eyebrows or the dark pink
of her small mouth.

“What is it, Simon? Is something wrong?” she
asks again and bites her lower lip.

“Damn it,” he swears under his breath,
earning a startled expression from Sam.

Simon sinks his hands into the
hair
at
either side of her face
and snatches her to him. Her surprised yelp gets smothered as his
mouth covers hers in a kiss that nearly buckles his knees. Hers do,
though, and he has to hold her up. He’s not sure if he’s frightened
her, but he also doesn’t know if he could’ve stopped himself from
doing this, either. He’s wanted to kiss her for so long, since the
first day he’d found her hiding on the floor of her closet. Her
fragile, doll face has beckoned him ever since.

He staggers forward, bumping them both
into the shelving unit. His dirty leather work-boots scuff against
the tile floor. Not wanting her to get hurt by the steel shelf
behind her head, or at least that’s what he tells himself, Simon
removes his hands from her face and wraps them around her middle.
He lifts her clean off the ground and up close to his front, up
against his chest like she’d fallen asleep that night in the barn.
Her stifled squeal of surprise is brief as his mouth covers hers
again. He kisses her thoroughly, letting the need for her that has
grown for so long
explode
from
him. His tongue slips past her teeth as he ravages her tiny,
Cupid’s bow mouth.

Her arms wrap around his neck, fingers
sliding into his hair, which causes him to groan. His hands slide
down and cover the tops of her thighs, then under her bottom, that
same bottom he’d been staring at during the walk to the clinic. The
perfect, heart-shaped bottom that he’s caught himself staring at
many, many times in these same stretchy tight riding pants.

“Oh, fuck!” Reagan yells from the door.
“Shit! Sorry!”

Simon immediately drops Samantha to the
ground, and they separate as fast as humanly possible. Reagan spins
and flees from the storage room as if she has spied a snake on the
floor. Simon is left standing awkwardly with Sam, but the mood is
gone as if a bucket of ice water has been sloshed over his head.
And his hormones.

“I’m sorry,” he stutters. “That was a
mistake.”

“It was?” Sam asks and touches her fingertips
to her reddened lips.

Simon rakes a hand through his red hair,
tousling it and probably making it stand on end. He is the most
disgusting, amoral man alive. He feels like he might vomit.

“I…we should never… I’m…that was
disgusting,” he blurts on a single, held breath. He actually meant
to say that
he
is disgusting,
but so many thoughts had popped into his idiotic brain at the same
time that it came out wrong.

“That was dis…. What?” Sam asks brokenly with
tears in her eyes and also flees the room.

Simon can’t respond. It is like his mouth is
filled with dried bread crumbs. He feels like either punching
something, someone or doing something violent. Crap. He’s a total
scumbag, no better than the Target men. No better than… him. He’s
no better than him, Bobby, his cousin who’d stolen her youth and so
much more. He’d promised himself that he’d always take care of her,
protect Sam from men that would hurt her again. And here he is
behaving just like those men.

Reagan reappears at the door to the
storage room where he is still rooted to the same spot, his muscles
shaking with an unrequited need for Sam and
an
anger
and an untapped rage at himself.

“Hey, sorry about that,” Reagan apologizes.
“I didn’t know that you…”

“It’s fine,” Simon tells her. “That won’t
ever happen again. I’m gonna move into town, leave the farm.”

Simon moves to squeeze past her, but
Reagan snatches his arm. Her small hand on his bicep is nothing
like what Sam had made him feel with her hand
on
his. Reagan is like his foul-mouthed, yet
intelligent older sister. He loves her like crazy, nearly as much
as he loves Paige. He loves all the McClane girls, but Reagan even
more because they’ve worked so closely over the years as she’d
patiently taught him medicine and anatomy and physiology and about
diseases. He can barely even look her in the eye. His guilt is at
an all-time high.

“The hell you are,” she argues. “Don’t even
say shit like that, Simon. We need you on the farm. You know that.
You know better than to even suggest leaving.”

“I can’t be around her,” he confesses. He
still feels like he might vomit. His face and neck and chest feel
flush and hot. He wishes Reagan would move out of his way.

“Why not, Simon? You obviously care about
her.”

“It’s wrong. It’s sick. I’m a disgusting
pig,” he says and looks at the doorframe.

“What are you talking about? Why would
you say such a thing? I mean, I’m not good with relationship shit
and all, but that certainly doesn’t make any sense. You’re a
really good
person, Simon.”

He shakes his head, “Please, don’t say
that.”

“Why not? Hey, talk to me. What’s going on
here?”

“Just don’t tell anybody you saw me doing
that. They’d all be so disappointed in me, especially your
grandfather. I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Why would anybody be disappointed in you?
Sam’s eighteen. It’s not like you’re trying to sleep with a married
woman or molest a kid, Simon. Sam is an adult and so are you.”

He flinches. Sometimes he wishes Reagan was
just a bit less blunt. Or crude.