Arielle and the Three Wolves (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read Free

abdominal region. So the good news was there were no head or internal injuries, and the prognosis for the wounded animal went up somewhat. The bad news was that the wound in its leg was still open and bleeding. It was a good thing it still laid on the tarp or her living room carpet would have been permanently stained.
    She had been up since the crack of dawn that morning. A full round of the county farms had been made in the morning. In the afternoon she had stopped by her clinic in town to receive more patients. Then when she got home and was about ready to relax with the steamy romance novel and dinner, her phone had rang. Old Mr. Clarkson had pleaded with her to come out to his place, which was thirty miles away, and help deliver the foal that just wouldn’t come out of its mother. Then of course the incident with hitting the wolf had occurred, and now it was one o’clock in the morning. She was dead tired.
    For the next two hours she worked diligently on the wolf. She cleaned the wound with antiseptic and bandaged it the best she could. She gave it another injection, this time of antibiotics to prevent an infection. Next she went about the long, arduous task of setting its fractured leg. She frowned as she worked the delicate splint around the leg. If the wolf could never walk straight or even run again, it would never be able to live in the forest, and wolves didn’t domesticate well like dogs did. The likely prognosis was that it would die or need to be euthanized. In fact she was likely fighting a losing battle, but she knew how that felt from the last ten years spent on work with sick animals.
    After the leg was set she reexamined it and realized that it would never hold. This wolf would need surgery if it was to ever have any hope of a recovery. She sighed and sat back on the floor of her living room and rested her back against the feet of her couch. Tomorrow was her single day of the week off, and she had planned to read and watch old movies on TV all day. She had not planned to perform an operation on a wolf.
    She looked across the floor at the wolf. It was huge, positively a monster wolf. She had never treated a wolf before but didn’t think they ever got up to more than one hundred and sixty or one hundred and seventy pounds in weight, and that was in extreme cases. Now that she had a chance to more closely inspect the wolf she realized it topped two hundred pounds. He was not fat either. All of that weight distributed across its body was pure muscle. It was a young male and in the prime of its life and strength.
    She remembered how it had looked at her while lying out on the county road. It was so intelligent, so brave. It had been in obvious pain but had seemed to put up a valiant front for her. When it stared into her eyes, it was like it tried to communicate. Those brown eyes had been deeper than any animal eyes she had ever seen before. The pupils were smaller than they should have been, like there was real thought behind them, even intelligence.
    There was a storm, and she was tired and upset when she hit it. Perhaps she had only imagined the look out of its eyes. She didn’t think so, however. An animal, and most especially a wolf, would never look a human in the eye unless it was about to go for the jugular and kill them. This wolf had shown her no violence when it peered up at her. It was like it tried to lift its head from the pavement and speak to her.
    She pushed her still-damp hair out of her face and climbed up off the floor. “You must be losing your mind, Arielle,” she told herself.
    Another snap decision was made. She decided she didn’t want to leave the wolf out of her sight while it was inside her home, and she wasn’t about to sleep out in the living room with it. The weight of the animal on top of the tarp was heavy as she dragged it across the carpet. She had to use both arms and pull it behind her. Her bedroom door was half shut, and she kicked it open to allow a big enough