“What? You’re bailing just like that?”
“I have my own mental health to think of.”
He couldn’t help it, he laughed. Once he started he couldn’t stop.
“Rafael. Rafael.” Her shrill voice penetrated his guffaws. “You’re hysterical. Calm down.”
He hiccupped to a stop. “Pull the other one,” he ordered. What the heck had he ever seen in a trembler? Even one who smelled like passion on the hoof. “This is about me being a hunter, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” she asked cautiously.
Grover Cleveland. Everything she said was considered twice before she spoke. Had she ever had a spontaneous utterance? Was she this stiff in bed?
“My contact filled me in on you and West Haven. He told me you folks draw a bright line between predatory shifters and every other type of sensitive. Listen, cookie, I may have some problems, but I don’t hurt children.”
“I’m not willing to risk it. I’ll find someone else to help you get off the drugs.” She had escalated to sheer panic. Which one of them was the patient here?
“Let me see,” he mused aloud. “You’re here on the island, living right in town. You’re a qualified psychiatric nurse, possibly the only one in Mystic Bay. You could use the money. I need care. And you want to call an agency? Do I have that right?” Why in the name of Abraham Lincoln had he decided to harvest lava for this wimp?
“Is it just you, or do all unicorns have a yellow streak?”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mystic Bay
Sully~
“Where the heck is Wally anyway?” Lester Crumb growled at Sully. Lester was a mid-range mage who ran the town’s general store.
Sully exchanged glances with Robin. They were trying to have a peaceful bite at the Bean before he took his next lot of whale watchers out. He took another pull at his coffee and ate another bite of his meat pie, buying time before he answered Lester. “As far as I know, Wally’s still over on Hyde Island. He should be back as soon as he wraps up over there.”
The island of Hyde was a ten-minute boat ride from West Haven, if you kept to the channels and did the speed limit. Wally would have kept the police launch in the channels and followed the no-wake bylaws.
“Well, I want to know what he’s doing way over on Hyde when there are cars double-parked on Main Street.” Lester thrust his jaw out.
Robin cleared her throat gently and laid a hand over Sully’s. He kept his expression bland as everything inside him tightened at her public display of affection.
“Lester,” she said in her clearest, most bell-like tones, which ought to have sent old Lester running for cover, if he had had the wits of a gopher. “You were on the council when we voted to include Hyde in the area served by the Mystic Bay Police Department. Today, Hyde just happens to need the services for which they have been paying for over twenty years.”
“There’s already a deputy over there. She should have handled whatever was going down.”
“Hester Goodman is a dispatcher, not a deputy,” Sully informed him curtly. “And the sheriff is the best judge of what policing is required on Hyde.”
Wally’s three deputies were all part-timers with no actual police training. Walter Babcock was a proud graduate of the Oregon Police Academy.
“Mystic Bay should come first. If they needed a cop, another cop, over there, Wally could danged well have sent a deputy,” grumbled Lester. “He’s got three. My customers have no place to park.”
Robin smiled. Just the merest curving of her rose petal lips. Sully was glad she wasn’t aiming that steely smile at him. “If you think we should hire a fourth deputy, Lester, I’ll be happy to put it to a vote when the policing appropriation is next discussed. If you would be so good as to write me up a proposal.”
The Bean had hushed when Lester began his complaint. Every ear in the room was cocked to best enjoy this genteel skirmish. Now there was a collective intake of breath as Robin threw down the gauntlet.
The council had recently voted to hire a third part-time deputy for the summer, to help deal with the much-valued influx of tourists. Robin’s art fair had worked wonders for the island’s economy filling the streets with extra vehicles. But no one thought raising taxes so Lester wouldn’t be inconvenienced would get far in council.
Lester clearly knew when he was beaten. He drained his mug and rose to his full five foot four. “I got better use for my time,” he muttered. He turned at the door and fired a parting squib. “You tell Wally to get that traffic cleared pronto.”
