Double The Alpha

by Amira Rain

  Seeing the Creepers and obviously realizing this himself, Eric momentarily clenched his jaw. “Stay close to the wall, Ellie. Once the Creepers are busy fighting, I’ll send Tom over. Hop on his back, and he’ll race you back to the gate. Got it?”

  I nodded, and Eric pressed a hasty, hard kiss against my mouth before sprinting away, shouting for Tom. Tom, who was one of a group of a half-dozen or so wolves that had just begun racing out from behind a newly-constructed portion of secondary wall, immediately made a beeline for Eric. Gesturing to me, Eric spoke to him for just a few seconds before shifting into wolf form himself and charging away.

  Not a moment later, the largest group of scaly green Creepers reached Eric’s snarling wolves, and pandemonium ensued, with Creepers slashing and biting, and wolves tackling them to the ground, fangs bared. Trying to make his way over to me, Tom got caught up in a group of wolves that had come from somewhere, either the woods or the south; I wasn’t even sure where. At any rate, Creepers to the north of this group of shifters made it so that they couldn’t easily pass, and I knew that I was going to have to defend myself with my orbs for a while until Tom could get to me. So, taking just a few steps from the wall, I began throwing them at two Creepers coming my way around the larger group.

  Immediately, I nailed both of them, knocking them to the ground. Soon losing the sense of panic and fear that I’d felt upon seeing the large group of Creepers coming in from the south, I continued throwing orbs, stunning several more Creepers. However, just when I was really hitting my stride, remaining in position with the wall providing defensive cover behind me, Tom finally came cruising over. Wanting to continue fighting but having enough common sense to realize that I shouldn’t, I hopped on his back, got a good grip on his long, coarse fur, and off we went.

  First, surprising me, Tom headed straight for the woods, bypassing groups of Creepers along the way. At first, I couldn’t see why he hadn’t just gone toward the gate right away; however, taking a glance over my shoulder while he headed south, presumably intending to take the long way around the wall, I understood. Yet another group of Creepers was moving toward the fight along the wall, and they would certainly hem us in, and in a location where there wouldn’t be anyone else to help us.

  Once past the southern curve of the wall, Tom really got going, practically flying east. With my adrenaline finally beginning to ebb, I just hung on tightly for a few minutes, until we were nearly to the gate. However, right at this moment, my adrenaline spiked again when we came across a small group of wolves heading in the opposite direction. Instantly, I realized that one of them was Ryan, who had a distinctive appearance in wolf form, with the fur on his face being much lighter than his unusually dark, coal-gray body.

  From this point, everything that happened next took place probably within the span of two seconds, if that.

  Without taking even a fraction of a second to think about what I was doing, I reacted purely in anger, suddenly hating Ryan for trying to have Eric killed. After whipping my hands behind my head, I launched two glowing silver orbs, putting every ounce of my strength into the throw. With the orbs speeding probably as fast as bullets, they hit Ryan within a blink, and I saw this happen. However, this was the very last thing I saw before tumbling right off Tom’s back, having stupidly and reflexively let go of his fur to do my double orb launch. The impact of hitting the ground was probably similar to that of a person being thrown from a galloping horse. And after that, all I saw was black.

  CHAPTER 16

  Judging by the sky beyond my bedroom windows, it was early evening when I came-to. Although for all I knew at the time, it could have been morning of the next day. But I just felt like it was evening.

  This wasn’t all I felt. I also felt like someone had filled my head with sand and then smashed it with a rock.

  Moaning feebly, I turned my face to the side, seeing Mira, the community’s doctor, sitting in a chair by my bedside with a book.

  Immediately, she dropped it right onto the floor, already rising from her chair. “Just don’t try to move, Ellie, sweetie. Just let me check your eyes again.”

  With my head feeling as heavy as a boulder, I didn’t think I could have moved to save my life, other than to shift the back of my head back onto what felt like a tall stack of pillows.

  Soon, using some kind of little physician’s pen light, Mira was examining my eyes, muttering to herself, saying things like, “Good, good,” and “Yup, looking good.”

  After shutting off her little light, she sat back in her chair with a deep exhale and a smile. “You’re going to be just fine, Ellie. I think you have only a very mild concussion. From the way Tom described you flying off his back, I’m not even sure how that’s possible, but it is. You apparently hit your head just hard enough to knock you out cold for a while, but not hard enough to cause any real damage. I bet you probably have one heck of a headache, though.”

  I moved my head in a fraction of a nod, this tiny movement making my head absolutely throb. “Painkillers, please, Mira. Lots of them.”

  She immediately complied with my request, giving me something that she called “the special stuff,” which was only for “very special patients.”

  About a half-hour later, when Eric entered the dimly-lit room, I was feeling pretty special. With my head not hurting at all anymore, I was feeling downright high, even, having spent a few minutes pretty much just laughing to myself, overjoyed because Mira had told me that Eric had survived the battle against the Creepers completely unscathed.

