Hitching up her chin, she got in his face. Screw it. What was the worst that could happen? Being fired? Hauled in by the police? Whatever it was, it was a sunny day in the park compared to what she was already facing in her personal life.
“If I’m so untrustworthy, Doctor, then why don’t you throw me out and call the police? I hate to hang around where I’m not wanted. In fact, why don’t I just go?”
For emphasis, she took a step toward the nearest glowing Exit sign, and that brought Dudley to heel, just like she’d known it would. Putting a hand on her arm, he stopped her and lowered his voice. “I don’t think so. I don’t like you, and I think you’re a criminal who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but this isn’t about me. This is about what’s best for Hopewell General, and the hospital—”
He caught himself with a grimace, but she already knew and took the opportunity to rub it in. Just a little.
“The hospital can’t afford another scandal so soon, can it? Not after all that nasty publicity about your intern who was stealing narcotics from the hospital to support his habit.” She tsked. “That was unfortunate, wasn’t it?”
Dudley stilled, his face slowly hardening into stone.
She waited.
“Allegedly stealing narcotics,” he said finally, and she knew she’d won. This round, anyway.
“Right.” Feeling cheerier by the second, she smiled. “Allegedly. Whatever. The bottom line is, I need you not to press charges, and you need me to build you a world-class security system to protect the hospital’s computers. See? Win-win. So maybe we could work on not hating each other so much. What do you say?”
To her dismay, he continued to stare at her, but the vibe twisted and changed into something that made her skin crawl, especially when that slow gaze scraped down and over her body, as though he could see through her black suit to the parts of her body no man had seen in more years than she cared to count. Those brown eyes became thoughtful … considering … calculating. He was so obvious about it she could almost hear the clank of gears shifting in his devious little mind. It would have been funny except that she didn’t have time for this kind of nonsense, not with—
No. She wouldn’t think about that now. First things first.
“Maybe we could discuss this over dinner,” he suggested, his voice as sleek and oily as a spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Hmm.” She smiled sweetly, purely for the pleasure of seeing that flare of greedy lust in his expression right before she cut him off at the knees. “Just so you know, Doctor, I was the best shooter in my class at the academy, and I’m licensed to carry a concealed handgun with me wherever I go. Still want that dinner?”
His skin went pale around his frozen grin.
“Oh, well. Too bad. And please make sure to tell your wife that we’ve decided to keep our relationship on a professional level. I don’t want her coming after me. Okay?”
Dudley goggled at her. “My wife?”
“Your wife.” Lia jerked her head in the direction of a woman behind the nurse’s station. Though she quickly tossed her fall of sleek black hair, lowered her head and made a show of flipping through a patient chart, the woman had been tracking Lia’s interaction with Dudley since the second they came into view. She was about thirty-five-ish, Lia guessed, and would have been stunningly beautiful if she hadn’t been giving Lia the Medusa stare for the last several minutes. “She seems to be the jealous type.”
Looking bewildered, Dudley turned to see whom Lia was referring to and spied the woman, who shot him a quick glare. His expression cleared with sudden understanding that made his face brighten to a stunning magenta. Lia considered the color change a dead giveaway to some sort of questionable behavior between him and Ms. Attitude, but Dudley apparently imagined himself to be quite the player and was now giving Lia the wide-eyed, innocent act. Lia played along, just for kicks. If this idiot wanted to delude himself into thinking that FBI agents couldn’t read people’s body language, then who was she to disabuse him of that notion?
“That’s not your wife?” she asked.
“Ah, no,” Dudley said, clearing his throat. “She’s, ah, Kayla Tsang. Head of nursing in E.R..”
“She seems very interested in our conversation.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Keeping his resolute gaze straight ahead, Dudley resumed his march around the nurse’s station. “And I need to get back to the office.”
Lia ducked her head, careful to keep her smile to herself. “My mistake.”
Yeah, it was time to get cracking, and, amusing as the good doctor and his extracurricular activities were, they had nothing to do with Lia. Well, unless he tried to hit on Lia again; then she’d use what she suspected as leverage against him. But she didn’t think it would come to that. Meanwhile, the sooner they got done with this ridiculous tour, the sooner she could get back to her new office and work on the security system, and the sooner she could return to the FBI after this leave of absence. They’d already wasted the better part of the morning.
“I’m just trying to understand what was going through your mind, Brown.” A man’s deep voice, low but hard-edged with annoyance, cut across the hubbub from the other side of the nurse’s station. “Give me something to work with here.”
Don’t be nosy, Lia told herself, even though Dudley and everyone else, for that matter, were already glancing around and craning their necks like rubbernecking drivers on the highway. It’s none of your business.
Her feet, unfortunately, didn’t understand social niceties and were already slowing for a better look at the developing ass chewing. There was something compelling about that man’s voice, something that caught her attention in a steel-jawed grip and didn’t let go.
And then she saw him.
Not the red-faced and stammering Brown, a young guy—resident, she was guessing—who looked like a twelve-year-old who’d tried on his father’s scrubs and was now horrified to actually be mistaken for a doctor.
No. Lia couldn’t look away from the other guy. The angry one who had his back to her while he got in Brown’s face.
About six feet tall, he, too, was dressed in scrubs—hell, everyone around here was—and had the broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, round-assed combination of a born athlete or a gym rat. His gesturing arms were smoothly brown and sculpted, and he wore battered running shoes, which told her they saw action outside the corridors of this hospital. A stethoscope dangled around his neck at the base of his skull-trimmed head, and she hoped he wasn’t about to whip it off and use it to strangle Brown, which seemed like a distinct possibility.
After several excruciating beats, the stammering and floundering Brown found his tongue and worked up an answer. “I didn’t think—” he began.
Dr. Pissed Off snorted. “That much is clear.”
“—that we needed a chest X-ray,” Brown continued. “So I—”
“So you didn’t order one.” Dr. Pissed Off swelled with indignation, somehow taking up more than his fair share of the air and space around the nurse’s station. “And now we’ve got a patient with a raging case of pneumonia, which should’ve been diagnosed yesterday. Does that about sum it up?”
Everyone within a twenty-foot radius was listening now. Oh, they kept up the pretense of working, sure, but the personnel behind the counter had their ears cocked as they tapped on their keyboards or spoke on the phone, and even the passing orderly and the patient he was wheeling on his gurney turned their heads to gape. Beside Lia,