Heroes Are My Weakness: A Novel

It broke the spell that had captured her. She lifted her head from his shoulder. “Making up for what? We haven’t been fighting. For a change.”

He rolled to his side and slipped his finger in a curl by her cheek. “I’m making up for all that clumsy fumbling around I did when I was sixteen. It’s a miracle you weren’t turned off sex forever.”

“Obviously not.” A blade of light cut across his face, highlighting the scar at the corner of his eyebrow. She touched it and said, more harshly than she’d intended, “I’m not sorry about this.”

“No reason you should be.” He dropped her curl and rose from the floor. “You didn’t do it.”

She propped herself up. A red mark from the coats—or her fingernails—crossed his back. “I did,” she said. “I hit you across the face with your riding crop.”

He pulled on his jeans. “You didn’t give me that scar. It was a surfing accident. Stupid on my part.”

Now she was on her feet. “That’s not true. I gave it to you.”

He tugged on his zipper. “It’s my face. Don’t you think I should know?”

He was lying. She’d grabbed the riding crop and swung it at him in a blistering rage, punishing him for the pups, for what he’d done to her, for the cave and the note he’d written and her broken heart.

“Why are you saying this?” She snatched up her coat and pulled it on over her nakedness. “I know what happened.”

“You hit me. I remember that. But you got me somewhere around here.” He pointed toward a tiny white dash below the larger scar.

Why was he lying? Being in this enchanted cottage had made her drop her guard. A mistake and a sharp reminder that sex wasn’t the same as either trust or intimacy. She reached for her clothes. “Let’s get out of here.”


IT WAS A SILENT TRIP back to town. Theo pulled into the harbor parking lot so Annie could get the Suburban, and as he stopped, a middle-aged woman with a baseball cap pulled over her fried blond hair ran up to the driver’s door. She started to talk even before Theo had rolled his window down all the way.

“I just came from my father’s place. Les Childers. You remember him? He owns the Lucky Charm. He’s got a bad cut on his hand. It’s been bleeding like crazy, and it’s deep. It’s going to need stitches.”

Theo rested his elbow on the window frame. “I’ll look at it, Jessie, but EMTs aren’t licensed for that. Until I finish my paramedic’s training, all I can do is bandage him up. He’ll have to go to the mainland.”

Theo was training as a paramedic? One more thing he hadn’t mentioned.

Jessie leaned back on her heels, ready to do battle. “This is Peregrine, Theo. You think anybody here gives a rat’s ass about what kind of license you have? You know how it works.”

So did Annie. Islanders took care of their own, and in their eyes, Theo’s medical training was something they expected him to use.

Jessie wasn’t done. “I’d also appreciate your stopping in to see my sister. She has to give her dog injections for diabetes, but she’s afraid to use the needle, and she needs help getting started. I wish we’d known you had medical training last month when Jack Brownie had his heart attack.”

Whether he wanted to or not, Theo had been sucked into island life. “I’ll look in on both of them,” he said reluctantly.

“Follow my truck.” Jessie gave Annie a brusque nod and headed toward the rusty skeleton of a once-red pickup.

Annie opened the Range Rover’s door. “Congratulations, Theo. It looks like you’re the new island doctor. And the vet.”

He pulled off his sunglasses with one hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose with the other. “I’m in way over my head.”

“Looks like it,” she said. “You might want to brush up on deworming dogs. And birthing cows.”

“There aren’t any cows on Peregrine.”

“Not now there aren’t.” She stepped out of the car. “But wait till everybody hears there’s a new vet.”