None of the McKeags were good at relationships. Not him. Not Lyons—Lyons was even worse at them than he’d been before being shot, and that had been pretty awful already. And their parents...two more dysfunctional people there could never be. He still didn’t understand how or why they would want to stay married. He’d lost track of the number of public affairs they’d each carried on by the time he was a teenager, and they still never divorced. Fought. Hated one another. Temporarily separated. Started and never finished a few divorces before getting back together, but after forty years of marriage, they were still at it. And still cheating, last he’d heard. Neither he nor Lyons were in contact with their parents. He doubted they even knew Lyons had nearly died.
Even after the shooting, he and Lyons still couldn’t figure out how to talk to one another, and Wolfe seemed to be the only one interested in trying. Yet even with the failure of the closest relationship, here he was, gleefully opening a fresh can of relationship worms with Angel.
With all that and his own history of dismal relationship failures, he’d finally come to accept that work and the lives he could save in his career would be the legacy he left this world. None of these children were his, but they all felt as if they were, at least in part. And that was how he’d ended up with Angel last night: the little girl who felt as if she were his had asked and he’d been helpless to refuse.
The fact that it was also Christmas, something else that left a bitter taste in his mouth, should’ve only made the whole thing more unbearable.
But hadn’t.
Knowing how flustered Angel became around him made it impossible not to flirt and tease her. Making her laugh, which seemed to be such an infrequent occurrence in her life, made him feel good in a way he truly wasn’t happy about, no matter the lies his current mood was trying to sell him.
“You shoulda come with me last night.”
Angel’s voice came from behind him, her accent more pronounced and drawn out. He felt himself smile reflexively, but then he remembered he shouldn’t be smiling just because she was there and tamped it back down again.
He turned, because that was polite, not because he wanted to see her. Early for her shift, just as he preferred to be, she still had the softness of sleep around those dazzling blue eyes, and not a single crease in her scrubs.
“Jenna appreciated the goodies?”
“She shined like a new penny.” She walked closer, and, although she looked put together and ready to start work, she was tired. It wasn’t just the sleepy adorable eyes; her accent also gave her away. Southern still, but deeper. Less careful, maybe. Less prone to pauses. Lots of long vowels. And her metaphor? Pure country in the heart of Manhattan.
“That’s good to hear. Glad it did her spirit good, and I’d thought she’d hoodwinked you.”
She sat on the bench beside his locker, slouched there, actually, comfortable with him now? That would be another benefit to their evening, if she relaxed some at work.
Her hands fisted together in her lap, which argued against comfort.
“But you still come with me.”
Came. Her accent was different. He’d never heard poor grammar choices from her before.
“I promised,” he said slowly, unable to look away from her. Something was wrong. “Did something happen?”
“The phone stayed runnin’ when I thunk...thought—” She stopped dead for a second, seeming to catch up with the grammar situation, and sat up straighter. “I thought it had turned off when I shut it, it always shuts off, but it didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Definitely not from Atlanta. Maybe more rural Georgia? Farther south? Was that even how southern accents worked?
It took several seconds before what she’d actually said sank in. It hadn’t turned off.
Damn.
What had he said to her when she was getting into the cab? Something about his manly virtue, that was all he could remember.
He tossed his things into his locker and closed the door, buying time while he came up with a response. Or even a reaction, figure out how dismayed to be.
“I don’t know how many people were still there, but Jenna was.”
Oh, man...
“I didn’t say anything specific, did I?” So much nonsense came out of his mouth when he got on a roll, he couldn’t be sure.
“Just that I was going to take advantage of you in the back of the cab.”
“No details? Not saying how you’d take advantage?”
She shook her head, but the grim set of her mouth stayed put.
That was better than it could’ve been, what with the way she inspired his imagination ever since...well, longer than a day. It had just gone hyperactive last night.
“Are you angry?” Worry colored her words, and the hands in her lap twisted tighter. Sitting there. Not getting ready for work.
He must be more tired than he’d thought. She was already ready, hadn’t come into the locker room for her own benefit. She’d come there to find him. She’d looked for him. Wanted to talk to him.
His attention sharpened, shaking off his sleepiness like a double shot of espresso mixed with a pound of sugar, judging by the sweetness spreading in his chest.
“Nah. Accidents happen.”
His mouth had been the fault. He couldn’t even blame her for the temptation she’d become. If he was well adjusted without miles of relationship dysfunction behind him, he’d definitely break his rules to spend more time with her.
He heard her take and release a deep, relieved breath. “Good. If you were angry, it’d be a lot harder to ask you to come out with me again.”
Was this a date?
“Huh?” The confused sound erupted from him on reflex. She wasn’t psychic, hadn’t just pulled thoughts from his mind. He must be mixing things up again.
“To the center tonight with me, to go ice skating,” she clarified, speaking much slower, and that charming, strong drawl tamed to something more refined.
