Two

Scrubs. Ick. I hated wearing them, and yet I had on my bright pink ones today. Reminded me way too much of my past career-the one I wanted nothing to do with now yet kept getting thrown back into.

This I blamed on none other than Jagger.

Okay, it wasn’t always his fault, but the guy had broad shoulders (sigh) and could handle anything. Sure it made sense that I would investigate the cases involving medical fraud.

That didn’t mean I had to like it-or the damn scrubs.

I headed out of my bedroom and down the stairs.

Lying on the couch with a cold pack on his forehead was none other than my darling Goldie.

“Hey, Suga,” he mumbled.

“Sinuses acting up again?” I thought about all the suffering he’d recently gone through for the “new” nose, and how maybe that caused him more sinus problems. “May is always a bad month for you, Gold. You taking your daily local honey?”

He peered out from under the ice pack.

“Gold, you have to take it! It’s like desensitizing yourself to the pollen.”

“Why you dressed like that?” he mumbled, ignoring my sage advice and more than likely expecting me to give him the horticultural lesson that bees pollinate the flowers and when the pollen gets into the honey and we take it in small daily doses, it’s just like getting a shot at the allergist’s office.

I sat on the edge of the white couch Miles so lovingly picked out for our snowy-decorated living room. Sometimes I needed sunglasses, but the guy had exceptional taste in d'ecor.

And roommates.

“Shit, Gold. I’m back to work already. Newport is barely a distant memory-”

Goldie shrieked, but not too loudly. Guess he didn’t want to scare Spanky, who was nestled beneath Gold’s arm. “Please don’t remind me of that debacle. Let it fade into the sunset.”

“It was only a few weeks ago, so I’m guessing fading is going to take some time. Either way, Gold, I start work today at TLC.”

He dropped the ice bag to the side and it landed smack on Spanky’s paw, causing him to spring up and jump off the couch before Goldie or I could catch him. I waved my hand at Goldie, who was apologizing to the absent pup.

“He’s afraid if a paper falls. Don’t sweat it. And-” I leaned forward, inches from his perfect nose. “-what’s that look for? What do you know about TLC that I need to know?”

Goldie knew something about everything, but not in the same way that Jagger did. Let’s just say, Goldie was always on the side of the law-while Jagger walked a fine line between right and wrong-but never got caught.

Gotta love both of them.

“Come on, Gold. Spill.”

He lifted the ice bag to his forehead. “Word on the street is they’ve been in much better shape financially since the nephew and his sister took over.” Leaning back into the white softness of Miles’s silk pillows, Goldie sighed. “Payne Sterling.”

“The nephew? I’m guessing he is going to be a pain to deal with and is not exactly sterling.” I laughed.

Goldie glared at me with a perfectly mascaraed eye.

“Okay. Okay. That was lame. I know. But, Gold, I’m going back into nursing! (To my ears that last word came out like something out of The Exorcist.) Cut me some slack, here.”

“Nursing on ambulance runs will be different, Suga. Especially flying in those air ambulances…”

I knew Goldie was talking. His mouth kept moving, but my mind wandered down the air-ambulance road. Just exactly how many near fatal or…eeks…fatal helicopter crashes occurred per year? Weren’t those air ambulances caught up in telephone lines pretty regularly?

“Suga. Suga!”

I jumped. “Hmm?”

“You’re as white as this freaking room. Stop worrying. The cruise ship didn’t sink in the Bermuda Triangle and the helicopters are not going to crash.”

He knew me so well. I did shiver at the thought of the cruise ship we’d taken a few months back when I was assigned a case on it. Actually it turned out to be great fun.

“Gold, Miles and I had a nursing friend named Hilly Wentworth. She joined the Air Force after leaving Saint Greg’s Hospital. All I remember from her e-mails to us was that there was an Air Force regulation that said the fire truck had to be called to the helipad each time the helicopter was going to land.”

“Wow,” Goldie mused. “Wouldn’t make me feel very safe.”

“No,” I mumbled.

Goldie grew serious.

Yikes. I was not liking this. Not liking it one bit. “Gold?”

“You’re correct. Payne really is not exactly sterling. Took over the business and-well, no one likes him. Now I know that’s not reason to give the guy a bad name, but there is something about him that begs for dislike. Almost hatred.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Nephew Payne makes money, but I’m not sure how much on the up and up he is. Anyway, that’s the street talk, and you know how reliable that can be.”

Suddenly the pit of my stomach knotted. Yikes again.

“What do you mean you are not flying?” Jagger asked, looking at me from his SUV. Well, not exactly “asked.” More like threatened, although I’ll never know how he could turn a question into a threat.

Then again, I was talking Jagger here.

I leaned closer to him before we got out of his Suburban. “I’ll do the ambulance runs, but I’m not setting foot on any helicopter. They’re not safe.”

Until my dying day I’ll never really know if the look in Jagger’s eyes was pity for me (my best bet), fear that I’d get hurt or worse (okay, also a best bet) or accusing me of being a wuss (oh-so very Jaggerlike), but whatever intent he had, I was standing firm.

“Come on, I’ll introduce you to the pilot you’ll be flying with.” With that he got out of the SUV, didn’t wait for me, and walked into the main building of the TLC property.

Three gigantic garages bordered the place while ambulances and vans sported the TLC slogan, Ride in style and comfort, on the sides.

I couldn’t help but wonder if accident victims even cared about comfort or style, and why the heck would an ambulance company advertise that? I was thinking more along the lines of “speedy delivery,” but the late Mr. Rogers only came to mind. I loved him!

On the north side of the complex (and it was large enough to call it one) was the helipad with two copters sitting at the ready.

I shivered.

When I turned back, Jagger was staring.

