“Hey, are you talking about the guy with the bloody pants?” a voice called out.
McKenna spun to face the young guy in scrubs who’d just spoken.Yes.Finally. Someone who knew what was going on. “Is he still here?”
Now another voice piped in. “The guy that needed the stitches, right?”
“Yes.” She spun in a circle in search of whoever had just spoken. “Probably.” Nate had been bleeding, so McKenna could only assume he needed stitches. “Do you happen to know how I can get a hold of him?”
“The one Wendy was hitting on?” another voice spoke up from behind the next curtain.
“Sure. Maybe.” Nate wasn’t terrible to look at, so she could see how someone named Wendy might want to hit on him.
“You’re not talking about the guy from New York, are you?” an elderly man sitting in a wheelchair in front of the nurses’ station asked.
McKenna bit back a frustrated growl. “See, that’s the thing. I don’t know where he’s from or how to find him. Did he say he was from New York?”
“Yeah, but I thought he said he was on his way to visit his mom’s bed and breakfast in Tennessee.” Wonderful. Now a young woman on a stretcher with a barf bag was joining the conversation.
“I’ll be sure to get all the details when I call him,” McKenna said, directing her attention back to the nurses’ station. “All I need is his phone number.”
“But you don’t know his last name?” said the first guy in scrubs.
Why was everyone so hung up on that one little detail? “No, but as I said before, we all came in together, so I really don’t think he’d mind if you gave me his phone number.”
“Are you talking about the cute guy headed to Bugle?” This from a middle-aged housekeeper pushing a cart full of cleaning supplies.
“Oh my goodness, I don’t know. Okay? I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know where he’s headed. I don’t know anything, which is why I just need one of you to tell me something helpful, like his last name!”
Side note—don’t ever yell at an entire department full of healthcare workers and patients unless you want a stern-looking security guard to escort you off the premises.
On the bright side, right before the automatic doors closed shut, leaving McKenna alone in a parking lot, a spiky-haired blonde with orange glasses stood in the doorway and called out, “Hey, honey, if you’re looking for Nate Lambert, hate to tell you, but he’s already taken. And I don’t share,” she added with a wink.
Strange. But okay.Lambert.McKenna had a last name. Finally. She should be able to track him down and get back the ring. Nobody would ever have to know that it had even gone missing.
“What do you mean it’s gone missing?” Nate rubbed his forehead. After missing the red-eye last night, he thought he’d been fortunate to catch a flight out of Omaha earlier this morning. Now he wasn’t so sure.
He’d always heard about bad things coming in threes. Funeral. ER visit. Why did he get the sense he’d just found number three? “All I had was a carry-on, plus my personal belongings bag.”
He’d specifically crammed everything into a carry-on to avoid this scenario.
“Sir, you don’t need to raise your voice,” said the airline worker in an extremely loud voice.
“I do, actually.” Nate motioned over his shoulder to where a high-pitched beeping sound emitted from behind a tarp that partially hid a construction-zone area next to baggage claim. Perhaps flying into one of the country’s newest and smallest commercial airports hadn’t been the best move. Looked like they were still working out a lot of kinks.
“Look, I’m not mad,” Nate said. “I’m just trying to understand how it could’ve gone missing. It was a carry-on. I have something very important inside that I can’t afford to lose.”
“Okay, sir. Okay. Time to calm down.” The airline worker, a broad-shouldered woman wearing a name tag that readHi, I’m: doing my best, pushed her braids over her shoulder, then began typing, her pink nails especially bright against the keyboard. “As you can tell, we’ve still got a lot going on right now. Everybody just needs to stay calm.”
“I am being calm.”
“Sarcasm will get you nowhere.”
“I’m not—”
“Tell me again what the problem is,” she said, cutting him off.
“I can’t find my carry-on.”
“Where did you leave it?” she said in the sort of tone that suggested she didn’t have time for this.
