by Lori Avocato
Goldie grabbed the blue top from my hands and stuck the pink one in its place. “Jacket schmacket. Make sure you wear uncovered spandex long enough for him to get a load of your perky-”
I smacked him on the arm.
“You two are pathetic.” I looked Goldie in the eye. “And stop trying to force another guy on me ’cause you don’t want me interested in Jagger!”
Goldie’s face dropped.
“Damn it.” I hurried toward him and wrapped my arms around his gigantic frame. “Sorry. I’m sorry, Gold. I know you always have my best interest in mind and keep telling me that Jagger is addictive, like cocaine, and will mess me up. I know. I know.” I felt him lift his head and in the mirror behind him, noticed him grin. I pushed him away. “You shit!”
Miles broke out into hysterical laughter, and it was at that moment that I knew I loved these two as my best friends and couldn’t move out of there anytime soon. It really didn’t feel as if I were an intrusion.
Besides, I couldn’t freaking afford it yet.
A bad choice in cosigning a car loan for an ex-friend and a bad addiction to a shopping habit, which I’d curtailed immensely lately, would keep me there a bit longer.
“I’m gonna be late if we keep this up.” I grabbed the pink top-since in reality, Goldie was the fashion expert-and said, “Gold, do my makeup. Please? I’ll wear the stinking pink.”
After Goldie got his hands on me, I looked into the mirror and said, “Wow. You could get a job in Hollywood with your expertise. I look better than I really am!”
The doorbell rang and suddenly my stomach dropped.
We’d had a lot of fun getting me ready-but now I was actually going out with ER Dano-alone!
A girl might be taking a big chance with a guy like him…
“Cold?” Dano asked.
He pulled into the parking lot of the beach. We’d driven down to the Connecticut shoreline and stopped at Meig’s Point in the Hammonasset Beach State Park. “Uh-uh. I’m fine for now.” I could picture Goldie in my head, shaking his head at me covering up the spandex. Dano probably had been too busy driving to notice, so I’d have to tough it out for a while.
Damn. I was feeling very “naughty nurse” again.
Seems the hot, sexy, probably burned-out paramedic brought that out in me.
Consequently, no jacket schmacket for now.
He pulled the truck into a space near the brown nature-center building. Actually, we pretty much had our pick of spaces. The place wasn’t very crowded, and I guessed that was because it was a weeknight. Good. We’d have more privacy on the beach, I thought, and then I also thought, For what, Pauline? For what!
Oh well, a girl could dream, and ER Dano was definitely dream material.
He got out of the truck, and I figured I’d better get out too or be left behind, but he surprised me. ER Dano actually opened the door for me! How very un-Jaggerlike.
I decided right then-and having a visual of Airbrush Lady actually was the catalyst-that I was not going to think of Jagger again. Well, not tonight anyway.
I rather liked this guy…
We walked toward the boardwalk that led to a pavilion on the beach, and Dano placed his hand on the small of my back. I loved that! It was such a minor little thing but said a wealth of romantic stuff in my mind. Dano wanted to make physical contact and that was fine with me, so I leaned into him a bit.
When we walked through the pavilion onto the beach, a gust of sea air tousled my hair, pushed me into Dano a bit more (really!) and made my perky you-know-whats stand out in the stupid Spandex. Oh, my.
Naughty nurse versus CSIC alumni (Catholic-school-induced conscience). Talk about being conflicted!
We walked for several minutes, and then Dano stopped, held my arm, slipped his feet out of his cowboy boots and yanked off his socks. He looked at me as if we were in the throes of passion and he was waiting for me to disrobe.
Trying to ignore how hot that made me feel, I smiled, bent down and slipped my feet out of my little white flats. No nylons. The cool sand felt gritty against the soles of my feet, but it was kinda neat to be sans shoes. Dano took them from me and with his, set them on the edge of the pavilion boardwalk.
“Look, the sunset is beautiful,” I said, pointing toward the russet sky in the west.
