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Rex rolled his eyes and gave a nod. “You’re not having too much trouble with thinking, are ya?”
“Fair enough,” Bullet replied, and grinned.
“Uh… if you’re talking about me, the answer is Negative. I belong to no one.”
“Sure, Doc,” Bullet replied breezily, and closed his eyes.
Rex shifted his attention to the doctor and saw her looking at him with that assessing expression she always gave him. In response, he winked at her.
Her eyes narrowed more. “You boys are insane… and not just because you can be animals whenever you want.”
“Yeah, but we can also be animals in bed,” Bullet mumbled as he fell back to sleep.
Rex shrugged. “He speaks truth.”
Doc raised a brow. “Not if I don’t give you permission to be.”
And that was the moment Rex knew his future had been decided, and it included the beautiful doctor across the room.
Three
Jolene
Lightstreamedinthroughthe open curtains of her bedroom window, falling on her face, and forced Jolene to consciousness. She groaned as she rolled over and slammed the pillow over her head to block out the light.
Why in the hell had she left the curtains open? It was part of her nightly routine to close them before she crawled into bed. Working in the medical field often meant long nights and endless days, and very little reprieve. Jolene learned to cherish the precious hours of sleep when she found them. She gave herself a routine, preparing the space around her and herself for the most effective slumber in order to recharge.
As she laid there under her pillow and comforter, Jolene tried to piece together how she managed to go to bed without closing the curtains. Searching her mind for the last thing she remembered from the night before, she started with what she knew. Her afternoon was spent filming videos about recall training. She remembered being interrupted by a knock on the door. When he opened it, there was a strange man on the other side.
The tiger!Her mind flooded with memories of stitching up a tiger in a bedroom… and that tiger suddenly turning into a man. She remembered the man from her porch stopping her from leaving and turning into a wolf right in front of her eyes.
Was that real? Did that actually happen? Or was that just an extremely vivid dream? It had to be a dream, right?Things like that didn’t really exist. Sure, she’d heard rumors, but that was just quirky stories from a small town, probably embellished tales meant to make things more interesting.
Shoving away the pillow and tossing off the comforter, Jolene climbed out of bed. When she stood up, she looked down and found that she was still wearing her jean shorts. “That’s odd,” she mumbled to herself. She never wore shorts to bed, let alonejeanshorts.
Rex must have brought her home and put her to bed. That was the only possible explanation for why she didn’t remember coming home or getting in bed. It also explained the fact that she was still wearing her jean shorts.
Annoyed with herself and the weirdness of the morning, Jolene yawned and headed out of the bedroom. She called out to her dog as she headed for her kitchen.
“Beast! Where are you?”
That was odd. Usually, her Yorkie was sitting at the side of her bed when she woke up, waiting to go out for his morning constitutional.
Jolene looked everywhere for Beast and eventually found him under the bed in the guest room. On her hands and knees, she peeked under the bed and tried to coax the dog out. “Come on. Everything’s okay.”
Her poor pup was shaking. What freaked the animal out that badly?
It took Jolene ten minutes to convince the pup that it was okay to come out. She rewarded Beast with a treat and let him outside.
As she watched the dog from the window in the back door, her phone began to ring. It sounded oddly muffled. Brow furrowed, she went in search of it and found it in her medical bag. Why it was in there, she wasn’t exactly sure.
Thoughts of the whys and hows left her brain when she saw that the number of her mother’s neighbor was on the screen. She pressedanswerand put the phone to her ear.
“Hello?”
“Jo,” the elderly woman said with a sigh of relief. “Dear, I’m so happy you answered! They just took your mother into the hospital. They said she’d be okay, but Jo, she was hurting. I don’t know how lon—”
“Phyllis,” Jolene interrupted. Her mother’s neighbor could chatter for hours and give very little information. She knew the woman needed direct questions, or Jolene would never get what she needed out of her. “Who isthey?”
