Wanted by the Alphas (An Extremely Sensual Paranormal Shifter Romance) (8 page)

She has to hide a smile.

“I’ll see you later in my clinic, OK? Just
let me interview this young lady first.” Kirk gestures to Shannon.
“Shall we?”

He turns to go into his clinic, and Shannon
gathers up her tote bag to follow, with a parting, “See you soon”
to Martha.

Martha looks up, her eyes shining.

“Dr. Fitzpatrick?” she says in a loud
voice.

Kirk turns. “Uh huh?”

“Whatever you do, don’t let this woman get
away. You have to hire her! Please!”

Shannon flushes as Kirk nods and smiles at
Martha.

“I’ll think about that.”

He opens his clinic door.

“After you,” he says to Shannon.

She enters, butterflies of a different sort
fluttering in her stomach. She wonders what fate has in store for
her now.

*

The clinic is neat, with all the medical
instruments put away nicely on the shelves and trolleys lined with
green cloth. Kirk seats himself behind his desk while Shannon takes
one of the chairs across from him. A skeleton hangs from a hook in
a corner, and she has to wonder if it’s real. Glossy posters of
bones and joints are plastered onto the bare parts of the walls,
and a tendon hammer sits on the desk like a phallic symbol.

She notes his personal mementoes on the
shelves behind him – photos of his voluminous family, she presumes.
She recognizes Ellie. One of the photos shows a family of seven
siblings who resemble one another in some ways and not in others.
There are five women and two men altogether. Kirk has the same eyes
as his older brother, but he is handsomer by far and more
prepossessing.

“So, Shannon Bellamy, can you tell me more
about yourself?”

Shannon hands him her document folder
containing her degree and accreditations. She gives him some
professional details, but nothing personal and certainly nothing
that cannot be accessed via her resume.

“Impressive,” Kirk finally says, leaning back
into his executive chair, which protests with a creak.

“Thank you.”

“I meant what you did back there.”

“Huh?”

His beautiful green eyes narrow shrewdly.
“Martha has never been in remission from her JRA long enough to
expect a full recovery. But what you did to her was a first. I have
never seen her so surprised in the entire time she has been coming
here.”

Shannon shifts nervously.

“I didn’t do anything. I just gave her a
massage. I have lots of static electricity in my body.” She gives a
short laugh. “People used to say I’m a walking generator.”

“I think we both know it’s more than that,”
Kirk says in a quiet tone.

Shannon raises her eyes to meet his. His
green ones are serious and understanding.

“Would you like to work here, Shannon? You
and I both know you have gifts. This is a safe environment for you
to practice them.”

The silence between them weighs heavily.

Kirk goes on when she doesn’t say anything,
“You get a basic salary with benefits, and on top of that, you get
a commission for every patient you treat.”

He writes down a sum on a notepad, tears the
top sheet off and hands it to her. He smiles.

“How does that look to you?”

Her cheeks dimple. She finds herself warming
to this quick-thinking, handsome doctor, who obviously is far, far
more than meets the eye.

“Yes,” she says.

“And remember, don’t tell anyone here about
what you can do,” he warns.

She pauses.

Then she says, “How did you know I can . . .
do what I do.”

He smiles sadly. “Let’s just say I have had
personal experience with people who have your kind of gifts, except
that they use them for anything but healing.”

SETTLING IN

For the next week, Shannon is kept so busy at
the clinic that she scarcely has time to do anything else. Between
work and making their new house a home, it is all she can do not to
collapse into bed, exhausted, every night.

Using her gifts makes her more tired than
usual, but it is a good kind of fatigue – akin to exercise. To not
use them would be to keep them bottled up inside her so that she
becomes choked and restless. She is glad to be allowed to use them
again.

As for Dr. Kirk, he is a whirlwind of
activity at work. From sunup to sundown, and sometimes well beyond,
he is there, everywhere – tirelessly seeing and diagnosing patient
after patient, sending them for X-rays and MRI scans, setting
splints and bandages, operating and repairing. As Shannon is not
his nurse or directly affiliated with what he does from day to day,
she hardly works with him except for when he has a case to refer to
her.

