THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

him surrounded by four of his men. At her appearance, he dismissed them.
    “Don’t let me break up your huddle,” she said. “I just wanted to check your vitals. It’ll only take two or three minutes, tops.”
    “No problem,” Eli said, as Shalvis, Hayes and the other two, whose names she did not know, filed out of the room. “We were winding up anyway. Any word on Bartlett?”
    Ainsley gave him the good news. She also told him Delano was down in the lab right now running the blood work to see what he might need in the way of coagulotherapy. She asked him a few questions about how he felt, took a quick core temperature reading with the ear thermometer, made some notes on her chart, then checked his urinary output since the last check.
    “So, Nurse Crawford, how am I looking?”
    She glanced up from her chart and gave him with her best squelching stare. “Eli Grayson, if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure you know there’s nothing to be gained from flirting with me, I might think you were. Flirting with me, that is.” She picked up his wrist, found his pulse and fixed her gaze on her watch.
    He laughed. “Ainsley, honey, I am a thousand percent sure it’s gonna get me squat, but when has a man ever let that stop him? Besides, I’m a little giddy that this whole thing is over, and that it turned out so well. You’re safe, the hostages are safe, I’m safe, my men are safe. That rapacious bastard Janecek is dead, and our small firefight at twenty-nine stories seems to have gone undetected by the authorities. And Delano is—”
    “Delano is changed.” She dropped his wrist.
    Eli watched as she wrapped the blood pressure cuff around his bicep. “Is that a problem for you?”
    “Of course not.”
    She put the earpieces in her ears, slid the head of the stethoscope under the cuff, and started inflating the cuff’s bladder. He waited quietly while she opened the valve slightly and listened as the pressure was released. A moment later she removed the stethoscope and whipped the cuff off his arm. “Very good.”
    “Getting back to this Delano thing…”
    “We’re not blood-bonded anymore.” She forced the words past the lump in her throat, surprised to hear how normal they came out. “That’s over.”
    “You’re not… Of course! He’s no longer a vampire. Oh, Ainsley—”
    “No big deal.” She bundled the stethoscope and cuff and shoved them into the medical bag. “He’s a regular guy now, like any other, and the whole world is open to him. He can have any woman he wants, and he should. He deserves to make up for all that lost time.”
    “Whoa, wait a minute. I think Delano has already made his choice.”
    “No, the blood-bond made the choice for him. And the blood-bond would never have come into play if I hadn’t crawled into his bed. He never would have crossed that line if he hadn’t thought he was dreaming. I took his choice away from him, even though I didn’t mean to. Now he’s got it back.”
    “But I don’t think he wants—”
    “It’s okay. It’s better this way. He should have a chance to adjust and take stock and decide what he wants to do.”
    “And who he wants to do it with?”
    “Exactly.” She had to swallow a couple of times before she could go on in a reasonably normal voice. “I just don’t want him to feel any sense of obligation toward me for anything he might have said under the influence of the blood-bond, when I was literally his only choice.”
    “I see.”
    As he said the words, Eli’s gaze slid to the doorway.
    Oh, please God, no.
    But when she swiveled to look, there was Delano standing in the doorway. From the expression on his face, it was impossible to tell whether or not he’d heard her exchange with Eli. Nevertheless, she knew he had. Way to go, Ainsley.
    He cleared his throat and moved into the room. “I have your test results back,” he told Eli. “You have some very minor coagulopathies going on that we need to monitor. Nothing that screams danger, but enough to be a concern. Which means you’re going to have to stay put in that bed for a day or two and give us blood at frequent intervals.”
    “A day or two?” Eli looked completely horrified, a reaction that was no doubt overdone in an effort to deflect attention from what he and Ainsley had been talking about. “Oh, man, you’ve gotta move me back to my own room if I’m going to be stuck in bed that long. No way can I survive a stretch like that without television.”
    “I