by Sara Rider
Fergus harrumphed.
She laughed. Maybe that was a little much to ask. A yawn crept over her, stretching her ribcage wide. It was long past time for her to go to bed, especially since she hadn’t even called a cab yet. “I should go. It’s late. I guess I’ll see you around.”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t even acknowledge she’d spoken. His attention was wholly absorbed by something on the ground next to her feet.
“What is it?” She asked.
He ignored her once again. He leaned forward and stared at something that was stuck in the wheel of the chair she’d been sitting on—a piece of paper, she realized. With the careful precision of a surgeon, he extricated it.
Horror rose in her throat when she saw what it was.
“Oh god.” She reached for the paper, but he was too quick, spinning in his chair so that his back was to her.
“Julia Hardin and the Tale of the Sexy Highlander Librarian?”
She’d known embarrassment in her life. She’d felt the sting of shame and stomach-curdling regret. But nothing in her life—nothing in the vast realms of her imagination—had prepared her for the sheer mortification she felt in that moment. If her skin hadn’t just turned ice-cold, she would have self-combusted.
She should have run, but her feet were frozen to the ground, forcing her to witness the horrified expression on his face when he turned back around. The heavy silence that followed was almost unbearable.
Finally, he spoke. “I don’t talk like that. I don’t even have a Scottish accent.”
She closed her eyes and waited for the devil to come tell her she’d just died and landed straight in hell. “I know.”
“Also, I don’t—”
A strangled noise exploded from her throat. She started running for the door. He caught her before she made it, hands landing on her shoulder. “Julia, what are you doing?”
“Running away before I die of embarrassment.”
“Why?”
She laughed hysterically, pitched high enough to shatter the windows. “You just found my sex cartoon of us, and you’re wondering why I’m embarrassed?”
“Sex isn’t something to be embarrassed about.”
He was trying to kill her. There was no other possible explanation. “Everything about that drawing is embarrassing.”
“You did a good job with my hands. Most people can’t draw hands.”
“This isn’t about the hands!”
“Then what?”
Her shoulders sagged in defeat beneath his hands. “You just found a drawing that clearly and undeniably lays out my sexual fantasies about you. Now you know that I…” she sucked in her breath “…lust after you.”
His brows furrowed, as though she’d confused him. “That’s embarrassing?”
Now he was just being cruel. “It is because you don’t feel the same way!”
That stunned him into silence. She succeeded in shrugging him off and pushed through the door into the cold night. She didn’t know or care where she was going, as long as it was far away from here.
“Julia! Wait!”
He was too fast for her to escape, especially when she was wearing her oh-so-beautiful but stupid-in-this-weather heels. She stopped running, knowing the only thing that would make this moment worse would be to fall on her ass. “Why? So you can rub in just how much you aren’t attracted to me?”
“Dammit, Julia! You are the most infuriating woman I have ever met.” He spun her around, eyes wild with an intensity that made her shiver. “If I wasn’t attracted to you, would I do this?”
He lowered his lips to hers, capturing her in a kiss that seared away every other thought in her mind. It was a hungry kiss—one that swept her up like a gale force wind. His hand cupped her nape and pulled her close while his tongue parted her lips. Exploring. Commanding.
She melted for him.
Her hands moved to his cheeks as if by instinct—but the real thing was so much better than the thousands of times she’d fantasized about it. His skin was rough with a hint of stubble but warm. His neck thick and strong. The heady scent of his skin underlined by faint traces of spice filled her nose and made her ravenous for him.
Beneath it all was an unexpected gentleness. The way he held her close and stroked her throat with his thumb. She’d been kissed before, but never like this. She never wanted it to end.
But then it did. He let her go and pulled back, looking at her like he couldn’t believe what just happened. Suddenly, she was standing on her own once more, lips swollen and mind dazed.
“Okay, well, I guess I’ll get going,” she said roughly, unsure what else to say or do.
She started to turn, but her balance was shaky after the kiss and her knees buckled. She tried to right herself, but her heel slipped on the ice and she fell. Hard.
Pain shot through arm, turning her vision black.
Fergus’s hands were on her once more. Cautious and hesitant now. “Julia, are you okay?”
She couldn’t answer with her lips pressed tightly together to hold back a scream. She’d never broken anything before, but she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had now.
7
Fergus wasn’t sure what had shocked him more—that he’d actually kissed Julia Hardin, or that he’d managed to break her arm in doing so. It had been a long time since he kissed anyone. Years, in fact. But he didn’t think he was that bad at it. Not bad enough to break bones. And yet, here they were in the emergency room of the Shadow Creek Regional Hospital with the fluorescent lights burning in their eyes while they waited for X-rays.
Getting Julia into his car hadn’t been easy either. She fought him every step of the way, insisting she could take a cab. In a fit of annoyance, he finally picked her up off the ground and carried her. She’d been too hurt to put up a fight.
When they’d gotten here, he came inside despite her insistence she could handle it on her own. No way in hell was he walking away from her tonight. She was exhausted and in a lot of pain, no matter how hard she tried to deny it.
