Her Guardian Harem: Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance

by Savannah Skye

  “Leave that to me. You guys get into positions where you can see the crowd and keep an eye out for Texas. Soon as you see him, knock that fucker on his ass. The others will cave when they see their leader is down.” I hoped.

  “But what are you going to do?”

  I grinned. “I’m going to give him a surprise. Go on, quick. Get in position.”

  The guys hurried off. I didn’t need to tell them where best to set themselves up – they knew tactical stuff better than me.

  “Good guys,” said Lovely, standing next to me and looking more like MacKenzie Molly every moment. “The four of you make a good team. And they obviously adore you.”

  I said nothing. There were more important things right now. But as I started to move, Lovely grabbed my arm.

  “Marley, seriously. Before all this shit goes down. None of this would be happening if I had been able to tell the difference between the people who care about me and the people who just want to use me. Those guys would bleed for you. Don’t throw away something special for any reason. Now, are we doing this?”

  She’d guessed my plan. I took her hand and we marched out across the front of the room towards the dais on which Sean was seated.

  I wished I could have seen the look on Texas’s face as his two prisoners walked out in front of him, but seeing the look on Sean’s was almost as good. The daughter he had not seen for years, and who he perhaps thought he would never see again, was strolling up to him as if nothing could be more natural.

  “Molly…”

  The word was barely out of his mouth before all hell broke loose behind us.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Reed, who had stationed himself on a raised guard’s platform by the wall, diving across the assembled people at a figure in the crowd. At the same instant, I saw Talbot running for the same figure. A gunshot went off, firing up into the rafters, and that seemed to have been a signal as Texas’s men reached for their hidden armaments.

  Hurling Lovely to the ground, I threw myself on top of her, shielding her body with mine. Up ahead of me on the dais, I saw Kessler, running like a demon before tackling his Pack Leader to the ground and doing the same as me, as the sound of gunfire echoed about the room.

  I’d been right about a lot of things since this affair started. I’d made some educated guesses and some pretty wild guesses, and they had all come good. I’d been the smart one who could figure out what was going on. But nobody can be right all of the time and it’s the sign of an intelligent person to admit when they’re wrong and learn from their mistakes.

  When I had said that Texas’s men would give up when he was taken down, I had been one hundred percent, dead wrong, and I was more than willing to admit it. Which was damn useless right now.

  Keeping my body clamped to Lovely’s as she shrieked in fear beneath me, I looked up at the ensuing carnage. The Pack Lodge guards had sprung into action but had been badly surprised by the firearms. Shots fired, blood spurted. The guards weren’t trained to deal with shit like this. Fortunately, they had help. While Reed kept Texas pinned to the ground, easily wrestling his deadly weapon from him, Talbot attacked the armed werewolves. I didn’t think I would ever cease to be astounded by the sight of Talbot in full fight mode. He moved like a whirlwind, careless of his own safety. He grabbed the barrel of a gun and used it to drag its owner into his fist, then spun the man round to take out another attacker. As guns were leveled at him, he dived for the floor, rolling across the ground and springing up into the faces of his enemies, fists flying.

  He was not alone for long. Kessler handed the job of protecting the Pack Leader over to one of his actual bodyguards and ran to help his comrade, leaping into battle and shifting as he went, roaring his fury at Texas’s men. It was a smart tactic. Werewolves are genetically keyed to respond to this sort of challenge. Guns hit the floor as men turned into wolves and attacked Kessler and then Talbot, who had now changed, as well. Reed was with them a moment later, his muscles bursting through his shirt as he went full wolf, lashing out with a clawed hand and sending smaller werewolves tumbling, whimpering as they scrabbled to get away from him.

