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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? Thatwouldexplain 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 anunfairlygood-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 hissternpatient 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.

Andoh. He smelled good.Reallygood. Like warm spices with some strange undertone. Something almost metallic, something that shouldn’t smell so good but most certainlydid.

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,finallymoved 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 potentialweirdos“—Danny couldn’t help but make that last part a little pointed—”hunting us down after work.”

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