Wrench hated being babied much less than he suspected he would. Ally clearly took a lot of enjoyment in playing nurse, and he couldn’t complain about getting more time to spend with her as he recuperated in Lydia’s room.

But it was only a day before he felt well enough to resent his inactivity and started thinking again.

He didn’t want to talk about it too much with Ally around, but Laura and Tex took the girl down to the beach on his second day of enforced rest.

“There’s still an assassin here,” he growled at Lydia. “One that knows about you and Ally now.”

“We’ll find him,” Lydia assured him. “Everyone—especially Scarlet—is on full alert, and we’ll make a game plan to flush him out when you’re back to full strength.”

“You don’t deserve this risk. It’s my fault this danger is here.”

“You don’t deserve it, either,” Lydia reminded him.

“What if I do?” Wrench demanded. “What if it’s all this I don’t deserve?” His gesture included Lydia, and Lydia’s cozy room, a room that felt more like a home than anywhere he’d ever lived, and the view out the open window. It encompassed the whole island, with all the strange people who had accepted him as one of their own.

He didn’t have to look at her to know that Lydia was gazing at him with that look she got—that look that said she wanted to touch him and was careful not to. She’d been thoughtful about how much she casually touched him, and Wrench had caught her reaching for him and pulling back at the last moment several times.

“Do you really think that?” she asked gently. “That you don’t deserve happiness? That there’s not good in you?”

“If there was good in me, I wouldn’t be so good at hurting people,” Wrench growled.

“We reflect the kind of people we’re around,” she reminded him softly. “And if you’ve never been anything but hurt, that’s all you’re going to be good at.”

Wrench started to interrupt her—but to his surprise, she walked past him then, and gestured to him to follow her out into the courtyard. “Come.”

A blanket was spread out on the grass, and at first Wrench thought that she had very specific plans in mind. He had no objection to this idea—Ally’s arrival and his snakebite had put the kind of crimp on those activities that anyone would expected and he craved having her in his arms again.

But Lydia patted the blanket and not only made no move to remove her own clothing, but put on a pair of flexible leather gloves from her apron pocket. There was a little pile of odd tools to one side and Wrench suddenly wondered if she had a kinky side he hadn’t known about.

“Take off your clothes and shift,” she commanded him.

He froze in confusion, his ardor dampened.

“Don’t look so frightened,” she scolded him. “I know you don’t like to be touched, but I want to show you how it can be.”

No one had ever accused Wrench of looking frightened in his life. When Lydia patted the blanket again, imperiously, he slowly obeyed.

In panther form, he crouched slowly down before her on the blanket, tense and anxious, tail lashing.

Then she slowly began to brush him, a coarse, short-bristled brush in her strong capable fingers.

Panther gave a long sigh of release and slowly relaxed under her ministrations.

She brushed his back with long, hard strokes, and moved down the sides of his neck. Without really intending to, he lifted his head to let her get the front and let out a long purr of contentment. She used her fingers to massage along his jaw and up around his ears. He head-butted her gently, and rolled to one side to let her brush his belly and smooth the fur down over his legs, massaging and brushing as she went.

He purred until he drooled, letting her groom him from nose to the tip of his flexible tail, and caught himself rolling to catch her in gentle claws when she paused.

This ain’t exactly dignified, his human reminded him, but his panther was too delighted by the attention to pay him any heed.

She kneaded muscles that Wrench hadn’t even known were tense, even relaxing the pads of his big feet. She sat between his front feet and did things to each side of his jaw and down his thick neck that nearly crossed his eyes with pleasure, leaning in with talented fingers to find every knotted muscle and hidden pain.

At last, he lay in her lap, gleaming with some sort of minty oil that she’d rubbed into his fur, and purred in a half-stupor of joy.

“I can do this to your human form, too,” she told him in amusement. “If you let me.”

Wrench shifted, head still in her lap.

“Right now I’d let you do anything to me,” he confessed, feeling languid and relaxed.

Lydia bent over to kiss his forehead. “Anything…?” she said suggestively.

Wrench grinned back. They had some time before Ally would be back.