Lori Avocato - Dead On Arrival

He kept cursing and mentioning my name over and over.

“Get to the shower!” I yelled, half pushing him toward the downstairs bathroom that did, in fact, have a shower hose attached to it despite the claw-foot antique tub.

“Did you kill Payne?” came flying out of my mouth as I undid Dano’s belt buckle.

Dano managed to open one tiny slit of his left eye and somehow glared at me. “What the hell is wrong with you tonight? No, I didn’t kill anyone.” He stood closer to me, probably to see me better. “But the thought did cross my mind this very second.”

I fingered the locket.

He grabbed my hand and yanked it off, breaking the clasp. “You can’t be trusted with that thing. Thank God you don’t carry a gun. I still want to know what the hell you are up to!” He shoved off his jeans and stood there in his boxers.

I stood my ground instead of giving into the flight-or-fight response that my adrenaline was pumping out. Actually, my first choice was the flight one. Okay, the very first one had something to do with seeing him in his boxers. “I need to know. Are you involved in the fraud at TLC?”

He hesitated. My mouth went dry.

“How do you know about that?” he asked, very seriously.

“It…doesn’t matter. Are you?” My nurse’s nature made me want to gently wipe the water from his eyes and face. He looked so miserable-and I had caused it. But I held back, remembering Jagger’s words. “And don’t go nursing the criminals,” he’d once said to me.

But I couldn’t believe I was standing here with a criminal.

It seemed like hours that I stood in the kitchen grilling ER Dano, sans clothes and now only with a towel wrapped around his waist, until he finally started to recover from the pepper spray. I knew if he’d meant to harm me, he could have done so a long time ago.

Had to be a good sign.

Actually, he became very cooperative about the questioning and made sense a few times, but right when I thought I’d figured him out, he’d get back on the “What the hell are you up to?” line of questioning.

“Make me some tea to ease this feeling in my throat,” he said. It really wasn’t a gruff order, but then again he didn’t say please either.

When I went to put a tea bag in a mug and pour tap water into it, he said from behind, “Don’t you know how to make proper tea? Boil it.”

Shades of Stella Sokol.

I boiled his and nuked mine and in a few minutes we were sitting at the table. His face looked much better, although still a bit pinkish.

And there I sat, not sure if I should feel badly or not.

Dano took a sip of tea and looked me in the eye. “Who do you work for, Pauline?”

Yikes. He’d used my first name as Jagger always did with his no-nonsense voice. As I sat there contemplating a lie, I realized there wasn’t a scared bone in my body.

ER Dano had to be clean. I just felt it.

“The more important question, Dan, is why do you have all that evidence of fraud at TLC?”

He didn’t even look surprised, which surprised the hell out of me-and maybe did scare me a bit. Then again, a con man usually could play a poker face like a gambling Vegas billionaire.

I sipped and swallowed and sipped then swallowed and sipped a few more times. When I looked him in the eyes, I said, “It shouldn’t take so long to answer truthfully.”

Dano chuckled, and then started to laugh. “You are one hell of a woman, Nightingale.”

Now I’ve faced murderers before, several times, as a matter of fact, and even had them make attempts on my life, and with my limited knowledge of psych, I could sense the nefarious personalities of these folk when it came right down to it.

And I didn’t sense it now.

Dano’s laughter wasn’t eerie or scary or nefarious. It seemed to come from deep within him and from humor.

“What is so funny?” I had to ask.

“It just dawned on me. You think I’m involved in the fraud and the stabbings.”

“And that is funny because?”

“Because, granted, I’m a burned-out paramedic, suffer nightmares from the job, don’t put up with any crap from anyone. Anyone. And have little patience for the newbies, although I always get assigned them, but I am not a killer or a thief.”

He has me convinced was my first thought; however, logically, I knew I couldn’t just believe his words. Probably I wanted to believe them and that was confusing me. But I looked him directly in the eyes and said, “Prove it. I need proof.”

Dano glared at me for a few moments.

I swallowed several times and fidgeted with my tea mug, feeling like a bug under a microscope. I also fidgeted in my chair. Finally I said, “Stop that! Tell me the truth now.”

He calmly got up and went to the cabinet that I’d been snooping in. When he pulled out the rest of the papers, he shuffled through them and handed me several. “Read.”

I read all right and had to push my jaw back up off my chest several times. Slowly I set them down.

“Then who killed Payne and stabbed Pansy?” the stupid question came out before I could think, since I was so delighted (and, yes, relieved) that Dano was not guilty of anything other than gathering inside information for one Global Carrier Insurance Company-the biggest one that Fabio dealt with in his agency.

Dano shook his head. “I thought you cared about me.”

Oops. “I did…do.” I set the papers down, got up and went to place my arms around his neck. “You have to believe me that I never wanted you to be involved.”

And his kiss said more, a hell of a lot more than any words could.

He started to nuzzle my neck. “If I knew who hurt Pansy and killed Payne, don’t you think I’d tell the cops?”

Preoccupied by his hands running over my body in oh-so delicious places, I barely remembered what he was talking about. In a few seconds I leaned back, looked him in the eyes and said, “Yes, I do.”

“Then sex isn’t out of the question, once I recover from your attack?”

Thank goodness he was smiling his dynamite ER Dano, sexy, girls-can’t-keep-their-hands-off-me smile.

I ran my fingers down his chest to grab onto the towel. “Not at all.”

His lips covered mine, and despite his earlier “discomforts” he lifted me up and carried me into the living room, where soon my clothing lay in a pile on the floor-right after I’d yanked off Dano’s damp towel.

It didn’t take me long to forget my concerns about Dano. As he ran his hands across my breasts so very gently in the afterglow of our lovemaking, it seemed like a dream. Well, this very moment seemed like a sexy, unbelievable dream, but any thoughts that he was a criminal seemed like ages ago and not very real.

I turned toward him, taking his now very pale pink cheeks in my hands and kissing his lips with purpose. “I am so sorry.”

He kissed me back, running his tongue inside my mouth until I thought we could do…it…again. “Fagetaboutit. You’ve worn me out.” He playfully pinched my nipple.

“I really do want to forget it all but need to make it clear. The job stuff. Not the sex. I’m sure you’re wondering who I am.”

He wrapped his leg across mine. “Nope. I know you rather intimately now.”

I smacked his hard chest. “Ouch. Well, I need to make it all clear.” And I really did. I couldn’t start a relationship on a lie, so I told ER Dano who I really was and who I worked for, leaving out Jagger’s identity-or what little I knew about it.

Dano leaned back, looked at me and smiled. “I was wondering when you’d get around to all that.”

I felt my eyes widen a hundred times larger. “You…were wondering?” I wrinkled my forehead. “I’m not following.” But my investigative abilities were sending out signals that said, He knew. He knew. He knew all along!