Chapter 13

I was just waking up in recovery when one of the nurses came in to check on my vitals. She was taking my pulse when I looked up and noticed her face clearly. She was possibly the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen with blonde hair, bright blue eyes and a figure that even the shapeless hospital scrubs couldn’t conceal. Sabrina had been the light of my life and she paled next to this girl.

She wasn’t looking at my face and she quirked a smile. “Like what you see, Soldier?” she asked knowingly.

“Sorry,” I said breathlessly. “You must get guys staring at you all the time,” I observed sympathetically.

“I do, but how about you close your eyes for a minute and let me get a clear reading on your pulse without your eyes making your heart pound?” she asked with some amusement.

I closed my eyes obediently and she took my pulse. “I really didn’t mean to stare,” I told her, trying to apologize again. “It just took me by surprise, is all. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospitals and I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you working in any of them. I’ll try not to stare from now on.”

“You DO look a little beat up,” she commented. “Where’d you get injured? Iraq or Afghanistan?”

“Lakewood Boulevard,” I told her dryly.

“What?” she blurted. “I thought you ... You’re not a soldier?”

I opened my eyes and looked into her beautiful blue eyes. “No, Ma’am,” I told her. “I was a designated driver on New Years and got in an accident. I’d just dropped off my last passenger, so the only person I failed to get home safe and sound was me. I was run over by irony.”

She smiled at that. “That’s a good attitude, soldier,” she said, winking at me. “Learn to laugh about it and you don’t end up crying about it.” She chatted with me a little more as she was checking my IV and making sure my dressings didn’t need changing.

I learned her name was Loraine or Lori for short and she was used to the surge of male attention. She told me that I’d be in for a couple of days, due to the extensive nature of the scarring they’d worked on.

It turned out that I ended up in a good news/bad news situation. The bad news was that I was the proud new owner of a brand new post-op infection. The good news was that I’d get to spend a little more time basking in the light of my new favorite nurse as they kept me in to treat the infection. We talked a little during the times that she was in with me and I took to closing my eyes when she was with me.

“What’s up?” she asked me a few days later, tapping me on the forehead. “You’ve been closing your eyes whenever I come in. You decide that you don’t like how I look after all?”

I laughed at that and opened my eyes to look at her. “I’ve been doing an experiment,” I admitted, gauging her reaction. “I wanted to see if I liked you for your personality or if I was won over by your stunning good looks.”

She smiled brightly at that. “And how’s your experiment going so far?” she asked.

“Not so good,” I admitted. “I still find myself looking forward to every minute I get to spend talking to you, but now I’m not sure if I like you for your personality or if I’m just falling in love with the sound of your voice.”

That made her laugh. “Nicely done,” she complimented me. “So how do you make sure?”

I thought about that. “Well, there’s two ways that I can think of,” I admitted. “I could ask for your number and we could get into text conversations, friend each other online and use messengers and emails to stay in touch after I’m released back into the wild.”

“And what’s the other way?” she asked, amused.

“I could ask you out to dinner and we can see how long before I stop thinking you’re stunning.”

She snickered at that. “I think there’s an ethical problem with dating a patient,” she told me dismissively.

“Well, obviously I’d wait until I was out of here for our first date,” I said exasperated. “Have you HAD the food here? Feeding this to a girl on a first date is a great way to never get past the first date.”

“That’s true,” she laughed and then shrugged. “Sure,” she said finally.

“Not gonna lie, that is the BEST news I’ve had in three years,” I told her ardently.

She smiled at me. “Just get better and we’ll talk about where you can take me,” she said lightly, then glanced at the door. “Not that I’m ashamed about it, but I’m gonna try not to mention it to the rest of the nursing staff on the floor,” she told me. “I don’t date and the girls think I’m gay because of it. The gossip flows freely around here.”

I nodded. “I’ll try not to look like I’ve been put on the good painkillers,” I promised. “I’ll have some trouble keeping the grin off my face though.”

“Slap yourself on the hip if you start getting too happy,” she said dryly and patted my surgery scar to demonstrate. She winked at me and then she was gone to check on some of the other patients. I was on cloud nine.

When Eve came to visit me later in the day, she looked at me oddly. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I told her. “I’m feeling pretty damn good actually. Why? Don’t I look it?”

“You look high,” she said. “I figured they must have put you on some kind of new medication.”

I shook my head. “No, nothing like that,” I assured her. “I’ve just been in a good mood all day.”

She nodded. “Well, it’s weird. Cut it out. Moan about the pain or whine about being stuck in here or whimper about the hospital food or bitch about getting an infection in the first place. You could at least complain that the hospital wifi sucks.”

“Okay,” I said with a smile. “The hospital wifi is the worst. Can you believe how bad it is. Like is this a hospital in Russia or something?”

She sat down and dramatically swiped an arm across her brow. “Whew! Now I feel better. So you want to tell me why you’re really on top of the world?”

“I think I need that to be a surprise for a little while longer, but I promise, I’ll tell you sooner or later,” I said with a smirk and promptly slapped myself on the hip like I’d been told to do, making myself wince.

“What’d you do that for?” Eve wanted to know, looking at my hip where I’d slapped the incision.

“It ... It helps when the incision itches,” I told her. It actually DID help some, but it was an old remedy for the itch in a healing tattoo. One of the guys in Austin had been an ink addict and had explained why he was tapping his fresh ink one day at lunch.

She nodded and accepted the explanation. We settled down into more comfortable topics after that. She’d sent the Chloe Sinclair footage to the District Attorney and to LAPD Internal Affairs. She’d included the login of the person that had deleted the footage originally.

I was glad she’d given me the heads-up when I got a call from a police detective the next day, to ask about it.

