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Soon, she expected, the other three watching would drift off somewhere more entertaining. Any second now.
He gestured for her to follow. “Get me in screen. You’re just awful at being a cameraman, love.”
That was teasing. It sounded like teasing. Not real criticism.
He put his gloves back on and gestured again for her to follow him into the plaza. Was she supposed to film him walking?
While not paying attention to his backside. Oh, Jeez, Jenna did not need a long screengrab of that man’s behind while he walked. This needed to be PG, even if her mind had sunk to the depths of at least PG-13 at that precise moment.
Jerking the screen up and off him, she panned it over the crowd and toward the tree as they walked. Let Jenna get a feel of what it was like to walk into the plaza. That was the experience. Not McKeag’s butt.
He glanced back at her, then, seeing that she was not filming him, fell back until he was in step with her. “You’re quiet.”
“I’m in awe of the majesty of—” your behind “—the crowd.” She sighed. “I’m trying to keep it level and not be all super shaky.”
“No stabilizer?”
“I have no idea. It’s a new phone. It should do all the things.”
To his credit, he didn’t laugh at her ineptitude. His smile was potent enough, especially when his hand moved to the small of her back and steered her to the left around some people she would’ve totally seen before running into while futzing with the phone. “She says the cookie place is on the far side of the plaza.”
“If it takes cookies, I’ll buy a dozen.”
If someone could shout an exclamation point with their eyes, Angel attempted it—eyes so wide they might pop clean out of the socket. She jabbed him in the arm with her elbow, so he didn’t miss it, and shook her head. Finger over the microphone, she whispered, “Kids take that kind of thing literally. You can’t say you’ll buy a dozen, she’ll expect a dozen and she needs some actual nutrition, not just empty calories.”
His adulting skills were also lacking in the child-bribing department. Which somehow made him more attractive.
“Yes, ma’am.” He all but saluted, then turned the camera to him, discreetly moving her fingertip off the microphone. “Lass, you know you can’t eat a dozen cookies and nothing else, right? I’m just prone to extravagance, my mum used to say. But I think your mum would whack me with the IV pole if I tried to give you a dozen cookies. So, it’s two. Any others that may come back to the hospital must be shared.”
She crossed her eyes and shook her head. “There is a two-cookie limit on what will be allowed onto the floor. If you bring a box, all the children—even the ones who can’t eat right now—are going to want a cookie and we haven’t cleared that with Dietary. This has to be a secret. Secret cookies come in small numbers.”
She puffed, then realized it probably sounded like hurricane force winds with her face so close to the camera and switched to reading comments again.
The administrator was watching.
Crap.
“Um, we’re...yes, ordered to only bring two.”
Back to their tree quest.
He led through the crowd, and she tried to pretend that the gentle steering wasn’t nice. It was kind of chauvinistic, really. That was exactly what she’d think if she saw some other woman being led around like that, but somehow he made it feel comforting. Probably nothing to do with him; it was a side effect of the ball of nerves in her chest every time she ventured into a proper New York crowd. That many people, packed so close? It was just plain scary. Riding the subway had made her break out in a cold sweat the first couple of times she’d tried it.
The presence of anyone she knew would’ve felt comforting. Safe. It wasn’t anything to do with him.
When they reached the denser crowds, he took her hand instead and cut through the sea of bodies until they were in the crush, three bodies back from the railing that kept the tree safe from the public. That was worse. Even with his fancy gloves, her hand in his wiped all thoughts from her head. All she could do was catalog sensations. All the tingling. The parts of her that trembled and heated. Insanity.
“Look up.” His voice was in her ear. She tilted her head back to look up at the tree, and he steered her arm, tilting the camera back.
They’d arrived just in time. The MC began to speak, and she missed every single word the man said. All she could do was stare up at the tree, focus on keeping it steady and try really hard to ignore the feel of him behind her. The crowds of New York were something she could never hope to get used to; they literally pressed so tightly together that the crowd seemed to move like one organism—which meant everyone directly beside her was touching her. So why was it that she only really felt him at her back? His heat. His solidity. The fan of his breath on her neck...
Someone flipped a switch and the tree blazed to life, thousands of lights instantly glowing.
