Nightwing by Lynn Michaels

the light? Maybe what she’d subconsciously wanted to see—Raven in her bedroom. Willie couldn’t decide, but whatever it was, the memory made her shiver as she eased herself up, opened the door and hopped into the kitchen.
    By the time they finished their moo goo gai pan and rice, Willie’s ankle was three times its normal size, pulsing with pain and beginning to bruise beneath the ice bag Frank had put on it.
    “I think you oughta have an X ray, Will,” he said.
    “Me, too. My purse and my keys are in the office.”
    Frank drove. Willie propped her ankle on the doorframe to keep it elevated, her foot hanging out what would have been the window if the shell were on. She hopped through the emergency entrance of Stonebridge General, Frank’s arm around her waist, hers around his shoulders, at nine-twenty. Since Raven didn’t go on duty until eleven, Willie figured she was safe.
    But it was Raven who raked aside the green curtain enclosing the cubicle the admitting nurse had put her in. Seeing him sent a jolt of surprise and pure sexual what-a-hunk awareness through Willie that made her ankle throb even more and her heart start to pound.
    He had a stethoscope looped around his neck rather than a tie. The collar of his green oxford-cloth shirt was unbuttoned, giving her a pulse-thudding peek at lots of dark chest hair. He looked up from the clipboard with her chart on it, and smiled at her, an amused curve on his provocative, oh-so-sexy mouth.
    “Hello again, Miss Evans.”
    “What are you doing here?” Willie blurted out.
    “I could ask you the same question, but it’s obvious.” He put the clipboard down on the gurney and removed the ice pack the nurse had put on her ankle. “We’re shorthanded so I came in early. How’d you do this?”
    She’d already told the nurse, who had written it down, but she repeated the story she’d told Frank, looking pointedly away while Raven probed her swollen ankle. His fingertips were warm, his touch surprisingly gentle. And arousing. Willie tried to steel herself against it, but she was only human, a sucker for foot rubs, and Raven’s dark eyes were just as luminous in the harsh glare of the hospital lights as they’d been in the soft glow of the luminarias.
    They were the same eyes she’d glimpsed in the mirror, in the face of the man standing beside her bed. The man who looked enough like Raven to be his twin. The man who hadn’t been there when she’d turned around.
    She was lying. Her pounding heart and trip-hammering pulse told Raven so. It stirred and excited him. He gave himself a moment to savor her excitement, the mad race of her blood, then quelled the urge and brushed his mind against hers.
    She’d seen his Shade. In the mirror in her bedroom, but it was gone when she’d turned around. She’d seen the temporal disturbance it made; that’s what had frightened her and sent her running down the stairs.
    “Ouch.” Willie flinched as Raven’s fingers tightened on her ankle.
    “Sorry.” He took his hand away and smiled. “I don’t think it’s broken, but we’ll take an X ray and make sure.”
    He already knew it was just a bad sprain, not a break, but he made it sound good. He picked up his clipboard and left the cubicle, drawing the curtain shut behind him. He saw two more patients while Willow Evans was in X ray, viewed the film when it came back from radiology and took it into the cubicle with him to show her the results on the wall-mounted viewer.
    “As you can see, there’s no fracture, the bones are whole. You double-sprained the ankle, turned it both ways when you fell, which stretched and severely wrenched the ligaments.”
    “A double whammy,” she said simply.
    “Exactly. Keep it elevated and use contrast baths—cold, hot, then cold again.” He took a prescription pad and a ballpoint pen out of his white lab coat pocket and wrote instructions.
    Then he cupped his hand gently over her ankle. While he told her about tendons and