Alec's Game (Shifter Fever Book 2) Page 13

  Milla nodded again. “And I’ll go with you when you go.”

  Alec scoffed. “Hell, no, you won’t. Herta is too dangerous for you.”

  Milla frowned. “I’m pretty sure I handled myself just fine on Herta for damn near close to three weeks. When you go back, I’ll go.”

  Alec ripped a hand through his short hair. “This is what I’ve damned myself to.” He spoke to the ceiling of the car and to no one in particular. “A lifetime with a woman who makes me crazy.” He turned to Milla. “You’ll not come back to Herta while it’s so dangerous.”

  He expected her to argue back immediately, the way she always did, but she was simply staring back and forth between him and the road, her brow furrowed.

  “What?”

  “You said lifetime,” she said, almost dully.

  “Yes,” he answered slowly, not sure what she was getting at.

  “With me.”

  “Yes. Of course. Milla–”

  “Like you want to get married?”

  That pulled him up short. He scraped a hand over his stubble and frowned. “Make this thing go over there!” He pointed toward an overlook over the mountains that was coming up.

  “What?”

  “The car, make it stop moving. I can’t think with everything rushing past.”

  Milla, bemused, amused, nervous, pulled the car into the overlook and slammed her way out onto the gravel viewpoint, the same way Alec just had.

  He paced over to the view and paced back. “It looks just the same as on Herta,” he said as he gestured roughly over his shoulder toward the mostly green mountains rising in the distance behind him.

  “Yes…” she stepped forward, her stomach flipping. She’d never seen him so agitated.

  “But nothing is the same as on Herta! All the, the, the technology, of course, is different. But also the way things are between a man and a woman. That’s different, too!”

  “What do you mean?” Her patience was winding down. She didn’t have that much of it in the first place and she was gonna need him to start making sense here soon.

  “I mean women on Herta do and, and say certain things and I expect it. I get it. You! Nothing you say is what I expect. And so you and I are different than we would be if you were Hertian.”

  “Just like we’d be different if you were an earthling, of course. What are you getting at?”

  “I mean that I thought we were already married!”

  His words pulled her up short and she stared at him, the wind tousling her short hair and the green mountains spreading out around her.

  “What? Why would you think that?”

  “Because I came here for you. You accepted me. We lay in one home like a husband and wife. I’m leaving my world for you. You’re leaving your job so that we can spend time in Green Mills. We’re training Griff together. I– if that doesn’t make us married, then what would?!”

  “Um. How about a discussion about whether or not we should get married?” She raised an eyebrow. “On earth somebody’s got to ask, somebody’s gotta say yes, and then we’d have to have a wedding.”

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus Christ. Fine. Then let’s just do that and have this awful conversation be over with.”

  Milla laughed. She couldn’t help it. “Jeez, John. You’ve sure bowled me over with your romantic ways.”

  He looked up and took her measurement. Deemed she wasn’t upset. No, actually, she was kind of glowing. “You don’t love me because I’m romantic,” he told her.

  “Is that right?” Her heart hammered in her chest. “Then why do I love you?”

  He shrugged. “Lots of reasons. I’m competent. And passionate. And I’ll stay by your side until I die.”

  Her heart did a somersault. How could something be so romantic and so morbid at the same time? She thought of every romantic movie where words were spelled out by a skywriter, or said with a choir in the background, or in some other grand, public gesture. She looked at the plain, brown-eyed man standing in front of her in a black T-shirt, jeans and a ratty combat jacket from another world.

  He scowled at her. She grinned.

  “Maybe that’s all true,” she waved her hand in the air. “But you love me because I’m a warrior just like you. And I’m loyal. And I’ll protect you. I’m the only person you’d ever let protect you.”

  His eyes darkened and he stalked toward her. “Fine.” He took her by the back of the head and landed a hard kiss on her lips. Their teeth clacked and their eyes blazed into one another. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” And then she took a kiss from him. Just as vicious, but softer, meltier. The way she was only with him.

