As she patched his chest with another water-magicked pouch of liquid, he returned his attention to the open door, looking for someone in particular. There she was, right in his line of sight. A woman in her mid-forties, long hair pulled back at the sides, her body softened with age, sat at the central computer terminal. Her head in her hand, she stared unseeing at the monitor.
“Emily Pritchart,” he muttered. Wes’s sister.
Kelsey finished her quiet chanting. The healing magic coursed through the wound.
“Yes,” she replied. “That’s her.”
“She’s one of your nurses?”
“Not exactly. She’s in charge of maintaining regular contact with our patients taking part in my test treatments. She interviews them, documents progress or problems, that sort of thing.”
Weeks of frustrating chases ate at him. Wes eluded him far too easily, considering Wes had been a suit his whole life. It was like he had help or something.
David shifted his head on the thin, papery pillow and asked Kelsey, “Has her brother tried to contact her here at the clinic?”
Kelsey’s eyebrows drew together. “Not that I know of. Why?”
“Has she mentioned him to you at all? Has she called him from here? E-mailed him? You guys are friends, right?”
Only when Kelsey’s hand slid from his pectoral muscle did he realize she’d been holding it there. She adopted that opinionated, determined look he remembered from her spirited class debates back in high school. “What exactly are you getting at? That Emily is somehow helping Wes evade you? She’s as devastated as the rest of us over what he was involved with.”
David struggled up onto his elbows. “And Wes is also her brother. Blood is a powerful thing, Doc.”
“She’s distraught, David. Look at her.”
As if Emily had heard them, the other woman glanced up and looked right at David—the man hunting down her brother. Emily jumped up from her chair, ducked her head, and hurried out of sight.
“Ouch!” His head whipped back to Kelsey, who’d slapped a huge bandage over his chest with none of her trademark gentleness.
“Can you sit up for me?”
He tried to do it himself, but in the end had to accept her help. Her cheeks flushed slightly as she wrapped gauze around his chest, passing the roll from hand to hand around his back. She had to move closer to do it, her body inserted between his knees, the short, sharp bursts of her breath on his neck. Her warmth coated his bare skin. He swallowed, willing away any pleasure his desperate body wanted to feel.
“I’m not trying to get at anything,” he said. “I’m just asking. It’s my job. Griffin wants Pritchart in custody. A lot—maybe everything—is riding on this capture.”
Bottom line, ousting the old Board hadn’t been a cure to what ailed their race. It had shattered Ofarian society into chunks and now it was Griffin’s job to pick them all up and somehow glue them back together.
“I know.” Kelsey backed toward the door, a steel veneer pulled down over her expression. “You’re done. Come back after the Ice Rites for evaluation.”
She left. And he’d been the one, again, to drive her away.
CHAPTER TWO
Kelsey measured her steps exiting David’s exam room. Running would draw the wrong kind of attention. Not to mention crying.
Research first. Always first.
She sat at the central computer Emily had just left and logged in the specific spell and human medicine she’d used on her former fiancé. She’d told David the truth. Her new research could alter how the Ofarians viewed their position in the world. Now that they knew they were not alone—that other Secondary races existed on Earth—they had to carve out their space within that.
Medicine could help.
She’d always wanted to test Primary and Secondary combinations, but the Board had forbidden it for fear of the knowledge leaking out. She’d become a doctor under orders, groomed to take over her mother’s position as head Ofarian physician when the older Dr. Evans retired, but now Kelsey’s designated career had become her calling.
David had been so amenable to her tests, so genial despite his ordeal. That was David for you.
Finally finished with the report, she headed for the empty break room and closed the door. Doing so, she shut out the doctor and responsibility, and for once, just let herself feel.
Sagging heavily against the door, she let loose a ragged sob of frustration and torment. Here, with no one watching, her lungs caught up with all the breaths she’d skipped ever since the call came through that David Capshaw had been injured in the hunt for the Ofarians’ most-wanted fugitive.
Two months, three days, and nine hours since David had unknowingly broken her heart. Two months, three days, and nine hours since he’d told her, “You know, with the Board gone, there’s no reason for us to get married now.”
She’d just stared at him, determined not to show him how he’d taken a hammer to her glass heart. Determined not to reveal how she’d essentially trapped him into the marriage in the first place.
“Right?” he’d added with a raised eyebrow and that trademark off-center smile.
So she’d given him a casual wave, and replied, “Oh. Right. Absolutely.”
Then he’d done the strangest thing. Instead of exhaling in relief or making a joke as he usually did, he’d simply nodded and said, “Okay, then.”
He’d vanished after that, consumed by the hunt for Wes Pritchart, until reappearing today on her exam table.
Away from her patient, her professional manner dissolved. Its absence left her flayed to the bone. She looked down at her hands, now stripped of latex, and willed herself to forget how his skin had glided beneath them. How cutting away his shirt had revealed him inch by lovely golden inch. How the blood seeping into his thick blond curls had made her chest ache with worry. How she’d wanted to snap off those gloves and slide her hands over the ridges of his lean soldier’s muscles, and under the gap of his waistband. It was too late; the memory had dug in deep and now she’d certainly lie awake that night, burning with regret and the dirty fantasies of him she’d entertained since high school.
The thing was, everyone loved David. Hell, when he’d been rolled into the clinic with blood streaming down his face, she’d watched from behind a curtain as he’d traded good-natured barbs with the EMTs and flirted with the nurses. It was no wonder he’d never wanted her, the girl who’d married her career before she ever even had one. The girl who’d always been way too serious to have any kind of life other than the one picked for her.
The Board had been wrong to match them. But by the time the betrothal had been announced, it was too late to correct what she’d started. At the matching ceremony, David had looked so overwhelmed, so scared. How could she ever admit to being the one to make him feel like that?
In self-disgust, she pushed away from the door and went for the sink. Tap water didn’t call to Ofarians the way a clear mountain stream or a wave in the ocean did, but it was still water. It was still her element. Turning on the faucet, she rolled her hands underneath it, commanding the liquid with a whisper to follow the prescribed pattern she’d adopted in her youth to calm her nerves. The narrow stream wove around each finger. Trickled into her palm in a lovely spiral. Dripped off her fingertips in even measurements.
The ritual over, her mind automatically straightened. She went into the locker room to throw her soiled white coat in the laundry. From her locker she removed a new coat with her name stitched in blue over the left breast.