Wedding the Highlander

by Janet Chapman

  But something had happened then.

  Something unexplainable.

  Elizabeth’s body had started to warm. Her skin had tightened. Her heartbeat had slowed, and the trauma room had faded from her sight until only light had remained.

  An array of colors in their purest form had surrounded her. A rainbow had swirled through her head in a brilliant display of laser-sharp beams. And Esther Brown had been there with her.

  Only Elizabeth hadn’t seen Esther, she hadbecome her. She had felt the blood rushing through Esther’s veins and the beat of Esther’s heart, and she had taken each breath with the woman. And she had felt Esther’s determination to live.

  Elizabeth lifted her trembling hand, examining its silhouette in the light of the hearth. It still tingled with lingering warmth.

  Elizabeth knew Grammy Bea was up in heaven, laughing her head off.

  Elizabeth had not only loved Grammy Bea, she had adored her. While her parents had been off vacationing someplace or attending never-ending conferences, Elizabeth had been quite content to bask in her grandmother’s attention.

  The only time Bea had agreed with Elizabeth’s parents was when Katherine and Barnaby Hart had announced that their daughter would grow up to be a doctor. That prophecy had come at Elizabeth’s birth, and everyone, including Bea—and later including Elizabeth herself—had worked for thirty-one years to see that it happened.

  The only discord was when her dad had announced that Elizabeth would train as a surgeon. Bea had spoken up then, rather forcefully, claiming that, yes, her granddaughter was destined to be a healer, but she should study for general practice instead.

  Surgery was too constrained, Bea had argued. Too focused on body parts and not the whole patient. Bea claimed Elizabeth had been born with the gift of healing, carried down through her family’s maternal line, and being in general practice was her destiny.

  A healer? As in the mumbo-jumbo of magic?

  Bea had insisted the solid white streak in Elizabeth’s hair was a sign of her gift, but Elizabeth thought it was nothing more than a genetic anomaly. It wasn’t even all that uncommon.

  She was not a healer. Such a thing was not possible.

  Or so Elizabeth had thought before today.

  By the time they’d gotten Esther Brown into the operating room and Elizabeth had gotten herself prepped for surgery, the change had occurred.

  At first, Elizabeth had been too focused on the procedure she was set to perform to pay much attention to the whispers. The surgery team usually whispered as patients were going under, and Elizabeth had learned to block out the unimportant chatter.

  It wasn’t until her scalpel was poised over Esther Brown that one of the nurses stopped her. Elizabeth had looked up to find a sea of panic-widened eyes staring at her over their masks.

  And then everybody started talking at once. The patient’s vitals were normal. There was no sign of a shattered leg or a broken wrist, and her once distended stomach was flat.

  Elizabeth had grabbed the chart away from one wild-eyed attendant, cursing the entire trauma team for anesthetizing the wrong patient.

  Dammit. She’d nearly cut into a perfectly healthy woman.

  For more than half an hour, they checked every monitor and took several more X rays. Admissions was called, and Esther’s wristband was read and reread and electronically scanned several times. Elizabeth had finally pulled off Esther’s surgery cap and oxygen mask and studied the woman’s face.

  It was her. Her hair was a bit whiter, and her features were no longer drawn in pain, but the woman on her operating table was the same woman she had prayed over less than an hour ago.

  Elizabeth could only stare at her silent team then. Something had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  Or wonderfully right for Esther Brown.

  Oh, yes. Grammy Bea was surely laughing her head off, telling everyone in Heaven about the miracle. And, like a house of cards facing a gale, Elizabeth saw her career as a surgeon being scattered to the wind.

  She had walked away from the operating room without saying a word to anyone. She had started to leave the hospital, but something had compelled her to push the up button in the elevator instead of the one that would take her down to the lobby. The elevator door had opened on the children’s ward, and Elizabeth had found herself walking to young Jamie Garcia’s room.

  That morning, Jamie had arrived with a head injury he’d sustained when his bicycle had rolled into the path of a car. He was in a coma, and the prognosis was bad.

