It was her turn to shrug. “What changed is that I talked to Jayna this morning. She told me about what it means to find The One. A lot of things started making sense after that. Like how terrible I felt after I ran away from you, and how depressed I was when I thought we were over.”
Alex seemed surprised by that confession.
“Don’t be mad at Jayna for telling me about the legend,” she said. “She helped me understand all these feelings that were churning around inside me and figure out what they meant.”
He shook his head. “I’m not mad at her. It’s just that I hadn’t realized it was like that for you.”
“You thought you were the only one feeling these things?”
Even though Jayna insisted that he did, Lacey wasn’t too proud to admit that she wanted to hear him say he felt the same.
“Yeah,” he said. “I fell in love with you the first day I met you in the vet clinic. Then I felt all this pain when you walked away, and to tell the truth, I couldn’t understand how you could do it if we were really meant to be together. I convinced myself that it must be a one-way thing, or that you’d somehow severed the connection on your side.”
Learning that he’d been in love with her all along was painful to hear, and Lacey felt tears well in her eyes as she thought about how stupid she’d been. She was so scared of being hurt that she’d ended up hurting not just herself but Alex as well.
“It definitely wasn’t a one-way thing, and the connection between us was never broken either,” she said. “I’ve been in love with you the whole time too. It just took me a lot longer to see it. I wish I could have been brave enough to tell you sooner.”
He smiled, and it took her a second to realize she’d just admitted to loving him.
She blushed. “Um, I’d hadn’t really planned for those words to slip out quite that way.”
He did a double take. “What, you didn’t mean it?”
“Of course I meant it!” she said. “I just thought that…you know…there should be some kind of big, dramatic moment when you say those words.”
“I agree we didn’t say the words the way you’d hear them in the movies, but we both said them, and for us, that’s what matters,” he said softly. “And as far as needing a big, dramatic moment, you’ve been standing here digging a bullet fragment out of my chest with the medical equivalent of a pair of needle-nose pliers, while your heavily sedated sister lies only a couple of feet away and the people who tried to kill her are locked in a supply closet.” He grinned down at her. “I don’t think you could come up with a bigger moment than this.”
She laughed, feeling like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. They were three simple words, and yet it felt like she could suddenly breathe easier.
“Let’s make sure the bleeding has stopped, so I can kiss you,” she said.
Lacey started to turn her attention back to what she’d been doing, but before she could get started, Alex slipped his finger under her chin and tilted her face up.
“Leave it for right now. It can wait,” he murmured. “Kissing you can’t.”
As his lips came down on hers, Lacey could almost forget where she was and what kind of day this had been. She melted against him, thanking God that everything had worked out okay, despite doing her best to screw it up the whole time.
* * *
Alex had heard the convoy of patrol cars arrive. The squawk and static of their radios was impossible to miss, even from the fourth floor. But the uniformed officers who’d entered the facility must not have liked the look of the three mangled bodies on the first floor. Alex heard a gruff order to pull back and establish a perimeter until SWAT arrived. Alex didn’t blame them. What those cops saw down there wasn’t anything they were trained to deal with. Without having a better idea what they were up against—and not seeing any innocents in immediate danger—it made sense for them to pull back and wait for backup.
A little while later, Gage, Xander, Khaki, and Cooper showed up to find Alex and Lacey standing watch over Kelsey. Lacey’s sister was still out of it, but her quickening heart rate told Alex that she was slowly coming out from the anesthesia.
Xander and Khaki headed straight for the supply closet and the people Alex had locked inside. A few moments later, they led the doctors and nurses out in cuffs while calling for an ambulance for McDonald.
“You got here fast,” Alex said to Gage. “How’d you know where to find me?”
Gage didn’t answer. Instead, he glared at Alex, his teeth grinding together so hard that Alex thought they might shatter.
Cooper chuckled and held out his cell phone. “Dude, you’re all over YouTube.”
Alex did a double take at the blurry video clip of a huge gray wolf running down the middle of the street and slamming into a car.
Shit.
“Over ten thousand downloads in the last thirty minutes.” Cooper’s grin broadened. “First full shift, and you’re trending. It’s freaking epic!”
Something told Alex that freaking epic were not the words his alpha would choose to use to describe the current situation.
