She glanced out the window and saw the snow still steadily falling. She sighed. She could mope about being by herself at home, or she could take a swim at the lodge and at least get some laps in. She always felt better when she did. She went upstairs to her bedroom and changed into her swimsuit, then pulled her sweats on over them. She slipped on socks, boots, gloves, a parka, and a knit hat. Then she grabbed a pool bag and added a bottle of water, a beach towel, a plastic bag for her wet bathing suit, and a pair of panties to it. She left her home to walk to the lodge close by. They had an indoor-outdoor pool that was great to swim in no matter the time of year.

  The pool was closed at ten in the evening, but because she was one of the lodge’s owners, she could swim in it anytime she wanted when she wasn’t working. She reached the lodge’s doors and went inside, waved at the new night manager, Eliza Fraser, and then headed inside the pool area to swim.

  After setting her bag on a chaise lounge, Roxie began removing her gloves, parka, boots, socks, and sweats. She stretched and went down the stairs into the pool. Then she began to swim her first lap. She considered just swimming to the divider to the outside part of the pool but decided to dive under and swim the whole distance to get a little more exercise. She dove under and surfaced, but before she started swimming again, she saw a male body, fully clothed and wearing a backpack, sinking to the bottom of the pool facedown. She gasped.

  Chapter 2

  Her heart racing, Roxie swam to the man sinking to the bottom of the swimming pool as if her life depended on it, when it was his that truly did. When she finally reached him, she struggled to lift him to the surface of the water. Thank God for the buoyancy in water so that he and all his gear felt lighter than they would out of water. She reached the surface and rolled him over so his face was out of the water.

  As soon as she flipped him over, she saw he wasn’t breathing. Her heart nearly stopped with concern. His eyes were closed, his lips blue, surrounded by a dark-brown beard. He was fully dressed in a blue parka, pants, hiking boots, and a black knit hat, making him seem even heavier as she swam him toward the outdoor pool stairs as fast as she could. But she also saw a trail of blood he was leaving in the water. Her thoughts were flying as she considered her next moves. Why was he bleeding? She was afraid now that he was dead from a gunshot wound and hadn’t just fallen in the pool and drowned. Yet with her sensitive hearing and that of any other wolves at the lodge, wouldn’t someone have heard a gunshot fired?

  She finally reached the stairs but couldn’t move him up them until she removed his backpack. Every second ticking by felt like hours as she struggled to unfasten the pack. The clasps finally released, and she frantically pulled at the straps.

  She yanked off the backpack and climbed out, slipping on the wet pavement. A heater warmed the patio so that ice and snow wouldn’t accumulate, but the pavement was still slick. She reached down and tried to pull the man out of the pool. He was deadweight.

  “Help! Call 911! Help!” With everyone’s enhanced wolf hearing, someone should be able to hear her, she hoped.

  Having heard her panicked cries, Rosco escaped through the wolf door at the house and ran straight for her, sure-footed on the patio, his large feet spreading, enabling him to grip the pavement better. As a mountain rescue dog, he had saved several people buried during avalanches and was trained to go to someone in distress. He immediately grabbed the man’s hood and began pulling him too. Rosco was a godsend.

  They finally tugged the man up the stairs the rest of the way. With the injured man lying flat on his back on the patio, Roxie cleared his air passageway and began to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She did chest compressions in between ventilating him and shouted for anyone to hear her.

  Then he coughed up some water and she prayed he would be okay, but she worried about where the blood in the water had come from. At least he was breathing, his heart pumping well.

  Now Rosco would provide a living blanket for the man until she could get help, though she didn’t want to leave the man alone for anything. Her adrenaline was rushing through her veins, but the longer she was out of the warm water, soaking wet in the freezing weather in her bathing suit, the more she was going to be susceptible to hypothermia, the same as the man.

  “Rosco, come here. Lie down with him. Warm him.” Once the dog had settled next to the man to help warm him, she raced to the door that led into the lobby and shouted at the manager, “Call 911! A man was drowning in the pool. I revived him. He needs urgent medical attention.”