“Mrs. Doherty needs rehabilitation,” he would
say, and leave her to decide what is best.

Or:

“Mr. Hirsch has had a stroke, and the left
side of his face is paralyzed. See if you can get those smiling
muscles working again.”

He does most of this through the phone or as
a written instruction on the patient’s case file, so she hardly has
any face to face time with him. Which suits her fine. He is her
boss, after all, and their relationship must be kept strictly
professional.

Kirk’s nurse is Patty Kane, and she is
particularly chatty during lunch hour. They are at the cafeteria.
Shannon has chosen a chicken salad and a bottle of orange juice.
Patty is beside her at the chow line. Her tray is laden with a
plate of roast chicken with loads of gravy and mash potatoes, and
she has added in a bowl of raspberry Jell-O.

“So you’re the new girl,” she says to
Shannon.

“I guess I am.”

“I heard you rented the old Pullnam
place.”

“I did.”

Patty is a brunette with an upturned,
freckled nose. “Do you sleep well at night?”

“Yes.” Shannon finds the nurse particularly
intrusive for someone she doesn’t know at all, but she is too
polite to blow anyone off at this stage. “Why do you ask?”

Patty wrinkles her button of a nose. “It’s
just that the Pullnam place is rumored to be haunted.”

Haunted? Shannon does not have ESP, but she
has felt no vibes of ghostly activity there.

She frowns. “How is that so?”

They reach the cash register, and Shannon
reaches for her wallet.

“I’ll get that,” Patty says with a smile.
“Consider it my welcome gift to you.”

“Thanks.”

Shannon wonders if this is Patty’s way of
poking her nose in further, but she has very few friends in
Dolphin’s Bay so far, and it might not hurt her to get to know some
people if she is going to live here semi-permanently.

Once Patty has paid for both of them, she
ushers them to a secluded spot in the cafeteria.

They seat themselves.

Patty says in a hushed tone, “Old Man Pullnam
wandered out to the woods one year ago. They found his mutilated
body two miles away from his house. They say an animal has gotten
to it, it was so badly chewed.”

Shannon remembers the wolf howl she has been
hearing for many nights now, starting from the night with Lucien in
the maze. A pang squeezes her chest when she thinks of Lucien, but
she brushes him firmly out of her mind.

“This happened a year ago?” she says
carefully.

“Yes.” Patty is clearly the town gossip and
she delights in having someone new to tell her stories to. “There
are wild animals in the woods. Wolves, coyotes and the like.”

“I reckon.”

“Old Man Pullnam would not be the first to go
that way. Dolphin’s Bay has had a history of animal attacks going
back as far as the 1930’s. The attacks are sporadic. No one ever
sees the animals or lived to tell the tale. Troopers have gone into
the woods to survey the area. They found wolves and coyotes and
shot them. But the attacks still go on. That is why the police put
out an advisory to those living near the forest. Has Deputy Janssen
been to see you?”

Shannon has been working all day. So if the
good Deputy has dropped by, either Jared has received him and
forgotten to mention it to her or no one was home.

“No.”

“He’s slipping. He usually makes a personal
visit to newcomers in the area, especially when there’s a pretty
girl around.” Patty smiles. “You are very pretty, you know.”

Shannon blushes. “Thank you.”

They continue to make small talk for a while.
Then Shannon says, “Does Dr. Fitzpatrick do lunch?”

“He doesn’t eat lunch.” Patty studies her.
“You’re not having designs on him, are you?”

“Huh? No, of course not!”

“Well, you wouldn’t be the first to, believe
me. Every girl comes in here and falls for him in one way or
another, but he doesn’t date. Rumor is that he has a girlfriend
back East. He trained in John Hopkins, you know, and word is that
he’s pining for some colleague of his back there.”

“You’re his clinic nurse and you don’t
know?”

“No one knows anything about him. He’s real
close-mouthed. All work and no play, I suppose.” Patty sighs.

“Maybe he’s gay.”

“Gay? I don’t think so. He’s very male,
although I suppose plenty of gay men are very masculine as well.
Anyway, I thought I’d let you know the score with him so you don’t
go around having your hopes dashed.”

