Page 3 of Meant for Her

“Luke and Ryan Lattimore. They’re twins. Aged twenty-nine, and the owners of the Circle L Ranch. I was driving down the highway when I spotted their two horses close to the road. Those men only had one other horse, so I figured something might have happened to them. I pulled off the road and found them about two hundred feet down the hill in a tall field of grass. Both were unconscious. That’s when I called the ambulance.”

“That was good.” Actually, it was quite bad, since the sheriff was a human. “Did you see who did this?”

“No, but shouldn’t you be tending to their wounds instead of trying to solve this crime? Last I heard, that was my job.”

Ouch.She was just trying to be helpful. Sheriff Hanson must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed today—or maybe he hadn’t even been to bed yet. Law enforcement often worked long hours. She knew. Her uncle was the sheriff of the nearby town of Wildwood.

“Of course. If you’ll excuse me.”

He touched his index finger to his hat, spun around, and left. Dr. David Weston, one of her cousins, rushed in. He was in charge of the Emergency Room and must have sensed the presence of werewolves.

“What’s going on?” he asked quietly, nodding to the two bloody men.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” The paramedics, together with the men’s inner werewolves, had stopped the bleeding, so there wasn’t much she could do at the moment, other than get them out of there. “Hanson called it in.”

“That’s not good. Does he know who they are?”

“Ryan and Luke Lattimore, owners of the Circle L Ranch.”

Her cousin checked their wounds. “They’ll need surgery. When do you get off work?”

“My shift was about to end when these two came in.”

“I’ll ask Hayden and Wyatt to take them to Dad’s. Make them comfortable, and I’ll be there shortly.”

“Sounds good.”

One of the men groaned. She didn’t need either of them to revive too quickly and make a fuss. To ensure they remained non-communicative, she gave each of them a mild sedative.

Hayden and Wyatt, two werewolves who worked at the hospital—one as an orderly and the other as a nurse—came in. “Dr. David said you needed some transportation?”

Malia nodded to the two men on the gurneys. “Yes. You know where to go.” These two men had delivered werewolves to her uncle’s back room a time or two.

“You go on ahead, and we’ll sneak them out through the rear.”

“I appreciate it.”

Since her Uncle Augustine was the hospital administrator, Hayden and Wyatt wouldn’t get into trouble for moving a patient without the proper paperwork. The big worry would be if some random human nurse or doctor stopped them. That could make things difficult.

The two men wheeled the gurneys out of the Emergency Room, supposedly to take them to surgery. Instead of putting them in the elevator for the second floor, they would slip them out the back.

Because there wasn’t an official ambulance they could use, David had told her they’d thrown a couple of mattresses in the back of their truck for such an occasion. A human might not survive the trip to her uncle’s house in their makeshift ambulance, but two werewolves would.

Malia clocked out and rushed to her 4-door Rav 4. Before she took off, she called Aunt Corrine to let her know there would be two incoming shifters, along with her son, who would be extracting a few bullets.

“I’ll be ready for them, dear.”

“Thanks.”

There was a sprinkling of snow still on the ground, but spring was right around the corner. Malia was definitely ready for warmer weather after this year’s particularly brutal winter that had buffeted the Montana mountains.

As she headed to her uncle’s home where he’d set up a make-shift operating room, she wondered how these two men managed to end up in their condition. The name Lattimore didn’t sound familiar, but that might be because she lived near Wildwood, Montana and not Midvale.

Understandably, Malia arrived before the men. Her aunt opened the front door and motioned her in.

“Come in, dear, and tell me what happened.”

“There’s not much to tell.” Other than she had this rather sensual reaction toward the men. Malia might not have been taken by surprise at her reaction if they’d been incredibly handsome or if they’d flirted with her. Their inability to speak, together with their swollen faces and bloodied bodies, made it hard to tell much about them. And she refused to consider these men might be her mates.