“You just spent the entire night watching over my daughter, Crush. I think it’s okay for you to call me Barb.”

“Or Mrs. M., which still seems respectful.”

“Barb is respectful enough if I tell you it is. Now go before my husband’s idiot sisters get here and make me much less pleasant.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

Cella heard the bickering, but she chose to ignore it, keeping her eyes shut.

The meds had worn off, so she felt every moment of her leg threading itself back together, making the foreign object part of it. And, in a word, it fucking hurt. If everything went as planned, Cella knew the pain would lessen in another day, maybe two. But at this moment—it hurt.

And hearing her aunts bickering with her mother—again—was doing nothing but getting on her frayed nerves. But since Cella had been hearing her relatives argue since her first breath—rumor was that her mother got into a claw match with Aunt Deirdre seconds before Cella came out of the womb, which in retrospect kind of explained Cella’s general personality—it was easy enough for her to tune them out and go back to sleep. Especially when she had something else to focus on. Specifically Crush. He was worth focusing on rather than the pain. She’d woken up here and there during the previous night and every time she did, he was still there, holding her. He snored a little, but nothing that made her want to cover his face with a pillow until he stopped altogether. And his arm was always around her, keeping her close and immobile all at the same time. Yet she didn’t feel trapped by so much male holding on to her. Nope. She didn’t feel trapped at all. Amazing. Because usually Cella felt trapped when one of the bathroom stalls at the Sports Center got stuck and it took her longer than two seconds to get the door open. Like five seconds. One time it took her ten seconds and she freaked out so badly, she just tore the door off the hinges, apologizing to the maintenance guy she’d passed on her way back to the gym.

Christ, was she really starting to like this guy?

Wait. No. She wasn’t starting to like this guy. She already liked this guy. A lot. Again, surprising, because he was nothing like the males she was usually drawn to. Nope. Crush was excessively polite, quiet, well-mannered, and absolutely trustworthy. Although, when she thought about it, all those qualities were important for any male to have if they were going to be around Cella’s daughter. Something she’d never really thought about because there had never been a male Cella had allowed around her daughter that wasn’t the kid’s father, a blood relative, or a schoolteacher.

Of course, it was too early to tell if all this thinking and analyzing about one bear was actually necessary, but it helped her fall back to sleep despite the continued bickering in the room.

Unfortunately, Cella didn’t have the chance to reallyenjoy much of that sleep because someone decided to touch her leg. It was a light touch, but enough to have her reaching up and grasping the throat of whoever was touching her.

Cella opened her eyes and looked up into the face of a nurse. A tiny, itsy-bitsy bobcat staring at her with wide eyes and a rather daunting-looking needle.

After having what he could only say was an astounding meal in the shifter-only lunch room—shifter-only locations did like to provide the best food and supportive furniture for all the different breeds since it cut down on violent explosions of rage—Crush headed back to Cella’s room.

The elevator opened on her floor and Crush stepped out, stopping at the giant bouquet of flowers standing in the middle of the hallway. Leaning to see around them, he caught sight of what could only be called a mane of white and brown hair.

“Novikov?”

The flowers moved a bit and scowling blue eyes glared at him. “Crushek.”

“Hi. Are you looking for Cella’s room?”

“I don’t know what to do with these.”

Crush went around the flowers so that he could look directly at the Marauder. “Do with them?”

“Blayne said I had to bring flowers. I told her to come with me, but she said she’d be here later because there was yet another emergency with the wild dogs.”

Wild dogs. What Crush deemed the chattiest of the shifter breeds. Mostly nice, though, unless their pups were involved.

“Okay.”

“I told her I could go practice and we could go when she was done, but she said I had to go now so that Malone doesn’t think all her friends are deserting her. I’m not deserting her. How can I be deserting her when we’re not really friends? We’re coworkers.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Well ... as far as coworkers go, she’s tolerable.”

Which probably meant Cella was as close to a friend as the Marauder was ever going to get from an actual teammate.

“Then I told her she should bring flowers from both of us and she said I should do it because it would be a nice gesture.” His scowl grew worse. “I don’t do nice gestures. I’m not a nice gesture kind of guy. Besides”—he looked the flowers over—“I think I may have gone a bit overboard.”

And Crush thought he was awkward in daily, non-cop-related situations.

“I’m sure if you explain all that to Cella, she’d totally understand.” And, even better, it would make her laugh her ass off.

“I guess. She gets me, ya know? She was probably one of the best enforcers I ever had. On most teams, I was not only the top scorer, I was the enforcer, too. But I didn’t have to worry about that with Malone around.”