Before I could mention the cloud formation like some dummy, his arms were around me, pulling me closer and whispering, “I’m seeing beauty all right.” His lips landed on mine-not so softly, which was pure ER-while his arms tightened their hold.
All I could think of for a second was, my “perky problem” was going to be solved in this position, since I was now burning hot.
Dano kissed me for several seconds and then eased his tongue past my lips and into the warmth of my mouth. Ah. What a fantastic feeling!
I ran my hands up his back to reach his cheeks. When I stood on my tiptoes, I couldn’t resist brushing back his hair with both of my hands.
He moaned.
I joined him while we kissed for several more minutes.
Without a word, he led me toward the little sand dunes filled with bushes and wild grass of sorts-a perfect spot in which to hide from the world.
I thought of the cold sand for a second, since I’d left my jacket in the car, but before I knew it, Dano had his jean jacket off, laid it down, smoothed it out best he could and waved a hand over it.
I laughed, joining the squawking gulls and crashing waves in the musical ambiance of the shore.
Dano eased me down onto the hillside of sand and joined me. I found myself moving closer, snuggling, kissing and even wrapping my leg over his. It felt…so right. So damn right.
Ah…
Thirteen
My fantastic, larger-than-life make-out session with ER Dano had me all hot and bothered and not in the least in need of a jacket. With no words spoken, we shared an intimacy that I was barely able to stop.
“Hey, there’s a time and place for everything, Nightingale,” he said in all his realism, yet they were the most disappointing words I’d ever heard!
Dano leaned to the side, bent forward for a quick kiss on the lips and then took my hand into his. “You fit perfectly.”
Wow. Nice sentiment.
“Um,” I mumbled. Funny how when you click with a guy, your intelligence sometimes bottoms out.
He was correct about the time and place, although for a few fleeting, CSIC-less minutes, I might have gone a bit farther if he hadn’t stopped us.
Pauline Sokol: real naughty nurse!
For a change I’d thrown caution to the wind-and I loved it! Hey, I told myself, this was the twenty-first century and women were allowed to have sensual feelings. Even allowed to be the ones to start the romantic/ sensual actions.
But this really wasn’t the place, so I tucked my desires into the back of my mind in a new folder called “ER Dano…Yum” and sat silently looking at the sunset.
We left the beach, since it closed at sunset, and he drove me home. He said good night with a decent kiss and, most important, an “I’ll call you.”
Now, I was no fool. Having a guy say he’d call was akin to having someone say “I’ll see you” when you meet them on a vacation, they live on the other side of the world and you didn’t even exchange email addresses. I’d long ago learned not to trust those words when a guy said them, so I quickly added, “When?” and Dano and I soon had a date set up for Friday night.
I mentally patted myself on the back when I went inside my condo and marked our date down on the calendar.
A light at the end of the single Pauline Sokol tunnel.
My mother would be stuffing lacy table favors with candy-coated almonds in pastel colors right now, if I told her.
No one was home, so I hugged Spanky for a bit, set him outside and pressed the play button on the phone recorder.
“Pauline Sokol? This is your m-m-o-t-h-e-r-r-r-r.” The last word came out in a slow, deep voice, much like Darth Vader’s.
I shook my head but sat down and listened, knowing the tone was all in my mind.
“Your sister Mary is coming over for lunch tomorrow. I thought you might want to join us-”
“I’m gonna have to pass despite the tempting offer,” I mumbled.
“-Oh, and Uncle Walt has to have his wisdom tooth out. Who would touch an old man’s wisdom tooth? Can’t they just dope him up so he’s comfortable? Pauline?” Silence. “I thought I heard a click and maybe you came in and picked up the phone. Just to let you know, you are not home much lately. Well, ever since that job. You know that job…”
I laid my head down on the counter and shut my eyes. I wanted to keep smacking my head against the counter, but that might dent the counter, and Miles would be pissed. I wasn’t crazy…yet.
