by Ann Gimpel
“Am I so unattractive ye canna bear to gaze upon me?” The folds of the plaid fell from his body. He folded it carefully, laid it aside, and unbuckled his thigh sheath before working his way into the far less comfortable attire.
“You know damn well that’s not it. It’s taking every shred of self-discipline I have to stay on this side of the room.” Breath rattled against her teeth as she exhaled. “I shouldn’t tell you this, but one of my patients tried to kill himself last night. The nursing staff is upset. They need me. I won’t stay at the hospital for very long, but I have to stop in, check on my patient, and sign orders for his care. It doesn’t look good when suicides happen on my watch. People aren’t lawsuit-happy here like they are in the States, but that’s no excuse not to provide the best care I can.”
“I doona quite catch some of your meaning.” Lachlan slid into the shorts and T-shirt. He pulled a top out of some soft material that wasn’t wool, but felt like it, over his torso and stared at the breeks. They looked as if they’d be uncomfortable as all get-out. He shoved a leg into one side, then the other, and pulled them into place. Because his cock was erect, it didn’t want to be stuffed into the confining space behind a row of metal buttons.
“Are you dressed?”
“Mostly. Ye’re fairly safe if ye turn about. This fellow ye’re caring for, he must be old and sick, eh? When people decide they have had enough of life, ’tis their choice to go far from their loved ones and meet the goddess. I doona understand why ye feel the need to prolong his life beyond—”
She turned slowly, gaze sweeping over him from head to toe. “Customs have changed dramatically since you were here last.” She waved a hand dismissively. “How society views suicide isn’t important right now. Ready?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Not quite. I canna get the breeks buttoned.”
Maggie’s cheeks turned crimson; her intense blue gaze zeroed in on his groin. “That’s because your, er, uh… Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’m an M.D., not a bumbling schoolgirl. Your erection is in the way,” she finished. “Push it to the side, and the buttons should go. I’d help,” she quirked a brow, “but I won’t make the problem any better.”
He half-turned from her and fumbled with his crotch. The buttons finally slipped into their fasteners, but his cock was wretchedly uncomfortable, trapped between his stomach and the rough fabric. Without the smallclothes providing a bit of shielding, the sensation would have been unbearable. “I doona see why a man would choose something like this over a plaid.”
If Maggie had an answer for him, she didn’t offer it. She handed him the other, thicker shirt and gathered food items from her table. “Let’s go.”
“Just a minute.” Lachlan picked up his thigh sheath and started to fasten it around his upper leg.”
Maggie shook her head. “You won’t need that, and it defeats the whole purpose of having you in modern garb.”
He eyed his sword. “I suppose next ye’re going to tell me to leave that behind as well.” She nodded. He chafed against leaving his weapons, but in truth, magic trumped steel every time. Lachlan gathered sword and dagger, placed them against a wall, and turned to face Maggie.
“Here.” He took a large bottle of amber liquid from her, hoping it was mead, and held the door open. She locked it behind them and vaulted down the stairs. By the time he got to her car, she had the back part open. He put the shirt and bottle inside and got into the car.
She settled behind the wheel, made a few adjustments, and the metal monster on wheels rolled toward the street. “I was thinking, while you dressed. The first thing I need to know is who Rhukon is.”
“Did he reveal himself to you, then?”
Her lips pursed. “Of course he did. How else would I know about him? He showed up in my dream. See this bruise?” She held her braid back and pointed. “He slapped me, and it left a mark. That’s how I knew it wasn’t a dream. My grandmother is on her way here to help, but we can talk about that later. Who’s Rhukon?”
“The black wyvern.”
Maggie blew out a tense-sounding breath. “Okay. So he’s a black dragonesque creature. That tells me less than nothing. Why is he after you—and now me?”
“’Tis a long story, lass.”
“Give me the short version. I don’t have to understand everything, just the essentials.”
“Out of all the dragon clans, only the black and red were evil and barred from Fire Mountain—”
“How many dragon clans are there?” she cut in. “And what is Fire Mountain?”
“If ye interrupt every other word, I willna be able to tell you aught.”
