Dragon Protectors: Shifter Romance Collection

by Lola Gabriel

  Her father’s voice traveled up the stairs to meet her honed ears, but he wasn’t speaking to her. One of the housekeepers had returned from her shopping trip to the towns.

  “Eelen, I’m going to the towns to visit my stores. Do not let Kennedy leave this house.”

  “Yes, Mr. Solstice,” Eelen replied, and Kennedy frowned. She wondered how the pixie planned to stop her if Kennedy wanted to leave. She was barely five feet tall and had no powers but that of a domestic nature.

  “Call Herbert if she gives you a problem,” Cameron continued, and Kennedy exhaled, deflated.

  I guess that’s how. Herbert was part Chimera, part Lycan, and possibly the biggest being outside of the giants that Kennedy had ever known in the Hollows. He was officially Cameron’s right-hand man and muscle in matters with which her father didn’t want to dirty his hands. And now he’s my babysitter, too.

  “I’m sure Miss Kennedy will not give me any problems,” Eelen murmured.

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought about her, too,” Cameron grumbled. Eelen didn’t reply, and a second later, Kennedy heard the front door close. She inched through the hallway, pausing at the top of the stairs to look into the foyer. The entrance was made strictly of marble and would, therefore, prove to be quieter for walking around undetected, but first, she had to make it to the ground floor.

  Eelen was not in sight, though that didn’t mean she wasn’t nearby. While Kennedy wasn’t entirely sure why she needed to stalk about in her own house, she felt it was important not to be detected. Silently, she found her way to the main floor, outside the study doors, which remained firmly closed. Was Rocco still there? Had he seen her father at all?

  The familiar doubts she had about the guy were creeping back up her spine, and she moved toward her father’s private office, softly testing the handles with her snout. The doors were unlocked, but before she could poke her head through, she sensed someone nearby.

  Instantly, she dropped back into the shadows and watched as Rocco appeared like a thief in the night, looking around furtively. Kennedy’s eyes narrowed, the suspicion becoming a wave of distrust. He hadn’t seen nor detected her there, even though they stood only a few feet away. Then again, Kennedy was still in her Lycan form while Rocco was not. Without preamble, Rocco let himself into Cameron’s office and shut the door in his wake.

  What the hell is he doing in Dad’s office without Dad here? Kennedy didn’t care how much her father liked the younger wolf—it was nothing Cameron would have permitted. Judging by the way he was sneaking about, Rocco was up to no good.

  “Oh!” The shriek startled Kennedy so badly, she jumped physically, her claws curling into the marble for traction. “Miss Kennedy, what are you doing like that?” Eelen choked. “You scared the wits right out of me.”

  Kennedy stared at her with wide eyes, unsure of what to do next. There was no doubt that Rocco had heard them outside. Would he come out and investigate? If he did, he would have to explain what he was doing in her father’s office. If he didn’t, that meant he definitely didn’t belong there.

  “I was just stretching my legs,” Kennedy replied loudly, willing him to show his face. She eyed the door through her peripheral vision, but there was no movement, no sign of Rocco.

  “Can I get you anything, miss? Are you hungry?”

  Kennedy shook her head, shifting back into her mortal form. “I was just looking for my dad. Is he in his office? I’ll go check.”

  She moved toward the door, knowing she was going to catch Rocco inside. Her hand reached the handles, and she thrust open the doors as Eelen called out.

  “No, miss. He went into the towns. He asked me to see to you if you need anything.”

  Kennedy’s smile froze on her face as she looked around the office. There was no sign of Rocco. He had apparently escaped through an open window. Kennedy’s heart was thudding dangerously in her chest. There’s no one I can trust. They’re all hiding something.

  “Miss Kennedy?” She whirled back around to the housekeeper.

  “Have you seen Rocco today?” she asked innocently. The brownie seemed to have a difficult time keeping up with Kennedy’s conversational flights.

