To Love a Highland Dragon by Ann Gimpel

evenly. “I don’t have a good answer for you. Something—God only knows what—compelled me to apply for a rural psychiatry fellowship I saw advertised at the hospital here. Even at the time, I knew it was a bad career move. I was done with residency and had gotten several attractive job offers, offers that probably wouldn’t still be there a year later, once I was done with the fellowship.”
    “Yet ye came anyway.”
    Maggie nodded. “It was what I had to do. I tried to explain what I was feeling to my grandmother. She started to tell me something but never did.”
    “Aye. Ye came here to find me. Somehow your grandmother must have realized that.” Two white-coated physicians waltzed past. Both stared frankly into the car. Lachlan glared back. “I could show them a thing or two about manners. Young pups without even so much as a ribbon to denote their clan.”
    “Please don’t.” She pulled away from him. “Look, I really do have to check on my patient. Don’t do anything foolish. I need you to be here when I get back.”
    “Doona worry, lass. I will not leave your side again. Ever.”

    Maggie got out of the car. Rather than his spoken words, the ones she’d heard him say in her dream rang in her mind. I was born loving you, and I will die loving you. Before she shut the door, she bent her head and said, “I don’t know what this thing between us is, but I want to live long enough to find out.”
    “That makes two of us.” He smiled softly. “Go. The sooner ye go, the sooner we can move on to what we must do next.”
    “Good that he seems to know what that is,” she muttered half to herself as she strode toward the hospital door. She keyed in the code and pushed her way inside. Maggie jogged down the hall, anxious to discharge her duty to her patient and do what she could to soothe Berta and the other nursing staff. It seemed odd they’d be so upset about a suicide attempt. After all, they worked on a mental health unit.
    Maybe it’s not like it is in the States. Perhaps suicide’s not quite so commonplace here. Maggie thought about it. Inverness was fairly rural. That was probably the difference. While the big, urban areas, like Glasgow and Edinburgh, likely saw their share of suicides, there were probably fewer of them here.
    She took a hard left into the ICU. It was a small unit, and she located Chris immediately. Maggie picked up his chart—this hospital was years from an electronic records conversion—and glanced at his vitals. She blew out a tense breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. He was stable and improving. From the looks of things, if they withdrew the IV sedative, he’d regain consciousness.
    Maggie pulled up a chair and took Chris’ hand. She bent her head and spoke low near his ear. “I’m not certain if you can hear me, but maybe you’ll be able to. What you did upset the nurses. They care about you. So do I. We’ll be discontinuing the drug keeping you asleep. When you come around, we’ll get your family in here, and we’ll all put our heads together and decide what will work best. I promise you that you’ll have a say in things.”
    “Now why would you tell him that?” a male voice said.
    Maggie’s head whipped around; she got to her feet and turned to face Dr. Frank MacDuff, chief of the psychiatry service. In his late fifties, he had a full head of steel-gray hair, sharp blue eyes, and a rangy build. Like most native Scotsmen, he had well-defined cheekbones and an angular jaw. Though he usually preferred dress shirts and slacks, today he wore green scrubs and a white lab coat with the hospital’s insignia on its collar.
    “Let’s talk in the lounge,” she suggested.
    “No need for that. He’s the only patient here, and he’s unconscious.”
    Maggie latched a hand through the other doctor’s arm and pulled him away from Chris’ bed. “Research suggests patients can hear when they’re comatose,” she hissed into Dr. MacDuff’s ear.
    “Aye,