Wish Upon a Star (16 page)

I took the chance to talk to Teel. “You’re amazing.”

“Ten out of ten wishers say that. Ready to make your fourth one?”

I shook my head. “No, seriously.”

“I
am
serious,” he said. “Completely serious.” Once again, he pinned me with those blue eyes. He grinned like a shark swimming through crystal waters, looking for an easy dinner. I began to understand why there were so many television shows featuring smart, sexy doctors.

“I can’t, Teel. I need to decide what to wish for.”

“And ten out of ten wishers say
that,
” he said. He raised a hand to rub at the back of his neck. Suddenly, I was reminded just how long the day had been, how many hours had passed since I had first stumbled into rehearsal. I saw the glint of light from Teel’s tattoo, a shimmer of flames that caught my vision and tossed it back at me. I shook my head, a little dazzled by my genie’s stunning good looks.

Or his magic.

Or my fatigue.

Something.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and further embarrassed myself by barely catching a yawn against the back of my teeth. I thought of the short-lived avatar of Leather Leopard Boy. “You probably have some place to be, don’t you? There’s got to be a party somewhere back in the city. Something to entertain you, while you’re waiting for me to make that last wish.”

He took a step closer to me, and his voice dropped to a private rumble. “Suddenly, I find myself pretty entertained, standing right here.”

Before I could think of an appropriate response, he leaned in and kissed me.

IT WAS A really great kiss.

It was the sort of kiss that you see onstage after hours of rehearsal, where the actors move perfectly, where there’s no awkwardness of bumped noses or clicking teeth, where both people manage to breathe, even as the kiss lingers and deepens and heats….

Maybe my legs started to tremble because I was tired. Maybe I felt dizzy because it had been hours since I’d last eaten a meal. Maybe I felt hot, then cold, then hot again because it was June and the waiting room was over-air-conditioned.

All I knew was that by the time Teel pulled back, I needed to reach out to him. I needed his steadying hand on my hip. I needed the length of his body against mine. All so that I could continue standing.

A smile lit his deep blue eyes, glowing from within like a beacon on a cold, dark night. “Easy there,” he said, as calm and controlled as if he were pointing out obscure medical details from an X-ray on a lighted screen. His fingertips cupped my elbow, and once again I found myself staring at the flame tattoo that peeked out from his starched white cuff.

“I’m sorry,” I said, because I had to say something. Because I was confused. Because nothing else sounded right, as I tried to regain my balance.

“No reason to be.” His gaze continued to scorch me, and I could not help but wonder what statistics he had up his proverbial sleeve. How many wishers kissed their genies in the middle of hospital waiting rooms? How many wishers contemplated doing a whole lot more than kissing? How many followed through?

Before I could act on the tendrils uncurling inside my belly—or quite a bit lower, to be one hundred percent truthful—Amy bounced back to us. Her face shone as if she were a little kid, just awakened on Christmas morning. When she saw Teel’s hand on my hip, a little cloud scudded across her features, but she blinked away her sisterly concern in a smiling heartbeat. “Derek got called away, but I was able to give him the 411 before he had to go. I’m going to find Justin now. I need to get some full optics on what’s going on, and they said they’re moving him into a regular room for the rest of the night.”

“Great,” I said, because it was my turn to say something. It was hard to force out the word in anything approaching a normal tone.

“Are you coming?” she asked, already turning toward the nursing station.

I shook my head before I’d given any conscious thought to a reply. I didn’t want to trail after my sister. I didn’t want to leave Teel’s side. “Um, no. You go ahead. It’ll be easier to settle Justin down to sleep if I’m not around.”

“You aren’t going back to the city, are you?” She sounded shocked. “He’ll want to see you in the morning!”

“No, no,” I reassured her, and waved at the bank of gray leatherette chairs. “I’ll just grab a nap here.”

“Those don’t look very comfortable.” A frown returned to Amy’s face, settling into a crease between her eyebrows.

“Amy, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” I made my voice as strong as I dared. I didn’t want her to think anything was amiss. Even so, my overprotective big sister cast a doubtful glance at Teel. Before she could voice concerns I really didn’t want to hear, I prompted her. “Go on, Ame. Justin is probably wondering where you are this very minute.”

