Healed Under the Mistletoe

by Amalie Berlin

  “This is a hospital. Lives are on the line in all departments.”

  “And in Emergency, the line is much narrower than most other departments. It’s the front line. People need to be focused, not distracted by and gossiping about orchestrated, compulsory...festivities.”

  The pause that lingered before he uttered the word festivities spoke to this civilized visage he projected to cover some of his anger, but her mind supplied several less civilized words that better expressed his vibe, and Nanna’s mantra sprang to mind right behind it: People who hurt others are suffering too. Suffering.

  No. Nope. Not thinking that today either. She didn’t have space left in her head to worry about a random, cranky doctor on her first day in a job that was probably too big for her anyway.

  “It’s just a holiday gift exchange.”

  “And it can occur without my participation, as can anything else that’s being planned. I hope the third time is the charm, as I’ve made this request twice, then found that slid into my locker this morning.”

  If anyone needed Christmas...

  “There’s nothing else planned as yet for Emergency.” Masterson smiled again, but the corners of her mouth barely lifted. It might not even be a smile, maybe it was an extremely pleasant grimace. Unpleasant smile, highly pleasant grimace.

  Sliding the offending invitation out of the way, Masterson moved on with a gesture to Belle, where she sat with McKeag still over her shoulder.

  “This is Ysabelle Sabetta, your new nurse practitioner.” And there went her stomach again. Nervous to get going, or hating being the focus of attention. Or dreading being labeled his. Dread. That was totally dread.

  “I was about to call down to get Dr. Backeljauw to send for her. We’ve agreed she’s to shadow you today, learn the ropes before she’s assigned her own patients.” By the time Masterson had gotten it out, Belle’s soul had sunk right through her body and seeped out of her toes, which was probably why it took so much effort to stand back up, but she had to stand. It was either that or implode like a socially awkward black hole and wink out of existence.

  She stuck her hand out, mustered a smile and waited.

  Although he looked at her hand, his attention shot back to Masterson. “I’ll take her down, but I don’t need a nurse practitioner.”

  Rejected.

  She let her hand fall, but he caught it before she got away.

  His hand was large and warm and drew attention to how cold her hands always were, now enfolded in his warmth. Another mark in the pleasant column for this unpleasant man. He didn’t shake right away. When she met his gaze, the coldness she’d seen in his pale blue eyes had dimmed a bit. Only a little and only for a second—so fleeting she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t imagined it—but it reappeared after the obligatory shake and withdrawal.

  “Have you just received your license?” The first time he’d spoken directly to her, and that was what he said? Maybe he didn’t have experience with women, even looking as if he did.

  She didn’t flinch, although it took a second for her to decide how to take his words.

  Kindly, she decided, with the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t mean to be rude, despite all she’d seen of him so far. Rude people, mean people, insufferable and just plain unpleasant people were the ones who needed kindness the most. They needed the greatest benefit of the doubt.

  The kind interpretation: his question was about how old she looked. She did look younger than her years and had heard so with annoying frequency since she actually was young.

  Normally, it didn’t bother her, but on the heels of everything that had gone on this morning—coupled with his tone—it took effort to take it kindly, and not as an insinuation she wasn’t up to the task.

  Which rankled.

  Even if she might not be up to the task and had been questioning that too since before he’d barged in.

  “Three years ago.” Words. An answer. Truthful, and not even said with the frustration making her forehead tight.

  “Three years,” he repeated, turning to Masterson. “She doesn’t need to shadow anyone. I’ll bring her down, but she’s not a child. She doesn’t need babysitting.”

  Another whiplash turn. Insults to expressions of faith? Or just getting out of spending more time with her specifically, for whatever reason.

  The idea of being lassoed to him for a day sounded about as appealing as a root canal, but she’d rather admit to possible inadequacy than risk patient lives, and they’d picked him for a reason—probably not because he was a bad doctor.

  “I usually work in small facilities—Urgent Cares and small-town emergency rooms, which send their critical patients to bigger cities with trauma wards, usually before they get to the hospital. I haven’t seen much, if any, intense, man-made trauma. Although I appreciate the vote of confidence, I haven’t earned it.”

  But she hoped to sort out the position and her capability before three months were up. The earlier the better, so if she needed to run, she could just go, no harm, no foul. They could fire her without much explanation in that time too, but she should be able to judge her inadequacy first, regardless of whoever got stuck babysitting her.

  It didn’t need to be him.

  It was still an insulting word, but she’d take whoever would allow her to shadow them.

  “Take it up with Backeljauw,” Masterson said, stepping neatly out of the discussion and standing up. “Good luck, Ms. Sabetta. Welcome again. Don’t let McKeag scare you off—he’s not the brother we use for PR for a reason.”

  McKeag gave a long-suffering eye-roll, looked at her clothes, then turned. “Come on. We’ll go to the locker room, you can quickly change, and we’ll continue to Emergency.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  LYONS STRODE OUT of Masterson’s office, his spine nearly creaking from the tightness that had seized every muscle in his body since he’d found that ridiculous Christmas assignment.