“-Okay, I guess you did not come home. From where? It is nearly eight o’clock on a Wednesday night. Where are you at this late hour?”
This time I was really tempted to slam my head into the counter-a few times. Instead I sat up and went to press the stop button. Too much Stella Sokol at this time of the night could cause wicked nightmares.
“-Well, you call me before I go to sleep so I don’t worry. It is still eight o’clock, well, four minutes after. Wait. Wait a minute. I’ve got five after on my watch.”
I could hear she had put her hand over the phone receiver to yell, “Michael, what time do you have?” Daddy was probably asleep, so she took her hand away and said, “I go to sleep at nine sharp, Pauline.”
As if I didn’t know that. Creature of habit Stella Sokol had gone to bed at nine sharp and woke up at six sharp my entire life. I only hoped that as a baby, I woke her up a few times during the night.
Mentally I chastised myself and stuck my finger on the stop button-
“Meet me at our spot at ten…”
Shoot! I stopped the message before it finished, but knew full well whose voice that was and where our spot was.
Ah…
As I’d stripped off my beach outfit to don dark clothes, I knew Jagger had called to work on the case. My case. Our case, as it so often became. I appropriately had stuck on “investigating” clothing, along with stuffing my pockets with work tools like gloves, my camera beeper and a tissue (okay, that was mother induced, like don’t leave home without going to the bathroom first or wearing clean undies).
Once dressed, out the door and into my car, I pulled into the Dunkin Donuts parking lot and into a space near the back. Soon Jagger’s SUV drove up beside me. Without a word I got out and hopped into his car, and we were off without any explanations needed.
Before long, we had come to the intersection where TLC Land and Air was located. My heart started to race in anticipation of finding something, some clue, no matter how tiny, that would jump-start this case.
Because right now we had nothing.
One murder, one attempted murder and medical insurance fraud being committed. The only guarantees so far.
I looked at Jagger. “Anything on Pansy?”
He parked on a nearby side street and said, “She’s in a coma.”
“Damn. I was afraid of that. Her body must be in shock after the blood loss and trauma of surgery.”
He looked at me, and I ignored how damn good he looked. “What are the chances she’ll pull out of it?”
“Geez, your guess is as good as mine.”
“I’m not guessing, Sherlock. I’m asking your medical opinion.”
My shoulders stiffened. “I know that, Jagger. What I meant was that no one can really say. I doubt even the surgeon would give you decent odds.” With that, I got out and stood on the sidewalk.
He followed me and took my arm to lead me toward our destination. “Someone’s a little testy tonight.”
I pulled my arm free. How I wanted to shout something about Airbrush Lady, but was too smart to say anything. “All’s fair in love and war” came to mind, and then I told myself we were not lovers, but coworkers. So I said, “Long day. Sorry.”
He nodded, took my arm again and before I knew it, we were at the back door of the building where Pansy lived. The Tudor house was built amongst the other buildings as if it had been there first and everything else sprung up around it.
“B and E?” I whispered.
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t take anything,” Jagger said as he placed something in the lock and fiddled with it. In a few moments it popped open, he turned the handle, looked over my shoulder and waved me through the open door.
Talk about eerie. I felt as if Pansy and Payne were standing in the hallway looking at us.
Something touched my face! I started to scream but found a gloved hand over my mouth. I swung around and found Jagger looking me in the eye. “Cobweb,” he whispered. “And no great surprise,” he added as he shined his flashlight across the foyer.
It looked like something out of The Munsters. Dark, dank, and medieval in appearance, the place looked like a Tudor house, all right-only one that was centuries old and not cleaned since the day it was built.
“Geez,” I mumbled after Jagger took his hand away.
“I’ll say. But not surprising.”
I was surprised, I thought as we made our way into the living room-which was as colorful as Payne’s office, including fifties décor. “I love that old television,” I said, looking at a pine-console TV that had to be very old. “These two were really nuts. His office taste, yet her living room. Let’s go see the kitchen.”