“What is happening on Hyde?” Sully asked Robin as soon as the hum of conversation could drown his lowest voice.
“I wish I knew. This is the second time in as many weeks that Walter has been needed over there.” Normally months could pass without the sheriff paying more than his routine biweekly visit.
“Who is it this time?” Sully asked quietly.
“Another retiree.”
The island of Hyde was bigger than West Haven. Instead of ragged hills of granite covered with trees, it was mostly flat and had been logged to the shoreline centuries ago. Unlike West Haven it had no real tourist trade. And the farmers over there liked it that way. They raised sheep, hay, and vegetables for the mainland.
But like everywhere in the Pacific Northwest, Hyde’s mild climate had attracted a certain number of retired people. They bought small sections of farmland and raised a few alpacas or heirloom breeds of sheep and enjoyed the slow pace of small-town life. What they didn’t do was get themselves murdered.
“Old people do die,” Sully pointed out in a murmur. They both knew that if the death had been natural or expected, Dr. Peterson would have been the only one on the launch with Wally, and Deputy Hansen would be out ticketing scofflaws. Wally was hell on wheels where illegal parking was concerned.
“So they do,” Robin said discreetly. “I’m sure Walter will handle the details with his usual dispatch.” She raised her voice and deliberately changed the subject. “How’s your invalid doing?”
“Grouchy. But he hasn’t burned down Ursula’s cabin yet.”
“Has anyone been out to see him?” Robin inquired.
Sully took his cue and raised his voice. “Sure. Virginia hired Samantha Belfast to take care of the major. She was supposed to go out there today and check on him.” Sully ate the last bite of his meat pie. “I must be running if we’re going to sail on time.” He got to his feet.
Robin floated out of her chair. “I better get back to the inn.”
Her sleeve brushed against his chest as he held the door open for her. Her perfume filled his nostrils. The tease. “Later,” he growled as he headed to the dock.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Reynolds’ cabin
Samantha~
“There is no need to insult me.” It hurt to have Rafael’s voice say cruel things to her. Even though this was not the man Samantha had fallen in love with. That Rafael was gone, burned to ash by volcanic lava. Not his fault. But just the same, she ached to the very depths of her soul. All she wanted was to get away and lick her wounds.
For four years she had mourned his death. To discover he had been alive all this time was a nightmare. It made it worse that he was still suffering from the effects of the helicopter crash. That he had completely forgotten her. But she just could not handle his hostility on top of her own anguish.
“I’m not a coward,” she said. Unicorns are valiant. Never foolhardy, but never shirking their obligations.
“You stink of fear,” he said coldly.
“I am afraid. That doesn’t make me a coward.” She stood her ground. “I’m here, despite my fear.”
“You’re more than halfway out the door.” He pulled down on one long finger. “One. You want to pass this job to someone else. Two. You’re poised for flight. Three. You’re withholding my child. I call that cowardice.”
She sat back down and stiffened her spine. He had a point. She had loved Rafael once. Unto death. Grieved his
death. He had given her a child. Her precious daughter. Surely she owed him something?
“I’m not the woman I used to be,” she admitted. “Your death changed me.”
“I’m not dead!” he barked.
“I know. But I just found that out. I haven’t had time to process your return from the grave. Touching you is much more terrible than touching other patients. We were,” she drew a deep shuddering breath, “Bonded. As soon as we make contact I know your thoughts. I can’t cope with them. Not today. Maybe never.”
“Why not?” he blurted.
How much to tell him? He deserved the truth, and she was congenitally incapable of a lie. “When my hand touched yours, I visited your experience in the volcanic lava field. The plunge into that molten lake. Your death. Your injuries. Your being burned alive.” Tears rolled down her cheeks and dripped onto her tightly clenched hands. She brushed at them futilely. More welled up.
“Huh. They tell me some of my memories of the accident are confabulated,” he said.