  To watch each of the guys fight individually was a treat – if you get off on that kind of thing, which I guess I do – but to watch them fight together was a dream. They did not move as one, but with total awareness of where their comrades were and what they were doing. They understood each other’s strengths and knew what they were thinking. When Talbot picked up a wolf in each hand to throw them across the room, then Kessler was there to pounce, to make sure they stayed down. When Reed body-slammed one of the larger of their attackers into the wall, Talbot had his back while he was getting back to his feet. When Kessler somersaulted like an acrobat to avoid an attacker, he knew that Reed or Talbot would have that attacker in their jaws before his paws touched the ground. They were breathtaking. They were wonderful. And God damn it, they were mine.

  Perhaps it was an odd time to come to such a revelation, halfway through a fight while I was using my body as a shield to protect a young werewolf female, but it was at that instant that I knew no impediment was enough to stand between me and my guys. If they were loyal to Sean, what of it? They would still always come for me. And that was what mattered.

  Texas himself had now been taken into custody by the guards, and I wondered if he was aware that he had been the architect of his own failure in so many ways. You can put guns in the hands of werewolves, but you can’t make them use them. A wolf is a wolf. Above all, he had killed Dog and so Lovely had turned on him. I’m not one for sentiment – I’ve seen too much – but I liked the poetic justice of it. The chain of events that Dog’s death had set in play was what had ended Texas’s plan. In a way, it was Dog who had brought him down. I liked that. I liked that life’s loser had finally gotten himself a win.

  The fight nearly seemed to be over now, Talbot picked up a wolf who had tried to run for the door and hurled him back into the center of the room, where there was a growing pile of beaten werewolves. Kessler lashed out at another, who looked like he might still have fight in him, while Reed was tackling two at once, his muscles bulging with effort, but still coming out on top, forcing his adversaries to the ground, whimpering in submission when faced with his dominance. They really were the best of the best.

  Only now did I dare to lift my body up from Lovely. “You okay down there?”

  “Is it over?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Did we win?”

  “Looks like.”

  “How?” she asked as I stood up and helped her back to her feet.

  I laughed. “My friends are more than just pretty faces.”

  But I was enjoying the moment so much that I missed something important.

  “Molly!” Sean shrieked from the dais, where he was being held back by his bodyguards, his eyes wide with panic, fastened on something behind me. I spun around in time to see that one of the wolves who had been cast aside by my guys had shifted back into human. As the fierce wolf passions left his body, he had suddenly seen the advantage in hardware. The gun was in his hand, pointed at the daughter of the Pack Leader.

  No thoughts went through my head. I don’t know if it was instinct or training, but as the gun went off, I shoved Lovely aside.

  A searing pain blistered into my body, so sudden and so shocking that I could not even tell where I had been hit.

  “Marley!” I heard Talbot, Kessler and Reed all yell at once, and vaguely saw them rushing towards me, blanched fear on their faces. As I crumpled to the floor, I thought; how nice that they care so much. It was flattering, really.

  Since my near-death experience last year, there had always been part of me that had assumed it would end like this. And during that year, I hadn’t much cared. But now, all of a sudden, and apparently from nowhere, I felt like I had something to live for. So, of course, that was the point when that death wish came home. How was that fair?

  As the world faded from me, my last thought was
that I was the only person in the room who could be killed by a damn ordinary bullet. Fucking irony.

  Chapter 20

  I woke up.

  That’s the goal, isn’t it? To just keep on waking up every morning. As long as you keep doing that then you’re winning at life. At least, that was what I used to think; just keep going and you’re probably doing fine. A near-death experience had robbed me of the joy I took in life, perhaps it had taken another near-death experience for me to realize how precious it was.

  Actually, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure that second near-death experience taught me anything except that bullets really fucking hurt – something I was just as happy not knowing. But wouldn’t it have been nice if it had been the bullet that taught me all that other stuff? Wouldn’t that have had a pleasant symmetry to it?

