Forged: The World of Nightwalkers (6 page)

“No. Please don’t.”

There must have been something in the tremble of her
voice that struck him. Or maybe it was another moment of that suddenly rare lucidity. Whatever it was, he looked up into her eyes and read the fear and conflict there and it made him do her bidding. He stopped, releasing his hold on her shirt and moving his hand to the neutral territory of the sheet beside her shoulder.

“Are ye teasing me, lass?”

“Not intentionally,” she said meekly. “The kiss wasn’t my idea.”

He seemed to think about that a moment, then with a scoff of breath he rolled off her. “Go!” he commanded her. “And doona come back until you’re ready tae do something about this!” He grabbed his erection in his hand, running his fist down the length of it. “You’re far too bonny tae resist. Remember that before you come tae tease me again!”

Katrina scrambled for her freedom, falling to the floor from the bed then struggling up to her feet. She hastened from the bedroom with all speed.

She needed to do something. She couldn’t just leave him in there to fester with fever and then die. Any medical professional past or present and worth their degree would know this.

Decision made, she grabbed up her car keys and ventured out into the storm. The storm was already brutal and this was an absolute act of suicide. She knew that it was. But desperate times called for desperate measures. Luckily, the nearest doctor was only a mile and a half down the mountain. Equally lucky was that the storm was obliterating daylight.

Kat was bundled up tight to protect herself, but still it was bitter cold when she stumbled out of her car and banged on the doctor’s door. Michael Sloan opened the door with a harsh yank and looked at her as though she’d lost her ever-lovin’ mind. Which, she figured, she obviously had.

“Urinary tract infection!” she said by way of greeting. “I’m sorry, but I’m dying and I had no choice. They said the storm was going to last days …”

“No, I understand,” the man said, ushering her in. Dr. Sloan was in his late forties, but looked incredibly good for his age. So handsome, in fact, that he was thought of
as quite a catch by the busybodies in their small town who were forever endeavoring to marry him off. They had focused on Kat more than once as a prospective bride for the single doctor, but she had managed to dodge their efforts thus far. She had squelched them every time as best she could. God knew the last thing she needed was the complication of a man in her life.

She might have found the present irony in that funny if she weren’t so bent on her task of the moment.

“I know all the signs, and the pain is tremendous,” she said, fisting her hand against her innocent bladder and doing the wee-wee dance for effect. “I need some Cipro.”

“Cipro? Don’t you think that’s a bit strong for—?”

“Trust me, it’s a bad infection,” she cut him off hastily.

He stood there and seemed to brood about it for a moment. “Of course I trust you,” he said then. “Of all my self-diagnosing patients, at least I can rest assured you know what you’re talking about.”

“None of your self-diagnosing patients were a physician’s assistant.”

“True,” he said with a chuckle. “Let’s do a urinalysis and I can get you the Cipro.”

“Dr. Sloan.” She cast a meaningful look outside. “I barely made it down here. With my shy bladder a urinary test could take forever. Please, I have to get back.”

“Right! Of course.” He hurried back to the rear of his house. There was no pharmacy in town, so he kept his own supply of medications on hand. He filled a bottle with the required pills and she paid for them hastily. “I’ll just note your chart and we won’t tell anyone we skipped a few steps. After all, it’s an antibiotic, not an opiate.”

“That’s right,” she said with a smile. “I better go!”

“You better be careful. You should never have—”

“I know! See you, Doc!”

As she skidded on the steep slope from the doctor’s porch to her car she muttered a constant litany of “This is crazy. This is crazy. This is
so
crazy!” And even a little of “You could have told him. You just had to open your mouth and say, ‘Hey. There’s this guy at my house who can turn to stone, right? Oh, and he’s wounded and probably going to die of infection. But before that happens he’s probably going to …’ ”

She couldn’t leap to the word “rape.” He had done nothing to make her think for a minute he was the raping sort. He was just … lusty. Yes, that was a good word for it. He was full of lust. Fevered lust. As if all his barriers and filters had evaporated and this was who he would be if all the clutter and nonsense of life were cleaned away. He was something of a throwback. As though he’d dropped in on her from a different time.

Oh great. Not enough for you that he’s made of stone half the time, you have to make him a time traveler, too? You’ve been reading far too many trashy romance novels, Kat! After all, a real woman wouldn’t just accept half the shit that goes on in those novels
.

She stopped and thought about that for a moment, applying it to her present circumstances.
Well, shoot
. Could she help it if she’d seen crazier shit in an ER than a man who could turn to stone? After all, it was rather a benign thing overall …

Katrina shivered her way into her car and, throwing the truck into four-wheel drive, began the treacherous trip back up the mountain. She was inching along, grateful that the snow had shifted from driving pellets of snow and ice to a thick blanketing fall of soft, fat, white flakes. It made it easier for her to see, although she couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her because it was, after all, still a heavy snowfall.

The thickened snow also provided a little more traction,
which she desperately needed. At the midpoint to her house she was so tight with tension from creeping up the deadly mountain road that her neck, her arms, and her entire back were hurting. She shrugged her shoulders, trying to work it out, trying to alleviate the pain of it, even though she barely noticed it on a conscious level because all her attention was focused forward.

And at some point she stopped worrying about getting home and started worrying that a man’s life might hang in the balance and she was the only means of swaying the odds in his favor. It was a weighty responsibility, one she realized she was glad to take on. If not, why would she ever have taken part in this madness? She could only suppose that instinctively she knew there was something good about him, something worth saving, worth risking her own life for. Then again, she probably would have done the same for even the lowest of men … only she would have made sure to call in the cavalry.

