Page 9 of Caught By the Wolf

“That’s my line.”

“Cheek. Sit.”

“It’s a scratch. I’m a medical professional, I would know if —”

“Ella.” Just her name, in that low voice, and her knees pulled the same trick they’d been pulling all day. Traitors. She sat.

He came around the table and crouched in front of her. He’d put on a shirt while she was in the bathroom, which was for the best. But also, a tragedy she was choosing not to examine. He tipped her chin up with two fingers and turned her face to the light.

Nobody had ever handled Ella Scott gently. She was sturdy. Everyone said so. Sturdy, dependable, strong as an ox—she’d heard every version, and none of them had ever once made her feel like this, pinned to a kitchen chair by two fingers and a pair of gray eyes. Women like her got practical touches. Efficient touches. Not this slow, careful attention that made her pulse jump in her throat.

Get it together, Scott. He is checking you for injuries. This is a medical exam. There is nothing romantic about a medical exam. You have given approximately four hundred of them yourself and never once felt like this during any of them. And men who look like him do not get romantic about scratched-up nurses who take up space.

The antiseptic was cold. His hand wasn’t. He worked slowly, dabbing along the scratch, frowning at it. She sat very still and looked anywhere but at his mouth, which left approximately nowhere to look. Because he was that close.

“Anywhere else?” His voice had dropped. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“No.” She answered without thinking even then, her body was reminding her she’d just ran through the forest, men chasing her, sliding down inclines and getting accosted by a bevy of low handing branch. The protest was real.

“Your ankles. You went down that slope hard.”

“They’re fine.” She held out her legs, wiggling her ankles.

“Your hands.” He took one before she could answer, turned it over, and ran his thumb across the scraped heel of her palm. Every nerve she owned sat up and took notice of his touch. “That’s not fine.”

“That’s— barely a—okay, in medical terms we call that a boo-boo, Roman, it doesn’t even need a—”

He lifted her palm and pressed his mouth to it.

Ella stopped talking. Possibly forever. His lips were warm against the scrape, his eyes stayed open and on hers the whole time. He was still crouched in front of her chair, close enough that she could see the storm-gray of his eyes go molten at the edges with a color that did not occur in humans. He lowered her hand slowly but neither of them let go. She heard the thud of a heart beating erratically and had a terrible feeling it was hers.

Oh no. Oh no, no, no. That was not allowed. Curvy women did not get their scraped palms kissed by men who looked like Roman Matthews. They got a bandage and a polite you’re fine and then the man moved on to someone sleeker. Her body, traitor that it was, did not care about the rules. It cared that his mouth had just been on her skin and that she wanted it on a great many other places immediately.

“Your brothers came through that door ready for a fight,” she said, mostly to have something to say that wasn’t oh God do that again.

“They were.”

She should push for more of an answer than that. She was a woman who pushed. It had gotten her into trouble at the last hospital she’d worked at and caused an incident she preferred not to discuss.

But she had never once considered not to push. That was who she was.

She looked at him—at the bandage on his shoulder and the gray eyes and the stillness—and for reasons that were not entirely rational, she let it go. Mostly because some small, deeply unprofessional part of her suspected that if she kept pushing right now, she wouldn’t like where her own willpower ended up.

“Fine,” she said. “Where do I sleep?”

CHAPTER FOUR

Roman

Roman woke the next morning at the same hour he always did—a few hours before dawn. Sleep had become a rare commodity long ago, but last night had been different. He hadn’t lain awake haunted by the ghosts of his old pack, the alpha he’d killed, or the title he’d walked away from.

No. Last night, every thought had been devoured by the woman sleeping in his guest room. One of several bedrooms. He still didn’t know why he’d built such a ridiculously large house for one lone wolf.

Yes, you do, his wolf murmured, unusually still and satisfied inside his chest. The restlessness that had plagued him for years had dulled. Now it was just lingering whispers. You built this house because you wanted a mate. And now she’s here. Under our roof. In our bed soon.

Roman ignored his wolf. Not because the animal was wrong, but because he was right.

He’d buried the need for a mate so deep he’d almost convinced himself it was gone. But the second her scent had hit him yesterday, that hunger had clawed its way back to the surface, raw and vicious. Now it was a full-blown ache. A need.