The Americans froze. Guleed was the first to grasp that the man in the hall was a friend, and partly responsible for his successful life in Denmark, so he extended both arms in welcome.
“What’s on your gl—uhhh.” Chris’s eyes weren’t seeing her messy surgical gloves anymore, dammit, and after she’d been so careful to keep them out of his sight.
Unsurprisingly, introductions were curt, given the personalities and weapons stuffing the room. As she whipped through her final stitches with Deavers enjoying his eyelids, she filled the silence. “Glad to see you, Ivar.” She was. He was out in public, moving among strangers, a good sign of recovery. “How’d you know where to find us?”
“I left New York within the hour upon learning of Dr. Haukssen’s murder,” he answered. “We have a long association with Mr. Abdirahman, so I began here at his home.”
“Must be how a chick feels when her boyfriend’s married,” Cruz muttered. “Lone Wolf forgot to mention his freaking pack.”
“My brother and I are not, and never have been, furry.” Ivar stared at Cruz.
Theresa wasn’t certain whether he’d intended to be funny or issue a clarification, but the stink of unused adrenaline rolled through the room. “Guys, we’re all on the same side.”
“Where is my brother?”
Her face must have conveyed the not-here part of the answer, because his good hand wrapped around the black-gloved fingers protruding from his sling.
“He ordered us to leave him at Lejre.” Her voice was low, but carried through the silent room. “It was Unferth, by himself against Wulf, and he made us promise to get out.”
“I see.” He swallowed, and stared at each person in the room.
She was too exhausted to decipher his expression. Maybe it was worry, maybe disgust or anger, or maybe nothing and she was extrapolating her own feelings.
“My jet is being refueled. By the time we reach Kastrup, it will be cleared to depart.” He pivoted to the door. She couldn’t see his face, but his shoulders hunched enough to shift his coat.
He wasn’t going to do anything? Although his inaction was nominally for their protection and part of Wulf’s wishes, Ivar was abandoning his brother. She’d do well to remember that he could walk away that easily.
No one else moved or spoke, so a response, like the explanation, fell to her. Sour as her words were, she knew what Wulf expected. “After I tape this gauze, we can go.”
* * *
“We land at Teterboro in forty-five minutes.” Ivar placed a mug of tea in front of her. He wasn’t the warmest guy, but he’d decisively removed them from Denmark before they could be connected to the chaos at Lejre. When the jet refueled in Burlington, Vermont, Kahananui’s Fort Drum friends had had a truck waiting. They were the type of buddies who didn’t ask questions, and by now Wulf’s teammates were in the shelter of the army. Deavers would be running laps in a week, although she imagined it would be far longer before the team stopped rolling their eyes and swooning in front of him.
“We didn’t clear immigration in Burlington, merely refueled. Here’s your passport.” He handed her a dark blue pamphlet that miraculously held her photo and several stamps, as if the person inside was well traveled.
“Where’d you get this? It looks real.”
“You are my assistant.” He ignored her question. “We’ve been in Venice for a long weekend and we had a fuel stop in Copenhagen, then Vermont, that’s all.”
“I’ve never been to Venice.”
“If the immigration officer asks, blush. Imply you didn’t leave the hotel.”
“Oh.” She squinted at him, but she couldn’t imagine Ivar in the clutch of passion.
“Think of my brother if it helps.” The iceman raised one eyebrow.
“Oh.” Warmth crept from her neck to her ears.
Personal immigration service for executive-jet passengers was as customer-oriented as ordering at a café. To Wulf, she would have whispered, May I have a regular skinny with my suitcase, please, and he would have snorted and bought her one at the first coffee drive-through. His brother would have pinned her to the spot with a glare if she’d opened her mouth during the process.
Of course Ivar had a limo waiting. They were on the road to Manhattan within fifteen minutes of landing. “Where are we going?”
He ignored her to thumb through data on his phone. “He has not contacted me.”
“Would he?” The glow from his small screen illuminated Ivar’s frozen face, and she wondered whether he worried more or less than she did. She loved Wulf, but Ivar was the one who’d been imprisoned. “Normally?”
“I regret this waste of resources,” Ivar said.
“What?” They hadn’t hit traffic into the city, so she didn’t understand what had been wasted.
“The additional losses without gain.” His voice sounded as dark and faraway as the water below the bridge.
He didn’t know. Neither she nor the others had told him, not at Guleed’s, and not on the long flight when they’d all slept. “But we found the hilt.” She fumbled in the overnight bag Ivar had handed her. “Here.” She held out the crucifix.
He held it like a new baby, with both hands, and stared, but the plastic bag she’d wrapped around the relic obscured the red gem.
Her fingers hovered over his shoulder, but she wasn’t sure he’d like to be touched.
“I have leased laboratory space. Equipment is ordered. And I’ve sent for someone who can acquire the arm bone for you.” Headlights reflected on the sheen of his eyes. “Wait for Wulf at my home. He will come there for you.”
She refused to consider other endings.
