Mercury Falling: a Grumpy / Sunshine Opposites Attract Romance

Kerry “Mercury” Dawson blinked.

Twilight. Dark Nevada sky. No stars out yet. No glow from the Las Vegas strip, either.

Wait… why am I looking at the sky when I should be riding the Harley?

Something sharp poked at his left shoulder blade, and he turned his head.

Pavement.

He was lying in middle of the road, the chopped-off motorcycle he’d been riding propped at an unnatural angle six feet away.

Oh yeah. Little old blue-hair making a left turn in front of me.

Even from here Kerry could see the caved-in front fender, forks grotesquely squeezing the wheel. The mini-windshield was a spider-web of fiberglass. All that glorious chrome twisted and scraped raw.

And what was left of the rear fender another six feet away.

Laz is gonna be pissed I trashed his bike.

“Yo, man, you okay?” Buck’s pock-marked face appeared above him.

Kerry lifted his arms. Yep, all his fingers were still there. And they moved. He wiggled his toes inside his boots. “Well,” he deadpanned. “I’m not dead.”

Buck smirked and offered Kerry a hand.

“Don’t!” The voice was high and shrill, jabbing into Kerry’s brain like an ice pick. “He could have a head injury. Don’t move him!”

The body belonging to the voice moved into the circle of bikers that stood over him. It was a woman with delicate features, elegantly shaped eyes and mouth, and a mess of blonde curls held back by a clip.

“We take care of our own,” one of his buddies—was it Chaff?—growled.

His buddies had to look damned intimidating in their tattoos, leather and Strikers patches, and yet this woman who was only half their size jammed her hands on her hips and said, “You’re kidding me, right?”

She pinned each biker with a stare, one at a time. “One of you is a trained doctor, then? Paramedic? Nurse?”

Damn!

Chaff’s jaw dropped. Kerry would have laughed out loud, except that his hip, his ribs, and his shoulder were suddenly on fire. And his head…

Fuck, my head hurts!

Someone groaned—shit, was that me?—and the woman’s chin jerked toward Kerry. She dropped to the pavement. “I’m Lucy. I’m an E.R. nurse. I’ve already called for an ambulance.”

Ambulance?

“No way,” he said. “I’m not getting carted out of here like an invalid.”

“We’ll see about that.” Her hands moved over his body.

He stiffened. “What the—”

“Don’t move,” she said. “You could have broken bones. And I think you hit your head.”

He wanted to argue, but… well, his head hurt too damn much.

Shit.

She got her hand into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to his license. “Kerry Dawson.”

“I prefer Merc,” he grumbled.

“Did you say Mark?”

“Merc,” he said. “Like, you know… Mercury Rising.”

Her hand fluttered above his face, blurring. Was she really moving it that fast?

“Well, Merc,” she said. “We need to keep you awake until the ambulance gets here, so tell me something about your life.”