  “Fine,” he repeated. “Now we’re married.”

  She laughed against his mouth. “No, John! That’s not how it works.”

  “I don’t care,” he leaned her into him and took another kiss. “That’s how it works for us.”

  Milla laughed again and kissed him hard and it was a long time before they got back into the car. When they did, the light had changed; it was blue over her husband’s face. Her man from a different world. Her warrior. The man who protected shifters with his life.

  “We’ll do it, John,” she promised him, lifting a hand to his cheek. “We’ll keep fighting for shifters.”

  “I know,” he said, bringing his hand to hers. “Now let’s go home.”

  The End

  Danil’s Mate - Preview

  (Book 1 - Secret Shifters of Spokane Series)

  PROLOGUE

  20 years ago

  “That guy right there, Dora. The one in the back of the line. What do you notice?” Pandora Katsaros’s dad asked her as he passed his eight-year-old daughter a pair of binoculars.

  Dora balanced up on her knees in the front seat of the unmarked car, careful to keep her head out of the line of sight, just like her dad had showed her. She focused the binoculars and zoomed in on a man in a red cap.

  “He’s got one hand inside his coat. And there’s a bulge there. I think,” Dora said as she zoomed further with the binoculars, “I think he’s stealing something. Yup. See, there he goes out the side of the building. He definitely stole something.”

  Stavros Katsaros fired up the car and followed the man in the red cap as he skittered down the block to his own car. The two cars got on the highway.

  “Theories?” Stavros asked his daughter as he trailed the man’s car at an inconspicuous distance.

  Dora thought hard, putting some puzzle pieces together in her mind, then shifting them when they didn’t fit quite right. “Some. But I need more info.”

  Stavros inwardly grinned at his daughter’s response. He’d taught her well.

  About twenty minutes later, the cars pulled off the highway and into a very white-bread neighborhood. Every house looked the same. Even the kids playing in the yards all looked the same. Tossing balls and playing with dollies. Not for the first time in her life, Dora was glad that her dad wasn’t like all the other dads. She never wanted to have a normal life. Not if it was this boring.

  Stavros pulled the car off to the side of the road, under a shady tree, and again passed the binoculars to his daughter. He already knew what the man was up to, but he was curious if Dora could put it all together.

  She furrowed her brow as she watched the man in the red cap bound up a carefully kept lawn. He called out something to a boy who was drawing with sidewalk chalk on the driveway. The boy looked up and sprinted over to him. The man bent down and pulled a brand new catcher’s mitt out of his coat. The boy lit up like it was Christmas and held the mitt in the air.

  Dora could hear her father snapping picture after picture with his high definition camera. The one with the lens a mile long.

  “It was a baseball mitt. And he gave it to that kid,” Dora muttered to herself. She thought about how she might run to her own dad across a lawn like that. “But that’s not his kid. I don’t think. They’re greeting each other like they’re still get
ting to know each other.”

  Stavros grinned to himself as he listened to his daughter work out the details under her breath. She was on the right track.

  “And that is definitely not his wife,” Dora muttered as she watched a pretty lady in a blue dress come out on the porch of the house and smile down at the man and the boy. “And he stole it. He stole it. Why did he steal it? Something there.”

  Dora paused, then tossed the binoculars on the seat beside her in victory. There was a smug look of satisfaction on her eight-year-old face. “Second family. He’s not the real father, he’s still trying to win that kid over with gifts. But he had to steal it so that his real wife, the one who hired us, wouldn’t see the purchase on the credit card statement.”

  Her father, still taking pictures, held his hand out for a high five without even looking up from the camera. “You got it in one, Pandora. You’re gonna make a hell of a PI someday, kid.”

