by Jade Alters
Protected by the Pack
Jade Alters
Starchild Universal Publishers
Copyright 2019 by Starchild Universal Publishers - All rights reserved.
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Contents
From the Author
They’re on the hunt..
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
A Final Note from Jade:
Other Books by Jade
From the Author
First and foremost, I’m so grateful to have you as a reader. Thank you.
If you haven’t claimed your copy of my previous release Mated to the Pack [Please Click Here] to get your gift.
They’re on the hunt..
They’re on the hunt… but is it to protect me – or something else?
I didn’t think I would end up like this, far from my nice life in Southern California. It all started when my dad forced me to pick a major in college, and my new journalism degree landed me here, in the mountains of Afghanistan.
But the cold, dark nights aren’t so bad.
Not when I’m under the close protection of four strong, hot Green Berets.
They’re true alpha males, ready to put their hot bodies in front of me… and anywhere else.
As the days pass, I find myself more and more attracted to them.
I want to melt in their muscular arms as they hold me close.
I want to feel their lips against mine as we ignore the chaos around us.
But I can’t…. Because everybody has secrets, especially me.
Out here in the wilderness, anything is possible – and nothing is off-limits.
And as the danger mounts all around us, I’m forced to ask myself: who can I trust… and who will prove that love conquers all?
1
Courtney Seagal
I was frustrated as I sat at the little desk in the tent and typed out an email to my boss. I didn't want to quit...I'm really not a quitter, and besides, my father would kill me if I did. But I had just about as much of this as I could take and I expected my boss to do something about it...something like bringing me back home.
It was mostly my father's fault that I was in my current predicament, and as I typed, I thought about how his controlling nature had landed me here...as close to hell as I would probably ever get. It started way back when I graduated high school...or maybe even way back before that. Yes. It actually started the day I was born. My father is a control freak. He is retired military, a Lieutenant General, and he doesn't know how not to push people around.
Behind his back I refer to him as “The General”. The General had been the one who had pressured me into picking a major when I first started college. I hadn't known what or who I wanted to be at that point in my life. I had been barely eighteen years old and had lived a sheltered life in a comfortable suburb of the San Fernando Valley outside of Los Angeles.
My mother and me stayed in that house while my father traveled, sometimes for months or even years at a time.
In other words, when he did come home, we barely knew each other. Yet somehow he still insisted on controlling my life.
The General had missed my high school graduation. He'd missed my first semester in college. But as my bad luck would have it, he decided it was time for retirement just as I was entering my second semester as a Liberal Arts major. When he arrived home and found out what my major was, I thought his head might explode.
I tried to explain to him that it was only temporary until I grew to know myself better and knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. The General's response to that was that if I didn't figure out who I was and what I wanted by my second year in college, I would find myself to be the person struggling to pay for my own education. I had been so pissed off by that I had actually almost taken him up on it.
My mother was the one that gave me a dose of reality. She told me that she'd met the General while she herself was working as a waitress and struggling to put herself through college. She told me about living in a run-down apartment, working twelve hours a day, attending school six, sleeping four and starting over the next day. She admitted to having regrets about not following through with a career and instead, becoming a stay at home mother and military wife. But she had made me realize that six more years under my father's thumb might well be worth the alternative.
So, I had done some soul searching and I'd decided that my curious mind coupled with my interest in reading and writing, my grasp of the English language and my knack for foreign ones, was a perfect fit for a journalism degree. For a while, I'd been happy with my choice.
I loved the classes, excelled in them and along the way I started picturing myself in the future, working for a television news show and traveling the world, reporting on things like politics and current events that were shaping the world.
But after graduating UCLA with honors and going on to complete a Master's program, I was stunned to find out that no matter how good my grades were, or how well I had done in my internship program for a widely popular periodical in Los Angeles...getting a real job in the news industry was going to be next to impossible.
I spent the first whole year after college, applying and interviewing for jobs. I worked a string of low-paying jobs that I was ridiculously over qualified for, anything to keep from asking The General for help. I wasn't happy or fulfilled in my career, but I was doing it on my own, and as frustrating as it was to wake up every morning knowing that I would be doing nothing more important with my day than covering a dog and cat show or a chili cook-off or high school football
game, it was still better than being dependent on my father. I dated occasionally, but out of fear of ending up like my mother someday, completely overshadowed by the man in my life, I avoided relationships.
The General was not happy with the choices I was making. He liked to remind me that I was only a few years away from thirty years old with a dead-end job, no husband and no kids like if those things never happened for me, my entire life would be insignificant. In hindsight, I wished that I would have cut him off completely...but I hadn't, and now here I was in a place I called hell, just because I'd been so determined to prove a point to a man that would never get me anyways.
I had just worked an eight hour day, reporting on a horticulture show...in the rain. I arrived home, wet, tired and frustrated to find The General waiting at my door. He had come bearing what he called “a gift.” He had an old army buddy who was now the station manager for a small television station in Atlanta. He was willing to give me a job...supposedly, reporting on “real news.” I was skeptical, but I was a big believer of trying to see the positive in negative situations. The first and most important positive was that I would be 2000 miles away from my retired and intrusive father. The second, it couldn't be any worse than the job I was doing now, and it paid almost twice as much.
So, less than a month after my father made the call to his friend in Atlanta, I packed up my studio apartment and boarded a plane from LAX to Atlanta. I checked into the hotel I would be staying at until I found an apartment on Saturday and bright and early Monday morning, I reported to work. I felt like my excitement was almost palpable to everyone in the building that morning, and by late afternoon, so was my disappointment.
The station manager assigned me to “assist” a middle-aged anchor named Lana right off the bat. Lana had a big, blonde, heavily hair sprayed hair and a plastic face.
