The Forbidden Mate: Claimed by My Ex's Alpha Uncle novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Doctor's Orders

Alone with her terrible patient, Geneva learns he felt her bond tear and swears he won't touch her, then finds silver in his saline as his monitor climbs.

Nobody argued with him.

The hunters went first, heads down.

The night nurse put the chart on the counter and fled.

Boyd hung up his phone and gave the bed a big warm nod.

"Glad to see those eyes open, boss."

Stellan didn't nod back.

Jarrett stayed in the doorway.

"Uncle, she's not fit to..."

"Out, Jarrett."

It wasn't loud.

Jarrett's shoulders jerked anyway.

Mirabel took the clipboard and her lipstick and followed him.

The door hissed shut.

It was just us and the monitor.

I picked up the chart because I needed something in my hands.

"Pressure's low," I said. "You lost a lot of blood. You'll feel like a truck hit you."

"A truck would've been an improvement."

His voice was a scrape.

I poured water into a cup and held the straw to his mouth.

He drank, watching me over it.

"You're the doctor from the basement," he said.

"Geneva Coulter."

"I know your name. My nephew's..."

He stopped.

"Not anymore," I said. "As of about four hours ago."

"I know."

I set the cup down.

"You were bleeding out in the back of a truck four hours ago."

"I felt it anyway."

He lifted one hand off the sheet and touched the center of his chest, over the dressing.

"Right about the time I hit the ground. Something tore. I thought it was me dying."

My throat closed up.

I made it open again.

"It wasn't."

"No."

He let the hand fall.

"Then you got hold of my heart, and it stopped tearing."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I took his pulse.

His pulse was fine.

Mine wasn't.

"You know what it means," he said.

"It means everybody in this building can smell me on you and you on me."

"It means more than that."

"Not to me, it doesn't."

He was quiet for a second.

"I know the Kin Law," he said. "Better than any wolf alive. I won't put a hand on you, Doctor. You have my word."

He said it like a man laying a gun down on a table.

Something in my chest sagged that I didn't want to look at.

"Good," I said. "Because you're my patient, and I'd have to report you."

The corner of his mouth moved.

"You'd report the Alpha."

"In this room, I outrank the Alpha."

"Is that so."

"You're wearing a gown that ties in the back. I'm wearing pants. I outrank you."

He laughed.

It hurt him, and he grabbed the bed rail, and I felt it too, a hot little echo under my own breastbone.

"Don't do that," I said.

"You started it."

"Breathe slow."

He breathed slow.

When his face eased, I pulled the curtain across the little window in the door.

Then I unzipped my scrub top, reached in, and took out the slug.

His eyebrows went up a long way.

"I didn't want to leave it in pathology," I said.

I put it in his palm, crescent side up.

He looked at it for a long time.

His jaw moved under the beard.

"Who knows you have this?"

"You. Lucille knows I have something. Boyd asked where it was."

"What did you tell him?"

"Pathology."

His eyes came up to mine, black and very steady.

"Keep it that way."

"Boyd was on the hunt," I said. "He carried you in."

"Boyd's carried me in before."

"That's not a no."

"It's not a yes."

He closed his fingers around the slug, then held it back out to me.

"Keep it on you. Not a locker. Not a drawer."

I put it back where it had been.

He looked at the ceiling very hard while I zipped up.

"One more thing," he said.

"You should be sleeping."

"Be my doctor."

"I am your doctor."

"Only you. Nobody else touches my chart. Nobody else hangs a drip or pushes a drug. Not the chief, not the day staff."

"The board will hate that."

"The board can tell me so when I'm standing."

I looked at him, gray in the face, wired to a wall, giving orders.

"Fine," I said. "Then you follow my orders. All of them."

"Within reason."

"No reason. All of them."

He sighed through his nose.

"All of them," he said.

He was asleep before I left the room.

I spent the rest of the night between my floors.

A stray trucker with chest pain in the basement.

Two drunk humans from a bar fight in the ER.

The chief arrived at six and read the order Stellan had dictated to the night nurse.

He went home again in a temper.

The next night I didn't go home either.

I slept two hours on the on-call cot, and I dreamed of a black wolf running.

At twenty to four in the morning, I went back up to check on him.

The hall was empty.

His guard was dozing in a chair by the door, a big young wolf with his chin on his chest.

Stellan was asleep.

The monitor ticked along.

The saline bag on his pole was fresh, full, the label crisp.

I hadn't ordered a new bag.

I stepped closer and lifted the tubing to check the drip.

Then the smell hit me.

Under the plastic and the salt, faint and sharp, like a mouthful of old pennies.

Silver.

Every hair on my arms stood up.

Behind me the monitor gave one quick beep.

Then another, faster.

I looked at the screen.

His heart rate was climbing, ninety, a hundred and ten, a hundred and thirty.

On the pillow, Stellan opened his eyes and his whole body arched off the bed.

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