  Dora leaned out the window as she and her dad headed back home, having gotten all the proof they needed for his client. The wind smacked her face like water at the topmost roll of a wave. In that moment she didn’t need anything else. Not a fancy house, or new toys, or a vacation to Disneyland. All she needed was her dad and a little mystery for the two of them to solve together.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Damn it,” Danil Malashovik growled as he glanced at the time on his car radio. His mother was going to deep fry his ass for being late to yet another Sunday dinner. But, he supposed he didn’t really have a choice. There were only so many Public Defenders in Spokane, Washington.

  And when duty called, Danil answered. It was in his genes. He came from a very long line of ridiculously hardworking men. His father had worked the wheat fields in Belarus for ten hours every day of Danil’s young life. Until they’d come to America a decade ago.

  Danil pulled his car into the parking lot of the northwest precinct. He hoped he could wrap this up quickly. He was starving and he knew for a fact that his mother was making babka. His barbaric brothers wouldn’t save him a single bite if he wasn’t there when it was first put on the table.

  Danil strode into the precinct, straightening his tie and putting all thoughts of potato pie out of his mind. He had a job to do. And he never did anything half assed.

  He came up to the front desk so that Freddie could tell him which room his client was in. He checked the folder in his hand. Harry Rourke. No priors. Good. This shouldn’t take too long at all.

  “But on the other hand, if you think about it, the first wasn’t a warning. It was more of a passing of information from one person to another. So this isn’t technically a second warning. It’s a first,” said a woman in a silky, flirtatious voice.

  Danil glanced up to see who the smooth talker was. His eyes landed on quite possibly the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen. She leaned up against the front desk in a pair of tight, cuffed jeans and a black leather jacket. Her curves were soft and generous. Her foxy face was sharp in the features and highlighted by a short, stylish cap of dark, glossy hair. She slanted her eyes up through a fringe of dark lashes at Officer Rickford, a personal friend of Danil’s.

  Rickford was looking a little pink around the ears, Danil noted. And he could see why. This woman was a stone cold ten and she wasn’t pumping any sort of brakes.

  Danil smirked as she reached up and gently readjusted Rickford’s tie, brushed something imaginary off his shoulder.

  “So, seeing as I’m new in town and didn’t know the rules, I think everyone would understand if instead of any more police action, I just took this warning very seriously, and promised never to do it again.” She pouted perfect, plump lips and put a very sorry look on her face.

  “Be that as it may, Ms. Katsaros,” Rickford said, turning even pinker and clearing his throat. “This is the second time in as many days that you’ve been brought into the station for trespassing on federally protected land.”

  “I was lost!” she insisted. “Is that a crime?”

  “Yes, actually. It is,” Danil said in his slight Slavic accent, deciding to throw Rickford a bone here. The man was a little out of his depth. Danil leaned across the two of them to hand his file to Freddie at the front desk. Freddie took it and flipped it open, started processing it right away.

  Danil leaned back, ignoring the quick tightening of his gut when he realized that this woman smelled like citrus. Light and clean and female.

  Frustration flickered momentarily across the woman’s face at Danil’s intrusion before she smoothed her exceptional features back into a flirtatious smile. “Well, in that case, I genuinely accept the warning, Officer Rickford. I’ve taken it right to heart. And you won’t have to worry about me for another second. I swear.”

  “Is this your client, Dan?” Rickford asked Danil hopefully. The officer already knew he was sunk. He needed reinforcements.

  Danil put his hands in his pockets and surveyed the woman from head to toe. He was lazy in his perusal of her, fully enjoying the opportunity. When his eyes landed on her exquisite face, he noted that she had one eyebrow raised sardonically.

  “Well, she doesn’t look like a Harry Rourke,” Danil said.

  “Dora Katsaros,” the woman introduced herself drily. “I’m new in town. Though some of us don’t seem to think that matters.” She flicked her eyes toward Rickford, who sweated and scratched at the back of his neck.

  “Now, Ms. Katsaros, you know it isn’t anything personal,” Rickford muttered, practically scuffing the toe of his boot on the ground.

