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and because she threw her head back when she laughed, and because her eyes sparkled when she spoke. It had been years since he’d seen someone like that. It had been years since he let himself see someone like that. See the joy in another person.
     
    There was nothing stopping him leaving and going after her, except that he believed it would be an incredibly bad idea.
     
    It was all well and good for his heart to choose now to finally be happy and complete and rediscover love, but he had a job to do. His pack was decimated. He needed to lay low, rebuild, and figure out who had attacked him and why. There had been something somewhat familiar about the Alpha’s scent, but he couldn’t put it together, as hard as he’d tried to.
     
    They would track him here, he was sure of it. They’d been on his heels as he collapsed from exhaustion at the edge of the road, only retreating when the truck stopped next to him. He didn’t remember the face of the man who’d stopped, seen him, and dialed 911. He didn’t know if that man knew how close he’d come to death. He didn’t know if the wolves had waited in the woods, wondering if they’d have another chance after all. They could be circling the hospital right now, for all he knew, wearing their human skins and waiting to destroy him.
     
    But Roxie had called it right. He wasn’t in anything like the kind of pain that a human man would be in right now, but if he had to run—he didn’t want to think about how much it would hurt. He would close his eyes for just a bit, let his body rest a while. When he woke, it would be time to move on. Long before Roxanne’s next shift, he suspected, which was a shame. He’d always wonder what could have happened there. What it would have felt like to press his lips against hers, to feel her body arch with pleasure underneath him. There was more that he needed to think about, however, than his own lust. No matter how much he wanted to focus entirely on himself.
     

CHAPTER FOUR
    The walk from the hospital to her house would only have taken about twenty minutes, but after a lot of years, Roxanne had realized that it was just too far to go after a twelve hour shift. All she wanted to do was to go home, crawl into the bathtub, and sleep until next week. Or, if that wasn’t going to work out, at least until she had to be at work tomorrow.
     
    Her parents had been so confused by her career choices. Daddy had insisted that she really could be a doctor if she wanted to be, and Mama had just shook her head and kept her mouth shut. She’d tried to explain that she’d seen both doctors and nurses in action over the years, and while doctors were the ones who got all the credit for the miraculous recoveries and the daring surgeries, it was nurses who made it all happen. It was nurses who were there when the patient was getting better, and nurses who got the thank yous and the joyful moments. And yeah, they got plenty of crap thrown their way too. But the good moments, she’d found, more than made up for the bad ones.
     
    She walked out to her car in the parking lot—a little old beater from the late 80s that was amazing on gas and ran mostly on faith—and slid behind the wheel. She didn’t have a car alarm, and she didn’t even bother locking it most days. Of all the expensive cars and trucks in the lot, no one was going to bother hers. And if they did, she would send one of her many large cousins after the offender. If she didn’t find them and kick their knees in herself.
     
    As soon as she was sitting, she pulled off her clogs and stuck them in the passenger’s seat. Her feet ached, and she rubbed at her arches for a moment, hoping to release the worst of the soreness. Her head was swirling, not just from the tiredness of the day, but from the pull of the Doe in bed 24. God, she hadn’t even gotten his name once he’d been conscious. Izzy was going to mock her for days.
     
    She started the car and pointed it towards home, her