Accidentally Catty (33 page)

“The collar?” Nina asked. “What collar?” She gritted her teeth. Knowing Nina, even if only for a short time, Katie knew her patience had to be running out, but then she hissed again. “Wait, he’ll die if he turns again? Do you mean Shaw? Please, please, please, Dr. Green! Slow down. Damn, I can’t make out what he’s saying anymore. His head’s a fucking mess of shit I can’t make out.”

Daniel began to shift in the bed, his grip turning to steel when he clamped Nina’s hand and sat upright. His eyes popped open, wide and unblinking, looking directly at them. His vacant stare penetrated everything and nothing. Alarms began to sound, piercing Katie’s sensitive ears.

“Shoot,” Darnell whispered fierce and low. “Those nurses are gonna be in here lickety-split, ladies. We gotta blow!” With a flash of his hand, Darnell blew the window open, but Katie ignored it and continued to cling to Daniel’s hand.

“Please!” she pleaded, her professionalism and better judgment for Daniel Green’s condition lost to the fear she smelled on him. He knew something, and if they could just make sense of it, maybe they could fix this mess. “How is Shaw in danger, Dr. Green?”

“Katie!” Nina hissed. “We gotta get outta here. Move it, blondie!”

Just a second more and maybe she’d have something else. “Just give me a second!” she cried, refusing to let go of Daniel’s weathered hand.

“I said
now, Katie
!” Then Nina was there, grabbing her around the waist with hands of steel and lifting her off the bed to jettison out through the window like some kind of paranormal football player, heading for the goal post.

Katie fought a scream on the way down to the parking lot, closing her eyes and putting her fists against them. They landed with a jarring slap of Nina’s feet to the ground. Nina set her down hard and Katie had to grab blindly at the air around her to steady herself.

Nina grabbed her up by the lapels of her jacket, her face an angry mask, her fangs out and shiny in the glow of the parkinglot lights. She gave Katie a hard jerk. “Listen, Bun in the Oven Barbie, didn’t I fucking tell you if shit started to go down, we were out? Could you be any more selfish? Did you forget Wanda and me are in the shitter with the cops in this backward-ass town, you moron? Not to mention, that’s one jacked-up senior in there who shouldn’t be riled up. Even I, hardcore bitch that I am, am sensitive to that. I know you wanna help your man, and all that bullshit, but don’t be so fucking free with my goddamned freedom and that old man’s health, lady!” She gave Katie a hard shove, sending her backward and making her fight to keep her feet under her.

Horror and shame washed over her in waves of red-hot embarrassment. Nina was right. Nothing had mattered but helping Shaw. Not Daniel’s dire medical state. Not the fact that Nina and Darnell could have been so much toast. Nothing. Her hands went to her face in embarrassment. Then she hurled herself at Nina, throwing her arms around her neck and hugging her tight just because Katie knew she hated it. “Nina, I’m so sorry. I got so caught up in—”

“Like our fair Nina doesn’t know what it’s like to be selfishly caught up in a moment,” someone chided, someone
British
. “So what’re we gonna do tonight, Pinky?” Shaw asked, looking down at her with amusement.

Katie whirled around to find Shaw, still weary around his eyes, but upright and mobile, minus three paws. “What the hell are you doing here?” Her hands instantly went to his face, checking for warmth, running her thumbs along his bruised cheeks to assure herself he was all right. “You should be in bed asleep.”

“Yeah. So should you. But look at us.” He spread his arms wide with a grin. “Not asleep.”

Nina didn’t bother to address Shaw’s poke at her with a rebuttal. If Nina wasn’t snarking, surely that meant her anger had reached a level none of them would wish to experience. “I’m going to let the doc tell you what Daniel Green told me because right now I want to bleed her dry. That poor man’s head was in such a jumbled mess of panic, I could barely understand most of it, but I did get some info we didn’t have before. Now take your woman away from me before I choke her medical degree the fuck out of her,” Nina snarled with a flick of her wrist, stalking off to weave between cars.

Katie gave Shaw a sheepish glance, jamming her hands into her pockets. “She’s
very
angry with me right now. Tonight when I say my prayers, I’m going to thank whoever’s in charge for giving Nina the gift of restraint. I blew it and almost got us all caught.”

