Allen was crowding her. Izzie barely had time to look up into his face before she felt herself turned almost fully around and practically dragged down the hallway toward PICU.
“What’s going on? Is the building on fire or something?”
He looked at the other two women with her. They’d followed Allen like a pair of tiny ducks. “Fin, take Nikkie Jean back down stairs. I don’t want her going down the 300s hallway.”
Nikkie Jean scowled up at him, looking ridiculous with her hair braided in two pigtails and cartoon unicorns on her glasses today. “Why for, Lieutenant? You have some explaining to do.”
“Wallace Henedy’s wife just went into her son’s room. I don’t want a confrontation between you two and her. Not today. He was shot last night, shortly before the deputy mayor.”
Izzie gasped. She’d seen Wallace Henedy’s son before. He’d been in a car accident at around the same time that she was in the hospital. They’d both been patients on the fourth floor and had come face to face—while she’d been wearing alien pajamas. He hadn’t seemed anything like his father at all. “What’s his prognosis?”
“Most likely a full recovery.”
Nikkie Jean’s name was paged over the intercom, and she straightened. “Aye-aye, Lieutenant. I’ll avoid this area. Come on. Fin, you can be my babysitter while Allen whisks Izzie away in the other direction.”
Then Nikkie Jean was gone, dragging Fin with her, after shooting a wink at Izzie and a significant look at Allen.
Izzie try to figure out what that was all about. She had no clue.
Sometimes with Nikkie Jean, there was no way to know what the woman was really thinking. Or plotting. Nikkie Jean was a real plotter.
The hospital’s never-ending stash of chocolate pudding was proof of that.
Someone had seen to it that Izzie had chocolate pudding on her food tray almost every single day during those three weeks she’d been a patient. It had most likely been Nikkie Jean, who seem to have an in with the dietary staff.
“I need to get back downstairs. Nikkie Jean took the paperwork I was fetching for Cherise.” Izzie looked up at the man still holding her arm in his firm, warm grip and immediately forgot exactly what it was her supervisor had wanted from her, Nikkie Jean, and Fin. Just for a moment. “Thanks. The last thing I want to do right now is get into a confrontation with Wallace Henedy’s wife.”
“I figured as much.”
He finally released her elbow. Maybe, thanks to all the times he’d been there to save her, she was somehow conditioned to his touch.
Why not? It made just as much sense as anything else. “Once again, thanks for saving me. You always seem to be there at the right time.”
“Just my luck,” he said. He shot her a smile, and she understood all over again why the doofy first-shift nurses got all twitchy whenever he looked at them.
Objectively, he was probably one of the most gorgeous men on staff at FCGH—with the unusual gray eyes and the caramel hair and the perfect smile. Not to mention the hard, toned body that looked damned good in a white coat.
Him, Rafe, Virat, and Cage eclipsed every other man in the building. There was no way she’d ever deny that.
There was something about his gray eyes now that was so different than it had been before. Before the evil pharmacy tech had gotten her hands on him. Back then, he’d been an arrogant jerk. He’d defined everything Izzie had hated about male physicians.
He seemed so different now.
Mostly with Nikkie Jean. Izzie didn’t think he was attracted to her friend. Not at all. Maybe at Ariella’s wedding he had been—back before the storm had struck—but now, he was almost brotherly where Nikkie Jean was concerned.
That had Izzie softening toward him, too. Nikkie Jean deserved people to love her and want to take care of her more than anyone Izzie had ever known. Nikkie Jean had met him before the pharmacy tech had wrought her destruction on him—Nikkie Jean said that woman had broken a part of Allen. A part he had yet to repair.
That had made Nikkie Jean, who usually feared male physicians from the top of her head to the bottom of her toes, almost protective of Allen.
Nikkie Jean said he had changed for the better.
He did seem to hover over Nikkie Jean whenever Caine wasn’t around. All strong and protective.
There was still speculation around the hospital because of how Allen seemed so close to Nikkie Jean.
Nikkie Jean said the rumormongers could go stick it up their noses. She was adopting Allen as her big brother, no matter what.
“Well, thanks again,” Izzie said, feeling beyond awkward.
“Maybe, Nurse Izzie, in another lifetime you and I were good friends. That’s why karma or fate keep putting us in the circumstances.”
“Do you believe that?” She fell into step next to him.
“Do I believe in other lifetimes or fate? I’m not so certain what I believe anymore,” he said quietly. “But in recent times, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I’ve had to tell myself that maybe everything does happen for a reason. Why else has all of this happened to people around us lately? To you? Nikkie Jean? Annie? I just don’t know.”
Izzie couldn’t think of an answer.
She heard an echoing confusion in his words, too.
A confusion she still hadn’t figured out even hours later.