# Healed Under The Mistletoe

Amalie Berlin

A precious gift… …to mend his scarred heart.In this Scottish Docs in New York story, when Dr Lyons McKeag finds an anonymous gift in his locker he’s furious! But nurse Belle Sabetta isn’t fooled by his brooding, Scrooge-like exterior… Her own experiences of loss means she knows that a little kindness, especially at Christmas, can go a long way. And Bella’s innocence and passion might be the gift that heals Lyons's damaged heart.

A precious gift...

...to mend his scarred heart.

In this Scottish Docs in New York story, when Dr. Lyons McKeag finds an anonymous gift in his locker, he’s furious! But nurse Belle Sabetta isn’t fooled by his brooding, Scrooge-like exterior... Her own experiences of loss means she knows a little kindness, especially at Christmas, can go a long way. And Bella’s innocence and passion could be the gift that heals Lyons’s damaged heart.

Scottish Docs in New York duet

Book 1 – Their Christmas to Remember Book 2 – Healed Under the Mistletoe

“Another wonderful second chance book.... Enjoy their journey back to love.”

—Goodreads on Back in Dr. Xenakis’ Arms

“I believe readers get an absolutely charming and enthralling read in this book that captivated me right from the start....”

—Harlequin Junkie on The Rescue Doc’s Christmas Miracle

AMALIE BERLIN lives with her family and her critters in Southern Ohio, and writes quirky and independent characters for Mills & Boon Medical Romance. She likes to buck expectations with unusual settings and situations, and believes humour can be used powerfully to illuminate the truth—especially when juxtaposed against intense emotions. Love is stronger and more satisfying when your partner can make you laugh through the times when you don’t have the luxury of tears.

Also by Amalie Berlin

Taming Hollywood’s Ultimate Playboy

Challenging the Doctor Sheikh

Dante’s Shock Proposal

The Prince’s Cinderella Bride

The Rescue Doc’s Christmas Miracle

Back in Dr Xenakis’ Arms

Scottish Docs in New York miniseries

Their Christmas to Remember

Healed Under the Mistletoe

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Healed Under the Mistletoe

Amalie Berlin


www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-07552-7

HEALED UNDER THE MISTLETOE

© 2018 Amalie Berlin

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

Version: 2020-03-02

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Dedicated to my brother, Seth,

and all the stories he has left to tell.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

NURSE PRACTITIONER YSABELLE SABETTA signed the last page of her employment paperwork and slid the bundle back across the desk.

No matter how many times she did it, her first day in a new facility always filled Belle with a mix of excitement and anxiety. She did it a lot, in fact, since she had only worked in contracted, short-term positions since she’d been accredited, first at home in Arizona, and then in neighboring southwestern states. This time the process was different: she’d taken the position straight out, and still wasn’t sure why she’d done that. Once the signings were complete, she’d be a full-time employee of a Manhattan hospital.

Her sister would’ve approved of this move, living in New York, a city they’d always felt linked to by their grandmother, who’d been born and raised in Queens, but followed to Arizona the injured soldier she’d fallen for while tending him in Korea during the war.

After a lifetime of Nanna’s stories about magical New York Christmases, the girls had vowed to make it there for the Christmas season so many times, but Belle had only made it after Noelle died.

She was never supposed to be there alone. But she was. She’d been there three days and although she was able to keep clear-headed most of the time, sometimes the world around her seemed to have sped up or she’d slowed down, as if she was out of pace with not only the city, but reality. The world didn’t spin, but the sensation was there deep in her chest, as if her inner gyroscope were broken and everything around her were spinning.

Nothing good could come from dwelling on it right now. Not on her first day. Really not on her first day in the biggest city she’d ever visited, let alone moved to—a place that might be too big for her, too much for her.

She had no idea what she might encounter, aside from the sort of situations depicted in horror-story documentaries about life in the ER, and sexy television medical dramas. Which narrowed expectations down to removing some bizarre item from a place it should’ve never been stuck, and a sexy rendezvous in the supply room with an arrogant ladies’ man who saved lives in between supply-room romps.

Or maybe she’d be taken hostage by an injured criminal who somehow had gotten a disposed syringe from the sharps container, filled with a mysterious cleaning fluid, and stabbed her in the neck while threatening to fill her carotid with something caustic and deadly if they didn’t give him a helicopter and a million dollars in untraceable bills. Anything was possible.

What curdled this morning’s coffee was more terror-tinged anxiety than excitement, mixed with the nitroglycerin-like certainty that she’d made a terrible mistake. That New York was too big for her, even outside work. She’d always been the timid twin—Noelle could stare down a dragon and Belle had once been cowed by a grumpy chihuahua.

“I hope you’ll enjoy your time at Sutcliffe Memorial, Ms. Sabetta.” The woman handling her paperwork smiled, showing no teeth and no warmth. A smile with too much knowing in it to inspire confidence, as if she could read anxiety in Belle’s penmanship.

She peered at her signature, half convinced she’d see the same shakiness that had seeped into Nanna’s penmanship near the end.

