“This has to end,” she told Keir.
“You know what to do,” he said. “One little announcement and this all goes away.”
For the first time since he’d offered to marry her, it didn’t seem like such a terrible idea. Not for her sake, she quickly told herself, but to end the hysteria. As she mulled it over, she let Keir fit a motorcycle helmet on her head, and then she climbed onto his bike behind him.
It was like coming home.
Chapter 19
Keir sat in the waiting room of Campbeltown’s small hospital, beside an unusually subdued Mairi, and worried over her silence. She was obviously thinking, which boded ill for everyone around her—especially him.
Throughout the waiting room, the rest of the fake boyfriends sat wherever they could find space. With the exception of Darius, every single one of the guys had a phone, iPad or laptop in their hands. For some reason, Keir wanted to take away their toys and make them do something more productive with their time. It was almost as though they’d activated his dormant parental gene, and he had to wonder when he’d stopped looking at them as rivals and started looking at them as clueless kids. Hell, these men were nobody’s kids; half of them were older than Keir. Still, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he had to sort them out.
A smiling, middle-aged nurse came out of the emergency room, scanned the waiting crowd and made a beeline for Mairi. “So you’re the famous bachelorette.”
“Not because I want to be,” Mairi grumbled. “What’s happening with Jonas?”
The woman’s face softened, making her seem years younger. “He’s fine. The damage was minimal.” She looked at Keir. “Mainly because you got to him quickly, but also because he was fully dressed under his Care Bear suit.”
“Wookiee,” Sebastian said. “He was a Wookiee.”
The nurse shook her head in bewilderment. “Anyway, he was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved cotton shirt. That’s what saved him from getting badly burned. Although the costume was made of plastic fibers, he had a layer of natural material underneath, which protected him.”
“So, he doesn’t have any burns?” Mairi asked.
But Keir knew better. He’d seen burns victims before. He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against him. For some strange reason, the fake boyfriends smiled at him, instead of looking daggers at him for touching their woman. If he lived to be a hundred, he would never figure those guys out.
“No,” the nurse said. “He has burns. They just aren’t as bad as they could have been. He’ll be in pain, and we need to keep him cool and hydrated while he heals, so we’re moving him to the burns unit in Glasgow.”
“Oh.” Another tear ran down Mairi’s cheek. “Can we see him?”
“Sure.” The nurse looked around the room. “Let’s keep it to a couple of people at a time, though.”
Mairi and Keir stood, and so did Sebastian. His face fell when he saw Keir was going in with Mairi.
“Three’s okay, right?” Keir asked the nurse.
She smiled. “Three is fine.”
“Come on,” Keir said to Sebastian. “Let’s go see how the idiot is doing.”
“The idiot has two PhDs and made several million dollars last year from a piece of software he designed,” Sebastian said.
“Seriously?” Keir said. “And he wants to marry Mairi?”
She smacked him in the stomach, but stayed under his arm, as they went through the door to visit Jonas. When Keir saw him, he almost took a step back. His face hadn’t suffered any burns, unlike his body. But that wasn’t what made Keir do a double take. Jonas the Wookiee looked like he’d fallen out of a GQ photo spread and straight into Campbeltown hospital. The guy would have given Brad Pitt a run for his money any day of the week. And this was hidden under a Wookiee suit? Keir really didn’t understand these guys.
“Jonas,” Mairi said as she rushed to his side.
For the first time since this boyfriend situation started, Keir felt a genuine pang of worry. Jonas had everything—looks, intellect, money. How was a guy supposed to compete with that?
“He’s really shy,” Sebastian said softly from Keir’s side. “Don’t growl at him. He doesn’t need the extra stress, and he hasn’t got his Wookiee head to hide under.”
That was when Keir’s shoulders relaxed, because even with everything Jonas had, he was still a guy with problems—just like the rest of them.
Keir watched as Mairi brushed Jonas’ blond hair from his forehead with one hand and clung to his hand with the other.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” she said.