It towered over the plaza and glittered as if covered by the wealth of the Rockefeller family. As if someone had opened some vault of jewels and strung the sparkling strands from bough to bough, spiraling upward to a crystal star that wiped out pretty much every thought she’d had before coming down.
So far gone from the strands of threadbare tinsel of her childhood trees. No hulking fire hazards of multicolored lights. No icicles dripping from everywhere because icicles were cheap and covered a multitude of tree imperfections. Icicles, it was well known, could kill your pets while making your Christmas tree seem full and high class. Not true, at least on one count. She hoped not many people lost pets to icicles.
No icicles here, not as she’d known them—though there did seem to be some crystal, icicle-like ornaments among the perfect, colored glass balls.
Did her family still celebrate the holidays? Maybe they’d only ever tried for her. It had been the one time of year she could count on receiving a gift, and only learned as a teenager that most of those gifts had been stolen. For her. For them. She didn’t know anymore.
“Ready?” he asked, breaking through the cold fog that rolled over her any time she thought about her estranged family.
“For what?” She looked over her shoulder, but he was already sliding between her and the next nearest body, so he stood more to the front and she could get part of him in frame with the tree.
“This is a stately Northern Porcupine Cone Tree. It was brought to this country approximately three hundred years ago by immigrants from the land of...”
Porcupine Cone? Was that a tree? No way. Three hundred years?
She felt her brows coming down even before he smiled extra bright at her.
He did not have the information.
“I don’t remember where they came from, but it was very far away.” He gestured up and down, denoting the height, and she finally caught on that he’d changed his accent. He now sounded like a remarkably proper BBC documentary narrator. “This magnificent beast of a Christmas tree is approximately seven hundred feet tall. The Rockefeller family employs twelve brigades of elves—one for each of the days of Christmas—both to make the lights and ornaments and put them onto the tree in the dead of night when the rest of the world is sleeping.”
She should stop this, shouldn’t she? Her smile said she wanted to hear more of this silliness, but he was lying to the kids and they would believe him. Well, might believe him.
But it was kind of amusing? To her, at least.
“Unfortunately, this year there was a terrible scandal in the Elf Union as Old Man Winter outsourced the production of the ornaments to South Pole elves, paying them significantly lower wages than the North Pole Union allows. And thus began the much misunderstood War on Christmas.”
CHAPTER THREE (#u19305b5f-b9e4-59ee-8769-31ad286e0369)
THE REMAINDER OF the ceremony continued in much the same manner—Wolfe narrating in the most outlandish and ridiculous fashion, which made the comments on the stream go berserk, and more and more people tune in to what was supposed to be a temporary, barely viewed feed on Angel’s account.
Now she couldn’t erase it. Now, although she barely used the thing, each view pressed on her like the weight of a stare. Increased traffic could only lead to increased scrutiny. Increased exposure and danger.
“You might’ve become an internet celebrity, in my small circle of friends and followers,” she murmured as she eyed the three-digit number of people following their—well, his—antics.
“Ah, fame. Such a burden. Next thing you know, women will be throwing themselves at me.” The ceremony had ended a few minutes ago, but he was obviously still on.
She flipped the phone case shut and walked with him back out of the plaza, because walking was the only way in which she could keep up with the man. It was both satisfying and horrifying to know how quick-witted he was. Satisfying because he was a surgeon, he took care of children in extremely critical situations, so him being bright was a good thing, but horrifying because she was a doctor too, she should be able to be as effortlessly witty as he was. Instead, she couldn’t work the phone, and she couldn’t come up with anything outlandish to say about the tree or the holiday.
“Dr. McKeag...”
“Angel, please, call me Wolfe. We’re friends now, right? Or at least we’re peers who aren’t mortal enemies. Call me Wolfe. I’d hate to think that you didn’t enjoy the evening half as much as I did, and I truly didn’t expect to enjoy it so much.”
Call him Wolfe, as if that made any of this easier. It was a step out onto a rickety bridge over rushing flood waters.
He paused at 49th, where they’d exited the cab earlier, and looked at her, the cookies in one hand and the caddy of hot drinks in the other. “You turned the phone off, right?”
She showed him the closed case, then dropped it into her coat pocket. “Listen, Mr. Alberts was on the feed, so it did go further than I’d hoped.”
