Their Christmas to Remember

by Amalie Berlin

  His question was gentle, almost kind, until he added, “Or did that...majestic skating outfit imbue you with the power of the Ice Capades?”

  “Still going to narrate, I see.” By the end of the evening, she’d probably be known throughout Sutcliffe as Dr. Puffybutt.

  She made a face at him, until he turned the camera on her and she remembered she was supposed to be smiling and happy for this performance. No one liked a grumpy ice skater. “Any tips you have on remaining upright, I’m open to hearing.”

  There, said without a single dropped g or an ounce of her natural twang coming through.

  Without any ribbing, he propped the phone up on the duffel bag to record them, took her gloved hand to offer support while he instructed from the ground up. How to remove the blade covers. How to find her balance. How to move. How to fall for least damage, a jinx if she’d ever heard one.

  It wasn’t much help; theory was a great deal different from application. By the time he’d retrieved the camera and returned to take her hand as she stepped onto the polished glassy surface of the ice, pretty much everything he’d said about staying upright left her mind. Even with them both wearing gloves, it felt like a touch, skin to skin. Distracting. And gallant. And infuriating.

  And exactly what she’d asked of him: come with a glad heart. She was the one having trouble with that right now. Not because she didn’t want to amuse the kids, but she really didn’t like being the center of attention—exactly what her glorious outfit had assured.

  Right. Time to make with the glad heart. She let him help her glide the first few feet, then let go.

  She hit the ice without even trying to muster her own locomotion. Her feet just went right out from under her and the thick layer of cotton she’d stuffed into her tights didn’t make any difference to the volume of the grunt she loosed when she hit, and did nothing to dispel her desire to rub her smarting rear end in public. She resisted. Barely.

  Over more than half an hour, Wolfe stood on the side of the rink while she went back and forth in about a ten-foot stretch of ice, trying not to think about how she looked. Really glad she couldn’t hear whatever he was saying on the stream about her skating skills.

  Had she stayed upright more, there would’ve probably been ruts worn in the ice, but, lucky for the ice, she polished it enough with her tutu butt to keep that from happening.

  Every time she fell, he asked if she was all right. Then asked what she did wrong or gave her some kind of advice that was basically meaningless. At least, until the last fall.

  It was almost at exactly an hour when she tried a particularly bold move of trying to stand completely up instead of continuing that kind of half-crouch, knees bent, arms stuck out for balance position she’d been living in.

  The crouch kept her center of balance low, and most closely resembled the stance of a toddler just letting go of the table for the first time. And that was pretty successful, all things considered.

  She was gliding, gliding, gliding, the slight breeze on her cold cheeks probably just an effect of the weather because she wasn’t moving fast enough to create current. As soon as she looked over to Wolfe to show him her I-straightened-my-legs victory smile, she hit a bump. Or maybe she hit nothing at all. Her feet just went opposite directions suddenly, and no amount of rapid scrambling steps could keep her from going down hard on her knees.

  It took a couple seconds for the pain to hit, and the realization that her knee pad had drifted off one knee. And it was a lot. The pain was enough to make her gasp and her eyes sting.

  The realization she’d done some actual damage didn’t arrive until Wolfe was on the ice, his hands under her arms, lifting her up. That was when she saw the red spot on the frosty, bluish-white ice.

  Angel grabbed at Wolfe’s shoulders, but couldn’t put any weight on her leg without wanting to cry.

  “Oh, I benastied it...” she mumbled, shifting her weight to her left leg, heedless of what it might do to his balance. She couldn’t stay upright on her own, so how he could stay upright for both of them was anyone’s guess.

  “Benastied?” he repeated, drawing her attention to the word she’d selected. God bless it, she had to stop that.

  “Hurt.” She tried the simpler, less colorful, less colloquial synonym, and didn’t even try to explain the word to him. Or why it’d come out. Or anything to draw further attention to it.

  “Think you can keep stable on the one foot while I steer us to the side?”

  “Cain’t promise,” she said, and then repeated, “Can’t. Cannot. Can’t promise.”

  He took the babble for the no it was meant to be and, in a feat of extreme showing off, picked her up and skated to the edge of the ice, stepped onto the platform, then set her down on the bench, as if it were nothing. As if he were suddenly Brian Boitano, king of the ice, and she were a dainty little ice dancer instead of the woman who made it to the gym maybe twice a week and probably shouldn’t have eaten that ice cream last night.

  The red spot saturating her tights was nearing her adorable fuzzy pink leg warmers and she shoved the one down so that it bagged at her ankle. “I don’t have anything to blot with...”

  He pulled a handkerchief from inside his jacket pocket and pressed it into her hands, then grabbed the material on either side of the seam running down one side her leg and ripped a hole, exposing her bloody knee to the air.

  She hissed as much from the material suddenly ripping off the wound as the cold air hitting it directly, and then covered with the hanky. “Did you get a look?”

  “There’s a pretty nasty gash.”

  “Was there something sharp...?” She tilted her head to look toward the spot where she’d fallen, but it was just smooth ice with a bit of blood on it.

  “No, just an unfortunate landing on something very hard.”