PTSD led directly to memory disorders. Some researchers claimed PTSD was a memory disorder. She knew the brain often dealt with trauma by creating stories to make sense of emotions it couldn’t otherwise explain. They might be fantasies, but to the traumatized rememberer, they were cruelly real.
“Your psychiatrist would hardly know that you are a phoenix!” she pointed out. “Some of those things probably did happen.”
“True enough. But I don’t think I regenerated. If I had, I don’t think my hands would be as scarred as they are, or the cartilage in my knee totally torn up.”
“And yet you are terrified of fire.” His fear had infected her. “You never used to be panic-stricken at the thought of flames.” In fact, he had bragged of his phoenix ability to control fire.
He shrugged. Held up his hands. They were strangely smooth. As if the skin had melted and reformed. Only the palms and fingertips looked normal. “I think I healed wrong. After the accident, I had the usual global amnesia. Didn’t remember who I was or where. Didn’t know I was a doctor, certainly not a shifter. I missed my moment to regenerate.”
Her training clicked in. “It could be that most of your memories are not accurate.”
“Doesn’t make them less vivid.”
“That’s so. But while re-experiencing the trauma reinforces false as well as true memories of the trauma, a first step toward healing is acknowledging intellectually that your memories may not be accurate.”
“And that makes them go away?” he sneered.
“Sadly no. But when you are re-experiencing a traumatic episode, I want you to tell yourself that it’s a movie made by your brain when it was physically and emotionally injured. Not reality.”
“Self-talk!” he jeered.
“Self-talk is always where we start,” she said firmly. “When that rerun of the event starts, what is the accompanying commentary?”
“I don’t want to alarm you,” he derided.
“Take those words out and look at them,” she instructed calmly. “Unpack all the self-loathing and recriminations.”
“How did you know? Did you read my mind?” he demanded suspiciously.
“I told you I did. But depression is usually accompanied by negative self-talk. Tell me the worst thing you call yourself,” she coaxed.
“A gutless wonder,” he burst out. “Two good men died. And a third was paralyzed. If I hadn’t been afraid of the volcano, I could have saved them.”
She nodded. Remembered he couldn’t see her. “How did the man who was paralyzed survive?” she asked softly.
“I don’t recall.”
That too was typical of PTSD. The sufferer generally did not recall the full details of the event. However, what they did recall they reran over and over. With invented additions. And in inventing, often imposed worse horrors on their psyches.
“Hmm. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that you saved Belovitch’s life. Was that the act of a gutless wonder?”
He frowned. “How did you know his name? Never mind. Belovitch saved his own life. He jumped and parachuted to safety.”
“Then his injuries were a misfortune, and not your fault.” She kept all triumph from her voice.
“That’s not how I remember it!”
“Say it aloud, Belovitch jumped. He landed hard. I saved his life. I’m a hero.”
Self-contempt carved new lines in his damaged face. He opened his mouth. Closed it with the words unspoken. She waited patiently. It could take many sessions to get a patient to repeat positive reframing, even to himself.
“Mouthing lies doesn’t make them true,” he said at last.
“But they’re not lies. They are a truer interpretation of the facts. Say it, Belovitch jumped. He landed hard. I saved his life. I’m a hero.”
“What the hell kind of phoenix is too cowardly to face fire?” he cried instead.
She swallowed her desire never to relive what she had seen in his thoughts. Sweat broke out on her back and ran between her breasts as she concentrated on what she had perceived and reframed it.
“You don’t know that you refused to face the molten lava, Rafael. You just think you failed to act. But Belovitch is alive. And no one but you could have saved the life of a paralyzed man. No one but you could have kept him alive for weeks in a jungle. You managed it with badly burned hands, and no sight. That is the act of a true hero.”
“Sure. That’s why I wake up in a funk.”
“Bravery consists of doing what makes us afraid. Being scared is normal, Rafael. Were you never scared before?”