She rolled her eyes. “Sorry, bad habit. I’m used to asking questions. Lots of them. I’ll shut up and listen. Promise.”
He inhaled, considering how to attack reams of information and distill it into something the lass could understand. “Fire Mountain is the dragons’ eternal home. ’Tis where their life was forged and ’tis where they return to die. It exists on the other side of time. Many dragons chose to live out their years there when things became difficult for them here.” He caught her gaze and held it. “’Tis why ye’ve probably never seen dragons in your lifetime.”
“No probably about it. I haven’t.”
Lachlan nodded. “Aye, ’tis as I thought. The dragon clans—not the blacks or reds, but the others—were promised immortality if they chose to bond with a human mage. Dragons are extremely picky, though, and long-lived enough even without Dana’s boon, so they only bonded with the strongest magicians.”
“That’s why you turned into a dragon in my dream.” Maggie’s jaws clamped shut with an audible clack. “Sorry. I really will try to keep my mouth shut.”
Lachlan snorted. Maggie being quiet was starting to seem like an oxymoron. He loved her forthright nature, though. “I studied for hundreds of years to strengthen my magic enough to attract a dragon. Nearly as soon as I’d bonded with Kheladin, the black wyvern laid siege to my person and my lands. It never occurred to me he was doing aught but making mischief. The black and red dragons have misbehaved, and rather badly, ever since they were excluded from Fire Mountain.”
A muscle twitched beneath one of his eyes. It was hard to admit serious miscalculation. By all the gods, he was a warrior. He did not want the woman sitting a hand span away to see him as weak. His stomach muscles tightened. “There were many things I dinna know back then—”
“Like what?”
“Goddesses’ tits, lass, but ye’re persistent.” He pressed his tongue against his teeth, thinking. “I dinna know Rhukon had cast strong magics to make both himself and his dragon immortal. Afore that, the blacks and reds were denied such blessings.”
“So there’s a red dragon mixed up in this, too?”
“’Tis prescient ye are.” He shot her a wry smile. “Aye, there is now but not at the time Kheladin and I barricaded ourselves into his cave.” Lachlan waited for Maggie to break in with another question, but she remained silent, so he continued. “Before I returned to your home, I met with Gwydion and Arawn—”
“Not the Celtic gods, Gwydion and Arawn.” She gasped. The car swerved, narrowly missing another. A hellacious blatting filled the air. “Surely you must be talking about men like yourself. Others who were trapped in the same time warp that snared you. You couldn’t mean the warrior magician and god of the dead.”
“What in the hell was that?” Lachlan stared out the car’s windows.
“Just the other guy’s horn. I pissed him off, and he honked at us. It’s nothing. Go on.”
“Yes, I did mean the Celtic gods, but Gwydion is better known as a master enchanter. In any event, though they dinna know aught at the time—no one did—Rhukon had joined forces with the Morrigan and the leader of the red dragon clan. The Morrigan feeds off energy from the dead and dying. She wanted more battles. Bloodier ones. Rhukon and the red wyvern simply wished to rule the world. To do that, they had to make things so unpleasant for the other dragons that they fled to Fire Mou
ntain, the place of their making.”
She swallowed, the muscles beneath her jaw working. “You said it’s somewhere outside of time, so I guess it’s not on Earth.”
“Nay, lass, ’tisn’t.”
Lachlan kept his gaze on Maggie. The lass looked battle-shocked. “Was aught I said unclear?” he asked softly.
She shook her head. “I feel like I fell asleep and woke up in a fairy tale—and not a very nice one. We’re nearly at the hospital. Maybe you should come in with me. You could wait in the lounge. We have a security team in house.”
“I will be better off out of doors, lass. I can make myself invisible.”
“You can?” Her voice cracked. “Sorry. That shouldn’t surprise me. Not really” She maneuvered the car beneath a sign that said Physician’s Parking. “I won’t be long.”
