far too much pain, and far too little celebration, in life overall, she’d discovered. At least in her life.
“And the winner of the award for Whiniest Self-Pity is…” She shook her head to shake off the mood. Enough, already. Better to think about movies than her boring, solitary life.
She had her best friend Annie, after all. She wasn’t entirely alone.
She opened her second bottle of the night, fully aware that she was drunk off her ass. “But who cares?” she asked the portrait of her grandmother. “Tonight I drink, and tomorrow I’ll go on a spur-of-the-moment and much-needed vacation.”
She finally settled on the best, most awesome choice for a drunken movie fest and settled in to watch it, saluting the TV with the bottle, having quit bothering with the glass a while back.
“Yippee ki-yay, motherfucker!”
But before John McClane could get off the plane with that enormous teddy bear, things started to get weird.
She laughed. No, that was a ridiculous thought after the night she’d had.
Correction: things got even weirder.
Because that’s when the magical kidnapper from the hospital appeared on her second-floor balcony.
The balcony that had no stairs, ladder, or fire escape.
“I’m more the Hans Gruber type,” he said. “Hello, Dr. St. Cloud.”
She blinked and then took another swig of wine, still staring at him. “Hey, call me Ryan. I’ve decided I should be on first-name basis with all my hallucinations. And damn, but you’re just beautiful, aren’t you? At least my brain dreamed up a hottie when it decided to go ballistic.”
“I don’t… You…” He shook his head and then raised a single eyebrow and pinned his glowing gaze to her, decidedly non-glowing, own. “I assure you, I am quite real.”
“Right. And so, Mr. Quite Real, what did you do with my patient? You know, the one who was dying? The one I had no chance in hell to save, even before you picked him up and disappeared with him?” She was on her feet and shouting at him by the end but didn’t remember standing. Also, unpleasantly, the rage smashing through her was, to borrow one of Annie’s expressions, harshing her mellow.
“How do you remember that?” His eyes narrowed. “Luke said he’d compelled you to forget.”
“I’d like to forget so much about tonight,” she muttered. “And who the hell is Luke?”
“I’d like to explain, Doctor… Ryan, if you’d invite me in,” her magical mystery guest said.
Ryan pointed her bottle at him. “No. Nuh-uh. No way. You keep your glowy-eyed magical ass away from me. And how did you climb up to my balcony? How did you even find me, more to the point?”
“Invite me in, and I’ll tell you,” he said, but his voice had a weird, buzzy resonance that tickled the inside of her mind somehow.
It made her laugh. “Nope.”
His eyes widened. “So it was true.”
“What was true? And why are you here?”
He folded his arms and said nothing, which infuriated her.
“Where is my patient?”
“Invite me in, and I’ll tell you,” he said again, shrugging.
She blew out a breath. “Fine. Whatever. Come on in, Mr. Drunken Hallucination. And then you damn well better tell me where my patient is.”
He smiled and took a step forward, into the room, and she started toward him but tripped over the coffee table and fell.
Into his arms. Damn, he smelled good. She rested her overheated cheek against his chest for a moment and inhaled.
Wait.
“You were clear across the room,” she muttered, struggling to back up while pushing him away at the same time. Trying to push him away, rather, because he had chest muscles like iron boulders. Was that a thing? Iron boulders? Rock-hard steel?
Some kind of metaphor for hard, for sure.
Yummy. Hard.
Also, damn. Maybe opening that second bottle of wine had been a mistake.
“You seem to have been having a party,” he said, and there was amusement mixed with something darker in his rich, deep voice.
God. He was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen—imagined? Dreamed?—and his voice sounded like silken sin. A tingle of heat and electricity raced through her, and she could actually feel her nipples harden. Now she was really losing it, because her hallucination was making her hot.
No different from fantasizing about a movie star in the bathtub, she tried to tell herself. Except bath-time fantasies never came to life and walked into her living room.
She’d never felt one hold her in his arms before, either.
A tiny shiver of real fear managed to break through the haze of wine-induced fog, and she stumbled back and away from