“Was he?” He handed her the cookies to free his hand to hail a cab, leaving her begrudgingly grateful for his remembering, and saving her asking.
“He was.” She tucked the small bag of snickerdoodles into her other pocket and cleared her throat. “And about one hundred and thirty-several people I barely know.”
He deserved to know the number, even if it was unlikely to trip him up the way it did her.
“You sound worried.”
How much should she admit to? It was unlikely this would snowball into Spencer coming out of the woodwork again to warn Alberts this time. She wasn’t even social media friends with him, or anyone else from her epic three-day job, but putting herself out there at all felt like running into a bear’s den.
“No, lass,” he said, probably because she took so long to answer, slipping into an even more familiar way to address her, a way he usually reserved for patients. Until a rascally light sparked in his eyes, and he followed up with, “I don’t feel slightly guilty for this evening. If you feel guilty, I’m going to have to assume you’ve been having untoward thoughts about me and all the things you’d like to do to me in the back of this cab.”
As he spoke—the velvety rumble of his voice, the way he leaned ever so slightly closer—her cheeks flamed brighter and brighter, and there went her ability to think again.
A taxi pulled up to the curb beside her, but still not a single danged word popped into her head. At least, nothing above a second-grade denial. Nuh-uh!
He took her scarlet silence with a grin, opened the door and gestured for her. “I’ll let you do the delivering to the hospital without me. I don’t think my manly virtue could be sustained if I climbed into this darkened leather interior with you now, Dr. Angel.”
He was teasing. She knew he was teasing. Sort of. Probably. She still couldn’t think of anything to say back to him, just climbed into the seat and held out her hands for the drinks.
When he’d placed the warm cardboard carrier in her hands, she found her tongue, or at least some semblance of the grace she wished she could display under pressure, and said, “Thank you for accompanying me this evening, Wolfe.” Oops. Said his name, and it took a couple of stumbling stutters to finish. “I... I... I’m sure the stream was more interesting to Jenna—and everyone else—because you were narrating it. It no doubt brightened her evening far more than it would’ve had she not sort of tricked you into coming with me.”
He kept hold of the door with one hand and leaned down to speak through it. “I could’ve found a way out of it, you know. I did give myself an out—early bedtime—should I be having no fun at all. But I was. You’re a much better cameraman than you give yourself credit for, Angel.”
Before she could say anything else, he ducked in, kissed her cheek in a vigorously platonic but sweet way, which still made her body turn into a human sparkler, and closed the door.
“Which hospital, Dr. Angel?” the driver asked from the front, having heard every word along with her complete inability to keep up with the dashing Scotsman.
“Sutcliffe,” she answered, then settled back, balancing the drink caddy between her knees and pulling the phone out again to check the views.
Could people keep watching the video now that it wasn’t live anymore?
When she opened the case, all the color she’d built up from Wolfe’s teasing drained right away. Closing it hadn’t shut it off. It always shut it off. Always. Always, always, always. But not today.
Jenna was still listening, and she’d filled up the comments with several lines of kiss marks and hearts.
If she’d just fallen off the Empire State Building, it still wouldn’t have been further or faster than the plummeting in her middle. Thank goodness she’d not had time to eat before the outing, nothing to throw up.
She didn’t look at the video, or the state of it, just manually turned the blasted thing off and closed the case again. Just pretend those hearts were Jenna’s way of showing appreciation for an entertaining evening. That’s all. She was blowing kisses of gratitude and affection.
Not Jenna’s way of commenting that she, and countless others, had heard Wolfe’s suggestion Angel was about to maul him in the back seat of a taxi.
* * *
By the time she arrived at the hospital, Angel had miraculously accepted Wolfe’s teasing, but although she wanted to think of it as flirting, the more likely reason was that he was bored, and he’d noticed she was tongue-tied around him.
And the unconcealable starry eyes she tended to have. Her ability to crush in a secretive manner had never really progressed beyond the age where you automatically hated the person you liked the most. So, around ten. She was a ten-year-old trapped in the body of a grown woman, and how ridiculous was that?