Kat didn’t even release a sigh of relief when she turned into her drive. The drive to her house was long and even more treacherous than the roads. The drive was dirt and gravel, which could make for good traction … unless it was drenched wet and then frozen. Then it was nothing but ice at an incline. Right then it was a mixture of both. The tires slipped and spun in places, the drive dropping off into a gully on the right side and threatening to skid her right off into it. But eventually she reached the final curve to the house, pulled right into the garage, and then came the well-earned sigh of relief. She didn’t spend more than a moment at it before she was out of the car and bursting into the house.

Karma was on her like white on rice the next instant. The dog whined and threw her big body into Katrina as if she’d been gone a year. She’d been trained not to jump
up only because that kind of love from that big of a dog would most likely kill Katrina. But that didn’t keep Karma from body bumping her like a maniacal kid in the bumper cars.

“Yes, yes. Hello, hello,” she said, giving the dog a hasty pet or two before plowing past her and heading for her bedroom. She didn’t even bother taking off her coat. She fished the Cipro out of her pocket and headed for the master bath to fetch a glass of water.

When she entered the bedroom she once again found the bed emptied of her patient and he was nowhere in sight.

“Damn it to hell and back!” she growled. God only knew what shape he was in and where he was in her house. And so help her, if he went about bleeding on something else she’d kill him herself!

Thumping the antibiotics onto the bedside she then shimmied out of her coat as she marched through the house in search of him.

“He can’t have gone far,” she said aloud as she stalked through the rooms of the ground floor.

And sure enough, she found him out cold on the kitchen floor, right in front of her refrigerator. Apparently fever had not ruined his appetite and he had come in search of something to eat. There were jars of things like pickles and olives on the floor near him, all of which seemed to be empty. She found herself praying he didn’t throw up later. That wasn’t going to be a pretty experience for either of them.

Anyway, in the here and now she had an unconscious behemoth lying on the floor and she had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to get him up and back in the bed … preferably without his usual groping and fondling and kissing.

Katrina tried to keep from acknowledging the warm,
gooey heat that swirled around inside her as she remembered the kissing and fondling with no small amount of craving for more. A craving that she quickly stomped down inside herself. She had enough to worry about without tripping off into fantasyland. He was a stranger.
A stranger
. There was nothing about any of this that should engender trust in him, never mind the comfort level she required before considering becoming intimate with him. And she didn’t
want
to become intimate with him. Not him or anybody, but especially not him. The guy was a Neanderthal for Pete’s sake. He kept pawing at her and trying to … to screw her ever chance he got. And it was very clear he was an old hand at tumbling “wench”-like persons.

With a sigh, Katrina went back to the bedroom. She took the opportunity to change out the soiled bedding, shoving it all immediately into the washer and dumping a hefty amount of bleach in the dispenser. It might damage the quilt, but so would blood. She had to take her chances.

As for herself, she had showered and changed her clothing before heading to Dr. Sloan’s, but she had been covered in blood herself at one point. So much for universal precautions. If he had blood-borne anything, she would definitely be exposed. She suddenly felt a twinge of fear. What if that strange stonelike condition were catching?

She shook that off. Partly because she simply couldn’t deal with the idea. She began another debate in her head, weary already from so much thinking, realizing she was tired because by then she would have already been tucked into bed. It was this nearly panicked rapid thinking that she had happily left behind when she’d left her life as a PA in Manhattan General Hospital. It was this kind of stress that had caused her to lose her hair, develop an ulcer, and gestate a major case of anxiety,
her whole existence about being on edge for the next thing that walked through the door … even when she wasn’t working.

Who would have thought she’d be dragging this kind of stress through her own front door years later, ulcer healed, anxiety at bay, and hair, thankfully, regrown. But she wasn’t interested in reverting to her previous state so she needed to relieve herself of this potentially high stress environment as quickly as possible. But … what if it
were
catching? Oh God! She’d potentially exposed Dr. Sloan to it!

“Okay, don’t panic. Don’t panic,” she muttered to herself rapidly.
He’s snowed in along with everyone else. No one is going to come into contact with him
. The odds of anyone else being as stupid and reckless as she had been by driving down the mountain were extremely nonexistent.

She hoped.

She tried not to think about it as she stripped out of her wet, snow-saturated jeans and wriggled into her favorite pair of heather-blue sweatpants. The house had warmed considerably in her absence, what with the fire and all, so she traded her sweater for a T-shirt that said
NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY!
on it. It always made her smile for some reason. True, she’d never had the guts to wear it in public, her conscience paining her that some small child somewhere might be able to read it and repeat it. But she loved the idea of it. The idea of being brave enough and bold enough to don it in the first place.

But it was not even a blip on her self-conscious radar as she hurried into the kitchen and kneeled beside her own personal feverish giant. She touched his skin and, as expected, he was burning up. Actually, she needn’t have touched his skin at all. He was radiating heat like a furnace and she could feel it all against the front of her body.

Before doing anything else, she carefully capped and moved the empty jars around him to the kitchen counter. “Oh man!” she whined. “You ate all my pepperoncini!” How the hell does someone eat a whole jar of the fiery pickled peppers? They were a favorite of hers, but in small doses. She knew the jar had been nearly full because she’d just opened it two nights earlier, eating a small pile of peppers with her pizza. “Hey, does this mean you picked a peck of pickled peppers?” she joked to her unconscious patient, snickering through her nose as she lightened her mood a little.