Chapter 220

Randy’s POV

At the idea of her leaving, my wolf started to panic. He leaped around my chest, demanding I take action to try to win her. Good Grief. One whiff of her pheromones and he was bouncing around like a teenage boy with his first hard-on.

But maybe he had more control of me than I liked to admit because I blurted out, “Is that at all?”

“Was there anything else?” she asked, pausing at the door and looking confused.

“Not unless you wanna have dinner with me?” The words popped out of my mouth before I could stop them, and my eyes shot wide open. That had fully been the fault of my wolf.

The doctor giggled, putting her hand on the doorknob. “I guess dinner with you might be all right,” she said. “Normally, I don’t mix dating and patients. It’s not good practice. But since you’re technically not my patient . . .”

Her smile at me turned my stomach gooey. “I guess I won’t be going back to your practice now that your father’s retired,” I joked.

She giggled again. “If you are one of his patients, then I’m glad that you haven’t needed to see a doctor in a while. You might have ended up with me. And then I’d have to say no. But for future appointments, I’m not the only one working in his practice anymore. He took on another colleague while I was still in Med school. His name is doctor Albert Wiley, and I could still go on a date with you even if you were Dr. Wiley’s patient.”

She winked at me and slipped out the door, shutting it quietly behind her. My stomach swooped and bounced around inside my chest like my wolf was using it as a trampoline or a playground ball. Time to have a little chat with him.

“What the hell is gotten into you?” I snapped. “Are you incapable of settling down when I ask?”

“That’s our mate,” he insisted. “And we have dinner with her. I’m excited.”

“Landing a mate is never a guarantee,” I reminded my wolf. “You don’t know that the doctor and her wolf feel the same about us.”

“Dinner’s a good start,” my wolf reminded me.

I leaned forward and put my elbows on my desk, rubbing my face with my hands. A new thought occurred to me, and it annoyed me almost as much, if not more, than my wolf playing with my heart like it was a volleyball.

“That meddlesome woman,” I growled.

“What are you going on about now?” my wolf asked.

“Don’t you get it?” I snapped. “Helen set Russo and Lisa up. And now this.”

“Not following,” my wolf insisted.

“She’s meddling in all of our love lives,” I growled. “You expect me to believe a young, single, werewolf doctor just happens to show up to care for Helen’s pregnancy? Like that could be a coincidence.”

“And you care?” my wolf challenged.

“And you don’t?” I whipped back. “It’s manipulative.”

“I don’t care if she found our mate,” he replied happily. My wolf curled up inside the corner of my mind, humming to himself as if that was somehow going to lessen his excitement.

My wolf might not care, but I did. Not only was the idea of being nudged into a relationship without my consent aggravating, but I still had feelings for Helen. I wasn’t ready to feel anything for another woman. And having my wolf insist I try churned me up inside.

“Crap,” I gasped, yanking open my desk drawer and rummaging around for one of my business cards. “I told her that we should have dinner, and the only number that I have is her office number.”

When I found a spare card, I slammed the drawer shut and went scrambling out of my office. I caught one of the guards in the hall on his regular round through the house, well, mansion. Since all of our work offices were still in King Juden’s old mansion, we did our business out of there.

Even though no one actually lived in the rooms anymore, it was still busy inside the building. One of the things we’d done over the two months since the Huntsman perished was to turn all of those rooms into quarters for the True Mate’s pack’s warriors, or at least the young, unmarried ones. We wanted to make sure that our soldiers had decent accommodations near where our headquarters so they could be dispatched properly without having to round them up first.

Juden’s mansion proved to be the ideal place for housing all those fighters. The grounds were big enough for them to train on. And the kitchens could accommodate cooking for that many people.

But we also kept a couple of private rooms for Justin and me, besides our offices, just in case, for any reason we needed to stay there. Since the mansion was where we conducted most of our business, it was also where the house call from Dr. Peterson was being made.

“Are they still in the private chambers?” I asked the guard that I had stopped.

“I haven’t heard that they’ve left yet,” he replied. “The order was to escort the doctor out since the administration portion of the building is closed for the day. So I would imagine I would know as soon as she left.”

“Good,” I said, nodding, and hurried off in the direction of the private quarters.

The last time Justin, Russo, Helen, and I had been here to gain information, we had picked the locks and snuck in. But after we moved the warriors on site, we had changed the locks so that Juden couldn’t get in at all. Besides, with the guards posted around the grounds, with so many having their quarters here, there was no way that he was going to take back the mansion as his own.

As a result, we weren’t worried about any of the materials that we had lying around in the mansion anymore. Having so many now living here also removed that sort of deadened silence from the place. The mansion wasn’t nearly as eerie, and I didn’t feel like someone might be watching me from around any corner, or at least no one that we hadn’t posted there on purpose.

The hall was still quiet enough to hear the heels of my shoes thump on the wood floors. In my hurry, they seem to tap out a rhythm almost as fast as my heart. When I got there, I knocked on the door quietly, not wanting to disturb them.

“Who’s there?” Justin asked.

“It’s Randy. May I come in, or should I wait outside?”

“You may come in,” he said.

I opened the door and scooted inside. Helen lay on the bed with a sheet over her lower half, pushed low so Dr. Peterson could hold a wand to her belly. A rhythmic wooshing noise crackled from the device.

Helen beamed at me. “That’s the baby’s heartbeat.”

“I’d like to run some more detailed tests,” Dr. Peterson said. “I’ll schedule you for an appointment in my office for the middle of next week.” She cast a sideways glance at me when she said this. “Given your history around the start of your pregnancy, I want to cover all possibilities and issues. My office has much more extensive equipment.”

She removed the wand and pulled the sheet all the way over Helen. “For now, we’ve verified the pregnancy, and you appear in good health. Good enough to make it into my office for those tests.”

“What are the tests for?” Justin demanded.

“I’m going to have a witch practitioner at that appointment. We’ll hook Helen up to some standard monitors to check the fetus. We’ll do an ultrasound, and you’ll both get the chance to see your pup for the first time. And the witch practitioner will check Helen for residual side effects. Once I find my partner, the witch will monitor for the duration of Helen’s pregnancy to ensure nothing goes wrong.”

She stood, pulling off gloves. “Gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind joining me in the hall for a moment. Helen, please remove everything from the waist down, then take your spot with the sheet over you again. I’d like to do an internal exam before I leave.”

Dr. Peterson herded Justin and me out the door and into the hall.

Justin made a motion with his hand like he wanted me to hurry up. “What brings you here? This is a bit private.”

“I know. I actually just wanted to give Dr. Peterson this.” I held up my business card.

He cocked his head, confused. “Why? Are you seeing her?”

“I’d like to be,” my wolf blurted with my lips. God damn wolf. More rationally, I added, “Professionally, of course. Besides, it’s good for her to have the number of your beta for any emergencies.”

Justin nodded without asking for more details. “I hadn’t thought about an emergency contact.” He gave Dr. Peterson a smile. “I’d be lost without such a reliable beta.”

Fuck. Was he in on this set up too? Listen to him try to sell me to this woman.

But when she grinned at me around his shoulder, my heart squirmed. Too late. My heart was already sold, and she owned it now.