It probably wasn’t fair for me to prey on her maternal solicitude. But with Teel beside me, I didn’t feel like playing fairly at all. Amy turned on her heel and started to walk away, but she only got a half dozen steps before she whirled back.

“Do you have any more raspberries?”

Raspberries. What raspberries? Oh, the raspberries that Timothy had given me.

Right before he had kissed me, on Eighth Avenue. Not ten hours ago.

So there I was, kissed by two different men, when I had sworn off guys forever. When I’d vowed to live my life, strong and independent, under the rigors of my Master Plan for well over a year. Another fifteen months without the complication of any Y chromosomes.

“Um, no,” I said to Amy, trying to hide my confusion. “That’s all Timothy gave me.”

My perceptive big sister frowned at me, and I could just imagine the difficult questions she was getting ready to ask. I preempted her by glancing toward the elevators. “Go,” I said. “You have to let Justin know what Derek said. He’s waiting for you.”

At last, Amy focused on the maternal task at hand, hurrying off to my nephew’s hospital room. I waited until the elevator doors had closed behind her before I returned my attention to the genie at my side.

“What was that all about?” I asked, forcing myself to keep my voice even. It took the better part of my actor’s training to drown the breathiness in my tone as I looked at his leading-man-handsome face.

Teel sounded eminently reasonable as he said, “Justin is probably hungry. He’s up way past his bedtime, and the raspberries would have helped him settle down.”

“I wasn’t talking about fruit.”

“I know.” That smirk would have been infuriating on most faces. On this incarnation of Teel, though, it made me want to raise a finger to the cleft in his chin. It made me want to test the wiriness of his hair. It made me want to measure my hands against his, to feel the strength of his muscles and bones as his fingers closed around my wrists.

I sighed and forced myself back to sanity. I was exhausted. That had to be why I was thinking such irresponsible thoughts about my
genie
. “Amy was right,” I said, determined to deal with the ordinary details of life in the real world. The nonmagical world. The world that I had lived in, every day, for twenty-five years. Without a genie at my side. I cleared my throat and went on. “Those chairs
do
look uncomfortable.”

“Who said you have to spend the rest of the night in a chair?” He arched an eyebrow, and there was no mistaking the sly invitation behind his words.

I’d always wanted to be able to arch a single eyebrow. A skill like that would have served me well on any stage in the country. Instead of responding with clinical curiosity, though, I felt a red-hot flush kindle in my cheeks. “Teel, stop it. This is all happening so fast.”

“Nothing has to happen that you don’t want to happen.” There was that doctor tone, again, that calm, logical timbre that made me melt just a little more. “I’m only suggesting that we go someplace else for the few hours left tonight.”

“Go where?”

“As a senior resident, I have dibs on the sixth floor on-call room.”

“Senior resident?” Despite the tension sparking between us, I grinned. When my genie took on a role, he didn’t do things by half measures.

He shrugged and dosed me with another one of those flawless smiles. “I thought someone might get suspicious if I became the chief of staff.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed.

I also let Teel guide me toward the elevator. He must have scouted out the on-call room after he’d made his rounds, during the long hours when Amy and I had waited for Dr. Finley to report on Justin’s surgery. I tried not to think about what Teel’s research meant, tried not to focus on who else he’d considered inviting to join him in his sexy-doctor bachelor pad.

I assumed he was a bachelor.

I stopped breathing and cast a quick glance at his hand. No wedding ring in sight. No pale shadow of a band recently removed. At least, not by this incarnation.

By the time Teel marched me down the darkened hall of patients’ rooms, my body had begun to remind me that it was almost three in the morning. My head seemed reluctant to keep up with the rest of me; I felt like I was floating a couple of inches above the black-and-white tile floor. I took a deep breath, thinking that would clear my thoughts, but the increased oxygen only made my fingers tingle.

Tingle, and not in a good way. Not in the way that Teel had evoked with his devilish grin and his not-so-subtle suggestions. And that kiss.

Tingled, instead, like I was going to collapse right there, in the corridor.