  “Your defendant’s in room B, Dan,” Freddie said, looking up from his computer and handing the file back across the group to Danil.

  “Thanks, Freddie,” Danil said, taking the folder. He nodded solemnly, just the hint of a smirk on his face. “Ms. Katsaros.” He winked at Rickford. “Officer Rickford, good luck,” he muttered under his breath.

  And then he was closing the door of the interrogation room behind him, and his entire world was Harry Rourke.

  Thirty minutes later, Danil dashed out of the precinct, his world zooming out into a wide lens again. He’d always possessed incredible focus. Even as a young boy in Belarus, running the streets with his brothers. He’d see men playing dice on the corner and stop stock still. Immovable, until he’d learned the rules, the theory, the strategy.

  Rules were how he lived his life. He trusted them, understood them. It was how he’d gotten his family American citizenship so quickly when they’d come to America. Even though he was the youngest of the four boys in his family, he’d been the one to learn English first. To seek out an immigration lawyer. To help his brothers find work. He knew the system could chew you up and spit you out if you didn’t understand it. So he’d pledged to understand it. From the moment he set foot on American soil. And now, here he was, a decade later. A public defender, using his knowledge of the system to defend the innocent. And occasionally the guilty.

  His thoughts passed back to Dora Katsaros as he slid into the front seat of his car. She’d so obviously been playing Rickford. He wondered if she was currently sitting back in one of those interrogation rooms, or if Rickford had folded and she was wandering free on the streets of Spokane again. He supposed he didn’t have the time to think of any perps except for the ones he was personally charged with defending. His plate was full enough without pretty, little, dark-haired sex bombs.

  Except, of course, socially.

  He wouldn’t have minded meeting Dora Katsaros in a bar. Or a Starbucks. Or the public library. He had no doubt that a little spitfire like her could keep him very entertained. For a week or two.

  As intense as Danil’s focus was for the law, his focus on women was admittedly a bit wandering. What could he say? He liked every flavor of ice cream. What was that Americanism? Variety was the salt of life? No, he corrected himself; he hated it when he messed up stuff like that. Variety was the spice of life. Spice.

  He pulled his car into his parents’ driveway and bounded out of the car,
sniffing at the air as he pulled open the front door. His mouth watered. His mother was a phenomenal cook.

  “There better be some fucking babka left!” Danil hollered as he kicked off his shoes and tossed his briefcase into the closet. He untucked his shirt as he walked into the crowded dining room. His three brothers and mother and father were all around the table, eating and laughing.

  “When you snooze is when you lose,” Emin, the second oldest of the Malashovik boys said in his thick Slavic accent. He hadn’t bothered with English for a long time after they’d immigrated from Belarus, so in many ways, he was still learning. Luckily for him, he was an artist, and his clients thought the limited English thing gave him an exotic flair.

  “It’s ‘you snooze, you lose,’ Emin,” Danil corrected. His brothers all rolled their eyes, very used to Danil correcting their English at this point.

  Danil inched around the table that filled the room almost to the walls, toward his mother and father. Both of them kissed their son square on the lips. Katya Malashovik, dark-haired and short, eyes like a quarter past midnight, slid a slice of babka off her own plate for her son.

  “I saved that for you, Danishka,” she told him in Belarusian. His parents understood English, but didn’t often use it in the house, no matter how much Danil insisted they needed to practice.

  “Ah, Maciaryszki,” Danil said, using the pet name for his mother. “My favorite parent.”

  “Hey!” Ilya Malashovik, Danil’s father, barked, his shock of white hair falling messily into his eyes, his wiry frame puffing up with indignation. “Who birthed you and carried you for nine months before that?” He pounded his chest pridefully. “Oh, wait. That was your mother as well.”

  The boys all laughed, as they were intended to do. It was impossible not to have a soft spot for the unstoppable swagger and silliness of Ilya Malashovik. They may not have been able to vocalize it, but all the Malashovik boys were striving to be half the man that their hard-working, soft-hearted father was.