Protector (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 3) (18 page)

“I need that ambulance to hurry up,” she said, still watching the woman’s chest rise and fall. “Go make sure that other driver doesn’t go anywhere. I’m afraid he’s too drunk to know that he’s hurt.”

“The boys have got an eye on Larry,” Miles said.

Of course they know who he is
, thought Delilah.
Everyone knows everyone in this town.
 

Then, at last, in the distance: sirens.

Delilah and Miles stayed there, Delilah in the Hyundai and Miles right behind, in silence until the sirens were right next to them. Miles met the paramedics as they jumped out, told them that the woman in the little car needed them the most, that the drunk guy in the SUV was fine.

Someone came and relieved Delilah, taking over the job of keeping pressure on her wound. The paramedics gently got her out of the car and onto a stretcher just as she woke up, her eyes flying open in her bruised face, immediately contorting with pain.

“It’s your lucky day,” one of the paramedics told her, and Delilah was impressed with how calm he sounded. “You’re not dead. That nice lady probably saved your life.”

Delilah, standing to the side, didn’t know what to do anymore, so she stood there uselessly, covered in blood that wasn’t hers. The men who’d lifted the car, minus Miles, still stood around the SUV, looking almost like guards.

“This has been coming for a long time for Larry,” said Miles, and Delilah jumped. She hadn’t realized he was right there next to her.

“How so?” she asked. She was hugging herself hard with her arms, doing her best to stop the shaking. Why was she shaking, anyway? She was a doctor, she saw this stuff all the time. She shouldn’t be in shock.

“His drinking’s really gotten to be a problem,” Miles said in his low voice. “Lost his job at the cannery, then his wife left with the kids, so now there’s nowhere to be at eight in the morning except the Rusty Anchor.”

Delilah nodded. It was a familiar story to her — too familiar, really. Growing up she’d through this kind of tragedy was specific to small-town Alaska, but it turned out that it was everywhere she went.

“The Rusty Anchor’s still around?” Delilah asked. The place had looked like a falling-apart fishing shack when she’d left, and she’d assumed that a strong wind had knocked it over at some point.

“Course it’s still around,” Miles said. “There could be a nuclear war and it’d be the only place left standing. The Anchor will outlive us all.”

The paramedics loaded the woman, still in pain and breathing heavily but alive, into the back of the ambulance. They slammed the doors shut and immediately, the sirens started and the ambulance lurched away, moving through the snarled traffic, even driving up on the curb.

“Does Fjords have a hospital?” Delilah asked Miles. She was still hugging herself tightly without really realizing it, and she shivered a little in the cool May air.
Alaska
, she thought.
Where you need a parka year-round
.
 

I guess I went soft down south.

“We’ve got a little urgent care facility, but that’s it,” Miles said. He looked worried as he watched the ambulance drove off, fast.

“They’ll probably have to patch her up there and then transfer her,” said Delilah.

“She gonna make it?”

Delilah looked at the ground for a second and then nodded. “I think so,” she said. “It won’t be fun, but I think she’ll make it.” She wrapped her arms even more tightly around herself.

“That ain’t gonna be the worst part,” Miles said thoughtfully.

“Her recovery is gonna be pretty bad,” Delilah assured him.

“Just wait until Roy finds out what happened,” Miles said, grimly. “The worst part is gonna be letting the police do their job and keeping him from killing Larry.”

Suddenly, everything clicked into place. Delilah had been far too concerned with the woman’s body and leg to get a good look at her face, but all at once, she realized who it was.

“That was Susan?” she gasped.

“Yup,” Miles confirmed.

That
was
bad. Roy was the alpha of their pack — or at least he had been when she’d left town years ago — and he wasn’t known for his kindly manner or his mercy. No, he ran the Fjords shifters with an iron fist, and woe to anyone who crossed him or broke the rules.

Susan, of course, was his mate.

Next to the SUV, the drunk guy — Larry, apparently — was on a stretcher too, seemingly lucid and talking to the paramedics. The three men who’d helped lift the front of his SUV off of the Hyundai still stood around, back a little, like they were watching over him and making sure he didn’t try anything.

From the corner of her eye, she could sense Miles watching her, like he wanted to say something.

Finally, he put one hand on her shoulder. It was big and warm, and his touch sent a rush of remembrance through her. All those
other
times they’d touched, before she’d left Alaska.

“Jeez, Del,” he said. “You’re shaking.”

He took his hand off of her and started taking his leather jacket off, wearing nothing more than a t-shirt underneath.

Peeking out from beneath one sleeve was a tattoo. She could only see the black lines the grizzly’s feet, but she knew exactly what it was: a thick black line drawing of a grizzly bear, the stars of the constellation Ursa Minor — the little dipper — arranged inside it, the North Star the biggest.

“No, it’s fine, it’s just the shock,” Delilah said.

He called me Del,
she thought. It had been years since she’d heard the nickname.

“Come on, take it,” he said. “The police are gonna want to talk to us, so we’ll be standing outside for a while.”

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Nah,” he said, and smiled the same old smile at her, putting his heavy jacket over her shoulders.

God, he even smelled the same. His hand rubbing her back, trying to warm her up — that felt the same too.

As they watched, the police came, sirens blaring, and started directing traffic around the wreck. Now Larry was in the other ambulance, and it set off in the same direction that the first had, going a little slower, driving a little less urgently. Delilah’s car was still parked right in the intersection, ten feet from the crashed cars, but incredibly it hadn’t been hit, not even by flying glass or car parts. The police directed traffic around it.

Miles’s jacket was warm and comforting, and in a few minutes, Delilah had stopped shivering, finally warming up. She put her arms through it, remembering again how much
bigger
he was than her, how her fingertips didn’t even reach the ends of the jacket’s arms, how she could have practically worn the thing as a dress.

