Rest & Trust by Susan Fanetti

gentle—and eased her off his bike. Now that hurt had made its way to her senses, she couldn’t hold back a cry as he moved her sore arm. Not sore. So much more than sore.
     
    She expected him to use that opportunity to ride away and leave her wherever she was, but instead he dismounted.
     
    Oh, he was tall. A weird thought to have at that time, but she had it anyway. She was five-three. He might have been a whole foot taller. She craned her neck to see his face—what she could see, under his helmet and behind his sunglasses.
     
    “You got shot, sweetheart. Twice.” He nodded at her arm.
     
    She looked dumbly down at it, now hanging useless from her shoulder.
     
    He reached inside his kutte and pulled out a bandana. While she watched, passive and speechless, he tied it around the gash, which was bleeding most freely. It hurt, and she winced and pulled away from the pain, but he held on and tied it tight.
     
    “I’m gonna drop you off at SB General. You need seen to.”
     
    That got her words back in action. “No! No! Cops shot me—I can’t go to a hospital.” Holy shit! She’d been shot! She made her brain think. Shit, her arm really hurt now. Like her blood was made of hot sauce. “Um…can you—can you just take me home? I can take care of it. There’s not, like, a bullet in me, right?”
     
    He smiled—a great smile, with straight, white teeth, surrounded by a thick auburn beard. A ring bisected his bottom lip, and he had a ring through his septum, too. “That’s a through-and-through, yeah, and that’s a graze. But it’s gonna take more than a Band-Aid to fix these, sweetheart.” He seemed to hear something and looked sharply up and around. When he seemed again satisfied that they were safe, he turned back to her. “Where do you live?”
     
    “Riverside.”
     
    His hands on his hips, he sighed and looked down, like he was studying the broken asphalt between his boots. Then he shrugged off his kutte and laid it across the seat of his bike. That bike was a monster—gleaming black and chrome, with a rear tire that was at least a foot wide.
     
    With his kutte off, he began unbuttoning his dark green shirt. That didn’t make any sense.
     
    “What are you doing?”
     
    “You can’t ride with that bloody arm out for everybody to see. The goal is to escape LEO, not invite them along for the ride, right?”
     
    “Leo?”
     
    “Law Enforcement Officers.”
     
    “Oh.”
     
    He pulled his shirt off; underneath, he wore a white beater. Oh. He had a lot of ink—covering both arms and across his chest. Colorful and various. The beater was snug and showed definition over—
     
    Was she seriously standing here in this scary alley, bleeding from gunshot wounds and checking out the strange biker?
     
    Yes, of course she was. This was exactly the kind of out-of-control mindfuck that made her horniest.
     
    With a step toward her—shit, she only came up to his chest—he eased his shirt over her wounded arm.
     
    It hurt, and she hissed. “Ow!”
     
    “Sorry,” he muttered but didn’t stop working the shirt up over her shoulder. She helped with the right arm and let him button the shirt over her black, sleeveless top.
     
    Then he unfastened his helmet and took it off. The auburn tone of his hair was a shade darker than his beard. He had kind of a punk cut, undercut all around, and about three inches long on the top. It flopped over his forehead as he leaned down, set the helmet on her head and tightened the strap under her chin.
     
    His ears were pierced, too—one-inch gauges in his lobes and an industrial piercing in his left ear.
     
    She wasn’t even fighting the urge to check him out and catalogue his features. He was hot, and noticing his hotness distracted her from the shrieking pain in her arm.
     
    “I’m Sherlock,” he said as his hands dropped from the strap.
     
    Strange name, but she didn’t comment on it. It seemed rude to mock her rescuer. “Sadie.”
     
    With a