Healed Under the Mistletoe

by Amalie Berlin

  Angel’s joking helped relieve the worry that had haunted her since she’d placed Lyons’s gift this morning: a box of Scottish tablet she’d made because she honestly had no idea what to get the man even now, but figured all bachelors appreciated homemade food and the internet said this was a traditional Scottish treat. And even if she wasn’t sure she’d done it correctly it did taste good. And it looked like the pictures she’d found and was easier than fudge. Besides, the knitting she’d started on Saturday wasn’t done.

  But suddenly, the chuckle she’d shared turned into a spontaneous confession—what she was doing with the presents, not the kissing. Angel listened, fully present, but didn’t look as if she quite understood. In a supportive way.

  “He was mean to you, so you decided to kill him with kindness?” she asked, half grinning through her confusion.

  “Not kill him. He needs kindness, and I don’t have anyone to give presents to this year, so I thought maybe it was Secret Santa time.”

  “And you’re changing your mind because of the way he’s storming around?”

  “I thought he was just storming at me.”

  “Why would he be just storming at you?” Angel asked a lot of questions but didn’t sound judgmental.

  The more they talked, the more comfortable it became.

  It was on her lips to really confess, but she was saved by her mouth refusing the task.

  “Shared attraction he doesn’t want to share,” she said instead.

  That got Angel’s attention. “Oh, really...”

  “Not mutually desired attraction,” Belle amended. “But now that this is a thing, I’ve been thinking it might be weird for me to keep giving him secret presents. But he likes them, right? You said he thanked you.”

  “I don’t know if I’d say he likes them. I think he was trying to be polite to me because I’m living with his brother.”

  The other McKeag. The one who did Christmas Things with Angel and didn’t yell at everyone.

  “So, he doesn’t like them?”

  Angel put her sandwich down and went silent as she considered the answer to this. “I don’t know. I think he needs kindness too. He’s had a very hard time this past year.”

  “He said.”

  Angel’s brows shot up again. “He told you?”

  Belle nodded. “We had a shooting victim yesterday and he had...difficulty.”

  Talking about that seemed wrong, so Belle waved a hand to get past it. “If you think I should stop, I’ll stop. I don’t want to make matters worse. I’m sure I can find someone else to give presents to. Maybe I’ll bake cookies for the break room and give to everyone.”

  Angel thought for a moment then said, “You should keep doing it. How many more are you going to do?”

  “I was going to keep hitting the work days until he went off for the holiday.”

  “He’s not going off for the holiday,” Angel said. “He’s working every day except Christmas Eve. He doesn’t want to work on Christmas Eve.”

  The anniversary of the death of his friend.

  “Understandable,” she murmured.

  “I guess, but I wish he’d come upstate with Wolfe and me. We’ve rented a nice country house a few hours north of the city. He refuses all invitations. Wolfe’s starting to get a little desperate. He doesn’t think we should leave him alone in the city, and I’m starting to agree. The closer Christmas comes, the more he’s growling at people.”

  Belle frowned then; she hadn’t put that together, didn’t know him well enough to know that pattern.

  “But he’s talking to you about it?” Angel asked.

  “I don’t know if I would say that. I would say in a moment of need, I was there, and he spoke reflexively. He certainly has been avoiding me today. Not even a hello when he should’ve said hello.”

  “That’s not about the gifts. He doesn’t want people knowing what happened. It was a hospital in a different hospital system across the city, and shootings happen so frequently, it’s hardly news anymore. Someone was shot, they may or may not say it on the news. They mentioned the shooting on one channel, but not the names of those involved, except the shooter who later killed himself. When Wolfe convinced Lyons to come to Sutcliffe to work, keeping it quiet was one of his conditions. It’s probably good that he’s talking to you, even if it’s just reflexively. He never talks to anyone.”

  Maybe the gifts were helping. Maybe knowing someone cared had worked in conjunction with yesterday’s painful situation and allowed him to speak.

  She ate for a while in silence and, before Angel got ready to go, asked, “So, what would you give him? I need ideas.”

  * * *

  Lyons had never had a kiss haunt him. Not in his entire adult life.

  He’d fondly remembered kisses, given them replays in his mind and looked forward to receiving more, but he’d never felt consumed. He’d never felt his lips buzz and heat or his mouth water just from remembering a kiss. He’d never lain awake, examining from every angle, looking for the reason for his fixation. Before now.

  As he’d been doing every spare moment.

  That was the reason he’d waited for her lunch to be nearly over before he hit the cafeteria and brought his lunch back to the small, communal office—avoidance. The cold-turkey method of fighting craving or addiction, which was what this had started feeling like. He’d read the literature on addiction; he knew people could become addicts with one experience with different drugs.

  She had all the drugging aspects.

  Highly pleasurable combined with the dangerous ability to transport him momentarily out of his miserable existence. That was what created addicts.

  Add the sweetness, or the apparent sweetness, and this morning’s gift—a box of home-made candy—and he couldn’t imagine another person making it for him.

  It had to be Ysabelle. He just didn’t know why. And for that reason, he wasn’t going to eat the stuff, even if just thinking about it made his mouth water and his stomach growl...like a furious bunny rabbit.