She sneaked another look at his arm, the tattoo still peeking out. It didn’t look faded yet, still fresh and black. He’d gotten officially initiated, then, into the inner circle sworn to put pack above all else.

“I heard your dad died,” Miles said, suddenly.

“He did,” said Delilah. “That’s why I’m back. I gotta clean out his house, deal with all of his —“ she paused. Now didn’t seem like the right time to lay into her father like she really wanted to.
Speak no ill of the dead
and all that, even if she’d thought she was finally free of his mess, only for it to come back on her after his death. “Affairs,” she finished. “I have to deal with his affairs.”

“That’s gotta be hard,” he said. “Just you, no siblings.”

“I’m hoping it won’t take too long,” she said. “A week, maybe?”

“The clinic is always looking for doctors,” Miles said, his face half-teasing. “Especially ones who understand the most common condition in Fjords,” he said.

That
brought a smile to her face. The most common condition, of course, was bear-shifter-itis, and it was an open secret that a good two thirds of the town had it. That was half the problem: combine the strange politics of shifters with their archaic social structures with the insularity of small towns, and things got stifling, fast.

Delilah wasn’t moving back, not ever.

“How’s Nathan?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

Something in Miles’s manner shifted, and Delilah sensed that she’d gotten too close to something.

“He’s doing okay,” Miles said. “He’s not at college anymore, but I think he’s gonna get his life together.”

“He still living with your parents?”

“Yeah. They threaten to kick him out once a week, but it’ll never happen.”

“How are they doing?”

“They’re fine,” Miles shrugged. “Dad and Roy are still thick as thieves.”

Delilah just nodded. She’d always been afraid of Miles’s dad. Nothing had been proven, but when she and Miles were twelve or so, the police had been interested in him for a murder further north. They never pinned anything on him, but she’d always suspected that he traded dirty work with another pack. After all, sometimes shifters who were causing problems up and disappeared.
 

Every so often, Delilah heard stories of bear shifter packs who weren’t so bloody and violent, where the pack was run more democratically and not just according to the whims of the man with the most brute force strength, but she’d never seen it in practice, not even in California.

Not that she’d known any shifters in California. It had been lonely, driving into Marin every weekend to shift, taking the long trip to the Sierras every month or so for a good, long weekend in her other form. She’d missed gallivanting around with other shifters, wrestling and fishing and doing all the bear stuff she loved. What she hadn’t missed were the brutal pack politics, the wild misogyny, or the long Alaska winters.

One of the officers on the scene came over to the two of them, Miles standing there in just his t-shirt, Delilah with her arms inside his jacket, wrapped tightly around her.

“Miles,” he said, nodding.

“Steve,” Miles said.

Officer Steve wrote something down on his notepad, then turned to Delilah.

“Name?” he asked.

The questioning didn’t take too long since it was so obvious what had happened: Larry had drunkenly run a red light and nearly killed someone. Ten other witnesses had seen the whole thing, and Larry was getting a breathalyzer test in the ambulance as they spoke.

When Officer Steve was finished, he put his notebook away on his belt and looked from Miles to Delilah, uncertainly.

“She’s cool,” Miles said.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Officer Steve said. “But the law really ought to take care of this one, Miles.”

“I know, Steve,” Miles said. He rested his thumbs in his belt loops and looked down at the pavement. Delilah felt her heart skip a single beat at something in his movement — it was just so familiar, and so....
sexy
. “I’ll do what I can, but it’s no promise.”

“That’s all I want,” said the officer.

Then he nodded at Delilah and walked away to talk to some other witnesses.

Delilah looked down at her watch. “I should get going,” she said. “Jeez, it’s almost seven. I forgot how light it stays up here.” She started to shrug off the jacket, but Miles put a hand out.

“Keep it until you get home,” he said. “I saw you use yours on Susan.”

“Come on,” she said, holding it out.

Miles raised his hands in front of himself and began backing away, toward his old pickup truck. Delilah recognized that, too — he’d had it since high school.

“I’ll get it next time I see you,” he said, and then he got into the cab and was gone.

Delilah walked slowly back to her own car and buckled herself in, around Miles’s jacket. She turned the key and then cranked the heat, let the officers stop traffic briefly to let her out. All the way to the grocery store, she kept her mind carefully blank, except for one thought:

I guess I’ll be seeing Miles again
.

Get the bundle now! Three novels for $2.99, or FREE on Kindle Unlimited!

Start from the beginning.

Predator

Copper Mesa Eagles #1

Seth Monson has barely scraped by his whole life. Still young when his parents died, he’s had to raise his two brothers himself, deep in the tiny Utah desert town of Obsidian. On top of that, age-old rumors about his family - that his ancestor made a deal with the devil so he could shift into an eagle - have kept him isolated his whole life.
 

Yeah, right.
If Seth could turn into an eagle, he’d have flown away from his problems long ago.
 

Jules Morgan is the kind of girl who likes to get dirty, drives a truck, and knows her way around heavy equipment. A field geologist for a mining conglomerate, she’s on a job outside Obsidian when she crosses paths with the
very
attractive stranger standing by his
very
broken truck. She can’t seem to escape his deep, golden-brown gaze no matter how hard she tries.
 

When they discover that Jules’s employer wants to destroy the only home Seth has ever known, they’re both stuck in the middle, caught between duty and what they truly want, with unstoppable passion burning like wildfire around them.
 

Can Seth discover the power hidden inside himself in time to save both his home of Copper Mesa and the town of Obsidian? More importantly, can he do it without alienating the one woman - the one
mate
- he’s quickly realizing he can’t live without?