I caught my lower lip between my teeth, exasperated with my body’s shortcomings. Annoyed. But also—if I was going to be totally honest with myself—a little bit relieved.

I was finding it all too easy to slip into my old boyfriend-collecting ways. All too easy to let myself become fascinated with Dr. Teel, pulled into the orbit of his magnetism, just as I had been with every single guy I’d ever dated. This was why Amy had invented the Master Plan. This was exactly the type of situation I was supposed to avoid as I got over Sam. As I figured out whatever was next in my dating life.

As Teel quietly shut the door of the on-call room behind us, I made a valiant—but ultimately unsuccessful effort—to keep from yawning. “I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed, only to lose myself in another mammoth yawn.

He shrugged. “I have that effect on women.” His eyes sparkled in the overhead fluorescent lights.

“No—”

He shook his head, cutting short my protest. Sitting on the bed, he patted the mattress firmly. I joined him, but I suddenly felt as awkward as a high school freshman on her first date. Um, more so, given that most high school freshmen weren’t in a bedroom on said first date.

“I—” I started to explain, started to justify, started to protest my own confused feelings.

“Hush,” he said, leaning over to pull off my shoes. “Lay down.” He stretched toward the foot of the bed, then shook out an institutional blue blanket. “Relax,” he whispered, and he reached across me to flip off the light switch.

In the sudden dark, he curled up beside me. I felt the length of his body, warm and comforting and somehow familiar. I was almost asleep when his arm settled around my waist. My eyes were closed as he breathed into my ear, “Now, what about that fourth wish?”

I stiffened immediately.

Was that what this was all about? Was Teel only interested in me so that I would make my fourth wish? Had he staged this entire seduction scene so that I’d do his bidding?

“Get out of here!” I said.

“But—” he protested. I felt him shift by my side, and I realized he was going to switch on the overhead light. All of a sudden, I imagined his tattoo glimmering in the fluorescent gleam. Those flames had pulled me, twisted me, turned me into something I didn’t want to be. They’d almost made me forget the value of the Master Plan.

“No!” I said. “Don’t turn on the light!”

“Erin,” Teel said, and his voice rumbled with deep concern. Fake concern. Concern manufactured completely for his own benefit.

“Please,” I said, sifting some of my true exhaustion into the words, adding a note of real pleading. “Just let me go to sleep. We can talk about it in the morning.”

I could feel the tension in his body, still stretched out beside mine. I knew that he wanted to say something else, that he wanted to protest. I was certain that if we talked, he would wear down my resolve, smooth it away. “Please,” I said again, forcing every last ounce of will into my voice.

And he took pity on me. Or else I fell asleep before he could turn on the light, before he could lure me back into his sphere of influence with the flames around his wrist. Somehow, I had escaped my genie’s concerted effort at seduction and, at long last, I slept.

* * *

By morning, he was gone.

I lay on the strange mattress, staring up at a ceiling that I could barely make out in the crack of light that peeped beneath the door. What had happened the night before? Had Teel stolen every vestige of my free will with his tattoo?

I rolled my head on the flat pillow. It wasn’t that simple.

Sure, Teel had done something with his magic. He had heightened thoughts that I already had, increased the confused emotions that churned just beneath my heart. But I had been attracted to him in his doctor guise, separate and apart from the compulsion of his ink. I’d been drawn to him well before he shot his cuff, before he snared me with those tongues of red and gold, with the shimmering black outline around the flames. That was just the way I was. The way I thought. The way I felt around attractive, available guys.

I’d told myself the night before that I had to back off, had to stay away. I really did believe in the promise that I’d made to Amy. I really did think that the Plan would make me happier, in the long run, and I was prepared to see it through—plant, fish and cat.

But now? In the light of day? After a few hours of much-needed sleep?

It was pretty clear to me that Teel stood outside the parameters of the Master Plan. I had enjoyed kissing him. I might even have enjoyed more, if he hadn’t ruined the mood by pushing for my fourth wish.

I should be allowed to play with Teel, to have a little fun. He wasn’t a guy that was bad for me, like so many of my past boyfriends. I wasn’t changing my entire life to be like him, rearranging what was important to me to stay with him forever.