Once again, Ms. Masterson went over the guidelines of the probationary period, delineating the date where she’d become officially an employee of Sutcliffe, and the restrictions. Belle initialed where appropriate, and kept up the polite conversation expected of her. “I’ll look forward to that date and...”

Muffled alarm bounced off the closed office door, stalling her words and kicking her pulse up a notch.

Raised voices.

A woman’s voice. Maybe the assistant who’d seen her in earlier. What had she said?

She twisted to look at the door, muscles tense, ready to run one way or another, then turned again to Masterson. It was her office. If she should be alarmed by the commotion, as the prickling sensation on the back of Belle’s neck argued, Masterson would show it.

People shouted in hospitals more than one would think. People in pain couldn’t be faulted, but that wasn’t the only reason people lost control. Emotions ran high where life-and-death decisions happened. People got angry. Sometimes people were delusional and not capable of controlling outbursts. Sometimes, even more sadly, outbursts were prompted by mind-altering substances.

But this office was nowhere near treatment facilities. It was an office at the end of a hallway packed with other offices.

Masterson’s calm, slow head tilt didn’t clarify whether Belle’s alarm was unfounded, but the shift of her gaze over Belle’s shoulder to the door behind her said enough. Paying extra attention to a commotion? A distinct reason for alarm.

Unable to help herself, as the voices continued—now with a deep, clipped masculine voice breaking through—Belle twisted back to watch the door in case a madman burst in.

“Should we check?”

The sudden swing of the door, combined with that hyper-alert prickling of her skin, launched her from the chair. She whirled to face the coming danger, every muscle balled and ready to do...something.

A tall, broad-shouldered man in scrubs strode in, a sheet of paper held in one hand—not a weapon. He glanced at her, but she clearly wasn’t who he’d come to see, as his glacial blue eyes returned to Masterson, still in her chair, far more at ease than Belle.

Past him, she could see the assistant hovering in the doorway, looking apologetic and worried.

“I’m not doing it,” the man said without preamble, giving the paper a flick to send it fluttering onto Masterson’s desk. “I’ve told you twice, I’ll not be dragged into this holiday madness. I’m not my brother—he can be Administration’s puppet.”

He had an accent, there but slight, and the man projected such unpleasantness, she didn’t want the little thrill his accent stirred. Didn’t want to examine it.

It reminded her of a person who’d spent their first ten years in another country but moved early enough to nearly lose their original accent. However, the clipped, perfectly enunciated words were like another language entirely; fluent irritation was the strongest accent she heard, strong enough it was impossible to miss.

“Your brother isn’t a puppet, Dr. McKeag,” Masterson said, reaching for the paper to read it.

The fact that Belle had leaped from her seat as one might a burning building went blessedly unacknowledged, but that did nothing to diminish the creeping sense of foolishness inching down her spine. Still standing out of the way of an irritated, paper-wielding doctor? All remnants of her nurse’s pride bristled.

He was just so close to her chair. Returning to it felt like sitting on a snake’s rattler but moving farther away would look as if she was every bit as intimidated as she felt, especially when he looked at her and those ice-shard eyes shouted at her.

I see you.

I know I’m interrupting.

I don’t give a damn.

It wasn’t that he reeked anger, but she couldn’t imagine anyone missing the cold, disdainful irritation that put him above, somehow. It was almost how she’d picture an angry king, forced to communicate with his lowly, and possibly scabby, subjects. Superior. Arrogant. Bothered.

If the universe had any affection for her, this would be her only interaction with him. Ever. Even if she was intrigued by the accent. And his shoulders.

“Isn’t Wolfe doing enough of this nonsense with Conley? I suppose it’s somewhat suiting to Pediatrics, but it’s beneath the other departments. This is Manhattan, not the North Pole Hospital.”

“I’m sure your inclusion was a mistake, Dr. McKeag,” Masterson said, looking a little bit bored. “And there’s no need to be sarcastic.”

Hands free of the offending paper, now propped onto his narrow hips, drawing her attention again to the breadth of his shoulders. The black scrubs stretched tight across his chest, defining everything. Impressive torso: one more shallow mark in his favor. Also, as inappropriate of her to dwell on as the man’s other attributes. Like his haircut: a strange mix of a carelessly natural, longish top and neckline razored to perfection. His hair should not matter.

“I’m a Scot. It’s genetic.” He said this so precisely she wanted to believe him. She could see the title of the imaginary medical journal article now: Sarcasm Gene Discovered in Ancient Scottish Burial Site.

The deadpan way he delivered it said he wasn’t done, no wrap-this-up inflection to his words, even though he’d just won. Masterson’s words were both admission and apology. The argument should be over. He should be going. Belle would like to get back to the business of finishing her paperwork, so she could get to the Emergency Department and get on with being out of her depth and out of her mind to take this position in the first place.