Maybe not a date. At least not on her end. No flirting, he realized. No smiling. No trying to tempt him into fantasizing about things he was already admittedly fantasizing about. She might as well have asked him to take her to have a suspicious mole removed, and she looked both nervous he’d say no, and entirely bothered to be asking in the first place.
Nothing like the other colleague who’d been stalking the locker room to repeatedly ask him out for over a year.
Reynolds was far more...he’d say convincing, but she’d yet to convince him. Even with Angel looking more like the last thing she wanted was to spend time with him.
“Why?”
“Because I’m boring, and you didn’t see her,” Angel said, the disgruntled request turning so hope-filled it almost burned him. “I can’t be that amusing. I don’t know how, but it did her so much good. She was so happy when I went in last night. If the other kids could watch too, get the same benefit... I don’t know, I just think it’d be good for them.”
Not a date. He felt some of the stiffness ease out of his shoulders, but the vague feeling of disappointment settling behind made his decision for him. It would feel like a date with his out-of-control id.
“I don’t date within the hospital,” he said, trying to frame it in a way that was both truthful, and something she could accept, even if it twisted what he clearly understood to be her intent. He looked her dead in the eye as he said the words, because if he was going to turn her down for bogus interpretation, at least he’d give it to her straight.
She sat back just a little, as if her personal bubble had been invaded by his refusal. Or she’d been offended.
The door to the locker room squeaked from around the bank of lockers, and they both paused, but when no other sound came and he looked back at her, she’d stood, putting three feet between them, her arms folded. Offended or angry, but she stayed, her expression stuck somewhere
between angry and pleading.
“She watched us and she forgot about what is happening to her. Sometimes the best gift you can give someone is the ability to forget. Even if just for a little while.”
His stomach soured.
She hadn’t asked again, and she didn’t even stick around to hear his reaction to her words. She gave it to him straight too: she thought less of him now. That realization had him on his feet before she’d made it out of the locker room, wanting to stop her, change her opinion of him. To make a concession. He was a good guy, and now he felt selfish. He felt like a McKeag.
The door squeaked again, and he knew she’d left. Had someone been in there before? He hadn’t heard movement...
Not that it mattered. This situation would only get worse if he spent more time with her, even under the flag of helping the kids forget. One evening together and he’d already failed not to flirt. Today he’d woken up smiling.
Stopping this right now was the only thing to do. Even if it meant she thought he was just another Arsehole McKeag.
CHAPTER FOUR
“CONLEY?”
Angel was standing behind the nurses’ station in Emergency, studying the open cases that had yet to be assigned, when she heard the familiar sound of her name on a Scotsman’s lips. In that split second it took for the sound to go from her ears to her brain, her heart lurched and began to beat fast and hard in her chest.
Wolfe had come to see her. Maybe he’d reconsidered. Maybe she wouldn’t have to do this alone.
She found herself smiling as she turned toward the voice, even if she’d only wanted to shake him a couple of hours ago. He was too smart to have misunderstood her, unless he thought she was just too backward and shy to ask him out directly.
That killed her smile.
Two of her coworkers, who rarely said anything not work-related, had asked if they were going to the winter charity ball together. People realized she was sparking on him, enough that she was still fighting a smile like a complete goober because he’d come to see her.
Only, when she turned toward the deep, broguey voice, it was the other McKeag. Dr. Lyons McKeag. The McKeag who worked in Emergency. Another animalistic-named McKeag brother. With her luck, they were probably spread all over the western hemisphere, each with a macho, primal name, and annoyingly pretty eyes.
Why had she thought that it would be Wolfe when Lyons was the one who actually worked in Emergency? Because she was hopeless. Because despite the way he’d turned her down, she’d still take his help if he came around. For the kids. For Jenna.
“Dr. McKeag,” she greeted, the urge to smile withering like the last autumn leaf. Lyons McKeag had not gotten the charm gene—he had so little charm that Angel probably had more friends than he did, and she had no friends. But she, at least, didn’t seem to be hated. Lyons? Pretty vigorously disliked far and wide. “Is there something I can do for you?”
If this was about the tree-lighting...
“There’s a woman in Eighteen with her toddler, and I can’t understand a word she’s saying.” Wolfe’s nearly black hair looked better with the startlingly pale eyes, Lyons’s was closer to caramel—brown with hints of red undertones. Probably nice to other women. “I’m not even sure if she wants treatment for herself or for the boy. You go talk to her.”
He wanted her to translate? She with a twang she couldn’t get rid of, and had only managed to cultivate to something a notch above her accent through years of study and effort?
“Why me?” she asked, but did reach for her jacket and shrugged it on, ready to follow him. There was a toddler involved, possibly, and that was reason enough.
“Because she sounds like she just fell off a mountaintop in Tennessee. Like you, only worse.”
She flinched, never able to fully control those reactions, and never able to erase them afterward, no matter how hard she tried.
Fell off a mountaintop was exactly the shade of her natural speech patterns that she tried to remove, first by identifying and killing the colloquialisms that had once peppered her speech, and still sprang up on occasion, then by addressing the mispronunciations and questionable grammar of her coal country roots.