When the nurse called her in from the waiting room, Julia gave him a look so vulnerable, he knew she didn’t want to be alone. He asked her if she wanted him to come with her and, just for that moment, she dropped her defenses and admitted that she did. It only took a few minutes for her to put those defenses back up.
She wasted no time pulling out her cell phone and typing awkwardly with her left, and clearly non-dominant, hand. Maybe she was attending to pressing business at 12:04 in the morning. Or maybe she was desperately trying to avoid talking about the kiss they’d both been pretending hadn’t happened.
“Can’t that wait until tomorrow?” he asked, finally breaking the awkward silence.
“Tell that to my brother,” she grumbled, wincing as though it hurt to speak.
“Your brother texts you in the middle of the night?” He didn’t have siblings, but that didn’t seem like a normal thing for a brother to do. Even siblings as weird as Julia and Eli.
She sighed and he heard the depth of her exhaustion echoing in the room. “He stopped by the Holy Grale after his date and found out about the broken lauter tun. I told Logan to let Tommy handle it, and now Eli is pissed that I did that instead of calling him. But if I called him, he would have been annoyed I interrupted his date.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s ridiculously protective of his machines and doesn’t like that I overstepped.”
Anger rose in his chest. “Give me your phone.”
“Why?”
“Either that, or I drive to your brother’s house right now and tell him in person what I think about him laying into his sister while she’s in the hospital.”
She winced again before handing over her phone. “I didn’t tell him I was at the hospital.”
That should have calmed him down a little, but it didn’t. Broken arm or not, he was still mad someone was ripping into her for trying to help. Mad that she was so stubbornly independent, she woul
dn’t even tell Eli she was in the hospital. And mostly, he was furious with himself for being the reason she was here in the first place.
He pulled up Eli’s number and called him. “Your sister’s in the hospital with a broken arm,” he said without waiting for so much as a greeting. “So lay off her. She was only trying to help.”
Julia groaned. “That’s not going to end well.”
“Don’t care,” he said, handing her the phone back.
The X-ray tech called Julia in at that moment. He helped her up, and once again saw the fear in her eyes. It was clear she didn’t like hospitals and he realized a little too late he shouldn’t have interfered in her life. The angry texts from Eli were probably a welcome distraction.
It was another thirty minutes before the sole doctor in the emergency room came back to tell them that her arm was indeed broken. By the time they were ready to put on the cast, Eli had arrived, bursting into the room like a charging rhino. He wasn’t alone either. Nora was with him, as were Jake and Clem. It was as if a party bus had pulled up to the hospital.
“Holy shit, Julia!” Eli said as he came to her side and took her good hand in his. “What happened? Why didn’t you say anything?”
The doctor, to his credit, didn’t even look up at the herd of people who’d just stampeded in, continuing to plaster Julia’s arm with practiced precision. Fergus couldn’t say the same. He felt like he was taking up space where he didn’t belong.
Now, instead of arguing about Julia’s decisions regarding the Holy Grale, she and Eli were arguing about her need to take better care of herself.
It was time for Fergus to go. He grabbed his coat and pulled back the thin blue curtain separating them from the rest of the emergency room.
“Fergus, wait,” Julia called after him. “Can all of you leave us alone for a moment?”
“Of course,” Clem said softly. Eli grumbled, but he complied thanks to Nora dragging him out.
When they were alone once more, save for the doctor, Julia looked Fergus in the eyes for the first time since they kissed. It sparked a fresh wave of desire inside him. “Thank you for helping me tonight.”
He nodded, still uncomfortable with the intensity of sensations he was feeling, all of which were completely inappropriate in a hospital room. “Anytime.”
Her jaw tensed, like she was trying to find the right words. Or maybe it was just the pain. It made his stomach clench. “Can we…can we forget about the thing earlier?”
The thing. The kiss. The first time he’d felt like a full-blooded human being in years.
She wanted to forget about it.
He wasn’t one to mask his emotions for the sake of others, but he found himself plastering on a smile so fake, it could have been made of plastic. “Yeah, of course. Already forgotten.”
“You don’t have to worry about anything,” Eli said as he stuffed a pink throw pillow behind Julia’s head as though she were on her deathbed instead of her living room couch. “We’ve got everything taken care of. Jake and I went through your files and divided up all the work for the next month. You won’t have to do a thing.”
Julia gave up her futile attempt to scratch the terrible itch inside her casted forearm, and pulled the pillow away. “I don’t want to be taken care of. I do the taking care of things around here. I’m perfectly capable of working with a broken arm.”
The room went silent—a considerable feat considering Nora, Jake, and Clem were there too, bustling around with make-work tasks that were starting to get under Julia’s skin. She loved her friends, but lately it was hard to be around them. She was tired of being the smiling, happy single one hiding the fact she constantly felt like a third wheel. They didn’t usually pity her—she knew that—but they were pitying her today and she had no patience for it. She was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, thank you very much.
Besides, the last thing she needed right now was for Eli and Jake to think she was replaceable.
Eli gave her a solemn look.