  “Uh… I…”

  “Never mind,” Kennedy chirped, turning around to bolt back up the stairs. “I’ll be in my suite.” She pounded through the double French doors and snatched up her cell phone. Suddenly, she didn’t believe a word that Rocco had told her about Owen, and she needed to speak with him, even if it risked making things worse.

  The phone rang several times and went to voicemail.

  “You have reached the private mailbox of Owen Parker at Parker Insurance. Please leave a message after the tone, and I will return your call as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  When the tone beeped, Kennedy took a deep breath.

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Owen, but I have a bad feeling we’ve both been played by Rocco. I have no idea if you genuinely don’t want to see me, like he said, but I won’t stop calling you until you and I see each other or at the very least talk on the phone. Please, Owen, call me. I swear, if you tell me to my face that you’re done with me, I will never bother you again.”

  Her voice cracked slightly. “I mean, I guess I should be able to read between the lines, since you haven’t called in days, but I need you to spell it out for me. I don’t want to believe that what we had didn’t mean anything to you.”

  The tone beeped abruptly, cutting off the rest of her message, and she disconnected the call, blinking the tears away from her eyes.

  That was really stupid, she thought miserably. You’re grasping at straws because you’re desperate to just see him again. Rocco probably had a reason for being in that office.

  Her head was beginning to pound from all the overthinking, and she picked up her cell, staring at Owen’s picture next to his contact information. Absently, she scrolled through the phone number and email address, her mind on anything but what she was reading.

  How many more signs do you need that Owen wants nothing to do with you? Just because Rocco might be shady as hell doesn’t have anything to do with Owen… does it?

  She thought about how obsessive Rocco had been, the calling and texting incessantly, the way it had all stopped when Owen came into the picture. Suddenly, Rocco had switched to being a protective friend, forewarning her about the dragon and his intentions. He had claimed to be on her side, but he had been slowly planting doubts about Owen in her mind, making her second-guess everything.

  Kennedy’s eyes came into focus, and she jerked her head up. At the bottom of the contact page, under Owen’s number, was the option “Unblock Contact.”

  Kennedy blinked twice. Unblock contact? That would imply that the contact is blocked.

  A chill snaked down her back, and she touched the button, unblocking the number from her caller list. She knew she had never stricken Owen from her contacts, not even in a fit of anger, which meant she had done it accidentally, though that was highly unlikely. She had never done anything like that.

  The only possible explanation was that someone else had blocked him. Someone whom she had seen with some frequency over the past few days. Someone who thought he had something to gain from eliminating Owen from her life once and for all.

  Someone like Rocco.

  16

  An hour after Owen entered his offices in New York City, he received a call from his office manager in California, Dylan.

  “Mr. Parker, they have three suspects in custody for the fires at Global Cor, Enderson, and Phillip-Evans. They’re being held at SDPD.”

  “Do you have any names for me?” Owen asked Dylan.

  “Not yet, sir, but you might have more luck if you call. They’re being pretty tight-lipped right now.”

  “I’ll look into it. Send me the number.”

  “Right away, Mr. Parker.”

  Unlucky in love, lucky in cards, they say, Owen mused, but it didn’t make him feel better that he might be closing i
n on a connection between the upheaval his company had faced. If anything, the anguish he was feeling about losing Kennedy only seemed to be amplified as he considered the distance between them. It will get better, he promised himself, grinding his teeth as if to steel himself from the pain. Time fixes everything.

  A sarcastic voice in his head reminded him that time didn’t fix an ages’ old vendetta against the Lycans and dragons.

  A moment later, a text came through from Dylan, and Owen jotted the number down on a yellow legal pad on his desk. He knew the district. He’d met with an officer from there. He just needed to dig through the mound of business cards he’d collected to find the name of the person he needed. As he was looking, his cell began to ring again, but he ignored it, focussing his full attention on the matter at hand. Whomever it was could wait to give him whatever bad news they were bearing.

  I’ll just focus on one thing at a time and get through this, he thought. One thing at a time.

