Chapter One #3
“Connor,” she repeated, testing the sound of it on her tongue. “I’m Emma.”
“I know who ye are.” He just stared at the hand she’d extended until she dropped it back to her side.
“Something tells me I don’t want to know how you know that.” Rubbing her temples, she squeezed her eyes shut again. “However, maybe you can tell me how I get back to my side of things?” She gestured at her body in the bed.
“I canna help ye there. Sorry.”
She tilted a look at him, then slowly nodded. “Ahhh. Of course you can’t. Because everybody knows you never really solve problems in dreams.”
This revelation seemed to both relieve and excite her. She paced around the small room. The dream explanation was all too common among these mortals, who rarely accepted their fate when the time came. Sometimes, it took weeks. Denial was powerful. Connor folded his arms.
“I mean…” she continued, “in dreams, you just go round and round until you finally figure it out by some kind of…magical realization what the whole point is of seeing yourself lying in that bed looking like… that . I mean, maybe I’ve been working too hard lately or…
it’s like that awful one where I’ve overslept for a college exam and I’ve actually forgotten to go to class for the whole semester?
Or…or maybe it was that Law of Attraction podcast I listened to that messed my sleep up for months last year coming back to bite me again, considering”—she waved a finger at him—“you. Here. Looking…like that. Hot, actually.” She blushed a little.
“See? That’s something I would never say in real life.
Alas, you’re not real. In dreams nothing gets resolved and then you wake up. Voilà!”
Amused, or oddly flattered, he narrowed a look at her.
“Yes. So, I’m going to wake up now. Goodbye, cute Scottish dream guy. Connor. Nothing personal.” She bowed slightly at the waist to him before she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to wake up. She spent a good thirty seconds at it.
But when she opened her eyes, nothing had changed.
“Wake up, Emma,” she told herself, slapping her cheek. Then again, harder. “Wake up.” Out of one eye, she peeked to see Connor still staring, his jaw cocked.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just more like a nightmare.”
“You dinna recall the accident?” Connor reminded. “Wi’ your automobile?”
Emma frowned at him. “That was part of this dream. I think.”
“I’m sorry t’ say ’tis no dream, Emma.”
“Okay, just stop it now. I’m just gonna—” She paced around from the foot of the bed, climbing down atop herself to align herself precisely with her body.
“It’s probably just logistical.” Squeezing her eyes shut, she winced with the effort to make something happen, but of course, nothing did.
Nothing at all. The monitors attached to her body kept right on beeping, albeit at a more erratic pace. But not a finger or an eyelash moved.
He folded his arms, leaning back against the wall. “Go on, then.”
She lifted her head, scanning her still comatose body. “When I want something, I…I make it happen.”
Absently, he glanced at his wrist again. The dial read -5 percent. Och. This is going in the wrong direction.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking up at him. “Am I keeping you from something important?”
“Matter of fact,” he mumbled but didn’t finish the thought aloud.
She sent him an offended look just as the nurse whose name tag read Katrina spun through the room, checking the IV and beeping machines beside her body.
“There you go,” Katrina soothed. “That’ll make you more comfortable now.”
“No! I’m not comfortable at all!” Emma practically shouted, sitting up.
“I’m right here! I just need to wake up.
Can you help me? I’m dreaming. I can’t seem to…
” Waving her hand at the nurse, it passed right through the other woman without notice.
Emma shook her hand. “Oh. This is bad.” Sitting up, she scooted off the edge of the bed. “Very bad.”
“They canna see us. Either of us,” he told her.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay, just for argument’s sake, let’s say you’re right. I’m not dreaming and I’m in this…this in-between but you’re… not . So, what are you ? Some kind of”—she swallowed thickly—“ghost?”
He shook his head, restraining a laugh.
Eyeing his clothes, she ventured, “Time traveler?”
He frowned with a look down at his apparel.
“ Angel? ”
He gave her a pistol-point with his index finger. “Guardian, more accurately.”
Again, she narrowed a look at him, apparently gauging his veracity. “ My guardian, I suppose you’re going to tell me?”
