Page 109 of Black Heart

He took her off guard when he chuckled. It was deep and sexy as hell.

Mental. Patient, Ashlyn reminded herself before she did something stupid like drool over him.

The well-timed ding of the elevator was truly appreciated as it gave her the excuse that she needed to get away from this man and get her mind back on her work. When the elevator doors opened, she sighed heavily. Looked like she’d found the psych ward, after all.

“Hold her down!” a nurse ordered just as her new BFF stormed past her.

“Get yer fucking hands off her!” he roared, noticeably startling the orderlies charged with holding the pretty brunette down while a nurse struggled to shove a very large needle in the woman’s arm.

The two large EMTs and the police officer with pepper hair helping to hold down the woman looked up as he headed for them. It was more than obvious that her new BFF’s presence wasn’t a welcome sight and as she followed behind him, once again holding her stun gun, she contemplated the benefits of taking him down for them.

“Mind your business!” the officer snapped, securing his hold around the struggling woman that honestly was hard to listen to without feeling her heart break. The woman’s pain was almost palpable and Ashlyn would have given anything at that moment to turn around and walk out of here, but the man she’d been trying to talk to for the past week was here and this couldn’t wait any longer.

“Get yer fucking hands off her!” he snapped, grabbing the two orderlies holding the woman’s legs down by the backs of their necks and tossing them away from her like they didn’t weigh anything. That alone had Ashlyn pulling her stun gun out of her bag and setting the voltage to high, because really, there was just no way that the two EMTs, a cop, and a nurse were going to be able to overpower this man.

Without a word, he reached down and plucked the needle out of the nurse’s hand and tossed it aside, his gaze locked on the sobbing woman. When the younger EMT moved to grab him, her new BFF simply shoved him away, knocking him clear across the room.

“Denny?” an older woman that she hadn’t noticed until then said, sounding calm which was probably a good thing right now since the last thing that this situation needed was a hysterical woman.

“Macha?” her new BFF said soothingly only to frown a few seconds later when the woman didn’t respond. Then, with a sigh and a self-deprecating shake of his head, he said, “Marty? Lass? He’s fine.”

The older EMT released his hold on the woman and looked like he was going to take his chances wrestling with the psych patient when the sobbing woman suddenly opened her eyes.

“Are you sure?” Marty asked, looking up at the psych patient with such hope that Ashlyn seriously considered tasering the bastard on principle alone for screwing with this poor woman’s head.

He smiled fondly down at her. “Aye, he’s fine, still an asshole, but he’s fine.”

The woman’s expression crumbled as her expression turned from heartbroken to relieved. She reached for the psych patient and wrapped her arms around him. He simply held her as she sobbed quietly against his shoulder and Ashlyn took that as her cue to move on. This wasn’t her drama, so she really didn’t need to be here, Ashley decided as she moved to turn around only to realize there was no one manning the nurse’s station. With a shrug, she faced the very confused-looking group. She decided to ignore the ones that were unconscious since they probably wouldn’t be much help anyway and focused on the ones watching her new BFF warily.

“Does anyone know where I can find Detective Black? I was told that he was here.”

* * *

“How did this happen?”Liam demanded as he paced the waiting room. He stormed forward, disappeared only to reappear on the other side of the room, doing that over and over again.

“The curse,” Finn said as Shayne carefully shifted Marty in his arms while she slept.

The poor thing had pretty much collapsed into exhaustion once the surgeon came out and explained that it had been touch and go, but that Tristan had pulled through and was being transported to the ICU. Shayne had tried to transport them both to Tristan’s room but he’d discovered that his ability to move around by jumping from place to place was gone.

He was once again human and he had no idea how in the hell that happened. The only thing that he’d been able to come up with was the curse, which seemed to still affect him. He still saw ghosts. They saw him and irritated the shit out of him. The only thing that changed was that he was human, all of his memories were intact and the woman sitting across from him, texting like a woman possessed, seriously pissed him off. There was good reason for that, Shayne thought bitterly as he narrowed his eyes on her and glared.

She was his fucking soulmate.

After all these years, here she was pissing him off and reminding him why he hated being human. If he’d still been in his true form, he could have given her the swat on the ass that she rightly deserved and popped out of the room, never giving her another thought. That’s not how this was going to work out apparently.

The curse had plans and they involved the two of them now. How did he know this? Well, that was really quite simple. He was the only dumb bastard out of his brothers who’d been turned back to human. His brothers were still in their true forms, Tristan was still alive, hooked up to machines, but still very much alive and hopefully out of the curse’s reach.

He ran his eyes over her, wondering how exactly he’d been paired with this woman when she clearly wasn’t his type. He liked long, beautiful blonde hair, soft brown eyes, pouty lips and a slender body. What he got instead was a woman with a very short haircut, shorter than his, about a half-dozen piercings in her ears, tattoos on her neck and arms and God only knew where else and a body with an athletic build. Her style also grated, nothing truly feminine about her clothes. She wore a black tee-shirt that showed off, of all things, a pierced belly button, jeans that rode a little too low and a pair of black combat boots.

Fate was truly a fucked-up son of a bitch.

“Keep staring,” she said flatly without looking up from her phone. “I love it, really.”

Yup, truly fucked up.

“You want to hand her over?” Denny asked, stopping in front of him and tossing the ice pack that he’d been pressing against his face aside so that he could glare down at Shayne.

“No.”

---