Fighting Lust: A Deadly Sins Novel by Jennifer Miller Page A

of approval. Tell you what… I’ll help you out with Tessa. Lord knows the girl could use a nice steady lay-”
    “Gina!” Tessa yells, “What the hell? I’m standing right here and can hear you.”
    Gina rolls her eyes and gestures for Tessa to be quiet and I’m more than a little amused. “As I was saying, I’ll help you out with Tessa. I know she can be a hard egg to crack, but there’s something I want in return.”
    My eyes move over the top of Gina’s head and land on Tessa. Her face is red and she looks like she wants to commit murder. She’s magnificent in her anger. “Deal,” I say and hold my hand out.
    “You don’t even know what I want.”
    “Don’t care.”
    Gina laughs and looks at Tessa, “Yeah, I definitely like this one,” she jerks a thumb to me. Tessa sighs loudly and whips out her paintbrush and starts slapping it against the side of the house like it’s a hammer and not a paintbrush. She’s pissed and hell, it’s amusing. Gina turns back to me, “I just want you to return the favor and put in a good word for me with one of your hot friends.”
    “Zane, I presume?” She nods, “You got it,” I promise.
    “Alrighty then,” she says, “Carry on!” Before she walks away, she gives my ass a smack making me jump in surprise. She looks over her shoulder and winks. Tessa sighs and shakes her head. “I like her,” I say. She grunts in response and I laugh softly at her irritation. “She’s always like that?”
    “Worse,” she grumbles.
    We work in silence for a bit. “So, how did you get involved with Helping Homes?”
    She glances at me before returning to her task. “Through a patient.”
    “A patient?”
    “Yes. Right now, I work in the emergency room, but I haven’t always. I was recently promoted to an assistant head nurse position and I’m responsible for a group of employees and medical residents in the emergency department.” I nod as she confirms what I’ve already learned about her. “Before that, I worked wherever I was needed, wherever I was scheduled. That week, I happened to be assigned to a specific floor where patients recovering from various procedures were roomed. There was one elderly woman on my floor that I took care of during my rounds. She was recovering from an open-heart procedure. She had clogged arteries and they had to do bypass surgery. It can be a tough recovery for some.”
    She looks at me during a break in her story, we make eye contact, before we return to our task of painting. I like the sound of her voice. That, combined with my even strokes up and down with my paintbrush is soothing in its own way.
    “Her name was Helen. We hit it off and I found myself always checking on her a little more than I needed to, or staying a little longer each visit as time allowed.” She dips her brush back into her can before continuing. “During my many visits she told me about her rough start with life. She was married to an abusive man that beat her – sometimes daily – and so bad she couldn’t move. It took her a long time to gather the courage to leave. She found it in wanting a better life for her daughter. One night, her husband went over to the neighbor’s house late at night to drink beer and watch a ball game. Helen woke her daughter up, told her to grab what she could, and they stole the car keys, snuck out and drove away.”
    During her story, Cole and Levi found their way outside and have since stopped to listen too. “They snuck off in the only car they had, with little more than the clothes on their back and a few dollars she’d been saving under her mattress here and there. They just took what they could in a hurry. Helen had nowhere to go, her parents were no longer living and her husband had long since made her ostracized by any friends she had. She was afraid to go to a shelter because she was convinced he would find them there. They roamed from town to town, always trying to stay close to parks that had facilities. Their