“Good.” He looked at her again and the curiosity she didn’t want to feel bloomed into life, a sign Belle should sit back down so he would be out of her line of sight and less inclined to sexually harass him in her mind—something he’d surely see on her face if he had any intuition or experience with women, which he certainly did, looking like that.

He wasn’t her type anyway, even if his attractiveness could counter his personality. Belle tended to date the kind of man who never stormed anywhere, outside video games. And, generally, only had the broad-shoulder thing happening in the avatars they selected. They were kind, quiet, intelligent and introverted, like her. Storming anywhere besides a digital castle to fight an electronic troll would never, ever occur to them.

The mental comparison conjured him in a set of armor, a battered iron helmet, with a broadsword, and was somehow less laughable than she would’ve hoped. Instead, it made her think of the sexy Viking book she’d read the other day.

Whatever. She was going to sit. Not stand there and stare at the man.

Pretend he wasn’t standing close to the chair she was foolish to continue avoiding when he wasn’t a threat, just exceedingly cranky about a Christmas molehill. Irritating. Not dangerous. She’d moved to New York City and had to act like it. Have some gumption. Decide he could just take his impressive torso, enviably square jaw, and step to the side to avoid standing close to her.

Yeah! Lie to herself. Might as well. Vigorous denial got her through everything else in her life, let her pretend she wasn’t the last Sabetta standing.

She sighed before she could stop herself, but Masterson’s glance pushed those thoughts aside.

She was usually better at putting away the misery she’d been avoiding for over a year, but since she’d arrived in New York her subconscious had waged a near constant assault.

She took a breath, stepped right back to the chair and sat, keeping him and his dark, foreboding shoulders out of view.

But not far enough away that she couldn’t still feel him, looming like a thundercloud in his black scrubs.

She glanced down into the bag still sitting beside her chair where she’d stashed the three sets of departmental scrubs she’d been provided. The black scrubs.

Her stomach dropped.

Damn. He was from Emergency, and this rude showdown wasn’t even related to the job. Nothing to do with patient care. She liked to think of all medical professionals having the guts to go to the mat for their patients, but all this was about Christmas activities?

One glance over her shoulder confirmed the sharp set of his clean-shaven jaw was not that of a happy man. The dissonance between his reaction to the event and the importance of it clanged like a gong in her ear.

If anyone understood dreading the holidays, it was her. Thanksgiving had been bad enough the past couple of years, but Christmas was worse.

Although her family had a history of service—starting with Nanna exchanging her white cap for fatigues to serve in the Korean War, continuing with Dad, a Scottsdale policeman until his death, to Belle becoming a nurse—Noelle had started her career as a flight attendant, then secured flight training and become one of the few female pilots in a major commercial airline. Her life had been flying around the world, gone most of the time, but she’d always come back home for Christmas. At least for long enough to fetch Belle for their traditional adventure.

They were always together for Christmas, and that now made the season about two months of misery.

Yet, even she—with her impossibly good reasons to dread the season—couldn’t drum up this level of irritation at being included by someone.

The muscle at the corner of his ridiculously square jaw bunched and flexed, bunched and flexed, and could be doing nothing but gritting and grinding his back teeth. Not irritated. Angry.

“Emergency, of all departments, is too busy and too critical for this kind of nonsense to take up space in anyone’s head. Lives are on the line.”

This was him holding back? Boggled the mind.

“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.

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.

No. She wasn’t ready. But he didn’t have time to coddle her.

As soon as they hit the hallway, he sped up to run down the three turns it took to reach Emergency, with her following close behind.

Another thing he had no time for: dropping her off with Backeljauw to find a new sitter. That would have to come later.

No sooner had he reached the monitoring station than he had to step aside for a stretcher and team to roll past. The man on the stretcher had dark red compresses and bandages held to his abdomen. Conley headed the team, but, seeing him, nodded, which he took as a request to follow.

“Sabetta.” He said her name, leaving her to figure out what she was supposed to do, and hurried off with the team.

Abdominal bleeding. A mass event. His mind could supply only one cause. Was this it, what his gut had been warning him about?

“Was it a shooting?” he asked Conley when he caught up, prompting her to begin her report there, since she was obviously wanting to hand the patient off. Pediatric emergencies were a little different from this kind of trauma.

A look flashed across her bonnie freckled face, confusion and then sympathy, but she shook her head. “Subway derailed. Yours is in triage.”

She knew. His brother had obviously been sharing, and Lyons didn’t have the mental currency left to be angry about it.

Derailment. That could still be a man-made incident, but it wasn’t a gun. It couldn’t follow into the department and begin attacking personnel, unless it had been orchestrated and was the first step in a larger plan.

He turned, nearly trampling his unfortunate shadow, and had to grab her shoulders to stop them both making more of a mess of this. She grabbed his forearms in return, back to the wild-eyed stare as he took a breath and put her to the side to step around.

He pushed the tingle spreading from the center of his palms and hot on his arms from his head and jogged to meet the next stretcher coming out of triage.

Tingles didn’t matter. The delicate, fragile-feeling slender shoulders on his new colleague didn’t matter either. His too-young new colleague.

