Mount Mercy

I ducked under a cop’s upraised arm, turned sideways to slip between two nurses and slammed against the biker’s gurney. My hands wrapped around the doctor’s hands on the handle of the knife and I pushed down just as he pulled up. “STOP!” I yelled.

And the doctor stopped.

Everything stopped.

I stood there panting with relief, staring down at the knife. The hands under my fingers were huge and tanned. God, and so warm. The ER is a freezing, drafty barn of a room, but he throbbed with heat.

My gaze tracked slowly up his arms. They were... wrong. Surgeons, we’re quick and deft with long fingers like pianists. Doctors might carry a little more muscle from all that heaving patients onto gurneys but this guy looked more like a Marine. His forearms were as thick around as my thigh and chiseled with muscle, tanned to a light caramel and dusted with glossy black hair. But what really made me stare were the tattoos. The tail of what looked like a serpent began just above his elbow and went upwards, looping and twisting. The black ink gleamed as the design stretched over the curve of his bicep... and then his blue scrubs cut off my view.

As I looked up, I had to twist awkwardly to face him. There was a gossamer touch as the little hairs on his arm brushed my elbow and then our forearms were bumping up together, the warm solid bulk of him pressing against my cool skin.

I swallowed and lifted my chin. He was big: his chest filled my vision, glorious slabs of hard muscle that pushed out the front of his blue scrub top, the scoop neck just low enough to catch a glimpse of tan flesh.

I lifted my chin even more. He was tall, too. I was eye-level with his pecs. My lips were just the right height to kiss his nipples.

I flushed and craned my head right back.

And I was captured.

His eyes were like the sky, but not a sky you’d see over Colorado or Texas or anywhere in America. They were chips of the sky in some other land, an ancient sky that hung low, clinging to dark rocks with its mists, bathing the landscape with its tears. They were breathtakingly beautiful... and sad. Just for a second, they were the saddest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

But just for a second. I’d caught him off guard, but he put that right immediately. His back straightened, his lips pressed together and those eyes turned bright and diamond-hard, like the sky itself had frozen. The feeling was totally different. Before, I’d been captured. Now I was pinned.

He had high, almost graceful cheekbones that made me think of somewhere cold, but his skin had been warmed to a deep tan. A hard jaw with just a dusting of careless, I don’t give a fuck stubble. That jaw would have made him look too brutal if it hadn’t been set off by a gloriously full, soft lower lip that pouted out, arrogant and knowing. I learned soon that no matter where you tried to look on that face, you’d always be drawn back to those eyes and that lip. He was dangerously good looking and he dripped with confidence. If the doctors in the ER were lions, this guy was the leader of the pride. I didn’t recognize him: was he new?

His dark brows arced down just a little as he studied me. I could feel his gaze on every freckle, every loose strand of copper hair that had spilled out beneath my surgical cap. I could feel it on the line of my jaw and on my lips. It set off a lashing, twisting streamer of energy inside me that connected straight to my core and made me crush my thighs together.

The corners of his mouth rose lazily up.

A cocky smile.

An oh, it’s on smile.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked. The fuck wasn’t aggressive. It was amused. Intrigued. Which made no sense, I’ve never intrigued anyone.

I nearly said Amy but I was suddenly aware of the nurses, the other doctors, the whole rest of the ER. How long had we been staring at each other? Two seconds? Seven hours? “Beckett,” I said. “Surgery.”

“Beckett.” His accent was like brutally hard, rain soaked rock, each surface turning silver as lightning lit it up. Musical and violent. My name was transformed into a two-syllable slap, intimate and playful. I felt my cheeks flare. “I’ve put a tube into his lung to re-inflate it, but the knife has to come out,” he told me.

For a split-second, I thought: what knife?

Then I looked down at our hands, my fingers still wrapped over his on the knife’s handle like we were the betrothed at some ancient wedding ceremony. Appropriate: his accent sounded old. Not old man. Old country. And then I got it. Irish. And not the soft lilt of the south. This was darkly sexy, untamed, a rumble that resonated right down my body. Northern Irish.