  Eliza immediately grabbed the phone. “You need your clothes. Why don’t you stay on the line with the dispatcher, and I’ll go out to him.”

  “I’ve got this.” Roxie felt the man was her responsibility since he’d nearly died on her and her family’s property. She raced into the pool room and grabbed her sweats and pulled them on. She slipped on her socks and boots and yanked on her knit hat. She grabbed her parka and beach towel and then dashed back out of the swimming-pool room, through the lobby, and outside to where the man was lying on his back, shivering. Once she reached him, she placed her parka on top of him, while Rosco’s head and front legs rested on his chest. She pulled off the man’s knit hat and wrapped his head in the towel like a turban to keep him warmer and saw blood on his hat. She would have used her knit hat on him, but her hair had gotten it wet. She hadn’t thought of that when she’d put it on her own head. But the towel might stop the bleeding better anyway.

  She didn’t recognize the man, though he smelled like a gray-wolf shifter. She was glad for that. Wolf shifters overcame injuries twice as fast as humans did. She just hoped his injuries weren’t too grave. At least he was breathing, and the color was returning to his lips. She got down and pressed her body against his, trying to warm him and herself too. He was about six one, too big for her to move him into the lodge.

  Then it seemed like everyone was coming to the man’s aid at once. The ambulance arrived, EMTs, Sheriff Peter Jorgenson, Deputy Sheriff CJ Silver, her brother Blake, and brother-in-law Nate Grayson, who both lived in homes next to hers. Her other brother, Landon, lived farther away at the home next to his wife Gabrielle’s Silver Town Animal Clinic so he wouldn’t know that all this was going on tonight—yet.

  “Hell, Roxie,” Blake said. “You’ll catch your death. Go inside.” He gave her his own parka to wear since hers was still warming the man.

  Nate retrieved the man’s camping pack from the swimming pool stairs.

  “I’m not budging from here until I know he’s going to make it, Blake.” She knew her brother would feel the same way about the guy if he had been swimming and had saved his life.

  Nate shook his head at her.

  “Hey, Nate, tell me you wouldn’t do the same if our roles were reversed,” she said, annoyed.

  Nate gave her a cocky little smile. She loved her brother-in-law who was just as protective of her as if he had been her brother from birth.

  The injured man’s eyes fluttered open, blue eyes, the color of the aquamarine sea, and for a moment, he caught her gaze and held on.

  The EMTs made sure his vital signs were stable; then they carried him to the ambulance on a stretcher and drove him to the clinic where Dr. Kurt Summerfield was already waiting for him.

  Her rescue mission done, Roxie hurried inside the lodge to get warmed up. Peter, CJ, and her family joined her inside to speak with her. Rosco trotted along behind them. Eliza had already made a cup of hot cocoa for Roxie to drink to warm her up, which she appreciated. She thanked Eliza for it and took a sip.

  “So what happened?” Peter asked Roxie, readying his pen and notepad. The sheriff would be questioning the victim at the clinic once he had recovered enough and was able to speak.

  “I was just swimming my first lap in the pool when I dove under the divider to the outside pool and saw the man sinking in the water.”

  “Facedown,” Peter said.

  “Yes. I took him to the stairs, dragged him out, and saw he was unconscious. He had no vital signs. I was able to revive him, and you know the rest.”

  “So you didn’t see what had happened?” CJ asked.

  “No. He was already in the pool when I found him.”

  “You didn’t catch a glimpse of anyone leaving the scene?” Peter took more notes.

  “No. I mean, someone could have been nearby, hurrying away, but I was too busy trying to turn the man over and get him to the stairs to save his life. I just didn’t think of anything else.”

  “Okay, thanks, Roxie.” Peter turned to CJ. “I want you to check the security videos.”

  “I’m right on it,” CJ said.

  “I’ll get them for you,” Eliza said.

  “If you don’t need to question Roxie any longer, she has to get warmed up,” Blake said, rubbing her arm, ever protective of her.

  Roxie was wearing Blake’s coat, but she was still chilled, her hair wet, her clothes damp from pulling them over her wet bathing suit.