Lachlan wrapped a hand around her wrist. He reached across her body with his other hand and turned her head so she had to look at him. “I know ’tis not easy, but doona be afraid, lass. There hasna been a chance to speak of this, but we, ye and I, hold a power betwixt us strong enough to unravel Rhukon’s plans.”
Her beautiful, blue eyes narrowed. “I had more-or-less figured that out on my own. Something cut me off from my dreams from the time I came to Scotland—”
“Why did ye come here, lass?”
“I—” She captured her lower lip between her teeth and shut her eyes. When she opened them, she met his gaze evenly. “I don’t have a good answer for you. Something—God only knows what—compelled me to apply for a rural psychiatry fellowship I saw advertised at the hospital here. Even at the time, I knew it was a bad career move. I was done with residency and had gotten several attractive job offers, offers that probably wouldn’t still be there a year later, once I was done with the fellowship.”
“Yet ye came anyway.”
Maggie nodded. “It was what I had to do. I tried to explain what I was feeling to my grandmother. She started to tell me something but never did.”
“Aye. Ye came here to find me. Somehow your grandmother must have realized that.” Two white-coated physicians waltzed past. Both stared frankly into the car. Lachlan glared back. “I could show them a thing or two about manners. Young pups without even so much as a ribbon to denote their clan.”
“Please don’t.” She pulled away from him. “Look, I really do have to check on my patient. Don’t do anything foolish. I need you to be here when I get back.”
“Doona worry, lass. I will not leave your side again. Ever.”
Maggie got out of the car. Rather than his spoken words, the ones she’d heard him say in her dream rang in her mind. I was born loving you, and I will die loving you. Before she shut the door, she bent her head and said, “I don’t know what this thing between us is, but I want to live long enough to find out.”
“That makes two of us.” He smiled softly. “Go. The sooner ye go, the sooner we can move on to what we must do next.”
“Good that he seems to know what that is,” she muttered half to herself as she strode toward the hospital door. She keyed in the code and pushed her way inside. Maggie jogged down the hall, anxious to discharge her duty to her patient and do what she could to soothe Berta and the other nursing staff. It seemed odd they’d be so upset about a suicide attempt. After all, they worked on a mental health unit.
Maybe it’s not like it is in the States. Perhaps suicide’s not quite so commonplace here. Maggie thought about it. Inverness was fairly rural. That was probably the difference. While the big, urban areas, like Glasgow and Edinburgh, likely saw their share of suicides, there were probably fewer of them here.
She took a hard left into the ICU. It was a small unit, and she located Chris immediately. Maggie picked up his chart—this hospital was years from an electronic records conversion—and glanced at his vitals. She blew out a tense breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. He was stable and improving. From the looks of things, if they withdrew the IV sedative, he’d regain consciousness.
Maggie pulled up a chair and took Chris’ hand. She bent her head and spoke low near his ear. “I’m not certain if you can hear me, but maybe you’ll be able to. What you did upset the nurses. They care about you. So do I. We’ll be discontinuing the drug keeping you asleep. When you come around, we’ll get your family in here, and we’ll all put our heads together and decide what will work best. I promise you that you’ll have a say in things.”
“Now why would you tell him that?” a male voice said.
Maggie’s head whipped around; she got to her feet and turned to face Dr. Frank MacDuff, chief of the psychiatry service. In his late fifties, he had a full head of steel-gray hair, sharp blue eyes, and a rangy build. Like most native Scotsmen, he had well-defined cheekbones and an angular jaw. Though he usually preferred dress shirts and slacks, today he wore green scrubs and a white lab coat with the hospital’s insignia on its collar.
“Let’s talk in the lounge,” she suggested.
“No need for that. He’s the only patient here, and he’s unconscious.”
Maggie latched a hand through the other doctor’s arm and pulled him away from Chris’ bed. “Research suggests patients can hear when they’re comatose,” she hissed into Dr. MacDuff’s ear.
“Aye, I read that paper, too. Never put much stock in it.”
“Humor me.” She tried a fetching smile and didn’t point out that it had been far more than a single paper promulgating that finding. “Come on.” She tugged again.
“For a bonny lass, anything.”