His head came up. He looked utterly astonished. “No. Never.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Rafael~
Now that he had jolted her into staying, Samantha was acting like a nurse. Strangely, he didn’t like that any better. Her voice had warmed to its natural contralto, rich and sensuous. But she wasn’t trying to be alluring. She was doing therapy. Of course he needed some. But Rafael couldn’t keep his mind on the process when he was close enough to smell his mate and her voice promised passion hot enough to melt steel.
She was trying to pretend that he wasn’t responsible for the disaster. That he had done his best. And his best was heroic. William Howard Taft, he had a freaking medal and a citation that made the same stupid claim. Didn’t make it true. And he was damned if he was going to pretend that it did. He folded his arms across his chest and firmed his lips on a hot denial. Denials only made the shrinks more insufferably empathetic. As if he deserved empathy.
“Everyone is afraid of something,” she said softly. “Everyone. Fear is a normal human emotion.”
He snorted. “I used to be afraid of losing a patient. Or missing something in surgery.” Nothing he had to worry about anymore.
“That’s not exactly what I meant.” She paused. Waiting for him to speak.
He could win this one. The trick was to send your mind elsewhere until the other person broke the uncomfortable silence. He tried to imagine what she looked like. What charms went with that sexy voice. Samantha made small rustling noises as if she were fidgeting in her chair. Or perhaps just getting comfortable.
The silence went on. A towhee began to defend its territory. ‘Beat it buster,’ its song screamed at an intruder. ‘This female is mine, mine, mine.’ Rafael knew how the bird felt. Or did he? This was the hard part of losing your memories. You never knew when a feeling of déjà vu was genuine reminiscence or flat-out fantasy.
She rose to her feet. He distinctly heard the sound of her jeans rubbing as she walked.
“Where are you going?” he blurted.
“I want some water. Do you want some too?”
“Sure. I mean, yes, please. Do you know how to work the pump?”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“I’ll come with you. It sticks.” The little cabin smelled rank. It nearly overpowered Samantha’s delicious feminine fragrance. “Are you going to do the dishes before you go?” he demanded.
“Is there some reason you can’t do them yourself?” Her voice was tart.
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m blind.”
She huffed. “Then I’ll have to teach you to do them,” she said sternly. “I’m a nurse, not a nursemaid. Or a housekeeper. There is no reason why you can’t look after yourself. Change your sheets. Wash your clothes. Make your bed.” She spoke over the running faucet. “Your glass is on the counter at twelve o’clock.”
He stepped forward another pace, stretched out his hand and felt for the glass. Picked it up and drained it.
She sighed. Sipped from her glass. “You aren’t eating properly. Or staying hydrated. You need to practice self-care, Rafael. Make some routines and stick to them.”
“Self-care!” he spat the words back at her.
“You deserve better than living in squalor. Sandy Mulcaster deserves better than a week’s worth of dirty dishes and piles of laundry.” Her voice was indifferent, but her message stung.
“I’m blind,” he ground out.
“You need to deal with it. There are lots of blind veterans. You have to get past feeling sorry for yourself, and learn to cope with your new normal.”
“I thought you were trying to buck me up with positive self-talk,” he taunted.
“Not if your negative thoughts are ‘I deserve to live in a smelly dump’.” Dishes clattered. “I’m stacking,” she explained. “So you don’t break them. In the future, do them as you dirty them.”
She moved. He felt her behind him. “Finish your water and stand in front of the sink.”
Growling, he obeyed. She began to hum softly. He almost felt as if he recognized the tune. He concentrated on not destroying the dishes or flooding the counters.
She stopped humming long enough to say, “The sink plug is at two o’clock. Find it and put it in place.”
Then she patiently talked him thorough the entire process of washing dishes. Found a dish towel and dried and put things where he told her to. All the while she filled the air with that oddly familiar tune.
“What is that you’re humming?” he broke down and asked.
Fated for the Phoenix: A Shifters in Love Fun & Flirty Romance (Mystic Bay Book 5) Page 9