She kept up this time.

“What have we got?” he asked the nurses and paramedics rolling with his new patient.

“He was standing, and when it jumped track, he flew. Person from behind him hit him right after.”

Crushing damage.

“Name?” Sabetta asked, reaching for the chart as they ran alongside the stretcher.

“Samuel Riggs.”

“Mr. Riggs?” she called in his ear but got no response. “How long has he been unconscious?”

“Since it happened, probably. Uneven pupils, he’s breathing too fast. Tachycardic,” one of the paramedics filled in as they wheeled into the treatment bay.

“Get his shirt off.” Lyons gloved and reached for his stethoscope.

She beat him to it, listening to the patient’s heart while the others in the team fell in, taking the steps he didn’t even need to order at this point. Get an IV started. Hook up the telemetry to monitor vitals.

A good sign, not freezing up as he’d half expected.

“Get a blood workup,” he ordered, joining her in listening to the man’s heart and lungs.

She’d grown a bit paler than she’d been, but that wasn’t unusual for first-timers.

“Thoughts?” That would tell him more than blanching.

“His pulse is far too rapid,” she answered, backing up the paramedic’s report. “And he’s heavily bruised. There’s also a substantial lump on his head that I can see. If his pupils are unreactive, he needs a CT.”

This was easier, working with a critical patient to take his focus.

Lyons listened again. Everyone breathed faster when tachycardic. The heart didn’t pump blood and circulate oxygen efficiently, which caused the body’s natural remedies to kick in, even if they couldn’t help. He breathed faster naturally because his heart beat faster, it just didn’t help.

“What’s his pressure?”

One of his nurses took it manually while another worked on the telemetry and read off numbers far too low for his liking. She’d gotten the obvious things, and this wasn’t a teaching hospital, but it was his hospital, and he needed to know his peers could handle themselves.

“What do you want to check?” He knew what he wanted to check, but he’d give her one shot since all the techs should be descending on the room any minute.

“Rapid heart and low blood pressure, along with all this bruising from the impact. I’d want to check for internal bleeding.” She shook her head as she said it, as if she knew the answer was wrong, but stuck with it. “The head trauma is separate.”

Right about the head trauma, wrong about the internal bleeding—which, while probably present, wasn’t the most immediate danger to life.

“Look at his oxygen levels.” He indicated with a nod.

A number in the high eighties; he could tell by her expression that she recognized it wasn’t good.

“What tests?” he asked, giving her another shot.

“Typing for possible transfusion, a CBC, maybe troponin levels?”

Sticking with bleeding, but with a twist?

“Testing for heart attack?”

Wrong.

“All heart damage causes the same enzymes to release.”

He waited for her to listen to the patient’s chest one more time, still not leading.

She placed the bell to the man’s chest and listened, but not to his lungs. Just his heart. It was the obvious symptom, the flashy thing demanding attention. When she commented again, it was on the speed, and shouldn’t they slow it down? She’d somehow managed to miss that distinctive crackling sound his lungs made upon inspiration.

She’d said she normally worked Urgent Care facilities, not places that saw much active emergency. She wasn’t ready for this, so out of her depth it was almost laughable. When he spoke to Backeljauw, he’d suggest she be shifted to the non-emergency cases.

“I want a CT, head and chest. Image and circulation.” He directed his team. “And a blood panel. At least one lung has been damaged. I want a D-dimer.”

“For clotting?” she asked.

“Go back to the station and wait.” He grabbed his comm to suggest to Imaging that they hurry the hell up, but as she stood, looking confused, added for her benefit, “I don’t have time to hold your hand through this. Neither does he.”

CHAPTER THREE

STICKING AROUND TO defend herself or make excuses would’ve taken valuable time away from the patient, so Belle did as McKeag growled at her, slipped quietly out of the room and found her way back to the nurses’ station.

Her central nervous system couldn’t decide how to react to that whole humiliating set-down. Her face alternated between burning at a temperature best measured in Kelvin and the stormfront of an approaching Ice Age any time she relived the joy of the actual rebuke, and the number of eyes on her, the team working as she failed her first patient.

Still, with the hospital in the throes of a large-scale emergency, standing there, observing the bustle and scurrying about without helping somehow could be nothing short of dereliction of duty.

She wasn’t a doctor. She wasn’t trained for this type of medicine or level of emergency straight out of the gate and had truly only offered her best educated guess when prompted, but it still felt the same when an expert—a peer—immediately found her lacking. Even one she knew to be unpleasant in other circumstances already.

Something about it had felt like a teaching moment, but, in retrospect, she could see it had been a test. An unfair test, the kind of test only a real jerk would lob at a new colleague in the first five minutes on the floor, but still a test she’d failed.

It wasn’t just pride that never wanted to fail a patient. Not everyone went into medicine for the right reasons, but Belle had. Her main role models had been Dad and Nanna, a city cop and a former Army nurse. Belle wanted to help people, it was a core tenet of her personality. Seeing the nurses who’d taken care of not only her dad as he’d lingered in the days between when the bullets had wrecked his insides and when he’d actually died, but also the fourteen-year-old girls who couldn’t leave his side, had solidified that need to help into a calling.

