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her name. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Alice not only resented the intrusion on her privacy, but expected Rose to pay all the bills–rent, water, utilities. Unable to make her sister see reason, Rose had moved out as soon as possible. She loved her sister, but they were very different individuals.
    Even though Alice was older by two years, Rose had always been the responsible one. Her sister had taken advantage of the fact time and time again. Even so, Rose couldn’t stop helping her. Alice’s call this afternoon had sounded more than a little desperate when she’d asked Rose to meet her in the bar. Being at a bar was bad enough, but one that catered to both humans and shifters…What had she been thinking? That was the problem. Alice never thought anything through, never worried about the consequences of her actions.
    She left that to Rose.
    When McQuade stopped the bike, Rose still felt the sensation of moving. It was almost more than she could manage to undo the icy grip she had around his waist as he put down the kickstand and got off.
    Her tiny apartment sat above a garage that provided twenty-four-hour towing and was often noisy, waking her at all hours. But it was all Rose could afford on her nurse’s salary just yet. Even though she had worked while attending school, she had major student loans and wanted to make a dent in them before committing to higher rent on a larger apartment or even financing a mortgage for a small house. She had no one to depend on but herself. Alice had made that perfectly clear on more than one occasion.
    “Y ou need to get warm.”
    As the other man had at the bar, McQuade lifted her from the seat. He half dragged, half carried her up the stairs. She wanted to lean in, to let the heat radiating from his big body warm her, to close her eyes and breathe deeply of the purely male scent. Her keys were in her sweater pocket, which was beneath the oversized plastic raincoat. It took her several attempts to dig them out. He stood behind her, blocking out the night breeze. Amazingly, he didn’t growl or grow impatient at her clumsiness.
    “I know you’re tired. And hungry.” His voice held a note of concern. It had been so long since anyone thought about her wellbeing, tears threatened. Maybe thinking about her parents had made her sad and weepy. Or maybe it had been the whole damn night.
    “I’m fine.” She was indebted enough to the man. Her statement would have been more believable if her stomach hadn’t chose n that moment to growl.
    She finally managed to get the key in the lock. The door squeaked as she pushed it open—it always had. Rose had never complained to her landlord. She figured it was a cheap burglar alarm. Flipping on the light, she braced herself for the sarcastic comments that would no doubt be forthcoming. Every time Alice came by, she spent the first twenty minutes telling Rose how horrible her apartment looked. She tried to see it through this stranger’s eyes. The open area held a beat up leather sofa, a scratched and scarred coffee table, an upholstered chair, and a lamp some previous owner had covered in seashells to hide the peeling paint. Every piece in this room and her small bedroom had been purchased for next to nothing at the thrift shop down the street. Everything but the queen-sized mattress and boxed springs on her bed. She’d refused to sleep on a used mattress. That had been another month of eating almost nothing but noodles
    Thankfully , one of the nurse’s brothers had offered to move the whole lot in his pickup truck. All it had cost her was one of the chocolate cakes she was fond of making for the other nurses during the holidays—a whole lot cheaper than renting a truck herself. Besides, there’d been no way she could have gotten the couch up those stairs on her own. She’d paid the store extra to have the mattress set delivered.
    When he didn’t say anything, she looked over at him, h er eyes tracing the muscles in his arms as