  “Bashing laceration...” She puffed and tried to straighten her leg, but the heavy skate dragged hard and she whimpered.

  He stayed where he was, kneeling at her feet, and unfastened the laces. “Let’s get this off.”

  “I want to go back out.” She swallowed, tried again. “Let’s just get it to stop bleeding and have a little rest.”

  “Why on earth would you go back out there?”

  “Because you have to stand back up when you fall down. You have to do the things even when they’re hard, and you get better at it.” And that was when she remembered they’d been filming, streaming to whoever had stayed around long enough to see her fall and get up, over and over again. Where was the phone?

  “You really want to get that much better at skating that you’re unwilling to stop when you’ve hurt yourself?” His tone said she was nuts, but she had a purpose. This whole evening had a purpose. Not just to entertain.

  “I knew I’d spend the whole night falling down. But I wanted them to see that we get hurt, and get back up. We keep fighting.”

  Her lower lip quivered and she pulled her gaze away from him, embarrassed by the line of water rising from her lashes to wobble her vision.

  “Love, you showed them that repeatedly.” His words were gentle, and his bare, ungloved hand touched her chin, guiding her gaze to his. “And now you’re showing them that we all need time to recover from hurts. We’ll come skating again before Christmas. When your leg is feeling better.”

  The sincerity and tenderness in his eyes almost made her lose what was left of her emotional control after a long, stressful day. But she believed him. He’d come back with her another day, and they’d do better.

  Swallowing, she nodded, and, although she wanted nothing more than to feel his arms around her again in that moment, pulled it together enough to say, “We should comment on the stream. Tell them I’m okay.”

  He looked from her to where he’d propped the camera up before going to help her. It was still running. She’d gotten distracted in the sweetness of his mini
stering, and just assumed that, since he wasn’t holding the camera, it wasn’t running anymore. They weren’t in frame, but it was close enough it was likely they were once again overheard.

  Reaching for it, she turned a difficult smile to the camera and selfied her first video. “I’m all right. It’s got a—Well, it’s cut. So, we’re probably done for the evening, need to go bandage it.”

  “Stitch it,” Wolfe corrected.

  “Stitch it?” she repeated, and then put the phone beside her on the bench to pull up the edge of the formerly white cotton handkerchief. Gash. At least two inches across, and open. Very open. More blood oozed forth and she was forced to cover it again and swallow a couple times to make sure she wasn’t about to turn into a big crybaby on the stream.

  “Okay, it needs like...four or five stitches. So, we’re going to go down to the ER, and maybe Dr. Wolfe will stitch it up for me because he’s such a gentleman.”

  “He will,” Wolfe said, and she turned the camera to him. “Goodnight everyone. Stay warm, be good, sweet dreams.”

  She let that be the closing, purposefully turned the stream off. Double-checked that it was, indeed, no longer streaming, then turned the phone off—all the way off—closed it and stashed it in her duffel.

  “So, ideas on bandaging?” she asked.

  “Do you think it’s broken?”

  “I think it’s just cut, but every time I put weight on it, feels like the gash up and opens again.”

  “It’s not closed, lass. That’s why it’s opening up.”

  “I didn’t bring bandages,” she said, “because with the safety measures, well, I didn’t think I could actually hurt myself that badly.”

  “Let’s get that crooked tiara off your head, and maybe the tutu.”

  “Not the tutu.”

  “Why?”

  “I have cotton in my pants enough to make my bottom resemble a lumpy hippopotamus.”

  “Tutu’s hiding it?”

  She nodded, and he laughed. “Right, well, then let’s just get you to the street so we can get a cab, and work on the rest.”

  Fifteen minutes later, with much of her insane costume removed, material ripped off her legging to tie around her knee, and a strong arm around her waist to make walking easier, they made it to the street and into the back of a cab.

  Once they were in motion to Sutcliffe, Wolfe said, “Do you really want to go into work in that tutu?”

  He was right. Looking like a fool on video for the kids was one thing, but for her peers?

  “Not especially,” she admitted, but then the whole butt situation made it preferable. “But...”

  “Butt,” he amended, cutting off her re-explanation. “Lean forward, I’ll drag the batting out and stuff it into your duffel.”

  “You mean you’re going to stick your hands down my pants and pull all the cotton out?” she clarified, because the world had just gone insane. And Wolfe was leading the charge, with the bitey things in her belly trembling and starting to chew.

  “Or you could take off the tutu and fish it out yourself. It’s a little hard to keep pressure on your knee with one hand and dig around in your pants with the other while leaning forward.”

  Leaning off the cotton was necessary, her leg didn’t want to help brace her off the seat, she needed a hand to do the lifting and the other to do the pressure thing. He was right, she’d have an easier time if she just let him stick his hands in the back of her pants.

  He was a doctor. Just because he was also a Sexy Scottish Scoundrel didn’t mean he wasn’t also a doctor.

  With a sigh propelled from the depths of her feet, she unfastened the tutu, so it fell away as she leaned up on the other hand, away from him, exposing the fat, lumpy mass she had going on back there.

