My shoulders slumped. “Still, JC has power and resources we don’t.”
A thought occurred to me then, and I chewed on the inside of my cheek.
“What’s going on in that pretty head of yours?” Nate asked.
“Speaking of resources, I may put a call into some people I know from work. Maybe if we can’t get him onthis, we can get Rick on something else.”
“What’s that? Clubbing baby seals?” Nate asked derisively. “Playing polo with kittens instead of balls?”
Snorting a laugh, I said, “No, smartass. There might be something more innocuous that could bring him down. Traffic violations, tax fraud, stuff like that. I mean, the FBI never caught Al Capone. In the end, it was the IRS who put him behind bars.”
Nate bobbed his eyebrows and nodded appreciatively. “Fair enough. Here, give me that,” he said, snatching the cloth from my hand.
“Hey.”
“Calm down,” he muttered, tilting my chin up.
He gently cleaned the wound, being sure to be extra cautious around the lump on my head. I relaxed into his touch. His fingers on my skin sent waves of electric energy through my entire body. I couldn’t explain it, but I relished it.
“There.” He tossed the cloth into the sink. “Where else do you hurt?”
“Whatdoesn’thurt?” I rolled my eyes. “After the last two days, I feel like I’ve been rolled down a mountain in a trash can.”
Nate gently probed my body for aches and pains, touching here, massaging there. Nothing overtly sexual, yet there was a strange eroticism to it.
“Christ, your hands,” Nate said, wincing.
Both my palms were raw from catching myself on the pavement when I’d fallen. They looked worse than they felt, though.
“Yeah. Not great. It stings a little, but it’s not bad.” I studied my palms. They looked much better than they had even twenty minutes ago. “I really am healing faster. “
“You’ll heal even faster the longer you’re a shifter. Look.” He raised his shirt, showing me some of the injuries he’d received in his fight with Rick. The cuts and bruises had already faded. They looked like weeks-old injuries.
“Wow,” I said, looking from his wounds to mine. “I’m like a superhero.”
Nate chuckled. “Something like that. Let me make sure you’re okay everywhere else.”
Nate lifted my shirt to check my lower back for bruises, then rolled up my pants to inspect for cuts and abrasions. It felt pleasantly surreal. A weird, pulsing energy seemed to be pulling us toward each other. A magnetism I couldn’t fight even if I wanted to.
Again, I found myself in a bathroom with him, wondering what it would be like to be with this man. Toreallybe with him. Somehow, when we were together, the rest of the world vanished. Right then, it was as if he and I were the only people on the planet. An intense desire flooded me, and my inner wolf urged me to touch him, but I held off. Barely.
As if he could read my mind, Nate looked up, his eyes latching onto mine. For a moment, we stared at each other. A tether bound us, dragging us closer. My wolf growled in happy anticipation, and a small grin spread across Nate’s lips.
The moment shattered when his phone rang. We jerked away from each other, and the energy dissipated. Unfortunately. My wolf and my own subconscious gave a bitter snarl at the interruption.
Nate glanced at his phone. “It’s Ollie. I gotta take this.”
“Put it on speaker,” I said. “I want to hear.”
Nate nodded. “Ollie, I’mreallyglad you called,” he added with a bitter note in his voice.
“Yeah, I love you, too,” Ollie said. “I was calling back about that little issue you figured out.”
Nate glanced at me. “I told Ollie about what you found in the toxicology report.”
“What did you find, Ollie?” I asked.
“Hard to describe,” he said. “At first, I shrugged it off. Addicts relapse. Happens a thousand times a day. What’s the big deal? But the fact that he was being manipulated struck me as weird. I followed my hunch and did some digging. Nate, you remember what I told you about Rick’s dad joining the pack?”