  But it wasn’t the bullet in my chest that had taught me the value of life, it had been the three werewolves who had come into that life and given it a much-needed shot in the arm. Still; the bullet did underline it, by putting my life on the line yet again, so I think there’s still a poetic symmetry to it. And it was when I came around in the hospital after that fateful day that the world first looked really different to me. The darkness of the previous year had receded and I could see clearly again the stuff that had, presumably, been there all along. I could see that the world was an okay place, I could see how lucky I was to have friends and family who loved me and who I loved, I had made peace with being good at a job that put me in danger from time to time. Above all, I could see a future that went beyond my next drink, went far beyond it, in fact. It was a future that featured smiling, other people and domestic situations, a future that I couldn’t wait to make into my present.

  That was the world I had woken up to in the hospital the day after I had been shot protecting MacKenzie Molly, and that was the world I had woken up to every single day since. It was a world that never got old.

  The goal in life, I had now worked out, was not just to keep waking up every morning, it was to keep waking up with a smile on your face. And I had all kinds of reasons to smile.

  It was not just that I had put to rest those demons and nightmares that had plagued me, I had put into a prison a bunch of bad guys who had tried to assassinate a Pack Leader and take over his territory. Werewolves respect takeover attempts – wolves are supposed to fight amongst themselves and once they’re done tearing each other apart they’ll go off and have a drink together. But not when they do it like Texas. An open challenge to combat is one thing, a sneak attack made with human weapons was despicable. I could only guess how hard my guys must have fought to make sure that Texas went to jail, and was not just lynched there and then. Fortunately, they had learned to say ‘no’ to their Pack Leader.

  Though I was pleased that I had saved MacKenzie Sean and reunited him with his estranged daughter – now she was older and wiser they were doing very nicely at forging a fresh relationship – what mattered more to me was that I had caught the man who killed Dog. Fair enough, the guy had been a criminal, a bruiser, and someone who meant nothing to me. But I had put him in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, and this had been my only way of saying sorry for that. Also, he had come to me asking for help. I think he would have been pleased that I had saved Molly. The poor guy had gotten none of the breaks in life, this seemed like the least I could offer him.

  I sat up in bed and looked about the room in which I now slept. You could probably have fit most of my old apartment into this room, and you could certainly have fit all of it into the living room. I’m not an extravagant girl, I don’t go for material possessions so much; as long as I have food to eat and a roof over my head then I’m quite happy. But when Sean offered a large cash reward for my role in saving Molly and bringing her back to him, then I decided to treat myself. I needed a bigger place anyway.

  The door opened and Talbot walked in carrying a tray. “You’re awake.”

  “What time is it?” I rubbed my eyes.

  “Doesn’t matter, it’s Saturday. On Saturday the office is closed.”

  I had decided against going back to the police. There was a lot I loved about the job and it was something that I was good at, but the part of this affair that stuck with me the most was Dog just showing up on my door asking for help. That’s what the police are supposed to be for, but no werewolf would ever go to them. So I set up as a private investigator – it seemed a good fit, I already had the attitude, the drinking problem, and a weird habit of internally narrating my life. My door was open to all cases, big and small, specializing in werewolf stuff. I was the brains of the operation, and the brawn…

  As Talbot laid down the tray on the bed in front of me – a healthier breakfast than I would have made for myself – Reed and Kessler entered, smiling and wishing me good morning. This was why I needed the bigger apartment, because it wasn’t just for me, it was for me and my werewolf mates.

  I hadn’t been sure what my family would make of it. When I started getting back in touch with them after a year of barely talking, I had to tell them that I had shacked up with three werewolf males and that it was serious and that we were talking about marriage –although wolves don’t really do ‘marriage’ as such – and would they like to come round and meet them? It had gone far better than my wildest dreams would have permitted. My mom loved them – like mother, like daughter, I guess – and she’d come for dinner at least once a week since, always complimenting Kessler on his cooking. She’d met Talbot’s mom, Gwen, as well, and the two of them had set about making Talbot and I feel thoroughly self-conscious, swapping childhood stories, while Kessler and Reed laughed their asses off.

  It was the evening after that meeting, when the mothers had gone, that I sat in my chair by the window and wondered at what my life had become. So recently I had been resigned to slowly drinking myself to death, now, I had a family that looked like a 1950s sitcom.