Through the windshield, the bright lights and right angles of Manhattan posed a direct contrast to the snowy hills of Lejre. The city was where she wanted to hide, where she felt safest, and where she had ideas to test and promises to fulfill. Ivar might believe Wulf would appear soon, but she couldn’t forget the inferno they’d left in Denmark. And she knew from experience that immortal Vikings had a very different sense of time.
* * *
A clipboard and questions helped Theresa control her anxiety. If she focused on the patient in the opposite chair, she might forget for a moment that Wulf hadn’t returned or phoned for over a week. The woman, a refugee from Africa, had a yellow pocket of pus on the back of her hand that would have to be lanced and drained by a doctor at this women’s clinic fifty blocks north of Ivar’s town house.
“Dr. Chiesa, she doesn’t speak Amharic or Arabic.” The college student who helped as an interpreter flipped through a phone roster. “Maybe it’s Tigrinya, from the north of Ethiopia or Eritrea? Our interpreter list doesn’t include an Eritrean.” Her wide brown eyes sought guidance.
“Try a calendar. Maybe she’ll point to the day she was injured.” Until New York verified her board certification and issued her a license to practice, her volunteer work was limited to patient-intake interviews.
“There’s one in the next cube.” The student jumped to her feet. She hoped to attend medical school.
Theresa acknowledged a different goal. She hoped helping the flow of women, twenty an hour through five exam rooms, would fulfill the promise she’d made to Meena and herself back in Afghanistan. She wanted to make a difference, and she had to balance the isolated world of Ivar’s research lab and mansion with the hum of human contact.
While she waited, Theresa stared at the women’s health posters covering the tan walls of the cubicle she used. Hope is not a method. Please let Wulf be free, not locked under stone like Ivar had been. Are you pregnant? ¿Estás embarazada? She’d trade the chance to look like that big-bellied woman to hold Wulf in her arms. Chlamydia is not a flower. That one was mind-blowingly awful, and not the calendar she needed.
The door jingled. Unseen women in the waiting area burst
into giggles. Must be a baby.
Her interpreter returned to the cubicle, smiling. “Here’s the calendar.”
“Thanks.” She turned to the patient in the dark skirt. “This is today.” She pointed to the date. Ten days since she and Ivar had returned. Ten days without a word from Wulf. “Your sore?” She pointed to the patient’s arm and ran her pencil over the week before. “What day?” While the woman answered with a burst of language and pointed to three different squares on the calendar, the waiting room giggles grew. This should be easier, but how?
“Last Tuesday I was cooking injera when the hot clay plate slipped from the stove burner and hit my hand.” The voice she heard in her dreams washed over her from the other side of the cubicle partition. An interpreter had arrived, one called by her heart. Wulf was here.
She started to rise from her chair but couldn’t depend on her knees, couldn’t even breathe.
“The next day a neighbor gave me a paste to cover the burn.” The thunder of her heart almost eclipsed his smooth cadences. “By Friday my hand was much worse, so now I am here to see the doctor.” Wulf paused. “I was stuck in an air-cargo crate for a week.”
Clearly the last sentence had nothing to do with the patient. “You could have phoned.” She rested her clipboard on her knee so neither the patient nor the volunteer saw her hands shake. “Please tell my patient that coming to the clinic was very wise. We can’t risk a staph infection.” Remembering Wulf’s instructions from Afghanistan, she addressed the woman directly. “Can you tell me what was in the paste your neighbor gave you?”
While Wulf and the patient exchanged words, she concentrated on breathing in and out.
“Avocado and boiled plantain leaves and honey. Also butter.” Wulf recited the ingredients in the home remedy as fast as she could copy them to the intake form. “Sorry, but my freight pallet didn’t have cell service and I didn’t think I should show my face at an airport.”
Realizing the man she loved was a few feet away and they were on the verge of arguing instead of kissing, she stood and smoothed her hands down her new cargo pants. If she’d known he was coming, she would have dressed...but no, these were clothes she’d bought for herself. They represented the real her. She touched her hair, but didn’t have a mirror.
“My Puerto Rican neighbor says honey and plantain heal anything.” Wulf’s voice vibrated, as if he too was unsteady. “But I’m not so sure now. Maybe the doctor has something better.” The space dividers were thin enough that she heard him clear his throat. “Maybe the doctor will marry me?”
Ohmigod. She reached for the wall. Could she stagger around it without falling?
The openmouthed student nodded like a bobblehead, and even her patient understood something larger was happening.
Theresa realized that she had her other palm over her mouth and the waiting room had dropped into complete silence. Ohmigod again. She wobbled out the door and met him in the narrow space between intake rooms.
The gray carpet and beige walls disappeared at her first sight of him in two weeks. When he smiled, it was different from the cocky grin he’d first given her in the mess hall, different from the smolder when he zipped the boots on her feet or the sexy flirting grin in her mother’s kitchen. This smile made her hands damp. It made her want to cry and hug him and laugh all at the same time. He lifted her to her toes, and his kiss traveled from her lips to her heart. She flew, or felt as if she did, and opened in flight for him. Arms wrapped around her, he spun her through the hall. Every cell sang to touch him. His hair was as soft and dense as she remembered, his shoulders as strong, his mouth made for hers.
