“Start at the tree, then?”
She nodded, fumbling her phone from her pocket and wordlessly typing into a search engine.
“What are you looking for?”
“They get the tree from a different part of the country and a different breed of pine every year.” She paused, finally looking over at him. “What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re watching me like I’m doing something dumb.”
“I’m watching you like you’re about to waste time looking for information I already possess.” He plucked the phone from her hands, flipped to the camera, took a smirking selfie and handed it back to her.
Her stunned expression made him want to misbehave a little more. With his best rendition of her Southern accent he mimed back, “What? You’re watching me like I’m about to do something dumb.”
It took her a moment, but her reaction finally caught up with her and the plush mouth that had been hanging open stretched in a slow, bemused smile. “I will...treasure? This?”
There was a question at the end of every word she paused her way through. Then she laughed. An actual laugh that accompanied her turning the phone off and stashing it again.
And just like that, his plan not to get too friendly went up in flames.
“Consider it an early Christmas gift,” he murmured. “And the only gift I’m giving this year, so be honored.”
“You don’t do Christmas with your brother?”
Of course she’d ask about Lyons. She worked with his brother more than she worked with him, but his mention brought up that mixed bag of emotions he’d been struggling to deal with for a while. Before Lyons had been shot, they’d both been content ignoring the holiday, but this year Wolfe just didn’t know what to do with his brother. They weren’t close, but since last Christmas, Wolfe had been ineffectively trying to change that, and knew beyond any doubt that Lyons shouldn’t be alone when this Christmas rolled around. But he didn’t know how to talk about it. Just as he’d failed to know how to talk to Jenna.
“Lyons doesn’t do Christmas either,” he said after a lengthy pause.
“Is it a Scottish thing?”
She was funny. Or dumb. Both of which appealed in entirely different ways. “Scotland’s a Christian country...”
“Yes, but don’t you do gifts on Boxing Day? I’m not entirely sure what that is, to be honest. But there’s also the chance that you all do something with kilts and flinging massive logs,” she offered, and, instead of turning the phone back on, gave the buttons a rest to flip the case open and closed, open and closed, open and closed.
“The only massive logs I like to fling are the ones that fit into my fireplace.” He was supposed to be the one being a dork tonight, but she was getting in the good zings. “How do they celebrate Christmas where you’re from?”
Such a simple question, he didn’t expect the color to drain from her cheeks, which only darkened the swath of freckles that were thickest at the apples and across her nose.
He knew enough about paling to know that it didn’t come lightly and guessed, “That is the face of someone who dislikes Christmas.”
“No, it’s not,” she argued, not a drop of passion in her voice. “I want to see the tree very much. I was going to go anyway. I just wasn’t going to stream it.”
“Why? It’s technically a different tree every year, but it’s the same as last year.”
“I didn’t see it last year.”
“Why not?”
“Because I arrived in January,” she answered after the slightest pause. With other topics, she spoke easily enough, but when it came to talking about herself? She paused long enough to draw attention to it, like the beat people took to come up with a story before telling a lie. Like every conversation with his parents, which no doubt colored his thinking. Why would she lie about that? Silly.
“For point of reference,” she explained, “Jenna was my first patient at Sutcliffe, and I diagnosed the initial mass on her kidney.”
And the truth, he was sure of it. Her careful choosing of words was for some other reason.
And he’d performed that first surgery to remove part of the one kidney, which had seemed to come out clean. Which the chemotherapy and radiation should have finished off. It hadn’t been a date that had been burned into his memory at the time, but with her relapse and second surgery, he’d become more familiar with it—January 17.
And it explained her connection to Jenna. Why she continued to visit her despite no longer being her physician. He didn’t know much about her, except that she was moving to Atlanta and that she needed to be friendlier at work, but being captive in the back of a cab gave him a moment and freedom to ask questions.
“Why are you leaving so soon? Not getting on with someone?”
Again, the small amount of color she’d regained drained away, except for her ears. Her ears went bright, fiery red. Man, he was on a roll with her.
“I just want to go now. But it’ll be nice to have some proper New York Christmas activities before I go.”
“To Atlanta,” he clarified. “I heard you were moving to Atlanta. Want to be closer to family?”
“Look.” She gestured out of the window and he followed the motion as the cab slowed.
They’d arrived at the cross street between towering buildings, the plaza a block in. The tree still sat unlit. “We made it in time, I see.”
“Thought the crowd and traffic would be worse.” She went with the subject change.
He fished cash from his wallet, despite her objection, and paid the cabbie. When he opened the door to get out, the sound of the busy city streets wiped away that strange sense of intimacy he’d been feeling, exchanging it for Christmas music from a jazz band on the corner of 49th and Rockefeller Plaza, doing their best to assure everyone that it was “the most wonderful time of the year.”
He didn’t buy it.
* * *
Angel climbed out of the back seat, trying to shrug off the little squabble that had gone down over who was going to pay the cabbie. It was a kind offer, she knew that. He was being gentlemanly. But all she really felt was an insinuation that she couldn’t afford to pay, just like all those times when she hadn’t been able to.
