by Lisa Daniels
“He asked me if I would say yes if he asked me to be his mate, but he was not pleased with my answer.”
“Ah.” I heard him sigh, but I found I could not l0ok at Fisher. “You wounded his pride, but if you mean was it a genuine offer, I can say honestly that it wasn’t. If a shifter asks you to be his mate, it would not be so secretive or masked in a hypothetical question. You would know that he was offering himself to you and would then let you decide.”
“Is that what he did with Arabella?”
“Without a doubt. And I’ve no doubt she would say yes.” He leaned toward me a little, “As you said yourself, no woman in her right mind would turn him down.” Fisher straightened up. “I hope he will be happy, and that Arabella isn’t so foolish to risk herself. I doubt Braxton could take another broken heart.”
“Oh, shit,” I muttered. “We need to find him so that I can get his full report.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I allowed him to take care of her, and what happened to her is my fault. I want to know without a doubt that she is fine.” It was true, I was not lying. It just was not my only motive.
“Do you really care that much about a woman you don’t know? Because you feel that her predicament was your fault?”
“It wasn’t entirely my fault, but she was my responsibility.”
He cocked an eyebrow, “Are you still being a coward?”
I kept myself from gasping, then licked my lips. I did not trust myself to talk.
“If you are still too afraid, then I suppose I will try to protect you from yourself.”
Fisher walked toward me. He looked into my eyes and placed a hand on my cheek. “Rayne, I believe that I could be a suitable mate for you, if you will have me. If not, please reject me with as much compassion as you clearly feel for Braxton and his new mate.”
Not sure if he was fulfilling an obligation or asking in earnest, I placed a hand on his. “Are you asking for your pride, or for yourself?”
“With my whole heart, I am asking you for both.”
I could not help the laugh that burst out of my mouth and I pressed my face into his chest. “Then with my whole heart, I will spare you rejection and accept you just as you are, coward and all.”
His arm snaked around me as he put a finger under my chin. Tilting my head up to look at him, he gazed down at me and murmured, “You would know, being one yourself.” He pulled me to him and I felt his tongue tickling my lips. I opened my mouth a little a bit down lightly as his tongue slid between my lips.
Fisher pulled back, his tongue licking his own lips. “Ouch. And here I was trying to be kind.”
I leaned forward, “It’s forked.”
“What?” He looked down at me.
I put my fingers up to his mouth. “Your tongue is forked.”
“Of course, my other form is a dragon. There are always signs of a shifter’s other form.” He stuck his tongue out a little and I reached up to touch it, curious to learn more. Impossibly fast, he nipped my fingers just before I touched his tongue.
I began to suck on my fingers, more in surprise than pain. “You little—”
Whatever I was going to say was forgotten as he pulled me into a deep kiss and began to remove my shirt. His breathing was heavier as he pulled away a little, his voice low. “I need to tell you that kids are welcome, but not necessary. Whatever you decide.”
I stopped and looked at him. “What do kids have to do with anything?”
“Did no one ever tell you about how babies are made?” He ripped my shirt open the rest of the way, exposing my naked chest.
I gave him a slap on the arm, “That’s not what I meant.”
Fisher moved a hand up my back. “Remember, we take human mates so that we can have children. I just wanted to tell you that is not obligatory.”
I laughed, “Good to know, but I have never thought about kids. Why don’t we just see what happens?”
His thumb moved up my spine, causing me to shiver. Fisher pulled me to him and whispered in my ear, “That means you are leaving it up to me.”
I moaned as he moved his hand along my skin and under my pants. “If there is anyone I trust to take care of me, it is you. Just give me some time to enjoy whatever it is you have to show me first.” His hand moved slowly over my lower back and down to my thigh. I pushed against him, trying to finish my thought. “I want to make sure you won’t regret your choice.”
“I won’t. I already know I won’t, but I will wait until you are ready. Until then,” he lowered me to the grassy hill, “I will make sure you don’t regret choosing me.”
My hands pulled up grass as he tore off the rest of my clothing and slowly made love to me.
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Ellie’s Bodyguard
Bodyguards of Samhain
Book 4
By: Lisa Daniels
Prologue
Mason didn’t look forward to his new job. His only job, in truth. With his mother lying in a puddle of her own terrible addictions, with his three younger siblings, two girls, one boy struggling every day to be fed, to have decent clothes to go to school with—he knew if he didn’t plunge himself into work as soon as possible, their family would fall.
His mother had never coped well with their father’s passing. Coming from a low-caste family such as theirs meant automatic failure if no one picked up the slack. Someone had to. Who better than him?
Still, Mason wasn’t sure if he’d secure one. People generally didn’t think much of low-caste dragon shifters. His own species of supernatural kept them firmly out of the riches they had accumulated, and it wasn’t exactly uncommon to hear about another one of his caste being beaten to death for insubordination. His parents were thoughtful enough to cover up their heritage altogether, so they could almost function like normal people. Almost.