“Thank you for being so charitable.”

Patty laughs. “Do I detect a hint of sarcasm
there? You’ll do fine here. Some of the other guys are already
talking about asking you out. You’re still single, right?”

“Yes. Though I’m not technically looking to
start a relationship.”

“Been through a bad one?” Patty says
sympathetically.

Boy, is she nosy! Shannon thinks. Though she
doesn’t sense anything but warm curiosity and kindness on Patty’s
part.

“Let’s just say I need to cool off a
bit.”

Patty winks. “I’ll let the word out to the
guys. But anytime you change your mind . . . ”

Shannon laughs. Despite everything, she likes
Patty.

*

After a grueling Friday, Shannon is looking
towards a long, nice weekend just chilling out after her first week
at work. She drives the Toyota to a local supermarket she has noted
called ‘Safeway’s’. It is fairly large with a huge parking lot
half-filled with cars.

As she alights from her car, a familiar white
Mercedes draws into the empty parking lot next to hers.

Shannon looks up in surprise. Lucien Walker
comes out of the driver’s seat and saunters over to her,
smiling.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi.” She never expected to see him again,
and so this is a major surprise.

OK, if she is to be honest with herself, she
did check her phone now and again to see if there were any text
messages or missed calls from him. And whenever they were none, she
quelled her disappointment and busied herself with work.

“I saw your car out there and I decided to
follow you.” As soon as he said this, he seems ill at ease, which
has to be unusual for Lucien. “Um, I didn’t mean it in a stalker
mentality sort of way. I just thought it would be nice to . . . you
know, see how you’re getting along.”

His hair is neatly combed back and his face
is a paragon of Nordic male beauty, as always. She remembers her
limbs being entwined with his glorious body, and a flush creeps
into her cheeks.

“Well, you could have called,” she says.

And the moment she said this, she wishes she
could take it back. The last thing she wants to do is to sound like
a whiny girlfriend. They just had sex for one night, for goodness
sakes! They are very far from actually dating.

“I mean,” she adds hastily, “you are not
obliged to call, of course. What we had was great . . . that was
what it was.”

Why does everything that is coming out of her
mouth feel so lame? She half-wishes a great big hole would open up
and let her dive into it. Lucien’s presence is reducing her to her
tongue-tied, trembling-kneed roots, and that is the farthest from
what she wants to be in front of him.

He doesn’t seem to be as composed as he
usually is, either. But then, she doesn’t know him that well. She
doesn’t know him at all. He gave off the veneer of a
devil-may-care, sophisticated player at first meeting. It may not
be who he truly is.

“Well,” he says awkwardly, “you did leave the
next morning. You didn’t even leave a note. I was going to take you
to breakfast and ask if you wanted to stay longer at Pine’s Bluff.
Until you can get your feet on the ground, of course.”

“Oh. Thank you. That’s very nice of you.”

“You are welcome.”

A silence again. A very stretched,
uncomfortable silence. Shannon senses that Lucien is not used to
being silent on such subjects. Or maybe he is not used to having
his lover leave him without a word or a note in the morning. She
reckons that it is him who usually does the leaving.

Of course, that is probably unfair. She
doesn’t know what he does in situations like these.

He looks up, seeming to recover his usual
spirits.

“You going shopping?” he says.

“Just picking up some groceries.”

“Well, I need to pick some up myself. Do you
want to go in?”

“I didn’t know you picked up your own
groceries,” she teases. The awkwardness appears to have lifted
some.

“Oh, but I do.” He smiles. “I pick out my own
wines and cheeses. I’m quite a connoisseur.”

“I believe you.”

Together, they walk into Safeway’s. There is
no hand-holding, just a comfortable companionship – as if they have
both made a mutual decision not to push anything but just let
things go at their own pace, if there’s even anything there at
all.

She is flattered that he has actually tailed
her car and come to this place with her. She is flattered that he
is going grocery shopping with her. She is flattered that this
extremely handsome, sophisticated scion of a multi-million dollar
real estate empire is even with her at all.