The Love She Craves: Selling Her Soul to Declan Read Free Page A

pizza very often these days.
    A slice of pizza with no more than a couple of bites out of it, sat on a brown paper towel on her knee as she stared sightlessly at a point in the carpet. The younger girl pretended to feed her teddy bear a bite before she took a nibble of her crust.
    “Aunt Nyxie, are you saving yours for Cody? He can have one of mine, too,” the older girl said snapping Onyx out of her thoughts.
    “No, Lotus, eat your pizza. The hospital will feed Cody while he’s here.”
    “I feel bad eating pizza without him.”
    Onyx nodded and lifted her food toward her mouth. She paused with her slice in midair when she spotted him looking at her. Dropping the half-eaten slice back into the box, she rose to her feet and in turn, the girls did as well.
    “How is he?” she asked impatiently not waiting for him to speak.
    “He’s still in surgery but he’s holding his own. We had to work in teams. Dr. Patel and I opened up his abdominal cavity to stop his internal bleeding. He took four units of blood and his spleen had to be removed.”
    “He can have mine,” she jumped in.
    Under other circumstances Declan might have made a disdainful comment over the prospect of performing a spleen transplant but he held back. Normally, that would have been fodder for his friends and him to joke about, but he’d never make fun of Onyx. Even in school, there had been times when the jocks were looking for a victim and her name had come up. She never knew he had thwarted several incidents that would have been directed at her.
    “He can live without a spleen. Has the neurosurgeon talked to you yet?”
    “No. No one has said anything until now.”
    Declan frowned not feeling comfortable discussing part of the surgery he didn’t perform. He wasn’t even the boy’s attending physician, he was a second year resident. “The pressure on Cody’s brain from the swelling was getting too high. The neurosurgeon felt the best way to give him a chance was to remove part of his skull. So when you see him, prepare yourself, his head will look malformed.”
    Declan glanced at the girls and wondered where their mother was. He’d heard the older girl call her Aunt Nyxie . Why would their mother leave them with her at a moment like this? Surely, they realized children couldn’t go into the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. And even if they could, the sight of the boy would be traumatizing.
    “The orthopedic surgeon is in there now setting the broken bones. I’d say he’ll be in surgery another two to three hours.”
    “Oh, God, he’s so little,” she whispered. “How can someone so small have so many injuries?”
    He might have pointed out the boy was hit by a truck, but he knew she did not need the question answered. Stay on point .
    “When he comes out, we’re going to keep him in a medically induced coma for a while to give his brain more time to heal.” If she didn’t already seem devastated he would have prepared her for seeing him on a ventilator but he already felt he’d buried her up to her neck. And Onyx always appeared so vulnerable even now he wanted to protect her.
    He could see her fighting her emotions. “Is he going to l-live?”
    Declan hesitated. He hated to give a definite answer when there were so many things which could go wrong.
    “It’s still touch and go, Onyx. If he makes it through the next seventy-two hours without complications, we might have reason to be optimistic,” he said cautiously. “Do you have any questions?”
    Her huge brown eyes stared up at him filled with pain and confusion. He could tell she felt overwhelmed.
    He felt overwhelmed, too, to see her so unexpectedly. For God’s sake, he was one of her brother’s doctors not an eighteen-year-old horny teenager. Ignoring the way his cock strained towards her inside of his pants, he told himself he must remain professional and stop imagining her naked, on her knees, tied up with ropes and striped with pink welts.
    “My mind is an absolute