His first client wanted him to protect a daughter. A child, nine years of age. In other words, instead of a daring bodyguard destined to save people from horrific threats, Mason was more of a glorified babysitter. Still, the pay was nothing for him to sneeze at, and his family needed every cent that they could scrape to pay for the intimidating amount of bills and issues that consumed them.
Ellie Lockhart. A small bundle of blonde hair and hostile blue eyes. She wasn’t exactly impressed with him, and wailed about not wanting a scary man following her around. She started off as a virtual nightmare. Screaming, temper tantrums, hitting him, trying to run away from him, and all he could do was his job. Endure all of it, and try to remind himself that this was a lonely little girl, since her father barely interacted with her, and her mother was timid at the best of times.
Hell ended once Ellie realized that Mason didn’t mind doing things with her. He didn’t mind teaching her to play card games, or taking her out to the park because she wanted to visit it.
She might have been a little necromancer child, but she still wanted to do typical child things. But for her type of magic, she was every bit as lowly as Mason felt.
This was something they shared. Something they both understood. Something that made him immensely grateful to get paid for looking after this brat.
Mason hoped, one night, as he snuck Ellie a drink from the kitchen because she wasn’t allowed to leave her bed, that he’d always be able to protect her.
He would be, quite honestly, satisfied with his life to always have a place at her side. So he tried hard not to think about the future. That one day, this job would end, their contract broken, and never again would he have to look after her.
Two social outcasts. Lonely together.
He was just fine with that.
Chapter One – Ellie
Ellie watched the scene unfold. She knew it would happen, the moment her father answered the door, and that man was discovered behind it, brimming with so much fury that he poisoned the atmosphere of the entire house.
Yes, okay, father had lost his business. His earnings had slumped, ever since that day, when everything went wrong, and the malicious spirit her father tried to control turned out to be too powerful for anyone to handle. Yes, he deserved to lose it, after his own stubborn insistence of using a spirit too dangerous for any sane necromancer to go near, because he’d wanted to beat that girl.
Her father also didn’t seem able to accept this fact. He just kept croaking to her, “I won. I won. The spirit was mine. It’s mine!” As if a part of his brain had shut down, and refused to process any other thought. Since after all, when it came to any decent discussions with her father, it didn’t matter how reasonable you were, when he could simply shut down any reason and logic by letting it bounce off him and wither into nothingness.
Father was an idiot, certainly, when it boiled down to the core of their interactions. She didn’t agree with him at all. But this—that man coming here—changed everything.
She sat and observed from the stairs as the new man spoke to her father, casting a menacing shadow over the living room, almost drowning her father in it.
“You’ve screwed everything up. By rights you should be in a bodybag now, tied with stones and thrown in the deepest part of the ocean. You have made things inconvenient.” The man, a devil in Ellie’s eyes, paced up and down the room, his shoes squeaking against the polished wooden floor. He was built like a twig, a sinister twig all the same, the kind of person you might have a heart attack over if you saw them in the forest at night, and all Ellie knew about him previously was that he owned her father.
Though Regal conducted his business on the ground, there was always someone pulling the strings above. Someone like this long-fingered man. If he could be called a man. Her father, to be sure, was part werewolf, thanks to an ancestor four generations back, which made Ellie part one, too, though she had no external features that showed it.
“I apologize for the setback,” Regal said, and Ellie hated the tone of deference in his words. He was Regal, for god’s sake! He controlled the dead. He ran deadrings where necromancers used their summons to fight each other for money! Sure, she’d been going off her father for a while, ever since he became obsessed with spirits—ever since her own mother, turned into a guardian angel, was taken by him and used for whatever plans he had.
So, of course, Ellie needed to warn the next person she saw with a guardian spirit. The woman known as Crimson in the deadring needed to be warned. And now this man was opposite her father, staring at him as if he were worse than a speck of dust.
“Setback? Setback? Oh, you apologize, do you? That makes everything better, doesn’t it? You know damn well you messed up. The police were involved! Thanks to that giant, gaping hole your little spirit left in the side of your event!” The man paused for breath, still in the fury of his own storm. Her father attempted to stammer something, but was shut down. Amazing, how easily her father was silenced when it didn’t involve Ellie or the men he usually dealt with.
“We’ve lost millions in revenue since you decided to go ahead and do your own business. The police have shut down two of our auction places, and the clients are bleeding over to a different competitor, out of Stoneshire.” The evil man paused, huffing through his noise like a great elephant. “You will make up for this. From now on, you do everything I say. Because if you don’t… you will regret it in this world and the next.”
She couldn’t see her father’s expression from this angle, but rather imagine he paled. She decided in that moment to creep back upstairs, out of the scene of her father’s new disgrace, and up to her room. She passed the study area where her bodyguard currently stayed, hesitated, then went inside.
“Mason,” she said, smiling as he turned around from the computer screen, giving her a tired smile. “How much of the discussion downstairs did you hear?”
“All of it,” he rumbled in his deep, sonorous voice. Something of the dragon was in his features, from the hooded, crystalline green eyes, to the smooth, sharp angle of his cheekbones and chin. He had a kind of noble elegance about him, and due to her father’s insistence, he wore a black three-piece suit, with serpentine cuff links, two gold embroidered prongs to embellish the tailcoat he wore, and the shiniest pair of leather shoes Ellie had seen on anyone. “It sounds as if your father is in a situation he won’t be able to tunnel himself out of this time.”