She sighed. “Maybe I had a little trouble getting dressed this morning.” She’d given up trying to get a shirtsleeve past the giant cast, which explained why she was still in her robe.
“We’re more concerned about…” Nora pointed to Julia’s head.
Julia groaned. Sure, the fact a roller brush was stuck in her hair didn’t exactly give off the impression of total competence. She’d been a bit overambitious thinking she could manage to straighten her hair one-handed. “Fine. My personal grooming may be questionable at the moment, but I’m still capable of doing my job. I only need one hand to type. One hand to make phone calls. And the only thing I need to make decisions like a boss is my brain.”
“I know,” Eli said, trying to cover her with a blanket. “But the point is you don’t have to.”
She rose to her feet and ripped the brush from her hair, tired of being treated like a piece of broken china. The burn in her skull from the chunk of hair that came out with the brush only aggravated her further, pushing the limits of her control. “I. Am. Not. Replaceable.”
“Maybe we should all get out of Julia’s hair,” Nora said, gently tugging Eli’s arm.
Julia dropped back to the couch. She was exhausted, her arm ached, and her head was throbbing.
“You’re not replaceable,” Eli said a. “That’s the point. No one can replace you, which means you need to take care of yourself so you can come back and do your job the way only you can.”
“Think about it this way,” Nora offered. “You can finally do all those projects you’ve been dreaming about but never had time for.”
“And think of all the books you can read,” Clem added.
Julia’s annoyance deflated, leaving behind frustration and self-pity. “Fine.”
Eli bent down and kissed her cheek. “That’s the spirit. Promise me you’ll call if you need anything.”
“I will. Thank you. For everything.”
Finally, they were gone. So what was she supposed to do now? She didn’t want to sit around doing nothing. When she was a child, her mom used to call her a hummingbird. Motion was her natural state. Idle time made her feel twitchy.
She looked at her phone sitting on her coffee table, screen still dark with the absence of any calls or texts. In the whirlwind of the hospital trip, she hadn’t had much time to think about the kiss with Fergus last night. It had taken her so completely by surprise, she still hadn’t wrapped her head around it. She could barely believe it was real, and in light of all the pain meds she’d taken this morning, she wasn’t entirely convinced it had happened.
Except the memory of his lips on hers, the way his hands caressed her body, was burned so vividly into her mind, she would never forget a second of it. Her lips still tingled with desire. It was more than anything her fantasies had prepared her for.
Because in her fantasies, Fergus wasn’t a real person. He was a caricature of a person—all muscles and brooding stares and dirty talk. The real Fergus, the one who’d kissed with such startling passion, was a human being who was shy in crowds and a complete nerd about databases. He was grumpy and gentle and funny and…so much more than the Fergus she’d drawn in that cartoon.
She dropped her head back and sighed. He was also a man who hadn’t called or texted since leaving her at the hospital. She wasn’t entirely sure she even wanted him to, but the fact he hadn’t stung a little.
A knock on her door pulled her from her thoughts. Her heart skipped with excitement. Was it Fergus? Did she want it to be? She pulled herself off the couch and hurried to the door. It felt like forever as she slowly and awkwardly twisted the knob, still unused to the angles and motions of using her left hand for things like this.
George and Carol Kiesselburger stood on the other side.
“Julia,” Carol said, watery blue eyes wide with sympathy. “How are you doing, dear?”
Julia tried her best to smile, but disappointment welled in her stomach. Fergus had already done enough to help her an
d it was silly to think he would show up here out of the blue. “I’m okay. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” George said, waving his hand. “We’ve just come to check up on you.”
“We saw you coming home last night with your cast on. You must be so exhausted, so we brought you a casserole,” Carol added. She held up an oval Pyrex dish wrapped in aluminum foil that smelled of melted cheese.
“Thank you. That was very thoughtful of you.” Julia stepped aside to let them in so Carol could place the casserole on the kitchen counter.
She couldn’t help but adore her neighbors. They were well into their eighties and had been married for sixty years, but never seemed to grow tired of being together. They had matching white hair and were nearly the same height—just a fraction below Julia’s five feet four inches. From the photos the Kiesselburger siblings had rounded up for the slideshow, Julia knew George and Carol had been a dashing couple in their early years—him with a handsome jaw and piercing brown eyes, and her with the classic beauty of an early Hollywood film star—and she liked to imagine they’d spent so much time together that they started to resemble each other.
George clasped her good hand in his. “Tell us what happened to you.”
“Oh, I…” Kissed a man until my brain fell out of my head and I fell down after it. “I slipped on the ice last night. The doctor said I’ll be good as new in about five weeks.”
George and Carol looked at her with the knowing sympathy of parents who had been through this many times before. It made her miss her own mother terribly in that moment. “Well, we can always postpone our trip to the daffodil fields until next year. There’s no rush,” Carol said.
Julia’s eyes widened in panic. “No! We can still go. In fact, I would be disappointed if we cancelled.” The annual daffodil festival was the excuse she and the Kiesselburger children had used to get their parents to the venue for the party. If they cancelled now, the entire event would unravel.