And she was just standing around, while other people helped eased suffering.

If this was just how things went in a large, metropolitan emergency department, she had to either get out now and make this a one-day affair or find that steel Sabetta core and a way to help.

Like a gift from a higher power, the woman they’d initially followed passed by the nurses’ station, a light at the end of the tunnel. Belle stood and gave chase. She’d directed McKeag earlier; she’d have ideas on where Belle could be of use.

“Doctor?” Belle called.

The woman spun to face her as if she’d been expecting her call.

“Ysabelle?” Her smile and the soft southern cadence of her speech seemed to project sunshine from her pretty, freckled face and blazingly blue eyes.

For a moment, Belle even stopped mentally cursing McKeag to a lifetime of stubbing his right pinky toe any time he tried to go shoeless and enjoy the simple pleasure of the earth beneath his feet. This doctor was the exact opposite to McKeag’s surly presence—someone Belle could identify with.

“I’m Dr. Angel Conley, and we’re going to be working together today.” She offered a hand. “Do you prefer to be called Ysabelle or Sabetta? You can call me Angel.”

“Belle,” she managed to get out, then shook the offered hand. “Dr. McKeag wanted me to wait, but—”

“Yeah, Lyons is—Well, he doesn’t work and play well with others.” Angel added, “But I’m sure we can make the request for you to stay with him if you want. Between you and me? I’d rather shadow an angry mule than Lyons when he’s on a tear. Which is nearly always.”

The gentle teasing confidence gave a little shot of hope to counter the increasingly awful rot in her chest.

Belle squeezed Angel’s hand, needing exactly that connection in that moment—she’d have hugged this stranger if she could’ve—it seemed the only thing to go in her favor since she’d arrived in New York. But still. “I’m not sure he should receive all the blame here. I apparently went the entirely wrong direction with the patient.”

“We all have our specialties, and I’m sure we’ll find yours,” Angel said, gesturing for her to follow. “I’m a pediatric emergency specialist. Kids are my specialty, but I still need the help of trauma surgeons in unfortunate instances. Or cardiac specialists. We have a network. But we’ll talk more about this later. How are you with stitching?”

“I’m good at stitching,” Belle said and, with just the simple act of reminding herself that she did have strengths, amended, “I’m actually very good at stitching. If I had my education to do over again, I’d probably become a surgeon. I’m good with my hands.”

And with patients, she reminded herself. She’d become a nurse because she needed to take care of people, and she was good at connecting. She made mistakes, and she didn’t know everything, but she cared and connected, she tried. And would keep trying.

“Perfect. We have a heavy load today because of a subway derailment, which you probably heard, but not all the injuries are critical. Most of them are much more minor. Cuts. Sprains. Broken bones.”

Even with the little mental pep talk, she must’ve looked off still because Angel stepped closer, her voice lowering. “I know what it’s like to be new and feel disconnected from everyone. Don’t let Lyons scare you off. He’s—” She paused, obviously searching for some polite way to describe the arrogant doctor. “Christmas is hard for him. There are extenuating circumstances. Just take whatever he says with a grain of salt, and if you have trouble with anything, come see me. Do you have your comm yet?”

Christmas was hard for him. Even among the other things Angel said, that was what stood out.

The words resonated in Belle’s head, bouncing off her guilt centers and disrupting her presently cursing him to a month of upper lip and tongue burns from the morning’s first over-eager sip of too-hot coffee. It took effort to focus on the other important things Angel had said.

“I’m supposed to get it this afternoon. They said I wouldn’t need it since I’d be shadowing today,” Belle said, ceasing her ever ineffective but frequently cathartic cursing because it’d been useless at soothing her ruffled feathers.

Christmas was hard for him. Hard enough to affect his behavior. It hurt him.

He lashed out because he was suffering.

“Right. Well, you’re shadowing me. I’m just going to be in and out with a couple other patients while you stitch. But if you need anything, come to me. Really. I’ve almost been here a year, but I’ve pretty much sorted out the people to see to get things done. I also know all the best places to hide if you need a minute to practice a completely silent, faux primal scream because they might sedate you if you actually let your feelings out.”

“My locker.” Belle wanted to laugh at the image of her screaming soundlessly into some cabinet because she was stressing out, but facing Lyons again was right there in the front of her mind, taking the humor out of living. “My locker is stuck. The emergency call came, and McKeag tossed my things into his locker so we could get down here. It’d be really nice to have it working for tomorrow.”

It wouldn’t save her facing him this evening to get her stuff back, but it would allow her to start tomorrow with some distance.

“I can do that. What’s the number?”

A moment later, Angel was on her comm, walking off in the other direction, and Belle had a folder in hand, and slipped into the room of a man with a large leg gash to stitch.