“I work in online security,” I explained to him. “I have a lot of friends that work in cyber-warfare either with law-enforcement, government or freelance.”

“So which of your friends works with LAPD?” he asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know if any of them do,” I admitted. “About half the people I know are vague about what they do for a living. I’m sure at least one of them works to protect vital computer infrastructure for DHS, NSA or another of the alphabet soup agencies. When news about my accident got out, people that work in other parts of the country probably hacked in to get an idea what had happened to me.”

“Your friends are aware that obstruction of justice is a serious charge and hacking into police servers is a perfect example of obstruction,” he pointed out, leaving just a hint of a question.

“But they didn’t obstruct justice,” I told him. “They preserved the data in those servers and left behind a watchdog program to tell them who accessed the data so they could continue to follow the investigation.”

“I hadn’t told you that,” he pointed out to me. “So you know who the hacker is.”

“I didn’t say that,” I argued. “I was sent a copy of the footage and the login of the person that deliberately erased YOUR copy. So in effect, the hacker has handed you a criminal case on a silver platter, uncovered a dirty cop and done the heavy lifting for you. Threatening to charge them with a crime seems like a pretty poor way to repay their help. Don’t cops ask the public to help them track down the guilty?”

“They do, but not at the cost of what’s right,” he said reasonably.

“Maybe accessing that data wasn’t technically right, but deliberately deleting the data and then lying to me about how it was lost isn’t exactly the portrait of virtue.”

“Fair enough, but that’s why Internal Affairs is on the case,” he said.

“In this case, think of the hacker as an ombudsman. They oversaw the investigation from a vantage point free from bias and prejudice and bribery. The hackers I know are categorized as white hats. They use the same techniques, but they penetrate systems for damn good reasons, not for personal gains. All I know is that they boosted the footage originally because details of the accident were hard to come by through official channels. They left the watchdog program so they’d know who was handling it for the same reason. It’s hard to even get transferred to the right officer’s phone if you don’t know who you’re looking for. It turns out that they were lucky they did that. It ended up showing that the records were erased by someone.”

He grunted sourly, but the LAPD was extensive and getting in contact with an officer handling a specific case was sometimes a nightmare.

He asked me a lot of questions about the accident and my recollections. I told him that I’d seen the SUV coming toward me, but that once I’d been hit, I lost the thread of what else happened.

We talked for about twenty minutes and then he let me go, promising to keep me informed as the case developed.

I finally got my release orders two days later. Lori had told me that she’d meet me in the hospital lobby to drive me home. I’d purposely left my truck at home so I wouldn’t be leaving it in the hospital parking lot. I rode out of the hospital in a wheelchair and she led me to her very small and sporty Kia Forte. It was bright red, two door, low to the ground and terrifyingly fragile-looking.

I was thrilled to see her and told her so. If she looked stunning at work, she was a work of art in her off time. Her hair was usually worn up and she wore some minimal makeup. Today, she looked like she’d had a team of beauticians working all day to craft perfection and they’d succeeded. She was dressed in form-hugging jeans and a tight top that made me glad to have eyes.

“Thank God you’re driving,” I told her faintly. “I don’t think I could keep my eyes on the road right now.”

She grinned and as soon as I got out of the chair, she gave me a hug that pressed her breasts against my chest enticingly. I was aware of how good they felt and aware that I hadn’t felt this strongly about a woman since Sabrina. I hugged her back briefly and got myself into the car awkwardly. I was extremely nervous about the size of her car, but she was taking her day off to help me out. I was grateful.

We drove in silence for a few moments as I drank in the sight of her. I finally found my voice. “Sorry,” I said. “I promised to try not to stare when we first met, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I remember you making a ridiculous promise like that,” she teased me. “I don’t get what the fuss is about. I’m a girl. Didn’t they have girls where you grew up?”

I chuckled. “I think they had one or two, but you’re sinfully beautiful,” I told her.

“Sinfully?” she asked with an arched eyebrow.

“A guy can hope,” I shrugged. “I’m just thrilled that you agreed to go out with me. I was almost as stunned by that as I was by your eyes.”

The laugh she treated me to was musical. I’d fallen in love with Linda over the course of high school. Sabrina had stolen my heart over the course of that summer we’d reconnected. Everything about Lori surged through my soul already. Her laugh made my breath catch, her voice made my spine tingle, her smile reduced me to a stuttering mess. I blinked and realized that she was The One. I got quiet and she noticed.

“What’s wrong, Peter?” she asked. I hadn’t told her to call me Ham, like most everyone else did. She glanced over at me and pulled the car over to get out of traffic. “Are you okay?” she demanded to know. She reached over and thumbed back my eyelids to look at my eyes closely. She was worried I was in medical distress. I reached up and took her hands in mine, reeling from the lovesick way I felt, just from holding her hands.

I looked in her eyes and smiled a little. “I’m okay,” I said softly. “You’ve gotten close to me in a short space of time and I didn’t think that was possible. I just had an epiphany about it.”

She squeezed my hands in return, still looking concerned. “I’m all ears,” she told me, interested.

“I...” I started and wondered how to tell this woman that gets hit on fifty times a day that I was head over heels in love with her after only a bare week of her company. I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry and gazed at her. “I never believed in love at first sight before,” I said, nervous as a man with a lit match in a room full of dynamite. “I know it’s ridiculous to say that before we’ve even gone out on a date and the rational part of my mind is screaming at me to shut up, but I’ve never been blindsided like this. It’s completely out of the blue.” I finally managed to clamp my jaws shut and stared at her with love and terror mixing in my expression. I could feel myself blushing as my cheeks heated.