Page 8 of Beneath the Mountain Sky

“Willow?”

The plea in his voice makes me want to try again.

I somehow get them half-open, despite them weighing a thousand pounds, but the immediate blinding lights make the stabbing headache a thousand times worse.

Wincing, I clamp my eyes shut and try to swallow again, barely managing to wet my parched throat. “Lights…”

“Someone turn off the fucking lights!”

Killian’s voice booms, filled with so much authority and tension. A command he expects to be followed by whoever else is here.

And they’ll do it.

Everyone always does what Killian asks, even if he isn’t the nicest about the way he does it.

He has always been grumpy and short with people, but they know he doesn’t really mean it. And he’s never that way with me. Certainly not like that.

He sounds angry.

Frustrated maybe?

I try to shift again, to move closer to him, to reach out and offer my touch that always seems to soothe him whenever he’s lost in his own head, suffocating with the weight of all that he carries on his broad shoulders. Just as he does for me when I need it.

But everything hurts.

Every limb.

Every muscle.

Every damn inch of my skin.

Every fiber of my being screams at me to stop moving.

That incessant beeping picks up.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

What is that?

Killian’s thumb brushes softly over my cheek. That familiar scrape of hard-earned callouses soothes some of the tension in my body. “Willow, can you hear me?”

I manage an almost imperceptible nod through the pounding in my skull and hear his sigh of relief over that horrible beeping.

What the hell is that?

Nothing on the homestead makes that sound.

Certainly nothing in the cabin.

Yet, it’s somehow familiar, even though I can’t quite place it.

“Did somebody get the doctor?” Killian again, panic rising in his voice. “Someone get her. Now!”

Panic?

No.

Killian McBride doesn’t panic.