“Matthew is seeing a patient,” Carol said, sounding exasperated. “I’ll only be with Mr. Graylink a moment. You’ll be with me. Then Doc will see to him.”

“No, Carol. Darien would have my head on this.” He said to North, “Sorry. Please take a seat again in the waiting area. Matthew will be with you in a minute.”

North cleared his phlegm-filled throat. “Probably nothing the doc can do but order me to get bed rest. Unless I have a sinus infection. Might as well go home.”

“What are your symptoms?” Carol asked. He loved the caring way she spoke to him.

“Carol,” Tom said, exasperated.

“If he has a sinus infection, he needs to be on antibiotics,” she said firmly.

“And Matthew can take care of it.” Tom wouldn’t back down, but neither would Carol.

North waited, sweat beading on his forehead.

Carol’s gaze shifted, her brows furrowing. “Have you had a fever?”

“One-hundred and one,” North lied. He’d had a fever, but it was low grade and had vanished by the previous morning. “But that was last night. I didn’t have one this morning. And my teeth have been aching, headache, earache.” Which was true.

“Come over here, and I’ll get your blood pressure and temperature.”

Tom folded his arms and glowered at North. In response, North attempted to look demurely sick and un-threatening. Despite feeling lousy, he could still manage a good fight.

“No fever,” Carol said, reassuringly. “Come with me, and you can wait in the exam room for Doc.”

Tom gave her a look like he could throttle her. She ignored him. North hid a smile.

When they entered the room, she motioned for him to sit in a chair and held up a chart, waiting to question him about his symptoms. Tom watched him like a predator would, and North wasn’t sure he could overcome Tom and Carol before the alarm was shouted.

Hell, he was here, and it was his show. Without further hesitation and with a well-aimed swing, he hit Tom with a hard-knuckle fist in the cheek. Tom stumbled back, crashed into the exam table, and swore.

Carol screamed, and North knew he had no chance to take her now. Still, he jerked a syringe out of his coat pocket, but to his amazement, she pulled one from her scrubs pocket, too. For a moment, they stared at each other, hypodermics readied like two swordsmen in battle. He smiled. The woman was worth having.

Then he dodged out of the room, shoved aside the male nurse headed for the room, tore down the hall past a startled Dr. Weber, and dove through the back door before a guy in a red-and-white-striped jacket could even get up from his chair. Beta wolf.

“Are you all right, Tom?” Carol asked, touching his shoulder and feeling horrible about the whole affair.

He tossed her an angry look.

“I’ll… get an ice pack.”

When she returned to the exam room, Doc was shaking his head.

Appearing sheepish, Christian, who had abandoned his guard post in the waiting area too late to have been of any service, and Mervin stood in the doorway watching them and not saying a word, probably thinking that Darien was going to be pissed at the lot of them for letting one of the reds get so close to Carol and then letting him get away.

Tom glowered at her. “He wasn’t human.”

“I know that now,” Carol said, annoyed but also regretful.

Doc cleared his throat. “That was North, a red from my old pack. Must have been wearing hunter’s scent. I didn’t smell him as he raced by me. Where the hell is Ryan? I thought he was supposed to be watching you.” The inference was that he wouldn’t have let anyone near Carol like Tom and the rest had.

She felt bad, too. If she hadn’t insisted on seeing to the patient, wanting to prove that she could still see humans without any threat of shifting so that they would allow her to be a nurse like she should be, Tom wouldn’t have been hurt and in trouble with his eldest brother. Jake would be just as annoyed with him, she figured. And Ryan also.

Matthew poked his head in. “Got a case where the boy probably needs to be referred to an orthopedic surgeon in Denver, Doc.”

Doc gave Carol a hard look that reminded her she was one of the pack and had to obey rules. “I’ll see to him,” he said to Matthew.

Tom took charge of the guards. “Mervin, return to your post. Christian, stay outside the exam room until Carol leaves for the day.”

Feeling like a lupus garou failure, Carol worked for three more hours seeing to one sick patient after another, but she couldn’t help worrying about Ryan and about Tom—knowing she’d caused trouble for him.

After finishing with another gray female who had the flu, she thought again about Ryan. Even though she didn’t want him getting himself or anyone on the staff in trouble by offering medical advice, she missed his antidotes, all given in the spirit of wanting to help others in need.

