The Protector's Heart (Wilde Creek Three)
Read The Protector's Heart (Wilde Creek Three) Online
Authors: R.E. Butler
Tags: #wolf, #mate, #shifter, #mating, #wilde creek
The Protector’s Heart
Wilde Creek Three
By R. E. Butler
Copyright 2014 R. E. Butler
The Protector’s Heart (Wilde Creek Three)
By R. E. Butler
License Notes
This book is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other
people. If you would like to share this book with another person,
please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re
reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased
for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you
for respecting the hard work of the author.
Cover by Ramona Lockwood
This ebook is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s
imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is
coincidental.
Disclaimer: The material in this book is for
mature audiences only and contains graphic sexual content and is
intended for those older than the age of 18 only.
* * * * *
I’d like to thank Alexis Arendt for editing
this story.
Much thanks to my best sisterfriend Joyce
Bange for beta-reading and for always being there.
Thanks to Shelley Chastagner and Jackie G.
for their beta-reading help.
Many heartfelt thanks to my Aunt B.L. and my
husband. I love you both.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Malachi Slattery sat in the living room of
his alphas’ home on Monday morning and waited for Brynn, the alpha
female, to be ready for work. Malachi was a protector, a highly
ranked member of the pack whose sole job was to keep the pack
members safe. He’d been chosen by Acksel as one of Brynn’s personal
protectors, for those times when Acksel couldn’t be with her.
Malachi enjoyed being Brynn’s protector, and it had absolutely
nothing at all to do with the beautiful human woman, Nila, who
worked at the doctor’s office where Brynn was a receptionist.
Liar
.
He mentally told his wolf to shut up and
glanced at his cell, wondering what was taking Brynn so long. Just
as he’d decided to play a game on his cell to occupy himself, he
heard the bedroom door open and Brynn said, “Stop making that face,
I have to go to work.”
“No you don’t, love. I can easily support our
family. Stay home.”
Brynn made a happy sound that made Malachi
think that she was going to be
really
late, and then she
said, “Damn it, stop using your wiles to tempt me.”
Malachi snorted inwardly as Acksel demanded
to know what she meant by that and she rebuffed him, storming down
the hallway.
She brightened at seeing Malachi, switching
gears from annoyed to happy in two point two seconds. “Hi Mal.
Sorry for keeping you waiting.”
“It’s no problem, Brynn,” he promised. He
stood and tucked his phone into his pocket.
Acksel came into the family room and greeted
Malachi. “Don’t you think your alpha female should be home
resting?”
Before Malachi could ask Acksel not to rope
him into a personal squabble, Brynn threw a nearby pillow at
Acksel’s head. “As if you would let me rest, you big old horn dog.
I’m going to work.” Her scowl softened and she moved quickly to
Acksel, kissed him, and said goodbye. She strode to the door, and
Malachi looked at Acksel, who said the same thing he said every
morning Malachi drove her to work. “Keep my mate and my pup
safe.”
“Will do, alpha,” Malachi promised.
He followed Brynn out into the frigid
December morning, saying goodbye to Sam, the theto of the pack and
the leader of the protectors, who was standing guard outside of the
home. Malachi opened the door to his dark green SUV, Brynn climbed
into the passenger seat, and he shut the door. Glancing toward the
house, he saw Acksel watching from the open door and nodded at him,
a second, silent promise to keep Brynn safe.
Malachi considered it an honor to be one of
Brynn’s personal protectors. The pack only ran well when everyone
could do their job. If Acksel was worried about Brynn’s safety,
then he wouldn’t be able to lead appropriately. The personal
protectors helped to alleviate some of the stress of the alphas
being apart, because Acksel trusted them to keep his mate safe.
Some of the lower-ranked wolves thought that the personal
protectors were nuts for accepting the role to watch over Brynn.
Failure came with a hefty price tag. If something happened to
Brynn, Acksel would go on a rampage and the ones responsible would
suffer greatly. That didn’t worry Malachi, though. He had no plans
to let a hair on Brynn’s head — or her baby’s — be harmed.
As he pulled away from the curb, Brynn
sighed.
“How was your weekend?” he asked. Their
engagement party had been Saturday, and the pack had gathered at
Luna’s, a restaurant in town, to celebrate.
Brynn said, “Okay, I guess. Acksel’s getting
weirder and weirder about me leaving. Do you think it’s the
baby?”
Mal glanced at her. “Possibly. Males are
protective of their females and their pups, though. It could be a
combination of things.”
She hummed in her throat and then said, “I’ll
probably quit working before the baby is born and take some time
off to raise him or her, but I can’t see myself actually stopping
working.”
“So why don’t you tell Acksel that?”
“I did. When I tell him about going to work
he…distracts me.”
Malachi grimaced, hoping she wouldn’t go into
details. He’d known Acksel his whole life, but that didn’t mean he
wanted to hear about the intimate details of their life.
