was following, or the ever-flailing assistant was. He didn’t pause to check; she’d follow now or someone else would escort her down later.
He couldn’t afford to coddle the woman. If he could exchange his family’s fortune for time, he would. When he was on duty, there was never enough of it. There hadn’t been enough for his trip to HR this morning, but he’d gone anyway, intending it to be short. But it had already been too long. Who knew what had come into Emergency in his absence? If he wasn’t there, he couldn’t keep an eye out for inevitable trouble.
No matter how called he felt to emergency medicine, Lyons knew from hard experience the sorts of people who came in. Pediatric specialists might treat innocent children, but were exposed to their unsavory parents too, or had to treat the aftermath of abuse. Those who practiced widely, engaging in everyday emergency medicine, could see kindly grandmothers or men who’d injured themselves while beating another person to death. Patients with police escorts, cuffed because they were a danger to others, not that it always did much good. Trauma surgeons often treated the already unconscious, but afterward had to deal with those who’d accompanied the patient—people who might turn violent when given bad news.
Or worse, in the high flow of traffic in and out of Emergency, a madman with a gun could blend in and just start shooting. That happened here.
He hit the hallway without breaking stride. On a good day, he didn’t have time to coddle the woman, and that was without Christmas insanity being added into the mix.
His main task was vigilance, and medicine came second. He had to do what he’d failed to do last Christmas and pay attention to what his gut had been saying then and was saying now.
He heard rapid footfalls on the hallway’s tiled floors behind him—two steps for every one of his to catch up—and called over his shoulder, “Quickly.”
The difference between this Christmas and last Christmas was him understanding what his gut was saying. The three bullets fired into him by the husband of a colleague had become his gut’s Rosetta stone, the wake-up call that made him pay attention to everything—both for his own benefit and those who hadn’t had the misfortune to share in his life lessons.
Even without the sound of her scurrying, her presence heated his back. For once, that awareness of someone behind him didn’t prickle like danger. He just felt her there. Awareness that bothered by its nature, by the way it fractured his attention. She might not be a physical danger, but the way he heard and categorized her sounds—breath, step, fidget—was by robbing his concentration.
It was out of character for him to feel anything, really, except for the tension he’d become so intimate with he even carried it into his sleep. Mistrust of everyone, including himself, was also a constant companion. The attraction sparked by this woman—because he wouldn’t lie to himself; that was what it was—he didn’t like. Didn’t want.
Still, he had to be civil. This was his workplace; he only yelled when someone deserved it. Just get this done quickly, hand her off to Backeljauw for reassignment and get back on duty.
Breaking his habit, he stopped at the lift and summoned it, giving her a chance to catch up.
She stepped into his side vision, beckoning him to look at her fully again, for the flaws that had to be there. He was usually good at finding the unpleasant aspects of other people; they would take some shine off.
His first thought upon having seen her, standing across the office from him, her eyes wild and obviously frightened, had been predatory but restrained. The door hadn’t slammed. He hadn’t raised his voice, not once, but she’d still looked at him as if he’d been a barely leashed bear about to eat her up.
The thought, the sexual grind of it—sudden and unexpected—made his lower abdomen contract and start to heat.
Damn. Look harder, find the flaw.
He scanned her features. “Are you ready for this?”
The grim set of her soft mouth said no, but that wasn’t the flaw.
“Yes.”
Her lie was a flaw, but not in her appearance. Still not helping.
Neither was her silky, brilliantly colored hair. Sorrel, it was like sorrel.
Still not the flaw—even if it prompted him to think of her in equine descriptors. Disturbing, but his flaw if it was one, that and a dearth of words to name that rich color. Earthy brown with fire and gold mingled in. Not her flaw.
The braided knot she wore it in suggested length and would’ve looked very professional but for the curling lock in the front that bounced free no matter how frequently she tucked it behind her ear. She looked more as if she should be selling some upscale shampoo than wearing scrubs. Which she wasn’t wearing yet.
“Locker room first,” he muttered, trying to put himself back on track, then continued picturing horses because it seemed like the thing to do. A way to keep himself from dwelling on the fact he was taking her somewhere to take her clothes off and change into the scrubs she’d been given. He shouldn’t be thinking like that. She was practically a child.
That was the flaw. The thing he could cling to: common damned decency. She was too young. That would keep his unexpected flare of interest under control.
He locked his gaze to her nearly black eyes. “Did you work at all as a nurse before pursuing your advanced license?”
Her brows came together, forming the only line he could see on her face, and taking away a little bit of that wide-eyed vulnerability he kept seeing when he looked at her.
“I worked as an RN for three years before returning to school for another two years.”
“And you were licensed three years ago.” He remembered that as well. Laws existed to keep him from asking her age, but he could ask questions about her experience and qualifications, which would let him estimate.
Eight years ago she became an RN. It would’ve taken at least two, but more likely four, years to have become an RN. Likely twelve years of combined work experience and education. She was certainly no younger than twenty-eight, but probably closer to thirty.
Didn’t look it, but it was still enough of a gap for him to work with. Coupled with his track record with not getting involved on any personal level with colleagues at Christmastime helped solidify his determination. That and duty. He might not know when the danger his gut warned against would arrive, but he knew it would come.
The elevator finally dinged, and he stepped in with her right behind him. Both of them remained silent for the rest of the journey. All he heard outside the hospital’s PA system, and the lullaby music that played announcing a birth in the hospital, were her rapid footfalls to keep up with him in the hallway once they reached their floor, and the plummeting of his own thoughts.
“Locker room,” he finally stated, pushing in. “What locker were you assigned?”
She gave the number, two down from his own locker, naturally, and he led her around the middle bank of lockers to locate it. She pulled a small envelope from her pocket with the locker number written on it. Key. Good.
Time to hurry this up.
“Two minutes.” He checked his watch, then gestured to the locker. “Get changed, come out to the hall. Two minutes.”
