Reign: A Royal Military Romance

by Roxie Noir

  Please, she thought. Please, please, please.

  Then, on three, the SUV started lifting, moving backward away from the tiny Hyundai. Relief flooded through Delilah, and as soon as she could, she pressed her jacket to the wound in the woman’s leg.

  Take a breath, she thought, leaning as hard as she could against the bleeding wound, praying to stop it, just a little. Come on, breathe, breathe.

  There was a crunching sound and a jolt as the men lowered the SUV back onto the pavement.

  Delilah looked up for just a moment, making sure that everything outside of the Hyundai was still all right, that the drunk guy was still in his seat where she’d told him to stay.

  Peering in through the broken passenger side window was a very, very familiar face.

  For a split second, Delilah forgot to breathe.

  The woman in the Hyundai suddenly gasped for air, taking in a long ragged breath and then coughing so hard Delilah was afraid she’d rupture something. Delilah tried to keep her as still as she could — the woman was out cold — while keeping pressure on her gaping leg wound.

  “You need anything else, doc?” asked that voice, and Delilah looked up into Miles’s face. She’d known he was there from the first word he said. There was no mistaking that low, lazy, gravelly sound.

  “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 a
t 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.

  2

  Delilah

  The one thing that had changed in Fjords, it seemed, was the layout of Carr’s grocery store. At some point in the past seven or eight years, they’d repainted it, taken down the tired, chipping signs over the aisles and replaced everything. Even the lighting was better, the ugly fluorescents of her childhood gone and replaced with something just a tiny bit more pleasant. Alaska prices hadn’t gone down at all, though. It was still wildly expensive to ship groceries all the way up there.

  She didn’t even need very much — peanut butter, bananas, yogurt, bread — but Delilah found herself wandering the grocery store for a little while, seeing what sorts of food had made it up to Fjords, Alaska. To her surprise, they had tofu now, but still no kombucha. The apples were tired and bruised, the avocados all bright green.

  Something had made her leave Miles’s jacket in her car. She’d realized, back at the accident, that she still knew most of the people who lived in town, and she suspected she’d be recognized. Better if she wasn’t already wearing the jacket of the boy she’d dated in high school — that would be sure to get people talking.

  All the same, in a strange way, the inside of the grocery store felt like proof that Fjords could change, when it wanted to, proof that it wasn’t just stuck in time even if it felt that way. Carr’s could get better lighting and a new layout and could stock tofu. Who was to say that she couldn’t move on from her shitty father, that the town couldn’t find new industries and thrive again? Who was to say that the violent, hyper-masculine pack was the way that things had to be?

  Who was to say she, too, was stuck in the past, feeling a twinge of something for her high school sweetheart?

  Of course you felt something, she reasoned with herself, walking down the beer and wine aisle. She grabbed an exorbitantly expensive six-pack of Sierra Nevada from the shelves and put it in her cart.

  Miles was your first love, she told herself. You’ll always feel something about that. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a memory.

  By the time she left the grocery store, paying far too much for two scant bags full of food, she had almost convinced herself that it was true.

  Delilah had never intended to come back to Fjords.

  It had been five years since she’d last spoken to her father, and even that hadn’t gone well. He’d been drunk and it had been late in Alaska and even later in California. She had woken up when the phone in her tiny apartment rang, and she stumbled out of bed, dropping the receiver once, her heart beating fast, because who called at two in the morning if it wasn’t an emergency?

  “Lilah,” the voice on the other end had slurred.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, panicking, but doing her best to keep her voice down and not wake her roommate.

  “You don’t call me anymore,” her fathe
r said.

  Delilah had gripped the phone until her hand hurt. After everything, he was upset that she didn’t call him?

  “Someone had better be fucking dead for you to call me this late,” she hissed. “I’ve got an eight a.m. class tomorrow.”

  “That’s your problem,” he went on, totally ignoring her. “All you think of is you. You don’t care about your people. Your family.”

  Her roommate’s bedroom door opened and the other girl padded out, wearing a robe and pajamas, frowning at Delilah.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered. Clearly she also thought someone had died, or gotten into an accident. Something to warrant a phone call this late.

  Delilah shook her had. “It’s nothing,” she murmured, one hand over the receiver.

  “I heard that,” her father slurred. Her roommate nodded and went back to bed. “I ain’t nothing. We ain’t nothing. Someday you’ll realize that and stop thinking that you’re too good for us, Miss Med School.”

  Then he hung up, leaving Delilah open-mouthed in fury, only twenty years old.

  Years later, unlocking her father’s house with two bags of groceries, it still made her angry. Her going to California, getting an education and making something of herself hadn’t cost him a thing. She’d done it on her own, attending Berkeley on a combination of scholarships and student loans, working half-time to pay for her own food and lodging. She’d done the same through medical school, studying her brains out sleepless night after sleepless night.

  He, on the other hand, had seen fit to drink himself out of a job and then out of his family by the time Delilah was three. Her mother had taken her and stayed in Fjords because the pack was there, and the pack was what had kept her father alive when he was found drunk on the side of the road or when his electricity got shut off, but she knew he was tolerated at best.

  He’d never gotten properly inducted, and when she was a kid, Delilah had looked at other men’s bear tattoos, wishing her dad had one. Her mom had gone to Anchorage at the same time that she’d gone to college in California, and he was left alone in Fjords.