He had stopped bleeding, and Erica swore she saw the puckered and flayed tissue begin to stitch itself back together. It’d take longer for him to completely heal, but he was on his way to being good as new. She imagined the bandages were for her benefit to hide the carnage. With his shirt off and jeans hanging low around his hips, Erica realized that his tattoos were notexclusive to his arms. The collage of tribal patterns and various bits of artwork carried on down his chest and partially over his ribs. At first, she tried to focus her attention on the faded black depictions, but her gaze repeatedly trailed back to his battle wounds. Her stomach lurched each time she caught a peek of the gnarled flesh, but the rapid healing proved too fascinating for her to look away for long.
When he started to wrap his way up to the equally nasty wounds in his shoulder, the bandages wouldn’t stay in place. Ronan struggled with getting the right angle of the dressing and cursed when it slipped off.
“You need some help?” she offered, her voice little more than a whisper.
One corner of his mouth tilted up. “This isn’t my first rodeo patching up war wounds… I know you can’t enjoy watching this. Why don’t you go into Cole’s office or something? It’s the—”
“First door on the right. I know.”
Right now, no place in the house seemed safe. The living room was too close to the kitchen where Nathan’s body lay, the office had that damned picture sitting on the desk, this bathroom was becoming a little too crowded, and their bedrooms were far too personal for her to even think about going in there. The only thing she knew was that, despite his intimidating presence and the fact that he was riddled with lacerations, cuts, and bruises, Ronan was the safest person in this house.
“I’m almost done,” Ronan said as he pinched a bit of the bandage between his chin and chest to keep it in place.
Without being asked, Erica stood and held her finger where his bearded chin met the gauze. He brought his head back up and continued, but didn’t say another word.
Erica, however, couldn’t stay silent. “Thank you for trying to protect me.”
He snorted. “More like you protected yourself. I don’t think that gun’s been fired in years. Cole keeps it clean, but he probably never thought he’d have to use it.”
“Those bullets… They’re silver, aren’t they?”
“Sure are. Your dad keeps some with a spare Glock in his glove compartment too.”
“In case some…” She replayed the moment when she shot Nathan, how his body crumbled backward, and the blood gushed from the massive hole in his chest.
Ronan’s green eyes flickered in her direction, a bit of worry behind them. “In case a shifter gets out of hand. It can happen, like it did tonight.”
Erica removed her finger when he seemed to be past a tough part in the wrapping process. “Why was Nathan even here?”
Ronan grimaced. “Who the hell knows? That guy was fuckin’ crazy to begin with. And before you go thinking I’m a pushover, the dude must have been high on something. I’ve never seen a shifter go so ballistic.”
“Would he have been the one to plant the drugs at my house?”
“Maybe. His record had some drug-dealing charges on it, so it wouldn’t surprise me.” Suddenly, Ronan let out a long breath. “Your father’s here. He probably got a call about the gunshot, and he’ll smell Nathan from the driveway, no doubt.”
Not two seconds later, the front door opened.
“Erica!” her father shouted.
Without understanding why, she fled the bathroom and rushed to the living room. Cole’s arms were around her instantly. She returned the embrace and felt his taut shoulder muscles beneath her palms. There was something familiar about his cologne, warm and a little spicy. Like a recessed memory from her childhood, she instinctively knew it as her father’s scent.
He held her tighter, and she could feel the hard buttons of his uniform shirt dig into her chest and stomach. Erica felt all the tension leave her body as she gave in to this hug that proved to be more therapeutic than she expected it to be. She never thought she’d ever be in her father’s arms this way.
“Are you okay?”
She nodded and buried her nose in his collar. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Ronan came out of the bathroom, and Cole went rigid.
“What the hell happened?”
“The dude just came in like a fuckin’ berserker,” Ronan replied. “If Erica hadn’t shot him, he would have—”
Cole yanked her away to give her a look of shock. “You shot Nathan?”
Erica could only nod, too choked with a thousand emotions that she couldn’t put into the right order. Some of them she wasn’t even sure were hers, but they came in a jumbled lump through her mate bond with Dominic. Where was he?
Her father glanced over his shoulder toward the bagged body and sighed at the burgundy streaks of blood on the tile. “I’ll get Hank to…” But his voice trailed off, and Erica thought she heard a car door slam in the driveway.