Most important, he was here, with her, and he was safe.
He set her on her feet and withdrew to look at her face. “You haven’t answered my question.”
The collectively indrawn breath from all the women in the waiting room must have taken the oxygen away, because she felt dizzy, but she knew what to say. “Yes, of course, yes.” She threw her arms back around him, because any distance was too far. “I love you.”
Her prosthetic, a stray folding chair, a miscalculation and they staggered. Wulf’s legs tangled with hers, but his arms didn’t let go to find balance, and his lips never released hers. She heard the thunk as he hit the wall and they stopped moving.
Then he was kissing her ear and her neck and her cheek and repeating her words. “I love you.” No interpreter needed.
The women in the room jumped and cheered. He grinned, and this time he shouted, “I love you!” to the drop-tile ceiling while the patients clapped.
Life with Wulf would never be normal, but who cared? She’d have a Viking to love her for eternity.
* * * * *
Fiction Meets the Real World
I think reality is what gives fiction emotional weight. Many characters in this novel wanted to help the women of rural Afghanistan. The real world contains an organization that successfully does that, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. Every day, 22,000 doctors, nurses, midwives, logisticians, water experts and other professionals working for Doctors Without Borders/MSF provide emergency medical services to people caught in crises in more than sixty countries. They delivered more than 110,000 babies and performed more than 50,000 surgeries in 2009. By 2012, those numbers had risen to 185,400 babies and 78,500 surgical procedures. These medical providers are true heroes.
When my heroine was wounded in Afghanistan, her family stayed at a Fisher House in Germany. The Fisher House Foundation has built sixty houses (and growing) near military medical facilities in the United States and one in the United Kingdom. They provide free lodging for families of wounded soldiers, kitchens, space for children to play outside and a vital community of other families also supporting wounded warriors. At Dover Air Force Base, the Families of the Fallen Fisher House provides free lodging for families waiting to repatriate the remains of their loved ones. The United States’s fight in Afghanistan may be winding down. It may be out of the news. But the need for long and extensive medical care doesn’t go away when the logisticians pack up their last containers.
My family will be donating to both charities from First to Burn proceeds. If you want to know more, I invite you to visit the charities’s websites or AnnaRichland.com.
Acknowledgments
I became a writer on my own. I became a published writer because of Greater Seattle Romance Writers of America and its annual Emerald City Writers’ Conference. I could not possibly name everyone in my chapter who has helped me, but any list would start with Anna Alexander, Julie Brannagh, Eilis (and Mike) Flynn, Josie Malone and Shelli Stevens. Thank you also to the Starcatchers cheering section of the 2011 Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Finalists, especially Julie Brannagh, Amy Raby and Rachel Grant. Thank you!
I relied upon the website Beowulf on Steorarume (Beowulf in Cyberspace) by Dr. Benjamin Slade at www.heorot.dk for the Old English in chapter 24. I also read Beowulf: An Illustrated Edition, translated by Seamus Heaney, edited and illustrated by John D. Niles (W.W. Norton and Company, 2007) until the binding died. All correct references to the epic are possible because of these experts. Errors are possible because of me. For other research, I went straight to the internet’s Viking Answer Lady.
Several doctors provided invaluable help: Dr. Naomi Sullivan, who shared poster slogans and was never the weak link in any chain, army or otherwise; Dr. Stephen Buetow, the first Afghanistan veteran to read this; Dr. Crista McHugh, fellow romance writer and explainer of fainting; Dr. Elizabeth Moynihan, fellow college romance reader and explainer of symbiotic microbes, and Dr. Josh LaBaer, who figured out why my Vikings need Grendel’s bones. Thank you all!
About the Author
Anna Richland lives with her quietly funny Canadian husband and two less-quiet children in a century-old house in Seattle, Washington. Raised in Ohio, she’s l
ived on both coasts and visited more than fifteen countries, half of them courtesy of her former career as an officer in the United States Army.
She is thrilled to join the Harlequin family thirty years after she started smuggling romances home from the library. Her path from reader to published author led through law school, the army, a stint editing zoning codes and several years dodging small-child obstacle courses. The idea for a paranormal series based around the Beowulf epic hit while she was sorting picture books for a preschool Scandinavia-themed week. Under its former title, The Soldier, Anna’s first Immortal Vikings novel was a 2011 finalist in Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart contest and won the 2012 Suzannah Award from the North Louisiana Stars RWA Chapter as well as the 2010 Golden Pen award for Paranormal Romance.
Anna is busy writing the next novel in the Immortal Vikings series and editing a spin-off novella to be published by Carina Press in 2014. She looks forward to fan mail and book covers that will embarrass her children!
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ISBN-13: 9781426897825
FIRST TO BURN
Copyright © 2014 by Anna Richland
Edited by Jeff Seymour
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
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