When she’d been in medical school, she’d really thought that once she’d begun making a very comfortable living, that fear, that feeling of inadequacy would fade away like so many bad memories.
And she’d run with the notion. She’d been in medical school, hundreds of miles from Knott County, Kentucky, and the local Conley stigma. It should’ve been safe to be open and share her past—the poverty, the criminal family, the unfortunate time she’d spent in juvenile detention—with the boyfriend she’d thought to love but had lost instead. That mistake had followed her to New York, taking her first job too after she’d had the misfortune to work for a man who knew Spencer, and noticed they shared the same medical school.
Thinking she could get past that here? Wishful thinking. That inadequacy stayed pinned to her, like an errant shadow she couldn’t shake off. Sometimes, after the fact, she could rationalize her way through why her first instinctive reactions to the things said to her were wrong-headed, but reason and emotion were different things. She’d been judged too harshly for too long, and, no matter how far she’d run, it had chased her. She expected it now. Sometimes she even thought she deserved it.
Knowing how unlikely it was that McKeag would think she couldn’t pay didn’t make it feel any less real, any less pointed. But making a scene over a cab fare would just draw a big circle around her insecurities.
So, she put up the mildest fuss, then moved on.
His small, kind contribution wasn’t the same as charity. She didn’t rely on charity for anything anymore.
Phone in hand, she stopped on the sidewalk and tried to flip through to the
camera and juggle that with the social media account she was supposed to stream through. Not that she’d ever streamed before. But the words had come out of her mouth regardless. Everyone streamed, right? She’d looked up the instructions in the locker room while changing, but now could absolutely not remember the steps.
“Are you waiting for someone else to join us?” McKeag asked. Jenna might call them both by their first names, far too personal for her; he’d be McKeag. Wolfe sounded too...something. Primal.
“No, I’m just—” Just not wanting to admit she was having issues. She could figure it out. She didn’t need the help of the walking embodiment of gloriously scruffy, dimpled manliness. She tapped the icon that was supposed to initiate this nonsense again. Then twice more.
Nothing happened.
“Technological difficulties, please stand by,” he said, his voice like a surprisingly soothing narrator, but that damnable brogue played up.
“It’s not difficulties. I know how to do it. I read—”
“Never done it before?” he cut in.
She puffed, didn’t answer and mashed the icon again.
Then he was at her shoulder staring at the little screen; the firm plane of his chest against her back and the proximity of his head to hers made her fumble, nearly dropping the phone.
“Here.” He pulled off remarkably nice gloves, stashed them in his pocket, then wrapped one warm, firm hand around the wrist of her phone-holding hand. The heat of his touch spread up her arm and directly into her chest, making her muscles go soft and far too pliant. With no effort, he bent her arm slightly, to see the screen.
When he lifted his other arm to reach over her, which would practically be an embrace, the bitey critters returned with ravenous delight, and before she started to squirm against him, or throw herself shamefully on the pavement with her butt in the air like Meemaw’s ever-horny cat, she turned and pressed the phone into his hands.
He was going to do it, but, God help her, he couldn’t put his arms around her like that. The danger of making a complete fool of herself had already escalated when Jenna had tricked him into coming, and, given the choice, she’d rather be judged culturally stupid than accidentally throw herself at him.
She’d just been too lonely for too long. Another reason to move on. Although they were both massive cities, Atlanta and New York City might as well be different countries. Here she tried to speak the language and always sounded wrong, off...dumb. At least there, she’d have the native tongue, even if she had to keep her low-class dialect under control still.
Angel couldn’t say she’d had a crush on McKeag the entire eleven months she’d been at Sutcliffe. Those lame feelings had probably taken a good two weeks to colonize and really infect her, leaving her flustered simply by the man’s presence, and the chills he could send racing to little-used parts of her body even without all the physical touching. “You do it.”
He looked at her for a long second, his blue eyes pale in the center with deep indigo rings around them, giving them a mesmerizing quality under the best conditions. But when he grabbed eye contact like that, and held it, he had to see those frustrating feelings swimming around in her own eyes. It was just right there, and it didn’t take someone who’d survived childhood by reading other people’s intentions to see it.
His eyes were probably the heart of his damnable attractiveness. It wasn’t that the rest of him wasn’t wickedly handsome—the man had a jaw so square it screamed masculinity, and that mouth. If he didn’t stop smiling...heaven help her. She could imagine Lyons laughing about it tomorrow, even if she’d never actually seen him smile.
Just as she felt her heartbeat hit the high millions per second, he broke his gaze away to fix on her phone, not mentioning her lapse into starry-eyed staring. A few taps and he announced, “We’re a couple of minutes early. She might not be watching yet, but you know anyone following you will be able to see this, right?”
“Well, sure.” She knew that. She wasn’t dumb. At least, not all the time. She just didn’t know how to start the danged thing. And she really hoped no one else at the hospital would be watching. Being around Wolfe was hard enough. “If someone starts watching, they’re going to be bored pretty quick and turn it off. It’s for Jenna, so we’re basically just going to walk around and look at stuff.”
