Page 2

Danny

“ Y ou goddamn, flipping piece of crap, son of a hot potato!” Danny yelled, shaking his fist at the current bane of his existence. “You were put on this earth to torment me, weren’t you, spawn of Satan? Don’t even try to deny it.”

The copy machine did not, in fact, try to deny it.

“That’s what I thought,” mumbled Danny, a trifle smugly.

Then he remembered he was talking out loud to an inanimate object in the middle of the night, and all smugness was forgotten.

He took a quick look around to make sure nobody was nearby.

He was generally pretty good when it came to controlling his admittedly dirty mouth while at work, but he wasn’t actually quite sure what had come out just now.

The office was abandoned. Chloe, the night-shift charge nurse and his work bestie, had left her computer to go grab coffee and snacks, and he was pretty sure the other emergency room nurses were sneaking naps on some of the gurneys in the lesser-used patient bays.

It was a dead night.

Danny supposed he should be glad about that, since it meant no one was horrifically ill or injured, but it also meant he had time to help out his charge and copy the new schedule, necessitating the use of the copy machine from hell, so his feelings were a little conflicted.

The copy machine that was currently possessed, refusing to copy and also refusing to tell Danny why .

“Agh! I give up. You win again, demon.”

“Danny Boy, please stop talking to the copier. It’s concerning.”

Danny jumped at the sound of Chloe’s voice. She had appeared in the doorway, coffees in hand, a few bags of chips peeking out of her scrub jacket pocket.

Danny immediately blushed at being caught—he fucking hated that he blushed so easily—but still managed to defend himself. “That beast started it.”

“Be a good boy, step away from the copier, and drink your coffee. I appreciate you trying to help me out but not at the risk of your clearly fragile sanity.”

He was tempted to stick his tongue out at her, but he was a professional , damn it. He took the coffee with a quick grin of thanks.

Danny was nearing the end of his second year working nights in the emergency room, but it was too unpredictable to get used to any sort of routine.

Their hospital was in a smaller city, but the mountains around Hyde Park, Colorado, attracted outdoorsy tourists, and that meant that some nights it seemed everyone and their mother needed to be seen and some nights there was not a patient to be found.

It was hard to stay awake on the slower nights, but he knew if he tried to nap like some of the other nurses, he’d just end up throwing off his sleep rhythm. He tried to help out with some of the charge nurse duties when he had time, but sometimes he ended up more hindrance than help.

“I saw Gabe in the cafeteria. He told me to tell you to go see him, if you’re not busy.”

Danny rolled his eyes before he could stop himself. Of course Gabe had used someone else as a go-between rather than coming to find Danny himself.

“We both have phones. He can text me if he really wants to see me.”

Chloe shrugged while scooping her dark curls up into a ponytail. “I figured you’d say that, but I’m not getting in the middle of it—just told him I’d pass the message along.” She grinned at him. “I’m an angel that way.”

Danny couldn’t help his answering grin despite his annoyance with his brother. “You are an angel. Thank you. And thanks for the coffee. I’m gonna head back to my station. Call me if you need any help.”

”As long as it doesn’t involve the copy machine,” Chloe teased. “You two are on a time-out from each other.”

Danny just raised his coffee in acknowledgment and headed down the hall to the nurses’ station, which consisted of a semicircle row of computers facing out toward the patient bays.

Bays that were currently empty.

He sat down in an office chair that had definitely seen better days.

To be fair, most of their equipment had seen better days.

He took a sip of his coffee—scalding hot and indecently weak, the hospital special—and poked at his book.

He wasn’t exactly sure why he was reluctant to settle in and read, but he had an itchy, restless feeling that was making it hard to sit still.

A movement at the corner of his eye caught his attention.

“Chloe?” he called out, turning his head to the left. No answer and no one he could see.

He lifted slightly out of his chair and leaned over the counter, trying to peer around the corner. Nothing but empty beige hallway.

He sat back down, giving himself a shake. “All right, Danny, let’s stop creating distractions for ourselves. Also, let’s stop talking to ourselves. We’re embarrassing us.”

He picked up his book, leaned back in his chair, and opened up to his most recent page.

“Hello, lovely.”

The voice was deep, with a velvety smoothness that sent a little shiver down Danny’s spine. He looked up from his book and nearly jumped out of his chair.