“Hi, my name is Ysabelle Sabetta and I’m a nurse practitioner. I’m going to help you get that gash sorted out,” she said to the man sitting with his trouser leg ripped open and a bloody wad of gauze keeping it from bleeding too much. After confirming his identity, she got started.

“Please numb it.” Mr. Axler said three words to her, and then laid back on the table. No comments on her qualifications or ability to do the job, no doubts.

In that way, outside the jerky way he’d gone about it, McKeag had a point. People accepted you’d be able to help them when you came in wearing scrubs. They deserved that confidence.

Washing up, she gloved, got supplies—some of which had been laid out for her by nursing staff—and moved over to get a look at what was going on with the patient’s leg.

Christmas was hard for McKeag. It was still there in her head, behind her duties to her patient, but still there.

She didn’t want it.

She gingerly lifted the bloody gauze to see beneath, causing her patient to draw a sharp, pained breath. It hurt; she knew it hurt.

“I’m sorry. I know it’s hard, but I need you to be still for this. I’ll be as gentle as I can to make it as easy as possible, but it’ll go quicker and cleaner if you lock that leg in place as best you can.”

That was part of her job, even if it wasn’t technically codified in rules of conduct—to make the painful things easier for those who were suffering.

Christmas was hard for McKeag. She’d seen that. Anyone could see that. But hearing Angel put it into words—now she couldn’t hold his behavior against him. Couldn’t curse him to a lifetime of mushy pasta or underwear that snuck into uncomfortable arrangements at inopportune moments.

Before Angel, he’d just been someone who hated the holiday, now he was someone struggling with it.

An important difference. If she’d had any distance, she should’ve seen that on her own. Nanna had said it to her and Noelle so many times, it was practically a family mantra, even if it’d started out as a way to explain to two hurt little girls why their mother had left them.

Words said to make them understand it wasn’t their fault, because they didn’t remember her.

People who hurt others needed extra kindness to get better.

Their mother’s life had been too hard and her family too bad for her to know how to be a mother. Nanna made sure they understood Mama had become someone who didn’t really know how to love. That it was a tragedy she’d given up before all the love they and Dad had to give could transform her into the person she was always meant to be.

People who hurt others needed extra kindness.

Mama had been too far gone for quick fixes, and even now Belle couldn’t bring herself to consider looking for her. She wasn’t steady enough on her feet to take on that kind of damage. Besides, it felt like a betrayal to Noelle, who couldn’t make that choice anymore.

Was McKeag too far gone too?

The gash on her patient’s leg was deep but flayed open with remarkable precision. It barely grazed the muscle beneath; the only part that needed stitching was the cleanly sliced skin that now stood open.

She had a patient. This patient. The one with a wound she knew she could stitch.

She pulled a light down to see into the wound better, selecting one with a magnifying window so she could be certain the wound was cleaned out before she began stitching it.

Maybe the person who had included McKeag in that gift thing had been trying to be kind to him. Not a bad idea, but the execution was problematic. A gift exchange forced him to do something in exchange for his gift, which wasn’t what someone reticent to participate in the season needed.

She picked out a couple of little pieces of glass with tweezers. “I want to flush this with saline, Mr. Axler, to make sure it’s clean before I stitch it. I’m going to go ahead and numb it, so it’s easier on you when I work a towel underneath your leg.”

“Whatever you think. Just want to go through this once.”

“The shot will be the most painful part. A few quick sticks, and I apologize. I’ll make them as quickly as I can,” she said, prepping the needle and scoping out locations to numb.

“Were you by yourself on the subway this morning?” Distraction was a useful technique for dealing with pain, and she’d use anything to save patients from pain.

“I was on my way to work.”

She injected twice during his answer, his words only pausing or faltering a second for each injection.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Have kids?”

“Two.”

She finished the last injection and stood up to look down at him. “Injections over, should be feeling better any second. Boys? Girls?”

“One of each,” he said a little more easily, his voice letting her know it was working. Not only did talking help by distracting, but it provided a connection that soothed fear.

She found a couple of towels in a cabinet, got them under his leg and had flushed the wound to her satisfaction by the time Angel came in.

“How’s it going?”

“There was a little glass in the wound, but it’s clean now. I’m about to stitch it up.”

“Great. I’ll go to my next patient and pop back over when I’m done.”

“Is this your first day?” Mr. Axler asked.

“It’s my first day at this facility, but I’ve been doing this for several years now,” Belle answered, smiling at him. “I was an RN before I went back to school. Even if I look like a kid.”

“You do look young.” He chuckled but relaxed back.

She kept him talking as she worked. How did he meet his wife? How old were their children? Was she coming to pick him up at the hospital after this?

It worked. It usually did, and by the time she had him stitched and bandaged, that horrible anxiety from earlier had stopped chewing up her insides.

She met Angel back at the monitoring station, where another nurse walked her through the hospital’s patient system, so the file could be updated. Then they were off to another patient.

The morning continued this way, interspersed with patients and thoughts of McKeag. What had happened to him? Was he grieving too? Or trying not to grieve, like her?