“I’m not riding in them,” I said and walked in front of him to the door marked entrance. The way my cases usually went, I was certain they were expecting me for my first day of duty-and that Jagger had all the kinks ironed out of the plans.

At the door, I grabbed the handle but Jagger’s hand covered mine before I could yank. “What?” I said, turning. “Are you suddenly turning into a gentleman and opening doors for me?” I laughed. Sounded more like a snort. To ignore my burning complexion, (yeah, he still had the power to embarrass the hell out of me) I pulled my hand from beneath his, ignored the fact that I wanted to rub it, and stood there speechless but with my shoulders straightened to show it was my choice.

He opened the door, walked inside and over his shoulder said, “If the case calls for it, you’ll fly on them or you’ll drive an ambulance if necessary.”

Speechless was an understatement.

I followed him inside, biting my tongue although I really had no snappy comment other than, “No I won’t,” but felt it would have come out sounding like a kid-and my foot would stomp all on its own.

The room hummed with phones ringing and air-conditioning clicking on and off. Sunlight streamed in through bay windows that overlooked a fountain (of Cupid-geez) and the rest of the complex. All in all a nice office.

They really must have been raking in the dough.

Before I could turn to see whom Jagger was talking to, I heard, “ca suce!” The French-Canadian version of “That sucks!”

I knew this just as I knew who’d said it, because Lilla Marcel was sitting directly before me-behind the reception desk.

An obvious Jagger plant-probably working there illegally, since she was Canadian.

I didn’t even want to go there, knowing Jagger had finagled something to get Lilla working on the inside for us. Her mother was Adele Girard, who was Fabio’s receptionist and an ex-con. I curled my lips at the thought. Adele was like a second mother to me-which would make my first one gasp if she saw the “hooker” attire that dear Adele wore. After getting her hands burned in prison (this after she’d committed fraud to get money for her mother who was dying of cancer), Adele always wore gloves. White ones. Looked great with her spiffy, usually black-and-white, skintight polka-dotted outfits. And very fifties.

I loved Adele.

And after recently meeting her daughter, Lilla, I had taken to her too. I pushed past Jagger. “Lilla! Great to see-”

Before I could finish, I was yanked away toward the doorway. Jagger leaned into me and said, “Are you nuts, Pauline?”

When he called me by my real name, Jagger was dead serious. Suddenly I realized he was correct though. I should have pretended not to know Lilla. Damn. Sometimes I sank back into Nurse Pauline instead of Investigator Pauline.

I pulled free of Jagger and rubbed my arm as if it hurt. That always got a look of concern from him. “Sorry. I slipped. I’m human, ya know.”

As I turned to go back to “meet” Lilla I heard him mumble, “Don’t I know it.”

Of course that could be what I imagined I heard, but I was going with it. See, with Jagger, I had to sometimes take leeway with interpreting things-to sway them in my favor.

The guy was a veritable closed book.

I walked up to the reception desk and tried to ignore Lilla’s beauty (sometimes that could be very intimidating) and the fact that she wore some kind of Victoria’s Secret outfit all in black (which, in fact, was even more intimidating).

Jagger too, usually wore black.

It dawned on me that Lilla was a bit of a female Jagger-but when we’d first met, I immediately liked her.

“Hi, I’m Pauline Sokol.” I held my hand out to her. “And you are?”

“Lilla,” she said.

I noticed her nails, the length of some heroin-addicted Asian warlords’, as she shook my hand and, without a beat, pretended not to know me.

“Nice to meet you, Pauline.” She held up a clipboard with several sheets of paper on it. In her thick French-Canadian accent, she said, “Please to fill these out.”

I smiled, winked and took the paperwork. New hire. Eeks. I wanted to shake my head and run. How the hell was I getting back into nursing again?

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jagger approaching-with another fantastically gorgeous guy in tow.

Perhaps I’d died on the way to work here and this was heaven-where males outpopulated the females two to one. Wait-surely there couldn’t be that many men in heaven.

Where Jagger’s hair was jet-black, this other guy’s was light sunshine-and nearly shoulder length. All right, it fell below his eyes and had some fantastic waves that any woman would envy. Deep brown eyes matched Jagger’s, but where Jag’s were mysterious, this guy’s were friendlier. Sparkling. He stood about six foot two.

I swallowed hard and told myself to cool off or I’d never make it on this case. I said a silent prayer to my favorite saint, Theresa, that this guy was not going to be working here with me.

“Sky Palmer, Pauline, the pilot of one of the choppers,” Jagger said, his voice sounding as if in a dream.

I was hung up on the closeness of the two hunks, my hands shaking, my knees knocking and my hormones on speed dial (with a busy signal).

I had to get…you know…soon.

Slowly I held out my hand, since the guy next to Jagger had his in front of me. I felt a nudge on my left arm and heard a “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Jagger had pulled me back to reality. Delicious reality.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get your name?” Proud that I’d managed a logical sentence as our hands were still touching, I smiled like a fool.

“Sky. Sky Palmer,” he said in a Texas drawl that had me nearly drooling, as if I’d just bitten into a juicy rib eye. He let go of my hand.

I tucked mine into my pants pocket and was about to reply when Jagger cut me off: “And don’t go joking about Sky being a pilot. He’s heard it all. Sky is his real name.”

I bit back the joke I’d had ready, turned to Jagger and mouthed, “No kidding,” and then looked at Sky. Who the hell named a bouncing baby Sky? “Great to meet you. Texas? Huh?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He winked and smiled-I think at the same time, which had me nearly in a pile of liquid like the melted Wicked Witch in Oz.

“Oh, no need for the ‘ma’am.’ Just call me Pauline. I’m so looking forward to flying with you, Sky.” Quickly I turned to Jagger and mouthed, “Shut up.”