There was a man directly in front of him where no one had been just a second before.

And oh Lord, what a man.

He was the kind of handsome one rarely saw in a hospital outside of a soap opera, and dressed in an immaculate, perfectly fitted suit.

Cheekbones you could cut yourself on, with sleek black hair swept back, ending just below his chin.

And those eyes. A bright, icy blue that seemed to glow underneath the hospital’s fluorescents.

Eyes that were focused on Danny with unnerving intensity. But in contrast to the man’s greeting, which had sounded warm and even a little sultry, his blue eyes were hard, almost cold.

Danny felt all the hairs on the back of his neck prick up.

They could get some really strange people in the middle of the night, but they usually had to get through the entrance desk before ending up back here.

Danny hadn’t been called about any new patients, and this man didn’t have a visitor’s badge.

Fuck. Was the night clerk also taking a gurney nap?

Danny mustered up his best patient-friendly voice. “Can I help you, sir? Were you here to be seen? I can show you back to the front desk.”

The man’s cold stare didn’t waver. “I’m not a patient.”

“Okay, well.” Danny forced himself to keep meeting the man’s eyes. “Are you looking for a family member? If you give me their name, I can try to find what floor they’re staying on.”

“I’m not a visitor.”

Danny took in the stranger’s immaculate suit again. Was this maybe a new surgeon? That would explain the sociopathic stare. Although, he didn’t see a badge anywhere. “Are you looking for the doctors’ lounge?”

Those icy eyes didn’t even blink. “Who were you talking to just now?”

Of course this stranger had heard him talking nonsense to himself.

Danny refused to blush. “Myself.”

“I see.”

And that seemed to be all that Mr. Handsome Creep intended to say. He just kept staring at Danny, blue eyes stone-cold and eerily bright.

Seeing how this apparently wasn’t a patient he had to be nice to, and seeing as how he had just been forced to admit to an unfairly good-looking stranger that he had been talking to himself like a loon, Danny felt entitled to funnel his embarrassment into annoyance instead.

He switched to his stern patient voice, the one he used when someone seemed like they were about to take his sweet disposition as permission to throw something at him.

“Well, this is nice and all, but I need you to tell me what you’re doing here so I can point you in the right direction.

Because I can guarantee this nurses’ station isn’t it. So…?”

Danny was almost positive the man hadn’t moved—still hadn’t even blinked, for that matter—but he was suddenly much, much closer.

He was positively looming over the desk, blue eyes now only inches from Danny’s own.

Danny was never exactly the tallest guy in the room, topping off at just five feet eight, but had he been standing, this man would have towered over him by more than half a foot.

And oh . He smelled good. Really good. Like warm spices with some strange undertone. Something almost metallic, something that shouldn’t smell so good but most certainly did .

It would be weird to sniff a stranger, right?

“Who are you?” The man’s question came out clipped, almost angry, bringing Danny sharply out of his smell-induced reverie.

“I’m Danny, a nurse here.” It was best to keep it simple when dealing with the unhinged. He pointed at his badge.

The man’s eyes finally, finally moved away from his, moving down to his name badge.

“So you are,” he murmured. “Danny No-Last-Name.”

“We have a policy not to give our last names out to patients. Don’t want any potential weirdos “—Danny couldn’t help but make that last part a little pointed—”hunting us down after work.”

Mr. Handsome Creep’s lips tilted up. Nowhere near a full smile, but a little genuine warmth entered those glacial eyes, and Danny felt his breath catch at the sight.

He found himself thinking of nibbling on those lips. How much warmth would enter those eyes then?

No. No, thank you. We are not attracted to Mr. Handsome Creep.

“No, we couldn’t have you being hunted, could we?” The man’s voice was a purr now. “Lots of big, bad predators out there looking for a snack.”

“Um…” Danny wasn’t even sure what to feel. The words were teasing, but the tone was not. Was the man threatening him? Playing with him? Very poorly flirting with him?

All it took was another whiff of the man’s spiced scent, and Danny thought, Fuck it . This guy might be odd, but he looked like a prince and smelled goddamn amazing, and Danny hadn’t flirted with anyone in ages. Maybe he could be graduated to Mr. Handsome instead of Mr. Handsome Creep.

Danny smiled his best “get free coffee from the barista” smile. “Well, I’ve been called a snack before but never in that context.” He winked for good measure.