The sooner she got to Atlanta, the better. This place was hell on her self-esteem and her nerves. That was the problem. She worried about fitting in, then worried about being found lacking, then about the looming threat of public humiliation she’d spent a lifetime trying to outrun. It would come if she stayed. Just a matter of time. Catastrophe. Could still happen in Atlanta, at least if she got dumb again and overshared with someone, but that was something she could control. Here? Nope.
She stepped off the elevator on Jenna’s floor and made a beeline to her room. It was late enough that the kid should be sleeping, not waiting up for treats, but at least she could find out whether dinner had happened, and that would ease one worry standing between her and sleeping tonight.
She knocked on the right door and a moment later, before she could even reach for the knob, it swung open and Mrs. Lindsey, eyes glittering and smile too broad to be anything but alarming, invited her in.
“Dr. Conley! We were hoping you’d arrive soon.” She relieved Angel of the cup caddy, making her immediately glad she’d bought four cups instead of one. Mr. Lindsey was also there, as well as little Mattie.
“Did you all just get here from the lighting?” Angel eased the bag of cookies from her pocket. Should’ve bought more than the two cookies she’d argued for—there was a four-year-old boy there too.
“Did you get the cinnamon sticks?” Jenna asked, holding out her hands eagerly enough that her mother stopped everything to set her up with the drink, then did the same with her littlest playing on the floor in the corner.
“We came as soon as they lit the tree, so we could start decorating,” Mrs. Lindsey explained. “If Jenna has to be here for any length of time, we’re going to make it nicer.”
Angel looked around and noticed a few little touches of Christmas that now graced the simple buttery yellow walls. A tangle of twinkle lights and faux pine boughs wrapped around the television. There was also an old-fashioned Santa embroidered on a small blanket draped over the recliner placed in every room for the loved ones who stayed with the littles. Small touches, but heartfelt. Meaningful.
Suddenly, her nerve-inducing, awkward contribution felt completely worth it. Felt like a gift for her as well.
“That’s a lovely idea.” Angel watched Mr. Lindsey get a sprig of plastic mistletoe to suspend from an empty little hook on the railing upon which the privacy curtain hung. Then promptly snagged his wife by the hand and kissed her cheek.
“If you hang it there, you get to move it around and then it can be anywhere around the bed for everyone to get kisses.” There was a wistful quality to Jenna’s smile that suggested a boy on her mind, but it passed quickly. “Snickerdoodles?”
Angel didn’t comment on the mistletoe or the kisses—that might remind everyone of Wolfe’s teasing and she appreciated the small amount of sanity she’d managed to hold on to this evening. Instead, she jiggled the bag and handed the oversized cookies to Mrs. Lindsey to make necessary decisions about distribution.
“When Jenna told us you and Dr. McKeag were going to film the lighting for her, we had no idea how remarkably silly he was. I’m kind of glad I didn’t know that before the surgery, I might’ve thought him unfit for treating my daughter, but he’s both a skilled surgeon and an absolute, charming delight.”
And another woman in the world fell victim to the charm of Wolfe McKeag.
Which really should comfort her. If anything, he was used to women being dazzled by his eyes, his mouth, his dark, curling hair, that accent, the butt, which she now couldn’t forget, and which was still prompting her to think about his other parts. Parts she’d long ago sworn not to think about.
“He’s probably the best surgeon on staff,” Angel agreed, because, nope, she was unwilling to admit he was charming. Or a delight. Or whatever Mrs. Lindsey had called him. “I really need to get home. I used up my ability to stay awake past my bedtime during residency. Now I sleep just as often as I can and relish my eight hours.”
“Thank you for the treats and the recording,” Jenna said from around her cookie. “I ate half of my soup—it was okay. This is better.”
“Tomorrow you’re going to eat more, right?” Angel prompted but smiled just the same. “And don’t tell Dr. Wolfe, but I had fun with him there, even if I briefly wanted to strangle you for making him go with me. He was...”
“Funny,” Jenna filled in for her, and Angel nodded.
“He was funny.”
“And cute,” Jenna added.
“I’m glad you think so.” Angel deflected that one. She buttoned her coat back up and reached out to squeeze Jenna’s hand. “Glad you enjoyed the rare Christmas Porcupine Cone Tree.”
They all laughed then.
Just as Angel made it to the door, she heard Jenna call, “You should marry him. Then you won’t leave New York and you can stay here to help take care of me.”