Fortunately, she skipped over Acksel’s method of ‘distraction’ and
said that while he was busy rewriting hundreds of years of pack law
with the elders of the pack every day, she found it powerfully
boring and didn’t want to help.
Malachi pulled the SUV into an empty space in
the parking lot of the Family Clinic of Wilde Creek, where Brynn
was a receptionist. The small doctors’ office was run by Frank and
Kimmi Channing, and served not only the human population of Wilde
Creek, but also the wolves when they needed things like physicals
for sports, school, or work. Wolves didn’t naturally get sick, but
they still needed proof they were in good physical condition.
“If you don’t want to quit right now, then
don’t. He’s just a male who wants his mate where he can see her. He
trusts me to keep you safe, but he trusts himself more.”
She gave him a long look, her green eyes
searching his face. “The wolfy instinct stuff is a pain in the ass
sometimes.”
He grinned. “It’s also totally awesome.”
She snorted. “Time to go before Dr. Kimmi
fires me for being late.”
“As if she’d fire you. She loves you.”
They walked to the building and Malachi held
open the door for her. She took her bag to the breakroom while he
walked to the small office that was being used to house the
security system and sat down behind the bank of monitors. When
Brynn had been kidnapped and nearly killed in October, the
perpetrators — a small group of rogue wolves — had snatched her at
work, which was why Acksel insisted she be driven to work and that
a protector stay with her. Malachi was the natural choice. He had a
background in security and was good with computers. He had a side
business with his best friend, Lucian, setting up security systems,
although lately Lucian had been out of the country working at his
real
job, and Malachi had been running the company by
himself.
As he reviewed the recordings from the
multiple cameras inside and outside of the building, he heard some
very familiar footsteps and his whole body went tense, his wolf
alert. He watched the open doorway. Nila Caruthers, a nursing
assistant, raced by, her dark blonde hair flying behind her. She
was running late again. He could guess it was because of her son
and a situation at the daycare. Either the little boy was having a
bad morning, or something had happened with her ex. His wolf
snarled at the thought of that male, who didn’t deserve to breathe
the same air as Nila, let alone have had access to her gorgeous
curves.
He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly,
picking up her naturally sweet scent. She smelled like wildflowers
to him and his beast. He forced himself to stay in his seat and not
stalk to her and make sure everything was okay. She did
not
like wolves, because her ex-husband was a total whack-job wolf.
He’d mistreated her and her son more often than he’d been kind to
them. Even now, she was still technically married to him. According
to Brynn, he refused to sign the divorce papers.
Malachi thought it was quite cruel of fate to
give him a mate who hated what he was at the core of his being.
He’d win her heart eventually, he was sure, but the problem was he
couldn’t even get close to her without her defenses going up. He’d
only been around her for a little over a month, but he was certain
she was meant to be his mate. He just needed to convince her of
that.
Turning his attention back to the monitors,
he mentally flipped off whoever was in charge of werewolf matings
and tried not to think about the alluring woman with the pretty
brown eyes.
* * * * *
By the time the work day was over, Malachi
was no closer to figuring out how to deal with Nila than he’d been
the first day he met her, when she was crying in the closet of the
doctors’ office because her ex had beaten up a teacher at her son
Jack’s daycare when they’d refused to allow him to take the
boy.
“Mal?” Brynn asked as he drove her home.
“I’m sorry, Brynn, what?”
“You’re like a hundred miles away. What’s
up?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s Nila, right? Tell me
what’s going on, maybe I can help.”
He looked at his alpha and she smiled
encouragingly. “I just need her to see that I’m not like her
ex.”
“Anyone with half a brain would know that.
He’s a total nutcase.”
“She doesn’t want anything to do with me on
principle. Her ex is a bad wolf, so for her, all wolves are bad. I
can’t show her I’m different because she won’t even give me a
second glance.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said.
“What?”
“When we were coming back from lunch today,
she’d gone to have lunch with her son and came back a little before
us. She stood at the front desk and stared at us while we walked
into the office, and then she darted off like her butt was on
fire.”
His wolf practically cartwheeled in his head.
“Really?”
“Well, she sure wasn’t looking at me. I know
I’m pretty, but neither of us swing that way. So yeah... I think
she likes you. You’re fighting an uphill battle, but you’re not
going to back down.”
“Any advice rattling around in that head of
yours?” he asked hopefully.
“I wish I could tell you a way to handle
things with her that would guarantee success, but I can’t. It might
be enough eventually for her to see you watching over me while I’m
working, but I think her ex was really nice in the beginning. It
wasn’t until they were married that he changed and began to
mistreat her.”
Malachi growled.
“I know you’ll figure it out, Mal. If you’re
really mates — and I believe you are from what I’ve seen — then
she’ll see the truth of what you are. She just needs time. You can
prove you’re not like her ex and take care of her the way I know
you’re dying to.”
“How’d you get so smart?” he teased as he
pulled the SUV along the curb in front of her home.
“Just naturally brilliant.” She grinned at
him as Acksel opened her door and helped her out.
“Thanks, Mal,” Acksel said.