She realized then that he was similar to her in wanting to help others. As a P.I. looking into missing persons or wayward spouses or insurance fraud. As the mayor, trying to provide his people with a better way of life.

She glanced out the window between patients as Christian sat outside her exam room and served as a guard, while inside the room Tom watched her. He’d finally given up scowling at her and was resigned to his fate, but she hated seeing where the red had struck him, a reminder to her that not everyone could be trusted, sick or not.

“Ryan will be all right,” Tom finally said.

At the moment, she was worried about how Ryan, Darien, and Jake would react when they learned North had tried to take her again, this time from the hospital, and Tom had gotten clobbered for it.

“Ryan’s been shot three times—an unhappy husband caught in an adulterous affair, one fire insurance fraud case, and a robbery attempt at the bank next door to his P.I. business. He always comes out on top,” Tom continued.

Carol closed her gaping mouth. “How—”

“Darien checked up on him. You don’t think he hired him to be your bodyguard without seeing if he had the fortitude to do the job, do you?”

“But… if he’s been shot that many times, wasn’t Darien afraid he wouldn’t do the job right?”

“He’s had hundreds of cases over the many years he’s lived. So proportionately, he’s done damn well.”

“You don’t really seem to like him,” she said, although Tom had surprised her this time, sounding less harsh concerning Ryan than before when the two were butting heads.

“I think Jake should be the one for you. Then we’d keep you in the family.”

For the first time, Carol saw that he really did act like a protective brother. She smiled. “That’s sweet of you. But he’s not shown any real interest.”

Tom shook his head and winced. “He’s coming a little too late to the party, I’m afraid.”

Her cell phone rang, and she glanced at the Caller ID. Her mother. She’d been so irate every time she and Carol had had a visit recently because someone from the pack always accompanied them. Lelandi, Silva, one of Darien’s brothers. Carol imagined her mother was mad about it again, but Carol couldn’t tell her why Darien always wanted her chaperoned—that she was a newly turned werewolf and might let her “condition” slip.

Now with her having been kidnapped, pack members were watching her to an even greater degree. Hopefully her mother did not want to get together again soon, although she had loved to go shopping with Carol or to share a lunch. But how could she explain to her mother that she was being guarded more than usual, again?

“Hello, Mom. What’s up?”

“Ryan McKinley called me.”

Carol’s brain turned to mush. Not in a million years did she think Ryan would call her parents. “He called you? What about?” Her dad was always a real beta in wolf terms, even though he was human like her mother. Her mother definitely wore the pants in the family.

Her mother hesitated to say what McKinley had called her about, and Carol didn’t know what to think. “Mom?”

“Did you tell him that I sent you to see that psychiatrist?”

Crap. So was he trying to figure out if she was telling the truth concerning Dr. Metzger’s wife’s death? Ryan was an investigator, she had to remind herself. It was his business to investigate, and he wouldn’t get the truth from Dr. Metzger, not with patient confidentiality issues. But to call her mother…

“What did he ask you, Mom?”

“I didn’t tell him anything. I hung up on him. That’s what I did. He had no business calling me. He’s the one who doesn’t believe in your abilities. Isn’t that what you said? I have no time for people like that. I don’t care if he’s interested in dating you. He can’t. And that’s my final word.”

Carol raised her brows. “I am twenty-six, Mom.”

“Are you dating him?”

“Well…”

“Oh, Carol. You can’t be serious. Your relationships never work out. You need someone who at least believes in what you can do, like your father and I do.”

“I’ve only had one real relationship. And that was just out of high school.” There was a significant pause, and Carol glanced at the patient’s record again.

Her mother said, “I want grandkids.”

Carol bit her lip and looked back at Tom. He was watching out the exam-room window, but she knew he was mentally taking notes of everything she said to her mother. Speaking to any pack member was acceptable. But talking to a human alone, even when that person happened to be her mother? Wouldn’t be allowed. Which was ridiculous. If she made a slip about being a werewolf, would anyone believe her? They’d think she was joking.

Well, maybe not, since Carol was psychic and her parents had finally had to embrace the fact. What if she spilled the beans to them? They’d be destined to be just like her. Or terminated. According to Lelandi, anyone who learned that lupus garous existed had two choices—become one of them or die.