  “Or, at least completely unscathed once his rapid shifter-healing process kicked in. Same with his men too. All okay. I can’t say the same for the Creepers, though. There’s a pile of bodies about twenty feet high outside the wall.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure why all this good news should strike me as particularly funny, but it just did at the time. For some reason, my extreme relief just seemed intent on manifesting in the form of giggling.

  However, once Eric and Mira had had a brief, hushed conversation over by the doorway, Mira then left the room, and Eric came over to the bed and knelt down beside me. And for whatever reason, my mirth suddenly evaporated and I promptly burst into tears.

  “I just really love you, Eric.”

  With his handsome face radiating concern, compassion, and maybe just the slightest trace of amusement, he began smoothing my hair with a feather-light touch, probably not wanting to hurt my mildly-concussed head. “I really love you, too, Ellie…more than any woman I’ve ever loved in my life.”

  “Then, just get into bed with me, please. I just want to feel your arms around me.”

  After making sure that my head didn’t hurt anymore and he wouldn’t be causing me any pain, he went around to the other side of the bed and climbed in beside me, gently taking me in his arms.

  Wanting to look at him, I slowly rolled over, making the entire room seem to spin. “Whoa. I guess I’m just a little dizzy. I wasn’t when I first woke up.”

  Eric said that Mira had told him that extreme dizziness might be a side effect of the medication she’d given me. “So, until it wears off, I’m going to stay right here with you, just holding you. I’m not going anywhere.”

  With fresh tears suddenly welling in my eyes, I winced. “I don’t ever want you to go anywhere. I just want you and only you. I don’t want Ryan anymore. I don’t ever want to see him again.”

  Smoothing my hair again, Eric didn’t speak right away. “You won’t ever have to see Ryan again, sweetheart. He’s gone now.”

  Crying harder, I tried to nod, although without much success, being that the side of my face was pressed into a pillow. “I’m glad he’s gone now. He wasn’t who I thought he was, and when I saw him, I just hated him for it and what he tried to do to you. That’s why I hit him with my orbs.”

  Eric said he knew. “You stunned him badly enough that it wasn’t hard for me to take him out when Tom directed me to him. Kurt, Don, and Malcolm came later. And now, we can be happy
together without worrying about any more traitors around here.”

  Still crying, I tried to nod again. “That’s all I want. Just for you and me to be happy together. Do you know that before everything happened, I was even on my way to talk to Ryan to tell him that I only wanted to be with you? I’d been fighting it for weeks, but I finally just came to the realization that I loved you more and that I only wanted to be with you.”

  Eric said he’d been thinking that things were going that way. “I’ve been able to see it in your eyes for the past two weeks. You just weren’t looking at Ryan in the same way anymore, and you were starting to look at me in a whole new way. I wrestled with the idea of trying to talk to you about things…but, in the end, I figured that it was probably best to let you come to me or Ryan when you were ready.

  I never dreamed that he’d be cooking up some nefarious plot in the meantime. I knew he was dangerous, but not quite as dangerous as he eventually turned out to be in the end. I wish I’d just listened to my instincts in the first place and never offered to share the title of alpha. Obviously, that almost turned out to be a fatal mistake.”

  “And thank God it wasn’t.”

  Gently cradling my head in his hand, Eric leaned in and pressed a tender kiss against my forehead. “Thank God it wasn’t.”

  Feeling increasingly dizzy and tired from the painkiller, I was soon out like a light again. I woke up again after a while, asking Eric to help me to the bathroom. Once he had, he helped me back into bed, and I was suddenly crying again, saying that the sheets smelled like Ryan.

  “And it’s not like I’m sad that he’s dead or anything, but….” Still extremely dizzy, I sniffled, struggling to think of just what exactly I was trying to say. “I’m just sad for the person that I thought he was at one point, and I’m just sad for that man that I loved…but I know that that wasn’t really Ryan. That was just Ryan being a fake, and I just don’t ever want to smell his smell again.”

  Eric said he’d strip the sheets off the bed and wash them right then, but I told him no.

  “Please burn them.”

  Over the next week or so, I completely recovered from my mild concussion, and life slowly got back to normal, only now with Eric as my one and only man, and the one and only alpha of Silverfield. With all thoughts of Ryan soon fading from my mind, I quickly became the happiest I’d ever been in my life.

  I became even happier on Christmas day that winter, when Eric presented me with a large diamond ring, asking me to marry him. Overjoyed, I said yes without any hesitation.

  That April, on a sunny Saturday, we were married in the greenspace with everyone in the community looking on. With his lower lip trembling with emotion all the while, Norm walked me down the aisle and gave me away. With him having lost his unmarried, twenty-nine-year-old daughter to leukemia several years before the Chaos, and with her being his only child, he’d told me before the ceremony that he never thought he’d get the chance to walk a daughter down the aisle. That was how he saw me now, as he also told me. As his second daughter. Becoming a bit emotional myself, I’d told him that I’d be honored to start thinking of him as my second dad.