By the time lunch rolled around, the worst of the influx had been handled and Angel returned to seeing strictly children with Belle shadowing.

Being busy always kept her from dwelling too much on the stuff she didn’t need to dwell on. This morning’s failure. Her reasons for coming to New York. The way Christmas now had a mood more suited to Halloween, but instead of ghosts and goblins, it was Christmas trees with teeth and murderous tinsel.

Getting around the department meant she also saw McKeag growling at three other people before the day was up. Which helped shore up her resolve. It also helped negate her earlier estimation of his attractiveness. She might see and understand that he was wounded, and she might want to help him, but it did take the shine off his good looks and make his jaw seem less chiseled, more brutish.

He needed someone to be kind to him, maybe even more than she needed someone to be kind to, to give gifts to this Christmas in New York when she should’ve been buying for her twin.

Because she did need it and wanted to give to someone who might be a colleague for years to come. Someone she might be able to see change.

Whatever the true definition of the twelve days of Christmas, she’d learned last year that the lead-up to the holiday was the hardest to get through.

There were twelve more days left before Christmas Day. He might not be working that whole time, and she certainly wouldn’t be, but it had a kind of symmetry to it that appealed to her, even if she only managed to get him a few secret gifts before he took holiday.

She’d give to him, her stand-in Noelle, an act her family would’ve been proud of. After work and on weekends, she’d visit the quintessential New York Christmas sites to get the pictures she’d need to write to Noelle about, another unnecessary, yet wholly necessary, act.

That was how she’d survive Christmas this year. This second year alone had to be better than the first had been; she couldn’t do that again.

* * *

At the end of her shift, as soon as she could safely see to the handling of her last patient, Belle made her way back to the locker room.

Lyons, which she’d decided to think of him now in an effort to separate him from the feelings she had about McKeag, would be irritated if she made him wait for her.

Even with her new plan of action, the idea of facing him made her nerves tangle.

He’d still been with a patient when she’d exited Emergency so she could have time to test her locker door to be sure it had been fixed before he arrived.

Now all she had to do was get her things from Lyons and try to establish a new tone for their conversation, because his reformation couldn’t hinge entirely on gifts—he needed kind human interaction too. A friend. Or at least someone he had a less contentious relationship with than he seemed to have with all their colleagues. Earlier, she’d been nervous, which could’ve only come across as weakness. He was not a man who appreciated weakness, no question. She hoped that meant he’d be the kind of man who appreciated people trying to better themselves.

She didn’t have to go to medical school to learn more of what she might expect in a busy, big city emergency department and be better prepared. This wasn’t the same as an Urgent Care, and maybe her skills had gotten rusty in those gentle positions.

If she could inspire that in him, maybe it would trickle out to his interactions with everyone else and he’d stop yelling so much and make the department easier for everyone. Even if he wasn’t in charge, he still seemed to see everyone as an underling who continuously disappointed him.

Noelle would’ve told her to be bold, to confront him and tell him that she wouldn’t be pushed around. Noelle had always been the brave one, never afraid of confrontation. The first year she’d been a pilot, she’d had to suffer fools daily who hadn’t thought a woman could safely handle an airplane.

Belle was the introverted twin—which confused her really. The whole nature-or-nurture debate went nuclear when it came to the two of them, people who shared the same DNA and were raised in exactly the same way, but who were closer to two opposite halves of one complete person than identical twins.

Had been.

She was doing it again, dwelling on a subject that always stripped away shreds of her composure until she was a raw mass of emotional hamburger.

The door to the locker room squeaked, and she cleared her throat and swallowed down the unwelcome surge of grief, turning in time to see Lyons rounding the bank of lockers in the middle—in much the same fashion as he’d done this morning in HR: as if it never occurred to him that someone could be in his way. Or wouldn’t move once they saw him.

“Here you are.” His accent was a little more present, she noticed immediately. His words less clipped. Perhaps he’d shouted himself out? Or perhaps it was just her impression of him, and how she was trying to change it.

“You were still with a patient, and I wanted to come up and make certain Maintenance had unstuck my locker.” She crooked a thumb toward the now repaired thing. “So, you won’t have to deal with the clutter of extra clothing tomorrow. Thank you for the loan of your space today.”

He stopped and stared as soon as he saw her face, his brows slamming down above those icy eyes. No words came, he just scowled while searching her face.

Her lashes were damp, she realized. Must’ve not stopped the tears in time to keep him from seeing the piece her memories had freshly ripped out. She’d thought she’d gotten control of herself in time, but even with her tanned skin, her eyebrows and nose had a tendency to go red, even before the actual tears gathered. That was probably the tell.

What surprised her was how long he took deciding what to do, or maybe think, about it.

She willed him not to ask, and, although she had to draw the last ounce of today’s strength reserves, lifted her chin and held his gaze, daring him to bring it up.

It was only a second, and he didn’t so much back down as decide to move on. He opened his locker and began fishing out her belongings. “It was no trouble.”

She didn’t actually snort. At least on the outside.