  Despite the carpet inside the office of Human Resources, he could make out the sound of movement behind him. Either she was following, or the ever-flailing assistant was. He didn’t pause to check; she’d follow now or someone else would escort her down later.

  He couldn’t afford to coddle the woman. If he could exchange his family’s fortune for time, he would. When he was on duty, there was never enough of it. There hadn’t been enough for his trip to HR this morning, but he’d gone anyway, intending it to be short. But it had already been too long. Who knew what had come into Emergency in his absence? If he wasn’t there, he couldn’t keep an eye out for inevitable trouble.

  No matter how called he felt to emergency medicine, Lyons knew from hard experience the sorts of people who came in. Pediatric specialists might treat innocent children, but were exposed to their unsavory parents too, or had to treat the aftermath of abuse. Those who practiced widely, engaging in everyday emergency medicine, could see kindly grandmothers or men who’d injured themselves while beating another person to death. Patients with police escorts, cuffed because they were a danger to others, not that it always did much good. Trauma surgeons often treated the already unconscious, but afterward had to deal with those who’d accompanied the patient—people who might turn violent when given bad news.

  Or worse, in the high flow of traffic in and out of Emergency, a madman with a gun could blend in and just start shooting. That happened here.

  He hit the hallway without breaking stride. On a good day, he didn’t have time to coddle the woman, and that was without Christmas insanity being added into the mix.

  His main task was vigilance, and medicine came second. He had to do what he’d failed to do last Christmas and pay attention to what his gut had been saying then and was saying now.

  He heard rapid footfalls on the hallway’s tiled floors behind him—two steps for every one of his to catch up—and called over his shoulder, “Quickly.” />
  The difference between this Christmas and last Christmas was him understanding what his gut was saying. The three bullets fired into him by the husband of a colleague had become his gut’s Rosetta stone, the wake-up call that made him pay attention to everything—both for his own benefit and those who hadn’t had the misfortune to share in his life lessons.

  Even without the sound of her scurrying, her presence heated his back. For once, that awareness of someone behind him didn’t prickle like danger. He just felt her there. Awareness that bothered by its nature, by the way it fractured his attention. She might not be a physical danger, but the way he heard and categorized her sounds—breath, step, fidget—was by robbing his concentration.

  It was out of character for him to feel anything, really, except for the tension he’d become so intimate with he even carried it into his sleep. Mistrust of everyone, including himself, was also a constant companion. The attraction sparked by this woman—because he wouldn’t lie to himself; that was what it was—he didn’t like. Didn’t want.

  Still, he had to be civil. This was his workplace; he only yelled when someone deserved it. Just get this done quickly, hand her off to Backeljauw for reassignment and get back on duty.

  Breaking his habit, he stopped at the lift and summoned it, giving her a chance to catch up.

  She stepped into his side vision, beckoning him to look at her fully again, for the flaws that had to be there. He was usually good at finding the unpleasant aspects of other people; they would take some shine off.

  His first thought upon having seen her, standing across the office from him, her eyes wild and obviously frightened, had been predatory but restrained. The door hadn’t slammed. He hadn’t raised his voice, not once, but she’d still looked at him as if he’d been a barely leashed bear about to eat her up.

  The thought, the sexual grind of it—sudden and unexpected—made his lower abdomen contract and start to heat.

  Damn. Look harder, find the flaw.

  He scanned her features. “Are you ready for this?”

  The grim set of her soft mouth said no, but that wasn’t the flaw.

  “Yes.”

  Her lie was a flaw, but not in her appearance. Still not helping.

  Neither was her silky, brilliantly colored hair. Sorrel, it was like sorrel.

  Still not the flaw—even if it prompted him to think of her in equine descriptors. Disturbing, but his flaw if it was one, that and a dearth of words to name that rich color. Earthy brown with fire and gold mingled in. Not her flaw.

  The braided knot she wore it in suggested length and would’ve looked very professional but for the curling lock in the front that bounced free no matter how frequently she tucked it behind her ear. She looked more as if she should be selling some upscale shampoo than wearing scrubs. Which she wasn’t wearing yet.

  “Locker room first,” he muttered, trying to put himself back on track, then continued picturing horses because it seemed like the thing to do. A way to keep himself from dwelling on the fact he was taking her somewhere to take her clothes off and change into the scrubs she’d been given. He shouldn’t be thinking like that. She was practically a child.

  That was the flaw. The thing he could cling to: common damned decency. She was too young. That would keep his unexpected flare of interest under control.

  He locked his gaze to her nearly black eyes. “Did you work at all as a nurse before pursuing your advanced license?”

  Her brows came together, forming the only line he could see on her face, and taking away a little bit of that wide-eyed vulnerability he kept seeing when he looked at her.

  “I worked as an RN for three years before returning to school for another two years.”

  “And you were licensed three years ago.” He remembered that as well. Laws existed to keep him from asking her age, but he could ask questions about her experience and qualifications, which would let him estimate.

  Eight years ago she became an RN. It would’ve taken at least two, but more likely four, years to have become an RN. Likely twelve years of combined work experience and education. She was certainly no younger than twenty-eight, but probably closer to thirty.