“Technicality,” he said, gritting his teeth. “It’s a temporary assignment.”
“Oh. I see. Well. To be perfectly honest, I…don’t really believe in any of that stuff. Angels—sorry, guardians . Crop circles and all that.”
“Is that right?”
“Uh-huh. Or ghosts even. My gran did, but she was a little…you know.” She whirled a finger around her temple. “I believe that nonsense is just people trying to justify—”
“Their complicated existence?”
“Yes. No. Trying to…I don’t know…hope. That’s all.”
“Hope, is it?” he said. “And ye don’t? Hope?”
Glancing about the room, she replied, “Is that a trick question?”
“The Scots say: Were it not for hope the heart would break .”
“My heart,” she pointed out, “is none of your business.”
“And you not believin’ what’s happenin’ does make this whole situation a bit of a dilemma for ye now, does it not?”
“Maybe.” She moved around the room, trailing a finger along the surfaces of the machines, though, again, not exactly touching them. “Anyway, I can’t quite recall how it all—the accident… How it—”
“Happened? That’s irrelevant, isn’t it, at this point?”
“ Irrelevant? ”
“Aye. ’Tis of no matter now how but where ye go from here.”
“Maybe to you it’s irrelevant. But it’s not to me. I mean, look at me. I’m…I’m invisible . How did that accident happen? Why, for heaven’s sake? I’m a good driver. The best driver.”
“I meant irrelevant in the sense that the crash happened. Now you’re here. With me. In the in-between. See how that works?” He didn’t mean to mock her exactly. But speaking to Violet brought out the worst in him.
She considered him. “You’re a bit cranky as guardian angels go, aren’t you? I mean, in the traditional sense.”
He cocked his jaw. “I’m only here to facilitate.”
“Okay, I’ll play along. Facilitate what, exactly? My…death?”
“Most likely.”
“Wait…” She stopped with a puzzled look. “Wait. In my dream, I saw you before, didn’t I? Back on the road? In the dark. You called me by some other name.”
Slowly, he unfolded his arms, scowling at her.
“What was it again? Velvet? Veronica?”
He ground his teeth together.
“No. Violet. That was it. You called me Violet. Didn’t you?”
“No.” He couldn’t meet her eye now. “Maybe. That’s no’ important.”
“I think perhaps it is. Maybe that’s the key to my dream. Who is this Violet person?”
“Nobody.”
“Hmmm.” She eyed him for a full ten seconds before she walked closer to him, coming practically under his nose. She gave a sniff as if she were testing out his scent, scanning the full length of him from the ground up until her gaze landed on his face.
He felt the rake of her gaze rush through him like the heat of a flame.
“I thought angels couldn’t lie.”
“And I thought you didn’t believe in angels.”
Emma tapped her steepled fingertips together thoughtfully. “Show me your wings.”
A bark of laughter escaped him. “What? Why?”
“To prove to me you are who you say you are. You could be anyone. You could be—” She pointed downward. “Why should I trust you? I mean, how do I know you’re here in my best interests?”
Connor glanced around the ICU, where medical personnel flitted in and out of the sliding glass-doored rooms past desperately ill patients, most of whom had their own stoic guardians posted nearby, a mixture of males and females.
The constant sounds of the place were like the thrum of a hundred high-pitched drums, all disjointed and struggling.
Even Emma James’s heart. “If I do show you, then what?”
“Then”—she swallowed thickly—“I-I don’t know.”
“Then, you’ll stop arguin’ wi’ me?”
“Maybe.”
He was much taller than she was. He loomed over her until she was forced, by his mere will, to take a step back, bumping into the bed before rounding it to the other side.
She lifted her chin in direct defiance of his most practiced intimidating look.
Whatever resolves this unpleasant reunion in the quickest way possible.
What compelled him, no doubt, was pride. Ego, even. Because he’d never shown his wings to any mortal before. But she wasn’t mortal, was she? Not exactly. So, in one effortless movement, he unfolded and stretched his wings.