Page 7 of Throw Down
“We’re treating her, Derek. Snapping at Briar isn’t going to help.”
Derek glanced toward the laptop, breaking their locked gazes, and Briar felt like he could breathe again.Briar ducked his head, focused on keeping his hands steady as he screwed IV tubing into the catheter he’d secured to the puppy’s cephalic vein.
“You’re the vet,” Derek snapped, turning his ire on Nate’s pixelated image.“Get your ass down here and handle this.”
“I’m headed your way, but I live out in the boonies.You know that. You want Briar to just sit there twiddling his thumbs while you wait?Or do you want him to do everything he can to stabilize her?”
A muscle in Derek’s throat flexed, like he was swallowing the reality of his situation and it didn’t go down easy.In the end, he just shoved his fists in his jacket pockets and resumed his silent sentinel routine in the periphery of Briar’s vision.
Nate ordered a few blood panels and a cocktail of antacids, glucose, and electrolytes before shutting down the call to focus on his driving.
The room became uncomfortably silent.
Maybe it was Briar’s fault they’d gotten off on the wrong foot.After all, it wasn’t unusual for pet owners to take their frustrations out on staff, and Briar hadn’t exactly established himself as a trustworthy resource.He'd acted as if Derek was a serial killer the moment he opened the door, and Derek had noticed.The man couldn’t do anything about his appearance.Didn’t Briar understand better than anyone how much it hurt to be judged by something he couldn’t change?How many people took one look at him and assumed he was nothing but a vapid party boy or an easy lay?And tonight, he'd done the same to someone else.It made him feel small and petty.He decided to start fresh.
“How old is she?” he asked, spiking a saline bag and attaching it to the IV port.He offered a tentative smile, but Derek only narrowed his eyes in response.
“Dunno,” he replied laconically.
“You don’t know?”
“Look, she didn’t exactly come with papers.I found her in a box of junk parts at my gate last summer.Best I can figure is she’s around ten months.”
“Who could abandon such a cute little thing?” Briar murmured in his best good doggy voice.He stroked her ears, then pulled her lips back to examine her pale, dry gums.Her heart was beating so fast beneath his fingers that it felt like the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings.
The other man was silent for so long that Briar glanced over at him.Big mistake.
Derek must have gotten tired of freezing his balls off and decided to strip off his soggy outer layer. The shapeless jacket and loose, grease-stained jeans made him look stocky or maybe even a little chubby.Briar had assumed he was hiding a beer gut like more than half the male population of Sweetwater.
Oh, how wrong he’d been.
Derek Owens was sculpted like a Greek god.His shoulders were wide enough to work double-duty as an industrial beam, and Briar could trace every line of stacked muscle beneath his damp t-shirt.Even without flexing, the swell of his biceps threatened to bust the hem of his tight sleeves.Then he turned to toss his jacket on a nearby counter, and Briar's eyes nearly popped out of his head.Beneath his faded jeans was the tightest ass Briar had ever seen.
His mouth went dry.
“Holy…shiiii…” he wheezed.
Derek shot him a questioning glance over his shoulder.Briar flushed, dropping his eyes back to the puppy and fumbling with suddenly clumsy fingers.His ears buzzed in the silence.
“You did the right thing getting her to us so quickly,” he said, forcing so much cheer into his voice that it cracked.“I don’t see any wounds or punctures, so probably not a rattler bite.It might be an infection, or she might have ingested something.Fluids will help a lot. Just give me a second to calculate this drip ratio.We don’t want to mess with her arterial pressure by overloading her with fluids too quickly.Math was never my strong suit, you know?Barely squeaked by in college.”
He was spewing one-sided chatter like he’d busted a vent.The steam from his overheated brain was leaking out.All it took was a hint of six-pack beneath some wet cotton to completely snap his safety valve.Derek listened to him prattle on without comment, but Briar was too rattled to tap the brakes.
“Oh! Yeah, that sounds bad, right?Don’t worry. Nate would never have hired me if I wasn’t the best vet tech around.Scout's honor.” He held up three fingers in a scout salute.“I was never a scout though. Not unless you count a camping trip for troubled youth back in middle school.But they say it's the thought that counts.Anyway, don't worry. That’s what calculators are for, right?Haha…ha.”
Oh God, it was getting worse.Derek’s expression was growing increasingly skeptical.Or maybe that was horror.
“Even Nate uses a calculator for drip ratios,” Briar blurted, tugging his phone from the pocket of his lab coat and showing off the calculator function with a flourish.As if the man had never seen a calculator before.“I’m calculating her fluid deficit, see? She’s eighteen kilograms. So, I multiply that by eight percent. That’s her estimated dehydration. Then by one thousand, so—”
“1,440.”
Briar froze with his finger hovering over the total button.
“What?” he asked blankly.
“1,440,” Derek repeated, shifting his weight impatiently.“Eighteen multiplied by point-zero-eight and then one-thousand.”
“That’s not…” Perplexed, Briar finished tapping the equation into his app.He squinted at the answer, double-checked it, and then turned his appalled gaze on Derek.“How did you do that so fast?”