She was as thin as a rail and her skin looked like it hadn't seen the sun in years. On air, the smile on her face was plastered almost as tightly as her hair, but off, she was demanding and irritable and from what I could determine, miserable with her own life. She seemed to take that out on those closest to her and I quickly became one of her scapegoats.
Reminding myself daily that this job was an opportunity and I wouldn't be Lana's assistant forever, I grinned and bore it for months. After six of those harrowing months had passed, I thought my big break had finally arrived.
I arrived one morning to a message that the station manager wanted to see me right away. His words to me were, “I have an assignment overseas and I need someone who doesn't have too many commitments here in the states to take it. I don't know how long you'll be there.”
“Where is “there” exactly?”
“Afghanistan, near Kabul.”
I felt my heart begin to race. I wasn't sure if it was the excitement of the prospect of this assignment...or fear of the unknown. But what I did know was that it was the first time in months that I had really felt alive. Without asking too many questions, which in hindsight I would regret, I took it.
What I did know when I got on the plane to Kabul was that I would be stationed at a military base where a team of doctors from the US ran a medical clinic.
Their time there was all voluntary and financed by themselves and donations from generous benefactors in the states. The station wanted an in-depth story, a documentary...and if I did a good job, my name on the credits of that documentary could very well shoot my career to the top of that pyramid I had been struggling so hard to climb.
Hindsight...sometimes it was a bitch.
I didn't ask any questions about what life would be like on the base. My father never talked about his time in the army and I had never been interested. The first few weeks I was there was like culture shock and I tried listing out the positives in my head every day...but as the days went by, that was getting harder.
I had started out with a pretty good list. My travel was funded, I got a clothing allowance, and I was surrounded by hot, muscular men...Of course the travel was to the middle of the desert. It was hot, dry and buggy. The clothes I spent the allowance on were baggy khaki pants, camouflage vests, hiking boots and a hijab I had to wear if I went off base...which was rare. The men were plentiful, but they were quiet, serious and heavily armed. And the doctors I was there to do a story about were oddly tight-lipped and not welcoming at all.
My cameraman was a retired veteran who smoked too much and drank whiskey straight out of the bottle all day. My meals were served in packages. They were called “MRE's” and rarely resembled the description on the label. I wanted to go home...and after three weeks of struggling with both my conscience and the idea of facing my father as being a “quitter” I was finally composing the email that I hoped would put an end to my misery.
I stopped to wipe the sweat out of my eyes for at least the dozenth time since I sat down in front of the laptop.
It was hot...
Not, “California in the summer” hot, but “this is hell” hot.
At least I didn't have to wear the hijab while I was on base. It seemed to trap all that heat in my body and I couldn't help but wonder how the Afghani women didn't melt from the inside out. As it were, I couldn't find a deodorant strong enough to make me feel fresh for more than five minutes and that was even pressing it.
My lips were dry and chapped and my skin flaked off thanks to the ever-present wind...and everything was perpetually covered in dust. When I looked out beyond the gates of the small base all I saw was dust - piles of it, everywhere. It was like being on a deserted island, without the trees or the ocean.
Daytime was bad enough, but night was the worst. As I lay in my tent and tried to sleep, there were constant sounds off in the distance of guns or bombs going off.
That troubled me, especially since I'd been assured before I left the states that American's were simply still there to “keep” the peace. So far however I'd seen no signs of that peace. The base was constantly locked down and they had drills almost daily to prepare them for the possibility of a terrorist attack.
But what troubled me most of all at night were the howls. I could hear wolves, many of them, howling and whining all night long. They sounded close, too close to be outside the gates. But when I asked anyone else about them in the light of day, they all denied they even heard them.
At times I felt like I might be losing my mind. And it was after one such restless night that I decided I just couldn't do this any longer. I had to go home.
I was just about to type about the wolves in my email when suddenly one of the soldiers stuck his head inside the tent. I didn't recognize this one...I would have remembered him.
He was big, and although he was buried in army gear, I could almost imagine what his body might look like without it. Of course I'd been without a man for quite some time now.
Atlanta hadn't offered much in the way of a dating pool while I was there and then there was the three weeks in hell. He was incredibly hot though. Even his eyes were captivating. They were green, but there was a ring around the iris, and that was a dark amber color, unlike anything I'd ever seen. I was lost in them for a few seconds, strangely so...looking into his eyes gave me the strangest feeling of warmth, and peace...until I finally processed what he was saying.
“We have to go.”
“Excuse me? Go where? We weren't scheduled to go anywhere according to my briefing this morning.”
The civilians, myself and the five doctors, were given a briefing every morning. We were told how many refugees would be brought out to the clinic for treatment, or if we'd be allowed to go into town for supplies...or sometimes if the base would be locked down that day.
When that was the case we never received an explanation...it just was what it was.
“Now. We have to go now.”
Something in his eyes told me this was no ordinary trip into town. “Are we coming back?”
“I don't have time for questions. Come on, let's go.”
“What about my stuff?”
“Leave it, we don't have time.”
“Can I bring my laptop?” When I first arrived, I was told there might be the possibility of evacuation drills or even an emergency evacuation. This might be a drill, or it might be a real evacuation. Either way, no matter how boring the story I'd done so far, I wasn't leaving it behind.
“If you grab it and come now.” I was looking around the tent. I hadn't brought much with me, but if we weren't coming back, I hated leaving it there. It would only take seconds for me to pack it all in the big canvas bag that I'd brought. “Hurry,” he barked at me. I glared at him...and moved slower.
2
Clayton Barlow
I was a Green Beret and I didn't have the patience to handle anyone, even some princess reporter, with kid gloves. That was why I had taken a post outside the base for the past month. That, and the fact that I wasn't sure I'd even be able to control myself that close to a woman. The team had been assigned to “watch over” the military base and the six civilians currently bunking there.