Shaw pulled her into his arms, warm, safe, strong and gave her a shake. “Troublemaker,” he muttered against her hair.

She breathed him in, the warm, clean scent of him comforting her. “But not a dead or jailed one. There’s that to be grateful for.”

Shaw set her from him in a loose grip and gave her a look of question. His eyes sparked embers of fiery anger. “Why the hell would you do something like this on your own, Katie?You’re pregnant. Do you have any idea the million and two things that could have happened to you?”

“I wasn’t on my own,” she said defensively. “I had Nina and Darnell . . .”

“I wouldn’t leave Nina to look after my pet rock, Katie, let alone the woman who’s carrying my child,” he chided, a hint of anger in his tone, so rare coming from the quick-to-make-a-joke Shaw. It sounded off all sorts of alarms in her head.

She scuffed her feet in guilt. “Oh, I dunno. I would. Have you seen her with the mob and Teeny? She might lead you to believe she’s a bloodthirsty thug, but in all actuality, she’s a gooey marshmallow of four-legged, denture-soaking senior love.”

Clearly, from the simmering blue gaze he gave her, he wasn’t amused. “You could have been killed, Katie. What if Nina had fallen?”

His protectiveness, the possessiveness in his voice left her all warm inside, but she couldn’t let him see that. It would leave her open to her weakness for him. “Siberia would have called and asked me to keep the screaming down?”

He let go of her and ran an aggravated hand through his dark hair, his lips curling inward. “Not funny.”

“Do you mean it’s inappropriate to crack wise when a serious event has just occurred?” She rolled her eyes at him and made a face.

“Fine. I concede I’m the first to make a joke.You win, but, Jesus Christ, Katie. When I made Wanda, who’s the worst liar in the world, by the way, tell me where you were and drive me here—”

“Wanda’s here?”

Shaw pointed to the third row facing them in the parking lot. From Teeny’s truck, Nina flipped her the bird and Wanda waved cheerfully at her before grabbing Nina’s finger and bending it backward. “Anyway, when I found out where you were, I wanted to strangle you. Not only did you risk your safety but the baby’s. What if someone had caught you? You’d be in jail and so would Nina. Is this what I have to look forward to in our future as a couple?You doing foolish things that put your life at risk?”

A couple. Those words left her excited and afraid. “Hey! I was just trying to help
you
. If you’d seen what I saw out in those woods late this afternoon, you’d want answers, too.”

“Well, that’s not entirely the truth now, is it, Katie?” was his smug question, followed by a dimpled grin. “You might want answers, but you also want to help me because you like me. I’d venture to say you’re very close to falling in love with me. Don’t lie. You know it’s true, but all these questions surrounding me and my memory loss, plus the question of my age and potential inappropriate behavior on your part, had you just itching to go and do something damned well stupid in order to reassure yourself you weren’t crossing this ridiculous line you have when it comes to age.”

She totally refused to rise to his bait. Instead, she offered logic. “You couldn’t have helped with Dr. Green. If he’d said something medical or research related, you wouldn’t have been of any help. I’m the doctor here, remember? That’s why Nina and Wanda went for this idea. Besides, helping you helps me.”

He wasn’t going to make her admit something she hadn’t even come to complete terms with yet. Her emotions were too wiggy to be trusted. For all she knew, this insatiable lust for him would pass once her hormones stopped behaving as though they belonged to ten pregnant women, and they’d have nothing to say to each other. So, yeah.

“Liar.”

“Look, you didn’t see what I saw today. You don’t even remember it, do you?”

His nod was short in the negative.

“See? God, Shaw, it looked like you were in utter agony.” Katie fought ridiculous tears she wouldn’t be crying if she weren’t such an emotionally knocked-up train wreck. “It was horrible to watch you suffer. As a physician, I felt helpless. As a human being, I was immobilized by it. There was nothing I could do to ease what looked like incredible pain.”

He softened a little. “I apologize for frightening you.”

The shake of her head was brisk. “Don’t apologize. It’s clearly not your fault, but I never, ever want that to happen to you again. If it was brutal to watch, it had to be much more brutal to experience.”

“I don’t remember a thing.”

“Then there’s something to be grateful for, and if you’d seen what I saw, you’d have done the same thing I did if it meant there was a chance of preventing it from happening again.”