  Well… not exactly, like a 1950s sitcom – it would have to be a very open-minded one – but you get what I mean. I was somebody’s ‘partner’. The only time I’d ever used that word before, it had meant a professional partner, another officer on the force. I was in a relationship – not a conventional one, at least as far as human’s were concerned, but a loving and committed relationship, that I could envisage being in for the rest of my life. In fact, I couldn’t envisage ever being out of it. I had ceased to be an ‘I’, and become a ‘we’. Part of a family.

  This was my life now. I was surrounded by people who loved me, new and old. It would take some getting used to, but I’ve always been willing to learn.

  I moved Talbot’s tray to the bedside table. “Thanks, but there’s something else I wanted for breakfast.”

  When we first moved in together, I had promised myself that I would not go mad with having sex at every opportunity. I wanted to prove to myself that what I had with these guys went way beyond that, that it wasn’t just about the sex.

  That lasted about an afternoon.

  Why shouldn’t we go mad and have some fun together? I didn’t need to prove to myself or to anyone else that what we had was about more than sex. I knew it, they knew it, everyone who knew us knew it, and anyone who looked at us could see it. We loved each other. And this being the case, why the hell shouldn’t we enjoy the physical stuff as much and as often as we wanted. Which turned out to be a lot and often.

  I lay back to my bed, thinking the happy thoughts of someone whose world is pretty close to perfect, as my three gorgeous men stripped my PJs from me. I cupped Talbot’s face in my hands as he kissed me, my eyes wide open in wonder at how lucky I was – a wonder that did not diminish even as the days passed in this new life. I felt hot, fluttering kisses on the sensitive flesh of my inner thighs as Kessler worked his way towards my core, while, to the side of the bed, Reed stripped off his clothes. I let my eyes rove over his body as it was revealed in all its muscular glory – there was something wonderful about being able to watch one of my lovers strip while the others
serviced my body; the best of both worlds.

  Reed shed his shorts and tossed them casually aside, displaying to my lustful gaze the long shaft of his penis, half hard now but rising swiftly. He joined the party on the bed, kissing my breasts, his tongue flicking with electric energy over my aroused nipples. Talbot sat back from me to pull his shirt over his head and my gaze was torn between his incredible body and the sight of Reed and Kessler diligently lapping me into sharp arousal. Stepping off the bed a moment, Talbot took off his pants, bending over to give me a great view of the pert ovals of his ass cheeks, delineated by his tight shorts. I wondered if he would be mad if I leaned across and sunk my teeth into one of those firm cheeks. I wasn’t sure why I wanted to but I really did. The shorts hit the floor and Talbot returned to kissing me, now as naked as I was. I stroked his member as we kissed, feeling it swell to full size and strength beneath my touch.

  Reed now took Kessler’s place between my legs, his tongue flicking against my excited clit, as the latter stood up on the bed to strip before my delighted eyes. Talbot began to kiss, lick and gently bite his way down my body as I watched his friend hurl off his top. Damn, they were all so fucking gorgeous. Kessler dropped his pants to reveal that he hadn’t bothered with underwear today, and I giggled as his cock sprang forth as if it was spring-loaded. I watched it leap from side to side, somewhere between a boxer bouncing up and down before a fight, and a jack-in-the-box. If penises could have expressions, then Kessler’s would be sporting a permanent beaming grin.

  Dropping back to his knees on the bed, Kessler joined Reed between my legs, gently lifting my backside to get access to my asshole. Talbot returned to kissing my mouth and I stroked my hands across the firm acreage of his body. He moved down and his lips sought out the still healing bullet wound that marred my chest. It was bound to leave a scar and he knew I was a little sensitive about it, so I couldn’t help smiling when he kissed it, telling me that he loved that blemish as much as any part of me. His light fingers found the white scars in my side where, over a year ago, a werewolf had almost killed me, and gently traced the claw marks.