“I thought I could at least try. Your skin was starting to grow over so I couldn’t leave it any longer.”

Dee sat up in the enormous bed and pulled her arm away from Van Holtz. Using her fangs, she methodically tore out each stitch, spitting the material into her free hand, until she was done.

Ric, staring at her, observed, “You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

“A time or two.” Of course, when she’d done it before, she’d been knee-deep in some jungle or African grassland, waiting for hunters to take the bait and move into her line of sight. She’d definitely not done it while lying in a big, comfortable bed with a handsome wolf grinning at her.

“Got a trash can?” she asked, raising her hand with the stitches.

Reaching over his side of the bed, Ric lifted up a small stainless-steel trashcan and held it out for her to toss the evidence of her recent knife-fighting incident away.

“What time is it?”

He returned the trash can to the spot on the floor and glanced at the clock by the bed. “Six. I overslept.”

“Need to be at the restaurant?”

“No, I have dinner service tonight. I was going to try and get in some practice at the rink so that idiot would lay off.”

“Y’all sure don’t like that boy, do you?” Neither Ric nor MacRyrie had a nice word to say about Bo Novikov. She found it kind of funny simply because they were normally so damn nice.

“No. We don’t. But Blayne loves him so there’s not much we can say.” He reached out, his finger tracing the line of her jaw to her throat, to her collarbone. “You need to eat.”

“I’m fine.”

“It wasn’t a question, Dee-Ann. Or an offer.” He leaned in and pressed his lips to her throat.

Dee’s eyes closed, her left hand sliding up his bicep to his shoulder.

“You don’t always have to feed me, Van Holtz. I can find food on my own.”

“You find crap on your own.” He moved in closer, nipped at her jaw and Dee’s nipples hardened, her pussy getting wet. “You need a healthy meal so you can face the day.” He was pushing her back on the bed. She wasn’t trying to stop him. “And what do I have to face today?” she asked, both hands gripping his shoulders now, holding him tight against her.

“Worry about it later,” he told her—so she did.

Dee came out of the bathroom, her body again freshly scrubbed clean. She wrapped one towel around herself and used another to roughly dry her hair. As she stepped from the bathroom to the bedroom, she had to pause and stare at the bed. It was so big. It made sense since it was built specifically for bears but . . . good Lord. Not only was the bear-sized queen mattress more than double the size of a regular king, the frame was made ofextra-thick steel. Sometimes even titanium for those who could afford it. In case the bear cubs decide to jump up and down?

Shaking her head, she walked into the hallway and instantly scented a foreign wolf in the vicinity. She followed the scent to the guest bedroom and saw some scraggly looking homeless wolf going through the extra clothes there.

Standing behind the wolf, arms resting at her sides, fingers twitching just a little . . . she waited.

Stein Van Holtz, family black sheep and all-around recent loser, dug through his cousin’s extra clothes drawer. How low he’d fallen. How low.

It still dazed him sometimes to think about how far and how fast he’d crashed back to earth after so long at the top. Where did his luck go? He still had skills, but everything had gone wrong. In three years he’d gone from top of the heap to absolutely nothing. And through all of that, he’d lost his family and his Pack. If he had one or the other, he’d be okay, but he’d lost both.

So, when he’d needed help, he’d ended up approaching the last person he’d wanted to go to with his hand out, but he’d had no choice. Honestly, he’d thought the one cousin who’d toss him out on his ass would be Ric, but he hadn’t. And that’s why Stein had probably come to him because he knew Ric was the one blood relation who would help him.

The realization tore at him because it had been Ric that Stein had fucked over the worst. But still, it didn’t mean that—

Stein’s head lifted, the hackles on his neck rising up, his fangs sliding out. He shot around to face whatever was behind him, but the She-wolf had him by the throat before he could blink and, one handed, slammed him up against the wall, his feet not quite touching the ground—and they were about the same height.

“Stealin’, boy?” she asked in an accent he found a tad off-putting. Especially when she was choking the shit out of him. “That’s just rude.”

He tried to tell her he was a Van Holtz, that he knew Ric, that he could be here, but she wouldn’t loosen up her grip enough to allow him to say much of anything. Her towel slipped off and she stood brazen and naked, still holding him. She wasn’t exactly pretty or anything and her body had tons of scars, a few long and angry looking but mostly a bunch of little ones all over. But it was her eyes . . .

Christ, her eyes. Cold, bright yellow wolf eyes gazed up at him with no remorse, no doubt, no pity.

This wasn’t some average wolf, trying to scare him by shifting only her eyes. No, this was a warrior wolf. The kind Stein used to hear about from his grandfather, who loved talking of the times when Van Holtzes were only Holtzes and had faced down legions of Roman soldiers. This female would have been on the front line, a banshee if he’d ever seen one.