Free His to Bear: Icy Cap Den #1 (Alaskan Den Men) by Jennifer Hilt Page B

location or time of day. Ash is all that matters. He sticks out in the picture—as in Icy Cap in general—as if he is backlit.
    I could never figure out what made him glow like that. Then I realized: he’s a living man. Not a dead one. I’m too used to being around other vamps.
    I took that picture just a week ago. I’m eager to show him the completed scrapbook. When I moved into my room, I found a shoebox full of old pictures on the top shelf of my closet. Armed with the box of scrapbooking supplies I brought with me, I’ve been working away over the last month on recreating Ash’s life in pictures.
    Running my fingers around the edges of the last picture, I wonder what he’ll think. I’ve been considering ways to present it. And ways he could show me his appreciation for it.
    Ash is a man of his word. Too bad for me. It makes for one horny and lonely vampire when that sexy shifter lives under the same roof. A few days after I arrived, my paperwork caught up with me. Ash grew very quiet when he read the terms of my employment.
    They’re a mood killer, for sure. I serve as a physician in Icy Cap at the pleasure of the Vampire Medical Review Board. If they don’t like my job performance, I don’t get canned. I get staked.
    At the time of the Bite, when I was in medical school, becoming a vamp seemed like a good deal. I would receive eternal life and student loan forgiveness. In my human life, ever since I could remember, I’d wanted to be a doctor. Now I can practice medicine forever—and debt free! In death as in life, the devil is in the details. In my enthusiasm for leaping to the head of the recruitment line, I missed the celibacy clause.
    I know, right? Wouldn’t you think something like that would be more prominent? Turns out most of the Vampire Medical Review Board has literally been around since the Dark Ages. If it’s good enough for them, their reasoning goes, then it should be good enough for us.
    In the fine print, I discovered that sex with other vampire physicians (as long as it’s discreet) is ignored. What riles the board up isn’t sex but emotional attachments. The board maintains that it is impossible to fully focus on one’s work if a personal life spills over into a professional one. Sadly for me, their rule is law.
    The great room in Ash’s cabin is still a bit chilly for my comfort. I throw a few more logs on the fire. Two months ago, my plan was simple: move to Icy Cap and set up my medical practice. After being here for almost that long, I’m making slow progress in winning the area residents’ trust. And that’s with Ash’s support as community leader. Everyone is so suspicious of vamps. How tiresome.
    I’m not patient by nature, which is probably why the review board gave me this assignment. Well, that and I probably pissed off the current president when I sent her a box of sex toys with expired batteries to protest the celibacy requirement.
    The last laugh is on me, though. I’ve fallen in love with Ash and am forced to live under his roof in this “friends with absolutely no benefits” arrangement.
    I’ve made some inquires about other lodging, but Icy Cap residents are loath to take a vamp into their homes. They reluctantly allow me to treat them when they exhaust other options. Me sleeping under one of their roofs? Not so much. With no temporary accommodations in Icy Cap until the inn is completed, Ash offered me his spare bedroom.
    The cabin’s thick walls don’t quite block out the howling wind. Another Icy Cap winter storm. Being several hundred miles north of the Artic Circle means soul-freezing temperatures combined with three months of darkness.
    For a vampire, the darkness is heaven but the cold is hell. Even thinking is difficult.
    My cell phone buzzes like an angry beetle scuttling along the paper-laden table. Scooping it up, I answer it on the third ring.
    The line goes dead.
    Damn paranoid Icy Cap residents—all several hundred of them. That doesn’t