Page 43 of Calling All Angels
“And you have personal experience with twenty-first century surgeons, do you?”
“Ye forget, their thoughts are no’ private from me. As a guardian, I’ve taken my share of them. They are only human, with all the frailties that come with the title.”
“Right,” she said, forcing away the sadness that had just descended on her. “Grey’s Anatomyis proof of that.”
“Grey’s what?”
Emma rubbed her temples, leaning against Connor’s strong shoulder. “I’m feeling a little nauseous right now. Can we get out of here, please?”
His hand stroked her arm with an unexpected gentleness, one that made her want to lean into him for comfort. “You go, lass. I’ll stay here a bit and keep an eye.”
Keep an eye?
The icy fear that had been hovering beneath her skin since the accident surfaced again. Did he know something she didn’t know? The nausea at the back of her throat was the very thing she’d steadfastly refused to look at or completely acknowledge. She stood on some precipice, somewhere between living and not living. The real pain was behind her. Death, per se, was not what she feared. It was the leaving behind. That’s what she feared. All the people she loved. All the things she’d left undone. All the bravery she’d never mustered. The hope she’d relinquished time and time again that her life could be everything she’d wanted it to be. Now perhaps those choices were out of her hands. Perhaps they’d already been made for her and this…this in-between place was simply to allow her to get used to the idea.
But it was more than that. It was this moment in time with Connor, to know him, to help him, maybe, in letting go of…her? It was what he wanted. It seemed the least she could do for him, considering she’d clearly not learned the lessons she’d been sent here for.
But even separating herself from him now, walking down the hospital corridor without him, she felt exposed. Alone. Bereft without him at her side. That couldn’t be good.
Her feelings for him had taken a shift somewhere between showing her his wings and catching Nathan in his arms. For all his gruff bitterness toward Violet, there was another part of him that was equally gentle and kind. The way he looked at her, cared for her. Kissed her.
“Dinna think I haven’t imagined this every day for centuries. Dinna think I haven’t wanted to taste ye again. And now I have.”
Even now, she felt those words cut her. She’d wanted him to kiss her. Wanted to taste him, too. To feel what his Violet must have felt in his arms. Had he imagined that kiss all these years? Had it lived up to his memories? She supposed not since he hadn’t kissed her again. Either way this went, he would go his way and she would go hers. But what if that kind of thinking was exactly what she regretted most about her life? What if chances were simply out there in the universe, waiting for us to take them?
Emma shook her head as she passed people in the hallway. But seriously, how screwed up did the universe have to be to send her soul mate to her as an angel?
Aubrey and Jacob were in the waiting room. Aubrey was pacing around the chairs.
It was obvious she was upset. At first, Emma thought it was because of her surgery. But Jacob walked up beside her. “You can’t blame yourself,” he told Aubrey. “There’s nothing you could have done to change things,” he said, pulling her up against him. “I’m glad it wasn’t you. I don’t know what I’d do if it had been you.”
Emma moved nearer, confused by this.
“I’m younger than her,” Aubrey argued. “Maybe I would have fared better in the accident. I mean, Emma’s almost middle-aged.”
“Hey! I’m only thirty-three!” Emma protested. But what was Aubrey talking about? What should she have known? Why on earth would she want to trade places?
“Don’t do that to yourself,” Jacob told her. “We just have to figure out who it was that hit Emma and how they knew she—or you—would be on that road that night.”
“It’s the ‘why’ I don’t get. Why would anyone want to hurt either of us? What were they looking for?”
“I don’t want to sound nuts,” Jacob said, “but the only thing that seems to be missing in all this is your necklace.”
“That’s… No.” She shook her head. “I told you. My mom gave it to me as a little good-luck charm right before she…before she and my dad went missing. I didn’t even get it in the mail until after we heard about their disappearance. That necklace was only special to me. No one else could possibly want it. Certainly no one would try to kill me for it. It’s probably just somewhere out in the field where the accident happened. Emma did flip the car twice. It could have landed anywhere.”
Emma squeezed her eyes shut as fleeting snippets of memory of that night suddenly crashed through her: the grassy ditch careening toward her in the cone of her headlights; the rain-slicked blacktop; the washing-machine spin cycle she’d found herself in; and, most importantly, a shadowy figure leaning over her through her car window, tugging at her clothes.
Emma spun wide-eyed to find Connor walking toward her.
“What?” he asked her with a frown.
“I remember.”
*
As Emma relayedher memories of how the accident happened, Connor glanced down at the dial on his wrist: +22 percent. Now they were getting somewhere. If luck was with him, he’d get out of this assignment with Emma unscathed and move on to what he was supposed to be doing. Forget that the feelings she was stirring in him had no place to go. Or his very un-Celestial impulse to pull her against him, touch her. and protect her from whatever pain she was about to encounter, be that a continuation of her life or…her death.
“That other car kept bumping mine from behind. I was so scared,” Emma said, shaken by the memory. “Maybe he wanted me to pull over, but there was zero chance of that happening. But then—”