  Lyons took the entire hour and, forty minutes later, emerged from the secluded office to go see what was on the board and do his usual head-count.

  But there were so many heads. Sometime in the last hour, the number of patients had exploded. Ninety percent of the faces he saw were men in sports jerseys, many with evidence of a brawl on their faces: black eyes, split lips, broken noses...

  He grabbed Conley’s elbow as she hurried past. “What’s going on?”

  “There you are.” She shook her head, not even pretending to not be exasperated, “Local hockey tournament broke out in a brawl. They’re all half lit, and we’ve divided the department into halves to keep them separated. Go find someone to see to.”

  Drunken hockey players?

  Every single internal alarm bell rang in unison. Conley had all but said mayhem was about to break out in the department, and all this happened while he was on lunch?

  Running on fury, he headed into the monitoring station to look at the charts.

  Broken nose. Broken bones. Contusions. Lacerations to be stitched. Two with abdominal trauma who had been referred to trauma surgeons.

  And they were loud. How could he keep an ear out for the sound of trouble when it all sounded like trouble?

  He grabbed a possible broken-arm case and took a circuitous route to the patient’s room, looking in all the rooms as he passed. He found the men and women on both sides of the department looking equally furious, along with the scent of beer and the occasional vomit.

  Just beside his room, he saw Sabetta with an especially thick-necked man with a bloody head bandage, trying to get him onto the gurney. Beside the bed, she had a table laid out with stitching supplies.

  “Mr. Corbin, you have to lie down so I can stitch up your head,” she said, speaking gently to him, as if that was goi
ng to get through. She was too damned sweet for this.

  He stopped in the doorway, making himself pause and let her try to handle it despite every ounce of him wanting to jump in and stop this from going further.

  It took effort, restraining his body when blood rushed in his ears and every muscle tensed, ready to spring.

  She looked away from her patient, fixing her gaze on him standing in the doorway, and his morning’s message of avoidance came back to bite him. She looked him dead in the eye and walked toward him and shut the door.

  He was close enough he had to step backward to keep from being hit by the door.

  Damn. Now what? How was he supposed to move on to another patient when drama was clearly brewing in there with her and the behemoth?

  Conley passed by, brows up at him, a question he ignored. If Belle was going to have trouble, it’d be in the next few minutes, trying to get the man—

  A loud clatter—the sound of something being thrown or knocked over—erupted inside and Lyons launched himself through the door.

  She had her hands up, palms forward, warily circling with the drunk man, trying to be calm and coax him to the table.

  That wouldn’t work.

  “Lie down and let the lady stitch your head,” Lyons barked at the man, flinging the broken-arm file he’d been carrying onto the counter to free his hands, and stormed forward, making himself as broad and ready as possible.

  “It’s okay. He wants his head fixed, right, Mr. Corbin?” She was still trying, but upon Lyons’s interference, her voice became more pleading than authoritative, and he couldn’t say if it was because of him or the fight coming if the man took one more wrong step.

  Corbin might be drunk and have a neck like a tree stump, but he was also clearly starting to sober up—at least enough to make the calculation that Lyons would lay him out if he didn’t back down.

  Lyons held the man’s gaze, and, although his fist remained balled at his side, kept his voice level and quiet. “Settle down, or I’ll sedate you so hard you’ll be in adult diapers for a week.”

  Sometimes a calmly leveled threat worked better than shouted profanities, but Lyons was still thankful for the post-shooting therapy that started the gym routine that built the kind of strength and bulk to contain and intimidate a drunken hockey thug.

  He didn’t look at Belle, but, feeling her behind him, reached back to grasp her hip and guide her so that when he turned, allowing Corbin passage to the bed, she stayed behind him.

  Corbin sat and then just lay down, but Lyons didn’t leave her alone with the man. He moved to the uninjured side, allowing Belle access where she needed to stitch after she righted the tipped tray and gathered fresh supplies.

  Then, with hands as steady as a surgeon, she exposed the wound, picked up the syringe to numb it, and set about stitching.

  The broken arm he’d been going after could wait for however long it took. He wasn’t leaving her to deal with this guy alone.

  The vantage gave him a chance to observe her suture technique.

  He worked Emergency and tended to go for the kinds of sutures that got the job done in the fastest space of time—simple, interrupted sutures. Sometimes simple running sutures. There were a few other techniques he knew, out of a veritable smorgasbord of stitching techniques, but this was one he did not know.

  “What is that technique?”

  “Running horizontal mattress suture.” She said the words slowly, and then explained, “They’re a bit more time-consuming, but they heal the best. Less scarring, which is good for a face wound.”

  “I’m going to look like Frankenstein,” Corbin almost whined.

  “Not if you’re still,” she muttered to the man, who actually hadn’t moved since she’d begun. He also looked a little pale, as if he might be considering consequences finally, as the haze of alcohol started to clear.

  “Where did you learn it?”

  “I had a teacher who would take the time. I wanted to learn every stitch type. Practiced on chicken breasts from the grocery store.”

  He felt himself smiling, which would completely wreck his intimidating glare, and resumed watching the patient with a sobering stare.