“Then why were you looking up facts for the tree?” He kept the phone on her, clearly recording, which was not how she’d planned this going. She was going to hold the camera, not have her graceless, stuttering inadequacies immortalized online. “I was just going to tell her what it was and let her know she can look up where the tree came from to see the farm and stuff. I don’t know. I didn’t really have time to come up with a good plan.”
She snapped her fingers for him to hand the thing back over to her and stop recording her.
“So, you’re not going to play tour guide,” he reiterated, still recording.
“No.”
He watched her a moment longer, which was at least ten times longer than she wanted him to look at her, then handed the phone back. “Good thing I’m here. The poor kid needs some entertainment.”
She looked at the screen and saw four viewers watching, as well as a comment pop up from Jenna. “She’s here. She wants us to go to the tree.”
Soon, she expected, the other three watching would drift off somewhere more entertaining. Any second now.
He gestured for her to follow. “Get me in screen. You’re just awful at being a cameraman, love.”
That was teasing. It sounded like teasing. Not real criticism.
He put his gloves back on and gestured again for her to follow him into the plaza. Was she supposed to film him walking?
While not paying attention to his backside. Oh, Jeez, Jenna did not need a long screengrab of that man’s behind while he walked. This needed to be PG, even if her mind had sunk to the depths of at least PG-13 at that precise moment.
Jerking the screen up and off him, she panned it over the crowd and toward the tree as they walked. Let Jenna get a feel of what it was like to walk into the plaza. That was the experience. Not McKeag’s butt.
He glanced back at her, then, seeing that she was not filming him, fell back until he was in step with her. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m in awe of the majesty of—” your behind “—the crowd.” She sighed. “I’m trying to keep it level and not be all super shaky.”
“No stabilizer?”
“I have no idea. It’s a new phone. It should do all the things.”
To his credit, he didn’t laugh at her ineptitude. His smile was potent enough, especially when his hand moved to the small of her back and steered her to the left around some people she would’ve totally seen before running into while futzing with the phone. “She says the cookie place is on the far side of the plaza.”
“If it takes cookies, I’ll buy a dozen.”
If someone could shout an exclamation point with their eyes, Angel attempted it—eyes so wide they might pop clean out of the socket. She jabbed him in the arm with her elbow, so he didn’t miss it, and shook her head. Finger over the microphone, she whispered, “Kids take that kind of thing literally. You can’t say you’ll buy a dozen, she’ll expect a dozen and she needs some actual nutrition, not just empty calories.”
His adulting skills were also lacking in the child-bribing department. Which somehow made him more attractive.
“Yes, ma’am.” He all but saluted, then turned the camera to him, discreetly moving her fingertip off the microphone. “Lass, you know you can’t eat a dozen cookies and nothing else, right? I’m just prone to extravagance, my mum used to say. But I think your mum would whack me with the IV pole if I tried to give you a dozen cookies. So, it’s two. Any others that may come back to the hospital must be shared.”
She crossed her eyes and shook her head. “There is a two-cookie limit on
what will be allowed onto the floor. If you bring a box, all the children—even the ones who can’t eat right now—are going to want a cookie and we haven’t cleared that with Dietary. This has to be a secret. Secret cookies come in small numbers.”
She puffed, then realized it probably sounded like hurricane force winds with her face so close to the camera and switched to reading comments again.
The administrator was watching.
Crap.
“Um, we’re...yes, ordered to only bring two.”
Back to their tree quest.
He led through the crowd, and she tried to pretend that the gentle steering wasn’t nice. It was kind of chauvinistic, really. That was exactly what she’d think if she saw some other woman being led around like that, but somehow he made it feel comforting. Probably nothing to do with him; it was a side effect of the ball of nerves in her chest every time she ventured into a proper New York crowd. That many people, packed so close? It was just plain scary. Riding the subway had made her break out in a cold sweat the first couple of times she’d tried it.
The presence of anyone she knew would’ve felt comforting. Safe. It wasn’t anything to do with him.
When they reached the denser crowds, he took her hand instead and cut through the sea of bodies until they were in the crush, three bodies back from the railing that kept the tree safe from the public. That was worse. Even with his fancy gloves, her hand in his wiped all thoughts from her head. All she could do was catalog sensations. All the tingling. The parts of her that trembled and heated. Insanity.
“Look up.” His voice was in her ear. She tilted her head back to look up at the tree, and he steered her arm, tilting the camera back.
They’d arrived just in time. The MC began to speak, and she missed every single word the man said. All she could do was stare up at the tree, focus on keeping it steady and try really hard to ignore the feel of him behind her. The crowds of New York were something she could never hope to get used to; they literally pressed so tightly together that the crowd seemed to move like one organism—which meant everyone directly beside her was touching her. So why was it that she only really felt him at her back? His heat. His solidity. The fan of his breath on her neck...
Their Christmas to Remember Page 3