  “Yeah, that was a great rescue, by the way,” Peter told her.

  “Thanks. My army training helped.” She’d had basic first aid training, though everyone in the pack who was old enough regularly took lifesaving classes in case any of their people or visitors to the area were injured. She was just glad she’d managed to get the man out of the pool on her own and get help for him. She hoped he’d be all right.

  “Let’s get you home,” Blake said.

  She quickly finished her cocoa and handed the empty mug to Eliza. “Thanks again.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I believe I’ve had enough of a swim for the night.” Even though it was just half a lap.

  Blake and Nate escorted Roxie and Rosco home. They were glad Rosco wouldn’t leave the house through the wolf door now unless he realized it was an emergency—like if he heard someone yelling for help or in distress. He had even saved an avalanche victim once when they had forgotten to lock the wolf door and he’d heard the man crying out. Since then, they always left it unlocked when he was home.

  “What do you think happened?” Nate asked.

  “Maybe he was drunk, disoriented, and fell in?” Blake said.

  “I didn’t smell any liquor on his breath,” Roxie said.

  “Uh, right. Neither did I,” Blake said.

  She definitely would have smelled alcohol on the victim if he’d been drinking since she had resuscitated him.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Nate asked her as they stopped inside her house.

  “Yeah. Sure. I need to get out of this wet bathing suit.” She pulled off Blake’s jacket and gave it to her brother. “Thanks. Sorry it’s a little bit damp.”

  “Hey, you needed to get warm. Your hair’s still wet. You need to drink something hot again,” Blake said.

  “Oh, shoot. I forgot my pool bag on one of the chaise lounges,” she said.

  “I’ll secure it,” Nate said. “Let us know if you need anything else.”

  “Nicole wanted to see to you,” Blake said.

  “But she’s home with the twins and doesn’t need the stress.” Roxie appreciated that her sister-in-law had been anxious about her.

  “And Kayla wanted to come right away too, but we didn’t know what the danger was,” Nate said.

  “She doesn’t need to come. I’ll be fine. I’m off to take a hot shower. Thanks, Blake and Nate. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Night,” they both said to her.

  Roxie locked the door after they both left. She was glad at least her sister and one brother lived in the two houses next door, along with their mates, whom she also adored, so that they could help each other out whenever they needed it.

  She headed up to her bedroom, Rosco settling down with Buttercup in his bed. Roxie stripped out of her boots, damp socks, sweatpants, and wet bathing suit. Then she slipped into the hot shower to take the chill off. While she was washing up, she kept thinking about the man with the beautiful blue eyes and wondering where he had been wounded, how he had fallen into the pool, and who he was.

  Until she knew the answers to her questions, she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She left the shower and dried off, ran a hair dryer over her hair, then dressed and drove into town to the clinic. Since everything in Silver Town was wolf-run, they didn’t have the same rules about only family visiting patients who were staying at the clinic. She was desperate to see the injured man, to learn what she could about him, to see if he was going to make it.

  When she arrived at the Silver Town Medical Clinic, the office manager, Carmela Hoffman, was on duty. “Hey, Roxie. Thank you for saving that man,” she said. News traveled fast around there.

  “He was bleeding. How was he hurt?”

  “He was hit on the side of the head.”

  “Next to the swimming pool?” Roxie thought he might have hit his head when he fell into the pool.

  “CJ is getting the security tapes from Eliza to see if it happened at the lodge or if he was dragged from somewhere else. But the injured man is a tall guy, so I can’t imagine he would have been carried from somewhere else and then dumped there. Peter said it was more likely that he was attacked at the pool and then left to drown, if the blow to his head hadn’t been enough.”

  “Oh God, that’s awful. He didn’t tell Peter anything yet?”

  “The victim has a mild concussion. He can’t remember what happened to him. Tom is pulling guard duty to make sure he’s protected in the event this was a case of attempted murder.”

  “Oh, sure. Good idea. The man’s name?”

  “Dylan Powers. He’s a special agent with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. His driver’s license and badge were on him.”

  “Oh, a special agent.” That made Roxie think he was on a job and someone he was after had done this to him. “Can I see him?”