No wonder we’d all come in a different way for Pansy’s after-memorial-service gig.
I followed Jagger down a dark hallway to a swinging door. He held it open so it wouldn’t swing back and smack me in the face (or maybe so it wouldn’t swing back and make any noise) and I walked in. “Wow.”
The kitchen looked like Mother Goose had decorated it. Country/nursery rhyme was an understatement. Pots and pans hung from the ceiling. Braided rugs covered the hardwood floors and dried flowers hung from every nook and cranny possible. And if I had a nickel for every duck, goose and chicken in the room, I could quit my job.
We could only shake our heads. How sweet! Simultaneous head shaking.
Usually we’d get right down to the business of snooping, but both of us had our curiosities so piqued that we made a tour of this “fun house” before starting.
The bathrooms were decorated like the ocean, complete with real water inside the windows, which bubbled constantly (I felt a bit seasick). Upstairs, the master bedroom was done in monochromatic black and red this time. If it weren’t for the rest of the house, I would have thought Pansy had no imagination until Jagger opened the door to a spare bedroom.
Junglemania.
The entire room was done in animal prints, including a bear rug. I could only whisper, “Goldie would kill for this place,” and then caught myself. “Oops. Bad choice of words.”
“Yeah,” Jagger said, but I noticed he was as intrigued with the place as I was and nearly speechless too. A real rarity. “We need to get going,” he warned once he obviously came to his senses.
I followed him down to the living room, where he motioned for me to start looking on one side of the room. “Gloves on?”
I curled my lips at him and held my gloved hands up, wiggled my fingers and started to put all of them down except the middle one-then caught myself and made a fist instead.
“Good girl, Sherlock.”
I smiled despite myself and started to open drawers-not even sure what the hell I was looking for-but knowing I’d realize it when I saw it.
After several minutes of snooping, we came up cold and headed to the other rooms. Despite the very interesting objects we’d found, including a horse’s bridle and whip in her bedroom-neither of us wanted to go there-and scented soaps in male fragrances in the bathroom, we ended up in the hot African-style spare bedroom. And hot it was.
My face burned each time Jagger or I discovered some sexual device. That was what I termed everything we found. H…O…T.
Pansy was no
wallflower. That was for sure.
Jagger stood in the center of the sexual jungle while I tried not to blush. He shook his head, which looked like a pissed expression in my book. Maybe he was embarrassed with all the “toys” we’d found.
Then again, this was Jagger.
If anyone would come out of this embarrassed, it would be me.
I started to walk toward him and tripped over a “toy” on the floor. No way was I even going to imagine how that thing worked. However, on the way to falling, I reached out and grabbed onto a handle on the wall.
A vine-covered, fur-covered (black leopard, I assumed) swing came out of the ceiling and smacked Jagger right in the back.
“Oh!” I shouted, steadying myself.
“Damn it,” Jagger mumbled, pushed the swing to the side and went to the wall where he jiggled with the handle until the thing disappeared back into the ceiling like some snake retreating into a hole.
I could merely stand there and watch, amazed that Jagger could work the damn thing, along with amazed at what Pansy did on the thing.
Jagger motioned for me to follow him, so I figured our search here had been futile-and we weren’t going to play Tarzan and Jane.
On the way out, the lounge chair (which was what I was calling it although tiger stripes and vibration did not exactly say La-Z-Boy) caught my eye.
It did look rather comfortable, yet there were no arms to it. One could easily straddle…Whoops. Better not go there.
For some reason, I walked toward it though, pressed the on button and stepped back.
The top flew open, revealing a stack of papers.
I looked at Jagger.
Jagger looked back at me.
And the papers sat there begging to be read.
Fourteen
It seemed like hours passed while Jagger and I stared at each other and then at the papers sitting inside the sex chair, which is what I now called it in my mind. Had to be, I thought, looking around this room.
Apparently Jagger pulled his thoughts to the present sooner than I; he stepped forward and knelt near the chair.