  Elizabeth had sat beside Jamie, taken his young hand in hers, and quietly willed him to wake up. And again her body had warmed, her skin tightened, and her pulse slowed. The rainbow of brilliant colors had returned.

  And Jamie Garcia had opened his eyes and smiled at her.

  Elizabeth hadn’t walked away that time. She had run.

  She refilled her tumbler with Scotch and took the drink with her as she paced to the window. She stared out at the skyline, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She could just make out the surgery unit, where she had always felt so comfortable, vital, and in charge—of herself and of any situation she faced.

  Until today.

  In one blinding moment, as she’d stood facing her trauma team over the anesthetized body of Esther Brown, Elizabeth had realized that she wasn’t in charge at all.

  In her flight from Jamie’s room, and for the entire ride down to the lobby, she had fought the urge to run through the hospital and pray over patients. The need to heal had been so overwhelming that Elizabeth had felt as if she might explode. The only world she had known for thirty-one years was unraveling around her in a maelstrom of swirling colors, tugging at her until she felt herself being consumed by the chaos.

  Yes, she had been completely out of control.

  She needed to figure out what was happening. All of her life, Grammy Bea had told Elizabeth about the women in her family who supposedly had this gift. The last one had been her great-aunt Sylvia, who had died almost twenty years ago. All the women with this gift had had some sort of oddity or physical anomaly. Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, she’d been told, had two different colored eyes. Great-aunt Sylvia had been born with hair down to her waist, and throughout her life, it had continued to grow at an amazing rate. Elizabeth remembered being taken to Sylvia’s funeral when she was only eleven or twelve and seeing her great-aunt’s braided hair all but filling the casket.

  Elizabeth tugged on her own white lock of hair, pulling it forward and lifting her gaze, then blowing it back into place with a sigh. She’d laughed at Grammy Bea’s stories as a child, dismissing them as tales designed to add excitement to a lonely girl’s life.

  Well, she wasn’t laughing anymore.

  She couldn’t go back to the hospital. Not with all of those sick and injured people tugging at her. Not if she wished to keep her sanity.

  The phone rang, blaring into the silence of the town house. Elizabeth turned with a start, sloshing her drink onto her hand, and stared at the phone on the table by the couch.

  She didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  It rang five agonizing times before the answering machine finally picked up. Elizabeth listened to her own voice tell the caller to leave a message and then caught her breath when James Kessler’s voice suddenly filled her living room.

  “Elizabeth. Are you there? Pick up the phone, Elizabeth, I want to talk to you.”

  There was ten seconds of silence.

  “Elizabeth! Pick up the phone, and tell me what happened to Jamie Garcia. I know you were in his room this afternoon. His monitors went off, and when Sally Pritchard ran to check on him, she saw you leaving.”

  Another ten seconds of silence, and then, “Elizabeth, pick up the phone!”

  She took a step forward but stopped. James Kessler was a neurologist and family friend, and Jamie Garcia was his patient. He wanted an explanation from her, but what could she tell him? That she’d laid her hands on the boy and magically healed him
?

  “Dammit, Elizabeth. You call me the minute you get home.”

  The answering machine beeped, and the red message light started flashing the moment James broke the connection. Elizabeth took another sip of her Scotch.

  She had to get out of there. Hell, she had to get out of California. There was no way she could face James or her colleagues or even Esther Brown. How could she explain to any of them what she couldn’t explain to herself?

  She needed time to think—and some distance wouldn’t hurt, either. Until she could come up with an explanation that wouldn’t get her committed to a sanitarium, she had to avoid everyone.

  But did that include her mother? Katherine knew their family history, and, like Elizabeth, she preferred to believe their female ancestors had been eccentric rather than gifted. Having hair that grew excessively, two different-colored eyes, or a white forelock was not damning, it was—well, it was the stuff of family legends.

