Text copyright ©2018 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Latin Goddess Press, Inc.. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Paranormal Dating Agency remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Latin Goddess Press, Inc., or their affiliates or licensors.
For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds
Roar Britannia: Think of England
Paranormal Dating Agency Kindle World
Rebecca Fairfax
Roar Britannia: Think of England
copyright ©2018 by Rebecca Fairfax.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Milly Taiden. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Paranormal Dating Agency series remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Milly Taiden, or their affiliates or licensors.
For more information on Kindle Worlds: http://www.amazon.com/kindleworlds
Dedication
To the amazingly talented Milly Taiden, for her fascinating PDA world, with thanks for letting me play in it.
To Dr Melissa Bone, for all her expert help in the creation of Dr Eleanor Maxwell.
To my wonderful daughter, who has the patience of a saint.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Charles, for providing the twin gryphons that started the idea.
Thanks to Kelly Ann Martin, for her excellence.
Thanks to Liz Borino, for her eagle editing and proofing eye.
Roar Britannia: Think of England
Two unbelievably gorgeous gryphon shifters, one Ellie… You do the math.
Dr Eleanor Maxwell has spent her career working in shifter integration, so when a new shifter-human initiative is launched, she naturally agrees to lead it. But that’s before she knows it involves bringing Gerri Wilder to the UK to make matches between prominent shifters and humans.
Before Ellie can protest, she’s matched with not one but two devastatingly handsome and powerful beasts—identical twin gryphons Ludo and Jago Calter.
The aristocratic brothers don’t give a damn about serving their country by leading the way in this new initiative: they know Ellie’s their mate and they’re determined to claim her. They’ll start with this date, this match, whatever, sure, but after that, all bets are off.
Ellie is from a very different world to the wealthy, overwhelming twins—heck, she’s from a different species—and while she’s determined not to let them have their way in everything, she’s powerless to stop them from having her…
Chapter One
“Knock knock?”
“Aflie! Or rather, Your Highness!” Prime Minister Katharine Milburn got to her feet to greet the familiar face at the door of her first-floor office.
“Aunty Kat!” The young prince of the realm bounded in and hugged Katharine. As sad and painful as it was to even contemplate the death of the current ageing monarch, Alfie was tipped to take the throne next, with the crown skipping over his almost as ageing father. “Not interrupting, am I?”
“Nothing I can’t set aside for you.” Katharine smiled at the People’s Prince, or so the media dubbed him, whom she’d known since boyhood. Tall, rangy, with a shock of tousled straw-blond hair that never would lie flat, his wide-set blue-green eyes still peered curiously at the world he bounced around in.
“Tea? I’ve got that slimy green stuff you like.” She shuddered as she offered, wondering if they could slip out for a decent cuppa or java. They could perhaps drink it taking a quick stroll around the edge of leafy-green St James’s Park just across from the end of the road.
Then she frowned. “Hmm. I can see you want to harangue me about something. What is it this time? More banning of plastic? Improved cycle lanes? A better air quality plan?”
“Shifters. Shifters’ integration measures.”
“Shifters’ integ— Being a shifter is now a protected characteristic in the new Equality Act! Legislation covers them in regard to healthcare and social care, education providers, employment, government departments, local authorities…”
“I’ve got an idea for even greater visibility and acceptance.”
The brightness in Alfie’s voice made Katharine want to groan. She gestured to the sofa, but the prince preferred to pace around the room in his usual wind-up-toy manner, ruffling the antique red and gold Persian rug and stirring a faint rose scent from the potpourri with his speed.
“I know we could always do more.” She’d been trying her best with the issue, as had the United Kingdom as a whole, ever since shifters had revealed their existence here. Taking a leaf from their US brethren’s book, they’d put an end to speculation and suspicion about their possible existence and shown themselves. Had come out, as the term went. Which was only the first step, of course. For them as well as for her government. Her government, that was taking a daily battering for the way they were handling the issue, no matter what they did.
“What if prominent families of shifters took the spotlight, became more of the face of the issue, to make up for having hidden in plain sight for so long and being seen as having mocked non-shifters all along?”
“By prominent shifter families, I take it you mean aristocratic families, with room to hide away in their large estates? And by mocking us, you mean they practically flaunted their true nature via the animals or mythical beasts on their family crests or shields— lions, unicorns, cockatrices, lampagos, phoenixes…dragons—”
“Oh, not us,” Alfie broke in hastily. “Father and Grandfather…well, you know how the family is about discretion.”
Katharine hadn’t presumed the royal family, their longevity explained by their being dragon shifters, would suddenly volunteer to be the face of shifter awareness and acceptance. But maybe Alfie had a point. That section of society was currently being excoriated in the press for their wealth and privilege having made it easier for them to survive than their fellow, less-well-placed shifters, whom they’d ignored or exploited. Not much change in the shifter vs the non world then. Hmm. Perhaps those families should be the ones to blaze the trail.
“Not just stepping up, but by leading the way in inter-species relations! More specifically, in matches between shifters and humans!”