  “He’s asleep. If you’d like, you can sit with him. He’s in Room 3.”

  “All right. Thanks.” Roxie really wanted to ask him what had happened. But she also wanted to let him know who she was and that she was there for him since he didn’t have any family or friends here that she knew of.

  She walked down the hall to where Tom Silver was sitting at the door on guard duty. He was Darien Silver’s triplet brother and third in command of the pack. Darien and his mate, Lelandi, were their pack leaders. “He’s asleep.”

  “That’s what Carmela said. I still would like to sit with him for a while.”

  “You’re welcome to.”

  “Thanks.” She knocked on the door to the room where Dylan was staying. She hoped he wouldn’t mind that she had come to sit with him. He didn’t respond, so she opened the door and peered in. He was sound asleep. At least his cheeks and lips were a normal color—no longer gray skin and blue lips. She was glad for that.

  She went inside, closed the door, and sat down on one of the comfortable blue visitors’ chairs, ready to get some answers from him once he woke.

  Dylan’s head felt like it was splitting in two. He reached up to touch it and found it was wrapped in a bandage. How did he get here? What had happened? He could smell the antiseptics and something else. A female wolf and he recognized her scent. He realized he smelled of chlorine and…dog? He turned to look in the direction of the window, and there she was—a pretty woman with shoulder-length silky dark hair, sound asleep in the chair near the bed. He raised his brow. He vaguely remembered seeing her worried brown eyes when she was standing over him and while others came to help him. He was in a hospital room.

  Then it all came flooding back to him. Tracking Jim Johnson, losing his tracks, seeing Jim’s reflection and his own in the pool before Jim struck him on the side of the head with the butt of his rifle. Dylan didn’t remember anything after that, except when he had looked into the woman’s beautiful, caring eyes.

  Had she been part of a security detail at the ski lodge? Hopefully, they had caught the bastard striking him on video. Maybe Dylan could get him on more than just killing an elk this time. Jim wouldn’t get away with it. Attempted murder? Dylan didn’t think Jim could explain that away easily this time. Dylan sure hoped he could nail him. With any luck, he hoped the law enforcement personnel here had caught the bastard already.

  Chapter 3

  Dylan needed something for the awful headache he was experiencing and thought about pushing the nurse’s call button, but he looked at the woman sleeping in the chair and sighed. He didn’t want to wake her. He rubbed his head, surprised Jim would go to such extremes to prevent him from charging him with the illegal killing of an elk. As a lupus garou, Dylan knew his injury would heal in half the time that it would take humans to heal. But that didn’t lessen the pain he was feeling right now.

  He studied the woman again. She was curled up on the chair wearing a pretty pale-blue angora sweater that looked so soft and huggable, formfitting jeans, and fluffy blue socks. Fur-topped snow boots were sitting next to her chair, and a blue parka was lying on top of another. She wasn’t wearing a law enforcement badge or a gun, so he wasn’t sure what she was doing there.

  A nurse came in to check on him, and he was surprised to smell that she was a gray wolf too. “Good, you’re awake,” she said. “I’m Charlotte Grey.”

  “I need to see the sheriff.” Dylan didn’t remember talking to him yet about what had happened, but they needed to catch Jim and his cohorts pronto. He glanced at the woman sitting in the chair.

  “That’s Roxie Wolff, part owner of the ski lodge. She saved your life.”

  Dylan looked back at her. She was so petite that he couldn’t imagine her being able to pull him out of the pool, but he was damn glad she had saved him.

  “She had to resuscitate you. What were you doing in the pool? I mean, the doctor said you were struck on the side of the head, but they checked your ID, and you weren’t registered as a guest at the ski lodge. Were you just there to go day skiing? Do you have any idea why or who the man was who struck you? Oh, let me call the sheriff for you.” Charlotte pulled out her phone and said, “Hey, Peter. It’s me, Charlotte. I was checking on Dylan Powers. He has come to and was asking to see you.” She paused. “Okay, good. I’ll tell him you’re on your way.” She slipped her phone into her pocket. “The sheriff is on his way.”