  “You have to be careful with tension,” she explained. “If it puckers, it’s a do-over because the tissue will be strangled, and the scar worsened.”

  “I’ll be still,” Corbin said, not even moving his mouth all that much when he spoke in case it should move his forehead.

  Within ten minutes, she had him stitched and a nurse came in to bandage the wound. Although he’d not acted back-up, they both stayed until she was done. Lyons left the room with Belle and followed close until she stopped to look at him.

  “Did he hurt you?”

  She looked down at her upper arm, and half shrugged. “It’s probably going to bruise, but it’s not the end of the world.”

  He’d put his hands on her.

  Lyons looked back down the hall toward the room they’d just left.

  “Stop.” She said one word, interrupting his consideration of violent acts against the patient, then added, “Thank you for coming to help me.”

  Dismissed? She resumed walking back down the hallway, leaving him there.

  He still felt that connection to her, strongly enough to know that his rebuffing earlier—along with her own right now—smarted for them both.

  “You did good work in there. I told you that you can ask if you need anything. That still goes.” He caught up with her easily and took her hand to give a little squeeze. It was the most he could do. If they were alone, he’d have hugged her, probably kissed her again. Thank God they weren’t alone. He already felt eyes on them.

  “Thank you,” she said again and didn’t squeeze his hand in return, but she did stop walking, and looked down to where he still held her hand. A pointed reminder.

  He let go, hadn’t really meant to keep holding it, just stop her for a moment, make some kind of connection, smooth over the roughness he felt between them.

  “I need to update the file.” She nodded over his shoulder, still obviously upset with him.

  And that was probably for the best. Letting attraction run amok would just lead them both down dangerous paths.

  He had his own patient. Possible broken arm. He needed to see to that.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “HEY, BELLE?” ANGEL’S voice came from behind Belle as she stood at the computer, recording patient data.

  The tinge of apprehension in Angel’s voice made her turn. “Everything okay?”

  “Wolfe’s in the break room, came for a visit and asked if you had time for coffee?”

  Lyons’s brother wanted to meet her?

  “Sure, I just need to enter the diagnosis and sign discharge and I’ll be right there.”

  Angel smiled, looking relieved, as if she’d crossed some kind of “new friend” line in inviting her to coffee. Which meant Wolfe was there to see her because of Lyons, not to meet his girlfriend’s new friend.

  Which was fine. She knew better than anyone how different siblings could be, but she still wanted to meet the man who’d grown up with Lyons.

  When she stepped into the break room to find only the two of them, standing in a warm embrace, looking dreadfully cute and sweet, she almost fled.

  “Ah, there she is,” the man who must’ve been Wolfe said, his accent far more prominent than Lyons’s, as if he relished it.

  They exchanged greetings and pleasantries, taking a seat at the table where he’d brought tall coffees along with various packets of sweetener and cream.

  Yep, this was definitely weird. “I feel like you’re buttering me up for something. It’s okay if you’re coming to tell me to lay off the gifts. I think maybe I should after the way yesterday went, even if I have something else I’ve been making for him.”

  Wol
fe let her ramble, but the dimpled grin in his scruffy jaw and the merriment in his eyes stopped her.

  “Not sure what you’re talking about.” He leaned back in his chair. “I was just hoping to meet the woman Lyons was speaking with. I’ve been trying to get him to talk about what happened all year, and he usually tells me to shove it in colorful ways.”

  Angel looked somewhat sheepishly between them. “I actually hadn’t told him yet about the gifts.”

  He nudged Angel lightly. “Fill me in. These are the gifts he’s been calling me about?”

  Angel’s face scrunched up in a way that was cute, and completely chagrined.

  “Naughty elf,” he murmured, but didn’t sound upset with her. “Probably good, it’s harder for me to feign ignorance when I’m only sort of ignorant.”

  “Why are you thinking of stopping now?” Angel asked, slipping her hand into Wolfe’s on the table, the casual intimacy so easy between them. It was hard for Belle to even understand for a moment.

  “Just he doesn’t really speak to me now, except for yesterday when that patient got out of hand.”

  Wolfe’s brows shot up. “And Lyons hit him?”

  “No!” Belle blurted out, realized how loud she’d been and lowered her voice. “No, he didn’t hit him. He just kind of glowered and threatened him with adult diapers.”

  “Adult diapers?” Wolfe looked momentarily impressed. “I don’t even know how to process that.”

  “Effectively,” Belle said, then rewound to the other question. “And he set the parameters of allowable conversation between us as me being allowed to ask him for advice on medical issues to do with patients but made clear that was it.”

  “Nothing is ever clear with my brother,” Wolfe said, but had started to look somewhat less smiley and charming than he’d been. “I’ve been hoping to get him to come upstate with us for Christmas, but he’s not even interested in coming to dinner before then. I don’t—”

  His words abruptly died as a door opened behind her, and it took a good long second to summon a smile again. “Hey, coffee?”

  Lyons. She didn’t even need to look over her shoulder to know it was Lyons. Wolfe had the look of someone busted doing something he shouldn’t, and his untouched coffee offer was an olive branch.