Katharine did let a small groan escape at that. Sounded like Alfie had been in contact with some of the more radical ideas on the subject that flooded the media, providing fodder for entire studios of talking heads and panel discussions and article after essay after column in newspapers and journals. She’d been reading one only that morning, that young woman expert you couldn’t get away from. And wasn’t there something planned for later today?
Then a word caught her ear. “Matches? Why does that ring a bell?”
“Because, ta-da!” Alfie sang out, indicating the door.
Nothing happened.
“Ta-da!” he yelled, louder, then stalked to the door and threw it open wider.
“Cool your jets,” came a woman’s voice. An American woman’s voice, seconds before a woman strolled in. “I got a little lost, wandering around to look at the décor.”
Katharine could understand that—Number Ten Downing Street had almost a hundred rooms and was in fact three houses linked together by long, narrow corridors. The woman entering the room was petit
e, not even five foot, and immaculately dressed from her gorgeous hair right down to her Jimmy Choos, her understated flair bringing tears to Katharine’s eyes. She gave a quick pat at her honey-blonde coiffeur. Still bouffant, not flattened at the back. Phew. She straightened her pants suit.
“Aunty Kat, this is Gerri Wilder.” Alfie did the introductions. “She’s an expert in making matches for shifters and shifters and humans!”
“We can’t force relationships on people!” Katharine hissed.
The tiny woman laughed, throwing back her head and freeing her long white lock of hair that contrasted with the black of the rest. “Oh, I never have to force anyone or anything.”
“Gerri just feels when matches are right,” Alfie explained. “And she’s never wrong. I think it’s a great idea and—”
He broke off at the sudden din from below. As much as Katharine loved this room, it being street-side had its disadvantages, noise-wise.
“Antis and separatists!” Alfie called over his shoulder, peering out of the opened window into the spring afternoon.
The protestors’ chants and shouts got louder as the anti-brigade neared the door, no doubt to hand in a petition. Had removing the barriers that used to block of Downing Street, to signal a more open, in-touch and less bunker mentality, been a good idea? Katharine, yet again, second-guessed her decision.
She and Gerri joined Alfie, peeping out over the gathering crowd. Plenty of media, of course. “It’s not all bad,” she assured her visitor. “That group there is from the new Shifter’s Coalition—it’s made up of both shifters and humans. They’re all for them, as are the vast majority of us.”
“Hmm.” Gerri kicked a footstool over to stand on for a better view. She looked at the people below and narrowed her eyes. She pointed at a young woman at the head of a small group, pushing her glasses up her nose and talking earnestly to a reporter. Her caramel-brown hair tumbled from its clip and her pendant necklace swung with the force of her delivery to the camera. “And that would be…?”
“Oh, that Maxwell woman.” Katharine stretched to swipe a magazine from a side table. “Dr Eleanor Maxwell. Lawyer, social scientist, expert on shifters. Consultant to the Home Office. Works for a shifter NGO.” She rolled her eyes. “The media loves her. Well, look at her! Young, pretty… You can’t get away from her.”
“I see.” Gerri nodded. Her brow creased as she watched the woman turn to her party, try to bring members forward to the cameras.
Shifters, Katharine supposed.
“Well, Your Highness, you brought me here to make theoretical match between two unknown parties. I was coming to London, anyway, for Fashion Week, and I like a challenge…”
“What’s that thing there?” Alfie leaned so far out of the window at the shrill of a police siren that both Katharine and Gerri made a grab for the back of his trousers. “I can’t see what it is, on the front of that police van?” He pointed at the advancing van that was causing the groups of people to separate and jostle and push at the Coalition, which in turn made them shove into the shifter group. “Looks like a box, with a pipe and a nozzle on?” he shouted above the whop-whee-whop.
“Oh, no!” Katharine banged on the glass and signalled frantically—but she was too late. Whatever rookie was operating the new mini water cannon had become spooked by the surges and shouts of the crowds and turned the jet of water on the people. “Idiot!” Katharine yelled above the shrieks and cries, grimacing as those nearest to the jet took the brunt. “It would be bloody reporters they hit! Oh, and shifters!” Within seconds, confusion and chaos reigned, screams, shouts and screeches its soundtrack.
“A blind match between parties even I don’t know,” Gerri mused, eyeing the soaked-through female figure below. Her gaze sharpened, as if she saw things Katharine and Alfie didn’t. “There might just be two difficulties with that.”
Scuffles broke out, with shouting, yelling people trying to exit Downing Street in both directions, some rushing towards Whitehall and some running for Horse Guards Road. Two figures, however, weren’t trying to flee. It was impossible to see them clearly in the melee, but it seemed as if two tall dark-haired men leaped from out of nowhere to surround Ellie, sheltering and protecting her. One brushed her dripping-wet hair back from her face and the other replaced her glasses on her face, despite a shrieking Ellie trying to bat both men away.
“Did I say two difficulties? Maybe not.” Gerri smiled down at the three figures, her look unreadable. She snapped her fingers. “Have them brought to me.”