No one at Sutcliffe, aside from maybe someone in Human Resources, knew where she was from. People assumed Georgia—as Wolfe had when bringing up Atlanta—and she usually let them. Georgia was high-class southern. Even among the rural poor, being considered a Kentucky hillbilly held stigma.
Here in Manhattan? Spencer’s reaction and interference had made it clear: she might as well go shoeless and make moonshine on her fire escape for as distasteful as people would consider her because of the unfortunate geographical circumstances of her birth. And that was without knowing her family were the most notorious thieves—and worse—in Knott County. And really without knowing about her own short-term incarceration. No one believed it when someone said they’d been convicted despite being innocent; they’d laugh if she admitted she was convicted because of her own lying confession.
In that context, Tennessee was a leg up. Even if it was still handed to her in the form of dismissal.
“You tell me what she’s saying,” he ordered. “I’ll work out how to treat her.”
Translator. That was all he wanted her for? Was this another slam on her sounding just as if she fell off a mountain in Tennessee? Felt an awful lot like a slight to her intelligence and capabilities.
“No.” The word erupted from her on pure reaction. Seemed to be happening a lot lately, and she could only hope it was because of exhaustion and knowing she wouldn’t be here long enough to reap the consequences of fighting back.
Being agreeable was part of the persona she’d carefully constructed, but the idea of him speaking to whoever was in Room Eighteen with the same dismissal? No.
“I’ll see the woman and her child in Eighteen. You go find another patient.”
Somewhere in all that, she’d stopped walking and now he stopped too. The elder McKeag, the one who growled at everyone all the time anyway, looked at her with such shock it compelled her to restate her objection without the pointed tone she knew had crept in.
Be civilized.
“Dr. McKeag, if it is the mother who requires treatment, I can still treat her. Children are my specialty, but when they grow up, they are still of the same species with the same basic troubles.” Okay, not as civilized as she’d been aiming for. Maybe she shouldn’t be hoping for Wolfe to visit with her; she already seemed to be picking up his bad habits—sarcasm being right at the top of the list. “If it’s somehow outside the bounds of my knowledge, I’ll come find you.”
The long i of her find annoyed her. That was something she might never conquer, the long i that refused to go away no matter how many elocution lessons she took.
He fixed her in an uncomfortable stare for several long seconds, making darned sure she knew he didn’t like her—not that she thought he liked anyone—then Lyons McKeag waved her ahead and stormed back the way they’d come.
A minute later, she introduced herself to Becky Davis and asked what was wrong.
“I think he got poisoned.” Becky’s words came whispered, as if giving them full voice would make the poison instantly kill her son. She shifted the pink-cheeked toddler on her lap as he dozed against her chest, in no distress Angel could see. Not the sort that would indicate poison.
She reached over and brushed back the curly blond hair stuck to his forehead, sweat evincing a fever even before Angel’s touch to his face confirmed it.
She grabbed the thermometer from her pocket and placed it against his forehead for a reading.
“Did he get into cleaning supplies under the sink or something? Why do you think he’s been poisoned? What symptoms does he have besides fever?” she asked, taking her stethoscope from around her neck so she could listen to him breathe while his obviously distressed mama explained.
“We got in them toxic gases from the sewers. Then he took to coughin’ terrible.”
Another moment listening, and she confirmed that his lungs did sound wet, and musical in a way that suggested bronchitis. Although Becky’s story sounded alarming enough to ask, “You had him in the sewer?”
“No!” Her denial was swift and loud. “We was on the street. Then all these gases come up from the...the...” she waggled her fingers toward the floor “...grates?”
Gases on the street from the grates?
“The steam?” Angel tried to clarify.
Ms. Davis looked at her sleeping and sickly little one and then back to Angel, hope blooming in her eyes. “That was steam?”
And then right behind the hope, the certainty that life couldn’t work out like that. That Angel was wrong, that the gases were toxic, and that she was just inches away from losing her child. Even Lyons, who was apparently as thick as a coal slurry, couldn’t mistake the concern she had for her child. Sure, she also had kind of a thick accent, and maybe she had the same sort of questionable grammar that Angel still worked to rid herself of, but it wasn’t like a real accent. Her native tongue was still English.
“Where were you when it happened? Was it hot?”
“It was hot, but it just got the edge of us, didn’t really burn.”
“Yesterday?” She’d heard about one of the city’s ancient steam pipes bursting yesterday and the steam coming up through any vent possible until they got the big orange and white stack over it and a crew below the streets to repair the surprisingly eco-friendly Victorian power source Manhattan still used. But the steam was hot and dangerous. It could actually kill, just not through poison.
“Yesterday.” She nodded. “We—me and my husband—was walking around with Bobby and it just come up from nowhere, right in front of us. It was hot, but wasn’t on us. And then we went back to the place we’re staying, and he got sick fast after that and has got worse ever since.”
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