“I suppose it was less trouble than I was otherwise.” She took the still-packaged scrubs and the tote bag her clothing had been stashed in and began sorting it out for her ride home. Before he answered, she added, “About that, I don’t know if I’ll see that exact situation again, but I’d like to prepare myself better for it. For all this. I was wondering if you had suggestions on texts to read.”

He pulled his top off, leaving the white tee shirt beneath it, and dropped the worn shirt onto the bench in front of his locker. Unfortunately, a snug cotton shirt only made his impressive torso more impressive. The material clung; she could mark the shape of each muscle across the top of his back and shoulders. “Any texts on emergency treatment. Field treatment texts are actually a good start. The Army has a good one available.”

He shook out a nice dress shirt, pulled it on and began buttoning it up.

It was weird to stand there talking while he changed, and she refused to—unlike he-of-the-impressive-shoulders, she didn’t have a tee shirt beneath her scrub top and having him see her in her bra once was plenty.

Without the scrubs, it was easier to see him as Lyons, not Dr. McKeag. It also made her earlier attempts to convince herself he wasn’t really attractive completely ridiculous. He was handsome, but his face was also interesting. A study in angles, juxtaposed with a generous, soft mouth. Noelle could’ve had a field day drawing him—because being a brave warrior for women’s rights hadn’t been enough, her sister had also been able to work magic with a pencil.

The burning returned.

She had to get out of there. Stay on task. This was supposed to be about improving his impression of her and doing whatever she needed to become better equipped at dealing with her new duties, not having an emotional breakdown. She dug her fingers into the side of her thigh to give focus, and asked, “Earlier, what did I miss?”

“His lungs, the crackling in his breath sounds. You were dazzled by the heart,” he answered immediately, finished buttoning his shirt, then turned more fully toward her. “The heart rate was a symptom of pulmonary contusion. They found an embolism that formed where the bruise had nearly collapsed it. So, he had both.”

Yeah, pulmonary contusion, she hadn’t ever seen that, but she couldn’t find fault with his critique. She had been dazzled by the excessively fast heart rate and blinded by her own idea of what internal bleeding would look like.

“Do you know how he’s doing?”

“He is in ICU, still unconscious.”

He’d kept up with the status of a patient who was no longer under his care. That was the sign she’d been hoping for—he was in the profession to help people. Whatever his unpleasant exterior—his demeanor and words—there was goodness there somewhere. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

“His head trauma?”

“That’s the reason he’s still unconscious.” He looked in his locker for a moment, took out a pair of trousers, then hung them on the corner of the locker door, apparently waiting until their conversation was over to finish changing. Bless him. She didn’t need to see more of his impressive parts.

“Diagnosis?”

“Diffuse brain injury,” Lyons answered, and still his voice remained even, almost gentle. This wasn’t just her reframing their interaction; he was more at ease now. “I don’t expect him to wake. He’s on steroids in the hopes of shrinking the swelling, but he’s also vented. We’ll know more in the next couple of days.”

She seemed to have done what she’d planned, now she should get out. The sooner she left, the sooner he could dress and leave, and the sooner she could return and commence Operation: Secret Santa.

“I’m glad he had you,” she said finally, swinging her coat on and hoisting the tote bag to her shoulder to go.

“Sabetta?”

She’d reached the bank of lockers when she heard her name and turned to look back at him. He still had that stoic, measuring manner, but with his arms uncrossed he didn’t look as forbidding. He looked almost open. And even with the strange scrubs-and-button-down-shirt combination, she could tell he could devastate half the female population by putting on a suit.

“If you have questions about diagnoses, you may ask them of me. Use the comm.”

She felt herself smile before she knew it was coming. “Thank you. I will. And I’ll go home and start reading. I don’t have anything on the schedule tonight in terms of sightseeing.”

“Sightseeing?”

Was he actually being polite? Even if the subject was hard, a glimpse of civility gave her hope.

“I’m taking pictures of Christmas in New York to send to my sister.”

“Not going home for the holidays?”

“No.” She shook her head, falling back into the usual way she spoke of Noelle—the only way that let her keep any control over her emotions: by using the present tense. “We usually go somewhere for Christmas, no other family. But not this year.”

“Perhaps next year.” Polite, but the words he’d said in kindness stuck in her chest. There would be no next year. No looking forward to things Noelle would never do. The trips they’d never take. The children she’d never have.

The polite thing for her to do would be to ask if he was going home for the holidays, but her throat had clogged with the boulders of everything that could never be and filled with the sands of regret and grief, feelings she always tried to keep shoved down. It would’ve also been polite to say goodnight now, but no sound could pass through the whole world blocking her dry throat.

All she could do, all she had been doing for more than a year, was try and put it out of her mind until later.

Besides, she had tasks to accomplish. Tonight, she’d start simple, visit the boutique coffee shop near the hospital’s gift shop for a gift card, and pray it fit through the vents on the front of his locker.

Then she’d have the weekend to come up with other gifts she could shove through the narrow openings.