Cole couldn’t tell whether that bothered her or not, but when he followed her gaze, he saw Logan smirk at her. Probably not the first time they’d done this together.
“Did you bring a change of clothes?”
Cole patted his rucksack. “Yeah.”
Doctor Meena smiled. “Good. We’ll do blood pressure, weight, and height first.” She glanced at Nurse Lucas. “After we’ve taken your blood.”
Cole dutifully rolled his sleeve up when asked and watched as the nurse swabbed his skin with an antiseptic wipe and then expertly slid the needle into his vein. “You’ve done this before, huh?”
She smiled up at him. “Once or twice.”
He looked away from his arm as she attached a tube and it started to fill with his blood. His gaze landed on her name badge—Staff Nurse Amy Lucas. Good. Nurse Lucas was such a mouthful. Not that he’d call her Amy out loud, just in his head.
She seemed happy in her work. Cole wondered what it was like not to belong to a pack when surrounded by those that did.
None of his family were affiliated with packs, but then they mostly worked alongside other humans. One of the consequences of not having a pack—you couldn’t advance beyond a certain level in the workplace.
He looked back at Amy. Was the position of staff nurse as high as she could go? Was she bothered?
She didn’t look all that bothered.
Maybe living where you liked, keeping your last name, and having no alpha telling you what you could and couldn’t do outweighed promotions.
It would for me.
Amy switched out the now-full tube for an empty one, and Cole watched it fill with blood all over again.
They took four vials of his blood altogether.
Four.
“Why do you need that many?” He lay back on the bed as instructed and ate the biscuit Amy had offered him.
“Because we don’t just test you for shifter compatibility.”
“I know, but can’t you do all the tests from just one lot of it.” Cole didn’t know why it irritated him so much, but it did. The thought of them having so much of his blood made him incredibly uncomfortable.
“It needs to go to different places,” Doctor Meena cut in. “So, no.”
They talked amongst themselves as they labelled the blood and bagged it up, and for lack of anything better to do, Cole’s attention was drawn to Logan, who still stood in exactly the same position, leant against the wall.
Logan.
Of course he was called that, with his broad shoulders, short dark hair, and cut jaw. Of course.
Cole just about refrained from rolling his eyes.
Logan had his arms crossed, showing off muscled forearms dusted with dark hair.
And also his pack tattoo.
As tattoos went, it was beautiful. Eye-catching. The wolf howling mournfully up to the blood-red moon.
But the McKillan pack had a bad reputation as far as humans were concerned. They handled security for all thirty-two London boroughs and the City of London where the pack headquarters were. If you joined that pack as a human, you didn’t remain one for long. Alpha Michael McKillan wasn’t an alpha who took no for an answer.
Or so Cole had heard.
But Logan didn’t seem like the sort of shifter Cole associated with the McKillan pack. His laid back and friendly attitude were at odds with the no-nonsense and humourless idiots that Cole read about in theFreedomnewspaper. But then they’d been shut down twice already by McKillan’s pack; they were bound to be biased.