  Of course, Elizabeth had talked to her mother on more than one occasion during her childhood about Grammy Bea’s tales. Katherine had been quick to dismiss them as wishful thinking, saying Bea had always been jealous of Aunt Sylvia’s claim that she had been the one blessed with the gift. Bea thought of herself as an Earth Mother and had grown and gathered and processed herbs that she sold on her small farm up in the mountains. And since Bea had only one daughter, and since Katherine didn’t have any “sign” of being special, Bea was simply projecting the gift onto her granddaughter.

  Made sense to Elizabeth.

  Or it did at the time.

  But it certainly didn’t explain what had happened today. Even now, her body still quivered with a strange energy. Her head felt as if it was stuffed with cotton. Her living room, cast in shadows, seemed to pulse gently with an unnatural light that was more in her mind’s eye than visual.

  Elizabeth sat back down on the couch and stared at the fire. All these years, Grammy Bea had been trying so hard to give her a glimpse of something beyond surgery. Up until Bea’s death just two months ago, she had committed herself to grounding Elizabeth in the natural—or, rather, the unnatural—world.

  And that had driven Barnaby Hart crazy until the day he himself had died four years ago. Her father used to complain that it took him two weeks to straighten Elizabeth out when she returned from a visit to her grandmother’s farm. She usually came home with a suitcase full of medicinal herbs, tinctures, and balms and would have to hide them before her dad could throw them away.

  She would place them in with her mother’s toiletries, having figured out early that hiding something in plain sight was best. Besides, Katherine knew the value of herbs, being Bea’s daughter, and used them whenever she felt a cold coming on or a wrinkle dared to show itself on her beautiful face.

  The phone rang again, startling Elizabeth a second time. She held her breath for all five rings, listened to her voice tell the caller to leave a message, and then heard only silence.

  “Elizabeth,” her mother finally said. “Please, if you’re home, pick up. James just called looking for you. He, ah, he said something strange was going on at the hospital. Something about people being—being mysteriously healed. Pick up, Elizabeth,” Katherine said, her voice rising in demand.

  Elizabeth quietly picked up the phone and set it to her ear. “I must be crazy, Mom, because it’s true. I healed two people just by touching them.”

  There was a good thirty seconds of silence.

  “Mom?”

  “Did anyone see you do it?” Katherine asked softly.

  Elizabeth set her drink down on the table and gripped the phone with both hands. “I don’t think so,” she whispered. “My surgery team was prepping when I prayed with the lady. Her—her husband was there, but nothing outwardly happened. The chaos was all in my head. I just left the room after and went to scrub up for surgery. Mom, I didn’t even know what had happened until the lady was in the OR. Everyone just thinks there was a mix-up, because so many patients were coming in from the train wreck.”

  Another few seconds of silence, and then, “What about James?” Katherine asked. “He said you were in his patient’s room and that the boy suddenly woke up from a coma. And that he shouldn’t have. That he was about to be declared brain-dead.”

  Which was why James was trying to reach her. They’d always known each other, since their fathers ran a medical practice together. And having grown up on Grammy Bea’s stories with Elizabeth, James was now suspicious about her.

  “I—I healed him, Mom,” Elizabeth whispered, closing her eyes against the sting of tears, as the impact of saying it out loud echoed through the silent living room.

  “You didn’t, Elizabeth. You couldn’t.”

  “I felt it, Mom. I felt them—Esther Brown and Jamie Garcia. I went right inside them and—and healed them.”

  There was absolute silence on the other end of the phone.

  “What do I do?” Elizabeth whispered, swiping at a tear running down her cheek. “What happens now?”

  “You lie,” Katherine said succinctly. “You can’t have this get out, Elizabeth. Your life will be ruined, your career will be over, and the media will turn it into a circus.”

  “I have to leave,” Elizabeth added. “I can’t stay here. I—” She took a shuddering breath. “I can’t go back to the hospital, Mom. I thought I was going crazy. I could feel people tugging at me, begging to be healed.”

  “Oh, baby.” Katherine cried softly. “I’m so sorry. You’re right, you have to leave—but just for a little while, until this whole thing dies down. With nothing concrete to go on, James will have to let it go.”

