Claimed (The Lair of the Wolven #1) by J.R. Ward

Or maybe it was dying right now.

“Help is coming,” she said hoarsely to the animal.



Richard Marsh, D.V.M., gunned the ATV down the trail, the unmuffled engine echoing around the otherwise still and silent forest. As the tires hit tree roots, he fought with the handlebars, wrenching them to stay on course. With the wind in his face, he had to blink a lot. He should have worn goggles. Or at least not left his contacts in.

Almost ten minutes into the racing scramble, the glow of a flashlight registered through the trees, and he eased up on the throttle. Nailing the brakes, he skidded to a stop and dismounted. His med pack was a duffel large enough to haul a set of golf clubs, and its weight strained his bad shoulder as he hefted it off the cargo platform and started marching into the pines.

He stopped dead. “What the hell are you doing?”

Lydia Susi’s long, lean body was stretched out on a bed of pine needles … next to a full-grown male gray wolf which probably weighed as much as she did. Which was a wild animal. Which was capable of anything.

“Shh,” she said, like she knew he was yelling at her in his head.

Rick cursed. “Move away from the wolf. You are violating every common sense and professional standard—I mean, come on. You know better than this—”

“Just shut up and save him.”

The woman was no more than two feet away from that muzzle, her eyes locked on the closed lids of the wolf, her running tights and shoes crossed, her windbreaker a loose bag around her upper body. Wolves could run nearly forty miles an hour, but that kind of effort was not going to be necessary to bite her. That thing could just lunge forward and sink all of its forty-two teeth into soft skin—

“He’s cyanotic in his gums. It’s the same anticoagulant as before,” she said.

“You’re assuming.” Rick put his duffel down and unzipped one side of it. “Now get the hell back—”

“You are not tranq’ing him,” she hissed as she sat up.

“And you’re not a vet. You’re also clearly not thinking. Has it occurred to you that that animal could have rabies?”

“He’s not foaming at the mouth—” She lowered her voice. “If you tranquilize him, you’re going to kill him.”

“Oh, okay. So I’ll just cozy up like you have and ask him for his consent to treat. He can put his paw print on the forms—”

“Rick, I’m serious! He’s dying!”

As she raised her voice again, the wolf twitched and opened its eyes. Rick became an instant focal point, and the animal lifted its head to growl weakly.

“Get away from him,” Rick said in a grim voice. “Right now.”

“He’s not going to hurt me—”

“I’m not treating him until you’re out of range.”

Rick rose to a stand, the tranq gun in his right hand, his trail boots going absolutely fucking nowhere. Predictably, Lydia kept talking, but when he didn’t move … she eventually did. As she finally shuffled away from the gray wolf, Rick let out an exhale he hadn’t been aware of holding in.

Then again, when it came to the Wolf Study Project’s behaviorist, he shouldn’t have been surprised by any of his reactions. Lydia had been the outlier he had not been looking for since the day he’d met her.

At least now, things moved fast. As she covered her mouth with both hands and curled her knees up to her chest, he discharged a tranquilizer into the animal’s flank. Due to the wolf’s low blood pressure, the sedation took longer to have an effect than normally, but soon enough, those golden eyes were closed and going to stay that way.

Hopefully not because Lydia was right and he’d killed the animal.

Rick brought his duffel over with him, and he led with his stethoscope, pressing the metal disk to the chest wall. Moving it around.

“Do you have the vitamin K? You brought the vitamin K, right?”

Lydia’s voice was right by him and he jerked back. She had repositioned herself at the wolf’s muzzle, lifting that head into her lap, stroking the mottled gray fur of the ruff. For a moment, Rick became lost in the way her fingers soothed through the—

“Can you let me finish my exam first,” he said. “Before you start prescribing antidotes?”

“But you have the vitamin K?”

Rick peeled back the jowl. The gray gums, the sluggish, uneven heart rate … he knew what was going on, and not only because this was the third wolf they’d found in this condition in the last month.

“I’ll do what is medically appropriate”—turning away, he grabbed his penlight—“when I’m ready. And can you please put his head back on the ground. Thanks.”

As he returned to the animal, she did what he asked—sort of. She scooted to the side, but stayed bent over, still calming the wolf.

He separated the eyelids and shined the light in. Nonresponsive pupil.

Rick went to click off the little beam when a raindrop landed on the wolf’s cheek. As the crystalline droplet coalesced and then slowly trailed off the fine facial fur, he glanced at the sky. Strange, the moon had been showing when he’d come down the trail and was still—

“Oh, Lydia,” he said.

When she looked up at him, their faces were close together. So his hand didn’t have far to travel.