“The visitor bathroom was being cleaned,” I said before biting my lip. Don’t talk too much, Reese.
“There is no bathroom down this hallway.” He nodded toward the entryway behind him but kept his stare on me.
I swallowed and stepped around him, nearly tripping because my legs wobbled a bit. “I’ll be on my way now.”
I didn’t bother to look behind me as I speed walked toward the exit. I bypassed the bathroom door and picked up my pace through the sliding glass door exit.
Not until I got in my car and locked the doors behind me did I feel slightly safer. Something weird was happening in that nursing home, and I knew whatever it was, this situation was way over my head.
CHAPTER3
Reese
“Oh my gosh. She’s beautiful,” I crooned over my friend and coworker’s baby girl. Savannah Townsend was a physician assistant at Brightside Urgent Care, a receptionist. Savannah was only six weeks into her fifteen-week maternity leave, but she’d come in for a visit after having a checkup next door at her doctor’s office.
We were behind the front desk, and thankfully, there weren’t too many patients waiting in the lobby.
“Would you like to hold her?”
“Can I?” I asked while I held out my arms to receive baby Parker. She inhaled deeply and squirmed a little, repositioning her tiny body in her sleep. A giggle spilled from my lips, a smell of baby powder wrapping around me.
“She’s perfect,” I whispered in awe.
“Not when she’s up in the middle of the night, she’s not,” Savannah retorted.
I glanced up to see the shimmer of laughter in her eyes.
“But yeah, she’s pretty perfect.” Savannah peered down at her daughter. “Hey, how did it go at LS Investigations?”
I shrugged and handed Parker back to her Mama. “I don’t know, actually,” I admitted.
Savannah’s eyes narrowed. “Did Micah agree to help you?”
“Almost.”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I blew out a breath and opened my mouth to tell her how it went, but nothing came out. The answer to her question was still a mystery to me. I’d gone to LS Investigations to ask for her brother-in-law’s help but ended up running out before I could get anywhere.
“I need more proof.”
Savannah’s eyes narrowed. “He asked you for that?”
“In so many words. It’s okay because I think I got it.” The papers I took pictures of the other night at the nursing home had to prove something.
“What kind of—” Savannah’s voice cut off when the bell at the top of the clinic door chimed, alerting us of a new visitor.
A breeze blew through the lobby of the clinic, and the air sizzled with something electric. The hairs on my arms stood. My body’s reaction alarmed me. When I peered over at the door, my lungs stopped working.
“Chael,” Savannah greeted.
He stared directly at me, a glimmer in his deep, brown eyes.
“Savannah, good to see you,” he said, but his gaze never left my face.
A nervous tingling stirred low in my belly as I watched his lips twitch as if he held back a smile. He approached the front desk, and I had to crane my neck to look into his face from my seated position. On purpose, I lowered my gaze, noting the dark-blue Henley shirt and dark jeans.
The sleeves outline his broad shoulders and biceps. I had to pull my gaze away from staring at the pectoral muscles that poked through the shirt.
