“You went off to arrest…miscreants…while you were injured.”

Chase stopped walking so abruptly, Lily nearly bumped into her. Chase slid both hands to Lily’s hips and cantered her head as she whispered, “It’s a scratch.”

Lily’s heart thundered beneath her ribs. A familiar scent clung to Chase’s skin, something sweet and tangy that she finally recognized as the way that the air smelled first thing in the morning. Mountain air, clean and pure, dense with life. Chase teemed with the energy of life. Just being near her stirred Lily’s blood the way nothing ever had, even before the soul-numbing last few years. She swallowed, aware that Chase’s mouth was a fraction of a breath away from hers.

“I’ll be the judge of whether it’s a scratch or not,” she murmured.

Chase eased back a little, and that mouth, so sensuous and so tantalizing, slid into the smile that told Lily Chase knew exactly what she was feeling.

“You’re the doctor.”

Lily pressed both palms to Chase’s chest and gently gave her a little push. “So nice of you to notice. Treatment room. First door on your left. Go.”

“I know where it is.” With a chuckle, Chase turned, walked in, and, even though Lily was only a few steps behind her, somehow had her shirt unbuttoned and was shrugging it off.

By the time Lily closed the door, Chase’s back was to her. A white bandage covered a quarter of her back beneath a black tank top, extending from her trapezius to below her shoulder blade and almost to the edge of her latissimus beneath her arm. Four parallel streaks of blood showed through the white dressing.

“You’ll need to take off your tank.”

“I could use a little help with that,” Chase said. “It’s a little hard raising my arm.”

“How fond are you of this tank? Because cutting it off is going to be a lot simpler.”

“Good thought. I’ve got others.”

Lily pulled the bandage scissors from the top drawer of the equipment cart that stood next to the treatment table, walked around behind Chase, and cut the tight support tank up the back, well away from the lacerations. “Are you allergic to any drugs?”

“Nope.”

“Did you have any antibiotics administered in the field?”

“I took two 500 mg capsules of cephalexin.”

“I’m going to take off the dressing,” she said, pulling on gloves. “I’m sorry, it’s probably going to hurt.”

“Go for it.”

With the dressing removed, Lily got a good look at the four surprisingly neat gouges in Chase’s back. She bit back an oath. “Whoever saw this and didn’t send you to the emergency room needs to be written up for—”

Chase turned and rested her hips against the edge of the stainless steel table. “It’s okay, Lily. It’s been treated. We do things differently out in the field.”

“Oh, don’t give me that. You weren’t in a war zone. You could’ve left.”

With exaggerated patience, Chase said, “No, I couldn’t. We had a three-hundred-pound mother black bear, with two cubs out there somewhere alone, who’d been chased out of her territory by three dogs. She somehow decided to lure them away rather than kill them, and we needed to get her tranqued, on a sled, into the back of the transport, and home where she belonged. And then, like I said, I had to deal with the guys who set those dogs loose on her.”