  After the ceremony, the greenspace was turned into an outdoor party venue with music, a makeshift dance floor, several buffet tables full of food, and no fewer than fifty-something tables of all different sizes. Some people had even lugged over their dining room tables from home.

  All these tables were now needed because after doing some thinking a month earlier, Eric had talked to Norm, and they’d decided to move everyone at Towering Pines to Silverfield a few days before the wedding. Things would just be easier this way, Eric told me, as far as sharing supplies and keeping everyone safe and secure. I agreed, glad that everyone I cared about would now be living behind not one but two security walls that now encircled Silverfield.

  At the wedding reception, Alicia danced with Mark and also with Mason, who Eric had promoted to a position of leadership within the wolfpack as a result of his honesty about Ryan’s devious plot. Stunningly, not long after the post-plot battle, Mark and Alicia had started spending a lot of time with Mason, and then had invited him to join their union on a trial basis. Because Alicia had always seemed so sure that she could never have a relationship with two men at the same time, I asked her what on earth had made her change her mind.

  “Well…I guess just a very high libido and a strong desire to experience some of my fantasies in real life,” she’d said, looking more than a little uncomfortable. So far, things between her and her two men seemed to be going extremely well after several months, if a frequent smile on Alicia’s face and an equally frequent rosy glow in her cheeks were any indications.

  When the sun went down on our wedding day, Eric and I took to the makeshift cobblestone dance floor in the middle of the greenspace for about the tenth time during the reception.

  Smiling, I told him that I could never get sick of dancing with him. “Just you, and you alone.”

  With his beautiful gray eyes twinkling in the dim light, he pulled me close. “Never? You’ll never get sick of dancing with just me?”

  Smiling, I shook my head. “No, never. You’re the only man I want to dance with for the rest of my life.”

  Wrapping my arms around his strong shoulders, I knew deep in my heart that this would always be true.

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  *

  MELTED

  BY THE DRAGON

  A PARANORMAL SHIFTER ROMANCE

  AMIRA RAIN

  Copyright ©2015 by Amira Rain

  All rights reserved.

  About This Book

  In a future world that is ruled by dragon shifters, fertile women are scarce. They are so scarce that women capable of having children are now often cryogenically frozen for centuries in order to help future generations reproduce.

  Curvy Vivian Mason was one of those women who was frozen hundreds of years ago and now it is time for her to be MELTED.

  Dragon Commander Jackson Wallace is in urgent need of an heir and he demands that Vivian is melted and awakened in order to produce one for him.

  Now, with no memory of how she even got there Vivian has no choice but to go along with whatever her new mate demands.

  No matter how bad, rough or naughty it might seem...

  Can Vivian produce the baby dragon that Jackson so demands? And what might happen when she finally remembers who she was before she was MELTED?

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was cold.

  So cold I could barely comprehend it. Bone-chilled cold. Cold on a level that a whimper escaped my mouth, and I could have sworn the breath it produced instantly turned to an icy cloud. I gasped. It was a great gasp like a newborn might make. Bright lights illuminated the room, though I couldn’t see much. My eyelids seemed to require great strength to move and blink, as if they were frozen to my eyes. Bizarrely, or maybe not, I wished for my mother. And a heated blanket. Anyone, or anything, to warm me. Then it was all just noise. People shouting. A doctor in a white lab coat above me rubbed two metal paddles together, which made a loud whirring noise. A woman shouted, “She’s almost there! Keep going!” And then everything went black. Even in the blackness, I still felt cold.

  When I came out of the blackness and struggled to open my eyes again, I was still absolutely chilled to the bone. Some kind of frenzied, bustling activity was st
ill going on around me. People were still shouting. One man’s voice rose above the rest.

  “We’ve got her! She’s trying to open her eyes again! I think we’ve really got her!”

  I vaguely understood that her seemed to be me, but I couldn’t make sense of much else. Within seconds, my eyes closed again and I began sinking back into the blackness.

  When I came out of it once more, my surroundings were much quieter. The air held the sharp scent of antiseptic. I was still cold, though maybe just slightly less so than I’d been before. Now I felt chilled, not downright frozen. Something with a bit of weight to it, more weight than an average blanket, was covering me from throat to toe, and this thing was radiating warmth. I wanted ten of these things on me. I wanted a hundred.

  Opening my eyelids wasn’t exactly easy now, because they still felt iced to my eyeballs in a strange way, rusty somehow, but the task was easier than it had been earlier. However, I only opened my eyes a crack at first. The room was too bright and too white, and it kind of hurt to let much of that brightness and whiteness in. Immediately, there was some kind of rustling movement beside me, and I heard a woman’s voice.

  “I’ll shut the blinds, dear. I imagine bright sun might be painful for a while.”