Maggie would have rolled her eyes, but things were going well, and she didn’t want to rock the boat. As they walked to the physicians’ lounge, she asked, “What’s your suicide rate here?”
“Very few. Less than half a dozen each year.”
“No wonder Berta was so upset.” Maggie went through the door into the lounge and straight to the teapot. She poured herself a cup. “Would you like one?”
He nodded. They took their tea and settled across from one another in the rather spartan lounge. Medical reference books lined one wall. The floor was linoleum and the walls an industrial green. The ever-present scent of antiseptic was just as strong in here as it was in the wards.
“Were you the one on duty last night when he was found?” Maggie asked.
“Aye, and I’ve talked with his two sisters. They can’t handle him at home. Oh, they say he’s fine enough if he’s sober. Problem is he’s rarely that way anymore.”
“I see.” Maggie sensed a fait accompli and trod lightly. “What did you work out with them?”
“There’s an establishment not far from their community in Fort William that caters to men with bipolar disorder and drinking problems. Everyone is in agreement—”
“Except me. I’m his attending, and I didn’t know.” Maggie couldn’t help herself. Outrage flooded her.
“Dr. Hibbins.”
Oh-oh. Maggie recognized that tone. It was the I’ve-been-a-doctor-for-longer-than-you’ve-been-alive one. “Yes, sir.” She dropped her gaze, so she wouldn’t seem too argumentative.
“Better,” he snapped. “You might want to take a few days off. I’m certain you’ll be feeling more…rational once you’ve had a chance to rest up. I took a look at your timesheets. You haven’t taken as much as a long weekend off since you came to work for us.”
“Really? I wasn’t aware of that. It’s just there’s so much to learn and I—”
“Americans,” he cut in, his tone making it clear just what he thought of people from the States. “Always so driven. You need perspective, Dr. Hibbins.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she murmured. “I’ll just check in with the nurses because I promised, and then I’ll take the rest of the week off.”
“Perfect.” He beamed, ill-humor apparently forgotten. “I knew you’d come to your senses. You’re just tired. It’s why you’re wound so tight. My dear,” he leaned forward and laid a hand on her knee, “I know just the antidote to physician
burnout. Have dinner with me tonight.”
Crap! Just what I need, a middle-aged lothario. But I can’t piss him off, either. “Thanks for caring about me, Doctor—” She moved his hand off her leg.
“Frank, call me Frank.”
Maggie dredged a smile from somewhere. “Sure, Frank. I think I caught a bit of food poisoning yesterday. I was up most of the night, and I’m still feeling a bit under the weather. I’d planned to stop by here, catch a few hours’ sleep, and then drive to Glasgow. My grandmother is arriving on an early morning flight.”
“Excellent. You have family coming to visit. Another perfectly despicable American trait—estrangement from blood kin. Maybe once you bring her to Inverness, you could be my guests for supper.”
“Let’s give her a chance to get over jet lag, first.” Maggie stood. “If there’s nothing else, I’d like to stop by and see the nurses.”
“Go on, Maggie. Enjoy your time away.”
“Thank you, sir, er, Frank.” She scuttled out of the doctors’ lounge, so anxious to get away from Frank MacDuff, she could almost taste the relief once she escaped. She’d thought he had designs on her, but thank Christ he’d kept them under wraps. Until now.
Look, she spoke sternly to herself as she walked briskly toward the psychiatric unit, whether I complete this fellowship isn’t even marginally important. I can always show up from my few days’ vacation, give them thirty days’ notice and quit.
Chapter Eight
Lachlan sank back against the cramped seats in Maggie’s car. At first he warded himself, and then he extended his enchantment to include the car, casting a don’t look here spell. He’d have to keep an eye out for Maggie’s return. If he didn’t loosen his spell, she might think her car had been nabbed.
“We must find the other dragons. My kin who were forced to return to Fire Mountain,” Kheladin said, his voice a quiet rumble in Lachlan’s mind.
“I agree. There are other tasks that take precedence, though. Ye heard the discussion with Gwydion and Arawn.”
“Aye, but I dinna agree with much of it.”