Mason was referring to her father’s boast from his teenage years, where he’d tunneled out of a maximum-security prison with a chisel and hammer, and covered up the evidence with a poster. Ellie didn’t think it true, but her father used it to ingratiate himself with the criminal underworld. I was in prison, he said. I know how to deal with your kind.
“I want out of this place, Mason. Again.”
Mason’s expression became more guarded. “Your father’s orders are very specific to me, little one,” he said, and his use of that old endearment made Ellie sad. “If you attempt to leave, I’ll have no choice but to tell him. I’ll have to bring you back.”
“You do have a choice, though, Mason,” she insisted. “You could just say I slipped out one day, or that I drugged you and you were unconscious or something.”
The dragon man gave her a long, hard stare, and she sighed. For a moment, Mason looked as if he were about to lean over and ruffle her about the hair, just as he had done when she was little. His arm then twitched and planted itself down, awkwardly, upon the desk table instead. “As much as I would like to help you, little one, you are not responsible for my earnings. The client’s word is law.”
“I’m your client, too,” Ellie said. She stared into the dragon shifter’s eerie green eyes, and a memory entered her mind. One where she was nine years old, back when everything was right and perfect. A new bodyguard watched over her in dragon form. Noble and shimmering and a dark, moss green on his scales. She’d gone straight up to that dragon, bold as brass, clambering over his lizard body, lodging herself by his wings and giggling when he lifted one up and down slowly with her on it, causing her to tumble gently to the ground. He was smaller than she’d expected a dragon to be, like a stocky little horse, but still bigger than a child in her first decade of life.
Another time when she hurt her knee playing, and the dragon shifter had carried her and helped clean up the injury, and read her a story until she fell asleep.
She had great memories with Mason. But she knew, somewhere in the back of her mind, that all those good memories were a front. He was paid to do all of this. Paid to accompany her to the deadrings that her father was running. Paid to watch her when she went to school, and to make sure no one hurt her, or that she didn’t use her powers to hurt them.
Which was always a possibility, given some of the stupid things they said and assumed. Do necromancers eat dead people? I heard they can’t get a real relationship, and that’s where their skills suddenly come in handy. Better than a blow-up doll, isn’t it? Eww, how gross… you have to be a real freak to enjoy this kind of stuff! The words of her classmates still rang in her mind years later, though they also chased her onto the internet, where the commentary became particularly vile. Mason had managed to cut off a lot of it just by being there, but he’d also opted to let her have some freedom in her interactions. So he wasn’t there for everything.
Ellie was twenty-two now, and Mason thirty-one. Eighteen when he became her bodyguard, plucked out of the sky by her father’s money and desire to have the best protection for his daughter.
It hurt a little to consider, but she’d have to not only escape her father’s clutches, but Mason’s as well. But whatever. That was the way the cookie crumbled, right? If she wanted a clean break, she needed to shrug away everything that linked her here.
Goodbye, Mason, she thought, feeling as if she were shedding her childhood away, a part of the happiest memories she had, as she smiled at him, said she was going to sleep, and walked to her room. The goodbye continued to echo, heavy and uncomfortable, and she tried not to think on
it too deeply, because she needed to protect herself, now.
Drawing up her laptop, she opened up her messenger platform, intending to poke a long-distant friend of hers. A friend from the Necromancy Discord group she had joined, for people like herself, who wanted somewhere to talk and belong, to vent out their issues with people who really got it.
Ellie’s username was Eleganza, of course.
Eleganza: Hey. U here?
She waited for the response, heart thumping faster when the notion of what she was about to ask floated into her brain again. It was really quite a big ask, but this had to happen.
Besides, TaliaTails usually was online at this point in the evening. She was out of university then.
TaliaTails: y
Eleganza: Okay, so I kinda have a big favor to ask. Like, really, really big. And its related to what u said a few weeks back when u wanted to help with the thing.
TaliaTails: whats wrong? What happened?
Eleganza: Something big. I gotta get out. But I didn’t go to uni, I don’t have a job. I have a lot of money, ‘cause I was, u know, doing the thing.
TaliaTails: How much?
Ellie paused. Disclosing her full earnings from the deadring fights might be a tempting distraction for TaliaTails, who found herself a little squeezed by university life, given that her father was paying for the tuition, but not for anything else.
Eleganza: Enough. A lady doesn’t kiss and tell her secrets right?
TaliaTails: aww. Okay, yeah, sure. If you make it to Lasthearth, I’ll meet you at the airport. Do you need police protection?
And this was the real reason Ellie wanted to go through this with TaliaTails.
Eleganza: Yes. I cant do it here. Theyll know. I’ve got inside info. Heard u guys are all about the inside info.
TaliaTails: umm, yeah, but remember, I’m not the one in law enforcement. My sis is. I’m just a poor forensic archaeologist in training.