“I probably would have, but I’m a big, strong man who can take care of himself.”

“Who was as weak as a newborn when I left the house and resting, something I know you need after the experience of my shift.”

“Okay, I get it. Just don’t go around doing foolish things that put you and the baby at risk again, got that, Dr. Woods?”

His possessive nature almost made her preen, but then she remembered how she’d promised herself she’d use caution. “Got it.”

“So what happened up there?” he asked, hitching his sharp jaw upward.

Her frustration became evident in her sigh. “We’re not much farther along than we were with the information Darnell brought us. Except for two things.”

He slung an arm around her shoulder, clearly passed his anger and right back to happy-go-lucky Shaw. He directed her to the edge of the hospital parking lot. “And they are?”

“We think Nissa is your mother, and both of you are in danger.” She couldn’t tell him about the dying thing because she was still praying that was just Daniel Green’s jumbled thoughts.

He nodded like he’d known that. Patting a picnic-table bench where patient’s families could sit, he encouraged her to slide in by him. He surprised her when he said, “I know I’m in some kind of danger, but as far as I know, my mother’s dead.”

Her stomach did two things. It took a dive and danced with excitement. “You do? You remember?” She was almost afraid to say the words, but if she was going to stop hiding from this so Shaw could have the help he needed, and he’d never be subjected to that horrific shift again, Katie knew she had to hear what he’d remembered.

“Hold on. I don’t remember everything. I remember up until the point I got here to the U.S. and met Daniel Green. Then it’s all blank.”

“So you are from England?” That so blew. Yet she fought asking the inevitable question. Like, how would his middle-school girlfriend feel about the fact that he’d knocked up someone old enough to be his mother? Would she refuse to sit at the cafeteria lunch table with him and deny him a carton of milk? Jealousy warred with reason in a mess of nervous anticipation.

“Originally from London, but now I live in a town called Diss.”

“Diss . . .”

He chuckled “Diss. It’s on a beautiful lake.”

Where a beautiful cottage with ivy climbing up the side of it gave way to a vista of blue and green. And in that quaint cottage lived his beautiful wife and two children. Maybe he even had a dog.

Katie gulped. She’d known this was coming. Known. Now she was going to take it like the champ she was. But first thing was first. “Why were you here to begin with if you come from England?”

Dragging a finger across her cheek, he took her hands in his. “First my stats. My name is Shaw Sedgwick Eaton. I’m six-footthree, two hundred and twenty pounds, before I left the motherland anyway. Oh, and I’m pushing seventy years old. Your cougar status was just downgraded, fair lady. No more gummy bear jokes for you, young’un,” he teased with a grin. “I’m older than you by almost thirty years. No”—he held up a hand with a smile—“don’t thank me for dashing your high-school-boy fantasies.”

“Seventy . . .” she murmured. He was older than she was? Oh, sweet mysteries of life. And yay.Yay.Yay.Yay. “How can you be seventy? You don’t look a day over twenty.”

“For the same reason my mother, the woman in the picture we found in Daniel Green’s office, didn’t look a day over thirty, and she’s somewhere in her hundreds. At least, I think that was her picture. I don’t know. My father never leaked much information about her. So I’m not exactly sure how old she is, and I’ll get to why in a moment. We age very slowly because we’re shapeshifters, Katie.” His smile was ironic. “I’ve often thought eternal life was given to us as compensation for watching everyone around us die. So what applies to Wanda and the rest, also applies to us.”

Holy cats. Her breath shuddered. “We have eternal life?” She’d given the notion a great deal of thought before she closed her eyes at night, but his confirmation still took her breath away.

“We do, though we’re not quite as infallible as Nina and Wanda. We have our kryptonite much like Marty does. If someone were to take out a vital organ in just the right way, we’d most likely die without medical attention even with the power to self-heal.”

Katie grimaced. Right now, she just couldn’t wrap her brain around living for an eternity. “Okay, so why did you come to Piney Creek? I don’t understand the connection to you and Daniel Green.”

“Daniel is my grandfather. One I didn’t know about until my father,
a human
, died just recently. It’s probably why I was so distressed that he’d been hurt. Though I admit, I feel that on only a humane level at this point. I don’t know him at all.”