  He found what he was looking for and plopped back into his chair, turning to look out onto Central Park from his offices on the forty-sixth floor. Owen dialed the number to Detective Craven at San Francisco’s Central Division.

  “Bobbi Craven.” Her voice was low and guttural, the result of smoking two packs a day since her teens.

  “Detective Craven, this is Owen Parker of Parker Insurance.”

  “Ah, Mr. Parker. I was wondering how long it would take to hear from you,” she chuckled. “I guess you heard we have suspects in custody.”

  “I did. I was wondering if you could give me some names. My own investigators are working diligently to bring those responsible to justice. There were numerous injuries, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

  “Actually, Mr. Parker, one of the victims succumbed to their injuries last night. This is now a murder investigator.”

  Owen froze. “What?” he choked. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “That’s because we decided to keep it quiet. When people learn they’re wanted for murder, they tend to run, and we didn’t want to lose the leads we had.”

  “I see.” Owen exhaled, his own sadness suddenly insignificant in comparison to that of the family of the murdered… man? Woman? “Who was it?”

  “His name was Percy Jarvis. Thirty-seven years old, father of two.”

  “Shit,” Owen muttered.

  “Shit indeed,” Bobbi Craven agreed. “But I’m pretty sure we’ve got the bastards.”

  Owen cleared his throat. “Again, any names you can give me?”

  “Oh, I can give you the names,” she sang. “They’re going to be all over the six o’clock news, anyway. I’ll email you their mug shots and details. But good luck getting a dime out of them. They haven’t got a pot to piss in.”

  “Money isn’t everything.”

  Bobbi scoffed. “I guess it isn’t when you have it,” she jibed, but Owen was too consumed in his own despair to counter.

  “If you can send along that information, detective, I’d be grateful.”

  “Doing it as we speak.”

  Owen’s computer pinged, indicating an email, and he opened it, still on the phone with the policewoman. “I’ve got it. Thank you, detective.”

  “Sure,” she replied. “That’s what we get paid peanuts for, Mr. Parker.” She hung up before Owen could respond, but that was fine with him. He was too busy fixating on the faces of the three men before him.

  I knew it, he thought furiously, his body temperature spiking. That son of a bitch set out to ruin me. While Owen didn’t know the men staring back at him personally, his immortal sense knew they were Lycans, all three. He would have wagered good money that they belonged to the same pack: Cameron Solstice’s.

  Owen’s cell beeped, reminding him that he had a voicemail, and it almost instantly rang again. It was Colin.

  “They picked up a gang of kids in Boston for the vandalism to the Cornerstone Buildings. Guess what?” Colin rushed out when he answered.

  “They’re all Lycans.”

  Colin was silent and then exhaled into his ear. “What the hell do you even need me for?”

  “I’m sending you some pics. Get a hold of Trevor and ask him to find out what pack these guys belong to.”

  “What is going on?”

  “It’s the work of one pack, I’m sure of it. They targeted the company purposely.”

  “Whose? Who would be that stupid, Owen?”

  “There’s only one I can think of off the top of my head.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” There was a definitive nervousness in Colin’s tone, even though Owen wasn’t sure he had an answer to that question.

  “I guess we’ll wait and see, won’t we?”

  “I’ll call you back when I know more,” Colin offered.

  “I’ll be waiting.” As he hung up, Owen knew he didn’t have to wait for the answer. He already had it. He had been played like a fool by Kennedy, and her father had ruined his business. It didn’t matter if she was party to it or not—she was still responsible.

  He tried to muster the rage he should have felt with the realization, but he couldn’t. Owen was defeated, spent. All of his emotions had been put through the wringer again and again until he had nothing left but a void pit of emptiness. What could he do about it? Confront Cameron Solstice? Ruin the Lycan’s business the way he had tried to ruin Owen’s?

  You need to make a clean break from that family, he thought, flicking his cell phone through his fingers. Cut your losses and walk away. He thought of the house in Greece, the ink still wet on the deed, but the idea of going there without Kennedy was offensive. That had been their dream. Or at least my dream while Kennedy figured out what she wanted to do.