  Didn’t look it, but it was still enough of a gap for him to work with. Coupled with his track record with not getting involved on any personal level with colleagues at Christmastime helped solidify his determination. That and duty. He might not know when the danger his gut warned against would arrive, but he knew it would come.

  The elevator finally dinged, and he stepped in with her right behind him. Both of them remained silent for the rest of the journey. All he heard outside the hospital’s PA system, and the lullaby music that played announcing a birth in the hospital, were her rapid footfalls to keep up with him in the hallway once they reached their floor, and the plummeting of his own thoughts.

  “Locker room,” he finally stated, pushing in. “What locker were you assigned?”

  She gave the number, two down from his own locker, naturally, and he led her around the middle bank of lockers to locate it. She pulled a small envelope from her pocket with the locker number written on it. Key. Good.

  Time to hurry this up.

  “Two minutes.” He checked his watch, then gestured to the locker. “Get changed, come out to the hall. Two minutes.” All the time he was willing to spare for babysitting.

  He exited the way they’d come, back to where he wouldn’t be tempted to peek at her undressing—despite the self-disgust that came with it, he knew it’d be a struggle to contain the desire to look as he heard her peeling off that creamy blouse and black trousers.

  Safely outside, he leaned and shifted his attention from picturing horses, in an attempt to control his thoughts, to the cases he’d left being seen in Emergency. Specifically, the man who vibrated with ill intentions and who’d given Lyons something more than paranoid ideas, gave him genuine cause for concern.

  Was she done? How long could it take to change?

  It had been so long since he’d felt a tiny spark of desire, he didn’t quite know what to do with it. Even if it was in any way appropriate. His younger brother, newly involved with one of their peers, had recently accused him of being dead from the neck down, and he hadn’t exactly been wrong.

  For the past year, he’d felt very little, aside from bouts of irritation and maybe a little paranoia, both of which served his purposes. Kept him sharp. He got irritated with people because stupidity and incompetence were pet peeves, and he paid close enough attention to his surroundings and everyone around him to stay safe, so he saw all the stupidity that went on. None of that inspired his libido.

  Even before the shooting, he’d suspected violence and darkness lay at the heart of every person on the planet. That event had just driven the point home. Even the wide-eyed nurse practitioner changing in the other room had something wrong with her, deep down. Never mind her timid manner. Innocent masks were still masks.

  He had darkness, he knew. Wolfe had it. Most people tried to fight that darkness, most of the time, or used coping mechanisms to cover it. Wolfe’s jokes and sarcasm. His minute-by-minute reminder of the need for restraint and vigilance.

  He checked his watch just as the second hand rounded twelve again. Three minutes past his two-minute limit.

  No one took that long to change into scrubs. It was two simple pieces of clothing and a change of shoes.

  He knocked on the door, as if it weren’t a large public employee space, and before the sound had stopped resonating in the wood, his comm buzzed, a broadcast message immediately following. Four words.

  All hands on deck.

  His gut tightened.

  All hands.

  Departmental code for large-scale emergencies, when they expected to receive more patients than they were equipped to deal with. The kind of numbers that could only constitute a large group tragedy.
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br />   Right. Time for civility was past.

  Decision made, he pushed into the locker room.

  “Sabetta, what the devil is taking you so long?” He rounded the corner and found her wearing the scrub bottoms and shoes, but nothing above that save for a lacy pink bra that momentarily wiped his brain of any other thought besides the desire to stare, and absorb how delightful the pale pink lace looked against her tanned skin.

  She had one foot braced against the locker beside hers, her blouse clamped between her elbow and her ribs, and both hands on the locker’s latch, trying to wrench the thing open.

  “It’s stuck.” She sounded breathless, as if she’d been fighting it for a while.

  Slower than he’d like, his brain started to work again. He could either ask for details, spend time opening it himself or deal with it later.

  All hands.

  Deal with it later. That would get her clothed the fastest and time mattered.

  “Put your top on,” he bit out, dragging his gaze away, and opened his own locker instead of even attempting to wrestle hers into submission. As soon as he had it open, he began shoveling her things inside.

  “If there’s anything in here you need, speak now. We’ve got a large emergency to deal with. They’ve called all hands, which means even other departments send down whoever is free to assist. We need to go.”

  She stopped everything, maybe even breathing, for long enough that he had to look at her and found her eyes too wide again. And focused on him.

  This was a mistake. She wasn’t up for this.

  Her eyes were rich chocolate, and the innocence he saw sucked him in. He protected others from danger, should he be protecting patients from her? Or her from rushing into the deep end before he knew she could swim?

  Whatever she was thinking passed, and it really had only been a couple of seconds before she started moving again, tugging her shirt in place and thrusting her hand into his locker to grab her stethoscope, a pen and her phone from her bag.

  “I’m ready.”

  Another lie. But then again, it was the same lie he told himself every morning at the start of shift, when the double doors that cordoned off Emergency from the rest of the hospital felt like gates to a bloody battlefield where he was going to drag off bodies.