  His soft chuckling as he dipped his hand repeatedly into the back of her tights—knuckles brushing the bare skin and areas where her more sensible cotton panties covered most everything. Still, it was some strange, heady mix of sexy and humiliating to have him pulling wads of cotton from her pants.

  “You’re done, right?”

  He made some noise, then actually patted and prodded her butt and thighs from the outside of her leggings to make sure there was nothing else in there that wasn’t her. “Done.”

  She eased back. “I thought so. Everything back there got colder.”

  “I’m going to resist all the innuendo in my head about how I could warm up everything back there,” he said, making her head snap to the side to facilitate her need to stare at him.

  Mischief in his eyes, and in that smirk he wore, he continued stuffing the cotton into the duffel she’d carried, along with the tutu.

  “Thanks.” What was she thanking him for? The word just came out like polite, conversational filler. Thanks for helping. Thanks for resisting the innuendo, that he didn’t actually resist? Thanks for putting that mental image in her mind? All options worked. At least she wasn’t blinking like an owl at him tonight.

  “Look at the bright side—Alberts can’t ask us to do anything quite so physical for the rest of these shenanigans. He might not even expect you to continue them.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THERE WAS NOTHING subtle or sneaky about their trip to the ER. While Wolfe had privileges at the hospital, he had to launch a mini siege on the current ER attending to get to treat Angel himself. It was a catch-22—either he could cause drama at work or just let her go into the queue and wait it out for whatever doctor ended up treating her, a betrayal after the little allegiance they’d forged tonight.

  He stepped into the staff room where he’d left her to throw his weight around with the attending, and found her sitting in the wheelchair, ripped leggings, bloody knee peering under the edge of the makeshift bandage.

  “You’re going to start bleeding again before we get into a treatment room,” he said, and she whipped her head up, the guilty expression amid all the pink as cute as her freckled blush.

  Allegiance? At that precise second, Wolfe realized the word was too shallow to apply. He liked her. He didn’t just find her entertaining, or intriguing because she was so bloody strange at times, he genuinely liked her. Images of taking her back to his home, of her reclining in his bed with an ice pack on her knee, made his stomach do an unwelcome little flip.

  And he’d thought this evening would be easier on his willpower.

  “I don’t think it’s broken, at least. That’s something, right?” she said, completely missing the conflict she had brewing in his mind.

  “Have some pink, sparkly X-ray goggles in that duffel bag I missed?”

  “Don’t need ’em,” she said in an I’m-an-ER-doctor-and-I-know-some-junk sort of way.

  “We’ll see how well you can stand after it’s stitched.” He grabbed the handles of her wheelchair and pushed her into a small treatment room that remained unused except in times of extreme high volume, like what came with large-scale tragedies, then helped her shift onto the table.

  “Did Beetlejuice give you trouble?”

  He’d already assembled the supplies he needed before fetching her, and had just gone to the sink to wash up, but her nickname for Dr. Backeljauw, the attending, made him smile. “Why do you call him that?”

  “If you say his name three times, he turns up and something bad happens,” she murmured. In fact, she’d said his name low too, as if she believed the man could hear her speaking it from anywhere.

  “I told him Alberts would be upset if his PR skating star was left bleeding longer than necessary because I’m not on duty and he’s having fits.”

  She groaned. “I think you might get your wish about that, if this is the mess it seems like it might be.”

  He rolled the stool over with one foot, put his gloves on and retrieved the rolling tray with his other foot before sitting.

  “I’d keep a week of ridi
culous pageantry if it could save you a busted knee, lass.” It was true, no matter how much he wished it weren’t. He never wanted to cause pain, but he really didn’t want to cause her more than she’d already had—because something told him there was a lot of darkness in her history. She was too sweet to keep herself so far removed from everyone without a good reason.

  “I’m going to untie this now, but I’ll numb it before I start cleaning.”

  She scrunched her face up but nodded. “I’m going to watch you. It’s not cause I think you’re gonna do a bad job, I just need to see.”

  “Rather do it yourself?”

  “Nope.” She answered fast. “Just need to watch. It hurts less if I watch, then I’m not surprised by anything.”

  “Well, I’ll be numbing it good, so that should be the most painful part of this.”

  “The most painful part after removing that hot-pink stretchy bandage, because I can tell ya right now it’s sticking.”

  And that’d mean mechanical debridement if he just ripped the makeshift bandaging off. “I’ll hit it with saline before we peel.”

  He took a moment to step out, intending to fetch a couple bags, but, when he saw one of the nurses coming, asked in his most persuasive tones instead, then went back to wait with his still-sterile gloves.

  “Listen,” she said when he sat, looking down at him with what he could only dub chagrin, “I’m sorry that I was so cranky with you earlier in the cafeteria. You didn’t want to participate—that’s not a sin. I just—there was a thing in the ER today and I sorta let it color my mood. I don’t want to be the kind of person who judges someone by the actions of another, and that’s what I did. So, I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t need to ask who she’d judged him by. His brother had been at Sutcliffe a shorter time than she had—since he’d recovered from the shooting and the charming brother he’d known had become this grating, ever-irritated guy no one wanted to be around. Fortunately for him, Lyons was still a great doctor, even if his bedside manner was arsey.