  The voicemail notification dinged for the third time, and Owen grunted, almost throwing the phone across the room in anger.

  “Who the hell is it?” he mumbled aloud, pressing the message center button.

  “You have eight new voicemails,” the mechanical woman intoned. “First message…” Owen half-listened to a barrage of uninteresting messages from various sources, none of which were pressing. Everyone’s voices just seemed to bother him more.

  “Next message,” the auto woman announced when he had one voicemail left, playing the message. “I don’t know what’s going on, Owen, but I have a bad feeling we’ve both been played by Rocco.”

  Owen bolted up in his chair and sat forward, his headset pressed to his ear as he listened to Kennedy’s voice.

  “I have no idea if you genuinely don’t want to see me, like he said, but I won’t stop calling you until you and I see each other or at the very least talk on the phone. Please, Owen, call me. I swear, if you tell me to my face that you’re done with me, I will never bother you again. I mean, I guess I should be able to read between the lines, since you haven’t called in days, but I need you to spell it out for me. I don’t want to believe that what we had didn’t mean anything to you.”

  The message ended suddenly, and Owen realized that she had run out of the room. What kind of game is she playing? She blocks me and then calls me? She blames Rocco, but she was seeing him, wasn’t she?

  The desire to give her the benefit of the doubt far outweighed his anger toward her, and even his anger toward her father. She was right, after all. They had not spoken to one another since things had begun to go south. He was partially to blame for having ignored her calls, but maybe there was another force at play, one which had nothing to do with either one of them.

  Surely Kennedy wouldn’t have been party to destroying those properties, Owen thought, even if I was just a fling to her… like Rocco said.

  Rocco. He was the cornerstone of everything. He was the one who had turned Owen away at the Solstice mansion. He was the one who had claimed that Kennedy didn’t want to see him, but what did Owen really know? He had rumors and innuendos, second-hand information at best.

  Reluctantly, he picked up the phone to call Kennedy, his pulse racing. When he pressed the call button,
he fully expected to hear the odd dial tone, indicating that the number was no longer in service. Instead, it rang clearly.

  “Owen!” Kennedy breathed. “Owen, you called!”

  Relief and frustration fused in Owen’s blood, but he willed himself not to lose it, grateful to be hearing her voice for the first time in days.

  “I’ve been calling,” he replied, trying to keep his voice light. “You seem to be having some phone issues—particularly where my number is involved.” He didn’t bring up how he had used Theo’s phone to check. Theo probably told her, anyway.

  “No,” Kennedy replied sadly. “I think Rocco blocked you on my phone. Can I see you? I need to see you, please!”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Kenn. Your father has singlehandedly managed to destroy my company, and I don’t think I should give him a good reason to continue on his warpath. I’m not sure what I will be forced to do if he does anything else.”

  “What? What do you mean, he destroyed your company?”

  The confusion in Kennedy’s voice sounded genuine, but Owen’s guard was up. He didn’t know what to believe anymore. “Let’s just say, Parker Insurance is going to have a rough few years coming up.”

  “I don’t believe Dad would do anything like that, Owen,” Kennedy insisted. “He doesn’t want a war, and any jab at you would only wake the dragon—forgive the pun. He’s not stupid. Are you sure it was him?”

  “I probably shouldn’t even be talking to you about this, Kennedy. But I think it’s best if we don’t see each other, don’t you?”

  “No!” she answered without thought. “I think that is decidedly worse! I think that is the worst idea you’ve ever had! I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind for one minute. I know you thought that I was dating Rocco, but that’s not true! I never dated him, and I never will, not while my heart belongs to you.”

  Heat flowed through Owen’s body, the relief her words brought washing over him like soothing waves. She was saying exactly what he had wanted to hear from her, but with all that had happened and was happening… A man had died, and all so that Cameron Solstice could make a point about leaving his daughter alone. A bolt of fury slid through Owen.