  Elizabeth gripped the phone tighter. “No, he won’t. Not as long as we’re both up for that grant. He’ll use this against me.” Elizabeth sighed into the phone. “It doesn’t really matter now, Mom. I have to pull myself off the grant. Even if we can keep this a secret, I can’t work in a hospital anymore.”

  There was a gasp on the other end of the phone. “You’re a surgeon, Elizabeth Hart,” her mother said evenly. “You can’t just walk away.”

  “But I can’t go back. Don’t you understand, Mom? It was overwhelming.”

  “I realize that, dear. I mean, I don’t understand any of this, but I imagine it must be difficult. But Elizabeth, you’re not thinking straight right now. You can’t know that your career is over. Take some time. You’re right, you probably should leave, but don’t do anything you might regret.”

  “Why did this happen, Mom? Why now, without any warning?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. I’m as shaken as you are.”

  “How is it possible?”

  “It’s not,” Katherine firmly assured her. “You can’t heal a person by will alone, no matter what Bea wanted you to believe. Don’t let her stories affect you this way, Elizabeth. There has to be an explanation for what happened. And I’m sure once you put some distance between yourself and the hospital, you’ll be able to reason it out.”

  “Where should I go?”

  There was a hesitation on the other end of the phone, a deep sigh, and then Katherine finally said, “You can’t go to the farm. James knows about it, and that will be the first place he’ll look for you.”

  “I’ll write a letter to the chief of surgery tonight and have it delivered tomorrow,” Elizabeth said, deciding she’d figure out her destination later. “I’m going to tell him I have a family emergency and need a leave of absence. I’ll imply that it’s on Dad’s side of the family, so it won’t look strange that you’re still here.”

  “I could come with you.”

  Elizabeth hesitated. “No, Mom,” she said gently. “I need to get away by myself and think this out. I’ll call you as soon as I find a place to stay.”

  “Elizabeth? Are you going to be okay?” Katherine asked softly. “I’m worried about you just heading off all alone, without a plan of some sort or even a destination.”

  “I’m a big girl, Mom,” Elizabeth said brightly, trying to sound more
confident than she felt. “I promise, I’ll call you as soon as I find a place to stay.”

  “I don’t like it,” Katherine said with a sigh. “But I think it’s best, considering your alternatives. You simply can’t stay here right now. Not until this dies down and you’ve come up with a reasonable explanation.”

  Whatever that was, Elizabeth thought.

  “I’ve got to go now, Mom. I want to pack and get out of here before James decides to come looking for me. There’s too much money and prestige at stake for him to let this go.”

  “I love you, Elizabeth.”

  “I know, Mom. I love you, too. Please don’t worry about me. I’m very good at taking care of myself.”

  “Still, you call me the minute you’re settled. And meanwhile, I’ll take care of James on this end. I still have a few strings to pull at the hospital.”

  Elizabeth smiled into the phone. “Then pull them, Mom. I gotta go now. I’ll keep in touch, and you can let me know what’s happening here.”

  “I—I love you,” Katherine repeated.

  “I love you, too. ’Bye.”

  Elizabeth gently set the phone back in its cradle and stared into the fire. She had to find someplace to go, and she had to go now. She stood up, a sudden sense of urgency pushing her into the bedroom.

  She dug in the back of her closet, pulled out her suitcase, opened it, and threw it on the bed. On one of her trips from her bureau to the suitcase, her arms laden with clothes, Elizabeth stopped as she passed her computer and turned it on. She continued to pack while it booted up but suddenly had a thought, tossed her underwear into the suitcase, and all but ran to the kitchen.

  She walked to the intercom and pushed the lobby button.

  “Dr. Hart?” came Stanley’s voice over the speaker. “What can I do for you?”

  “Stanley, if anyone comes here asking for me, could you please tell them I’m not home? I don’t wish to be disturbed for the rest of the night.”

  “Not a problem, Dr. Hart,” Stanley cheerfully promised.

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks, to make sure no one’s disturbed if they don’t want to be.”