Katharine was startled to find herself scrambling to do Gerri’s bidding, to enact the prince’s latest crazy scheme which could just be the saving of her government—currently, disastrously, slipping lower and lower in the polls. “Not up here!” she directed the Number Ten guards via walkie talkie. “This carpet is new,” she excused herself to Gerri. “It’s murder, trying to get a budget for doing up this place. You can’t imagine… Outside,” she continued, depressing the button on her comm to talk to the sergeant. “The terrace, if you’d be so good.”
At first, Ellie thought she was seeing double in that horrible, frightening turn of the moment when events spilled over into chaos and danger. It was surprising to be seeing anything, though, when the force of the water blasted at them had knocked her glasses from her face, to tangle in her necklace or her cardigan buttons or pockets. The jet almost knocked her over.
“Ellie!” shrieked a voice from somewhere behind her. Justin, she thought, only to be cut off by the crowd, the size and mass buffeting her. Whether she was surrounded by antis or separatists, she didn’t know. All she did know was figures swooping, cleaving through the air, no; stalking, cutting a swathe through the ground, to reach her, one on either side, reaching for her, swatting at her. No; that was her, slapping them away, trying to stop them from touching her, stop them…restoring her glasses to her eyes and sweeping her long hair from her face as their bodies sheltered her from being battered by the crowd. Oh.
Suddenly she was warmer, well, less wet, as not one but two jackets were draped over her shoulders and her arms threaded through the sleeves. And even when police, riot police, with batons and whistles, waded into the crowd and began pulling people out, the figures, the…men stuck to her, encircled her, so Ellie found herself swept off with them, into Number Ten, across its checkered floor, down some steps and onto an open, empty terrace.
“Say nothing and sign nothing until you speak to a lawyer,” Ellie cautioned whoever who had been placed there with her in holding, although she was glad of the quiet and peace after the tumult of the street. She took off her glasses to clean them—she needed to see—and when she put them on again and got a good look at the two detained with her, she simply stared. She definitely stared, and she must have shivered, because one of them banged on the French window they’d just been hustled through and demanded a towel or blanket.
Because the men were gorgeous. Tall, lithe, yet broad-shouldered, they exuded power and confidence and privilege, from the tops of their heads, currently plastered dark with water, down their broad chests, currently visible through their soaked shirts—because she wore both their suit jackets—to their long, lean legs. She returned to their chests, to the white shirts clinging to defined pecs, to dark nipples visible through clinging white cotton, to hints of springy chest hair. They were simply—
“Monozygotic.” She pointed at them, from one stunning tall, tanned man with curly dark hair and beautiful eyes to another.
One laughed. “Most people just go with twins.”
“Or identical twins,” the other added. “Thank you.” This to someone inside who passed him a blanket, which he draped over Ellie.
“Thank you,” she echoed. “But you’re not identical. Your eyes are jungle green and you have a tiny freckle there.” She touched her finger to near his right eye, then almost exclaimed at the heat and life pulsing under his skin.
“I’m Jago,” he murmured, trapping her finger, her hand, where it was.<
br />
“And me?” his brother’s low voice broke in, reshaping their interaction.
“Sky blue. With a dimple there.” And again—without conscious thought that this was no way to behave, and certainly no way she ever behaved—she touched a finger to the man’s cheek, perhaps, she told herself, to see if he too carried the same life force, strong and vital, and if she could feel it beat beneath her fingertip. He did. He caught her hand between both of his, just as she was standing between them, oblivious to her surroundings, to the people watching through the glass windows—everything.
“What’s your name?” she whispered, reluctant to break the moment, the spell that held her there, in the middle of the two males, but she wanted to know.
“Ludo.” His voice was similar to his brother’s, rich and full, lazy and confident. “Who are you?”
“Dr Eleanor Maxwell?”
It wasn’t her voice. It belonged to the man bouncing out onto the terrace. A…very well-known man. One who shook her hand when she should have curtseyed, shouldn’t she, and who was greeting her rescuers with backslaps and mock punches.
“I see you’ve met the terrible twins. Ludo Calter, Earl of Haliford and The Lord Jago Ca—”
“We don’t use titles.” Jago scowled at Prince Alfred.
“And you’re the prime minister!” Ellie felt stupid, shaking hands with the woman emerging onto the flagstones. “Well, of course, you would be. This is your house.” And then felt even more stupid.
“And Ms Gerri—”
“Wilder.” Ellie nodded at the final member of their group. “I know who you are, of course. I’ve lived in several shifter communities in the States, doing research.”
She thought she understood: she’d banged her head somehow, in the confusion outside Number Ten, and this was all a hallucination. So she nodded more through the prime minister’s and prince’s apologies for her soaking, nodded again at the suggestion they walk a little in this pretty L-shaped garden, with its green grass and colourful flowerbeds all hidden behind the high walls, and nodded harder as she summarized her work with shifters to the legendary Ms Gerri Wilder.
Paranormal Dating Agency: Think of England (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Roar Britannia Book 1) Page 1
