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Wild Ride
Preston Walker
An MM Mpreg Shifter Bundle
Book List
Wild Ride
Stealing His Heart
Unexpected Love
Uriel’s Forest
Regal Bloodlines
Wild Ride
Preston Walker
© 2017
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.
This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).
Chapter 1
“It’ll look good on your application,” were the words of encouragement that Bo Everett heard every single year of his high school career. Sound advice, if it hadn’t come from his so-called crazy uncle. So, Bo ignored the idea of volunteering until one day, he had graduated and suddenly had no idea what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
For most omega shapeshifters, that wasn’t a problem. Someday soon he would stumble across his perfect mate and they would have an instant connection. His mate would be an alpha, of course—either male or female—who would provide for him and take care of him so that he didn’t have to get a job. Until that happened, most omega shifters tended to stick close to their family and work for them; alternatively, one of them might get him a job with a friend, or someone who owed them a favor. However, omegas were always kept nearby. They were the lesser half, the domestics.
The Everett family was the exception to this norm. Not only were they shifters, they were wolf shifters. Their pack was a close-knit unit of family, and family’s family. A guy like Everett would normally be kept well within the center of things, a homebody. But the Everetts prided themselves on not being so old-fashioned. All wolf packs had their weaker members and all shifter groups had their omegas. That didn’t mean they were less important, or should be limited.
As a result, Bo had enjoyed far more freedom than others like himself. Though there were sure to be pack members within reach, they let him do as he pleased as long as it didn’t cause harm to anyone. He was almost equal with some betas in fact,, and the only thing stronger than a beta was an alpha. He could have his freedom. He could have his career.
If only he knew what that should have been...
So, sighing heavily at that realization in the middle of his graduation party, Bo resolved to do some researching about all the different volunteer opportunities in Seattle.
Most of them were downright boring. There were the usual community-service types of volunteering: picking up trash along the side of the road like a convict or sitting in a stuffy room with elderly humans to listen to their dumb stories. He could sit with the council of elders and have a more meaningful experience. No— that just wasn’t going to do it.
Then he came across a single, solitary advertisement that had been posted online quite a few days ago. Next Generation of EMTs Wanted.
Curiosity prickled inside his chest. EMT? Like, paramedic people? He didn’t have any training for that, but he clicked on the link nevertheless.
One thing led to another, as all things do. As it turned out, the position was on a volunteer basis but with a possibility for a permanent paid position. It seemed like there was always a shortage of paramedics this time of year, as the current workers all moved on to different positions. Training would be provided for a discounted fee, six months of classes—at the minimum—to reach a basic level.
Bo wouldn’t have been so tempted if the fee for the classes hadn’t been at such a discount. 90%. That was the kind of discount that made a person buy far more than they needed. Who could resist?
Certainly not him. He had gone to the council the very next day and asked for their permission. They’d granted it, and even forwarded him the amount of the fee.
As he went to sign up for the program, Bo realized he felt...happy. He was about to go out there and do something! And since the turnaround for the program seemed so high, he wouldn’t feel bad about quitting it if he decided he didn’t like it.
He never would have imagined that in three years, he would still be in the same place—but that was exactly what happened.
Bo stood, leaning against the wall of the small dispatch room where he was awaiting any sort of emergency call at all. Some days were slower than others, with only a handful of calls throughout his whole twelve-hour shift; others were jam-packed with action, and he was hardly able to finish helping one patient before being forced to move on to the next. This seemed like it was going to be one of the slower days, since no call had come in from Emergency Services yet. The other EMTs and paramedics who were going to be his crew for the next half-day were leisurely examining their rig—the ambulance—and checking that they had all the supplies they were supposed to, as well as making sure that the equipment worked.
It usually did, but there had been that one day when they discovered a hole worn in one of the oxygen masks. It was small, almost unnoticeable, but just big enough to cause a problem. Shortly after replacing it, they went out on a call to a man who’d had a heart attack and needed help breathing. It could have been disastrous if they hadn’t checked everything, slowly starving their patient of the air he needed to breathe.
That was why it was more important than ever to take advantage of the slow days like these. Of course, someone had to man the phone, and it was his turn.
Bo shifted around in his chair and watched through the window from the phone station, looking out to the garage as the other members of his crew ran through the checklist. He itched to be out there doing the same, but part of working in a job like this was learning to trust the others around you to do things properly. They all had the same basic training. No matter whether he liked them or not as people, they were part of the same lifeline as he was and he had to trust them.
He shifted again and looked at the clock. It was half-past midnight. The night was still so young yet.
Turning his head back towards the garage to watch the others, he took count of them all, as he always did. Since they worked for a company called Envision Healthcare, rather than for the hospital itself, who worked with who tended to vary from night to night as schedules were adjusted and rotated. The pool of workers was on the small side, but large enough for it to have taken quite a while before he met everyone. Now he knew them all intimately enough to know their dynamics even before they did.
None of the others were shifters tonight, although there were one or two others who worked for Envision.
There was Jason, a middle-aged balding man who did most of the driving. He used to be a taxi driver—or so he said—and Eric, who was more or less going to be the team leader because of his twenty years of experience. They were both paramedics.
There was a newer EMT named Hannah, who was steadily losing that sparkle to her eye that most new worker
s had. Nearly all of them came in with visions of glamour and heroism, dreams of saving lives, but it was hard to keep up that sort of illusion when on most calls, you were simply handing out allergy medication, or offering stitches and a band-aid. Not all calls were life-threatening, and most could be rather dull. Those who came for excitement either adjusted or left.
As far as he knew, Bo was the only one left out of all fifteen who had taken the classes with him.
The only other member of the team was Bo himself, who had since taken the second round of classes to become a second-tier EMT. He was allowed to do more on calls and had the freedom to act on his own and make his own decisions immediately.
However, if he ever wanted to take the next step after this, he would need to apply to the appropriate medical school and actually become a student. As much as he had come to have an appreciation for this job, he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it for the rest of his life.
Or did he?
Bo groaned inwardly as he came to the same-old crossroads that had been puzzling him for over a year now. The phone was still blessedly silent, meaning he had plenty of time to overthink this all on his own. Was there even any point going any further into this field? After all, it was a rare shapeshifter who never found their mate. He had to be prepared for that sudden turn of fate, to find himself attached to another person who might very well be a traditionalist and insist that he stop working to maintain their household.
He wasn’t exactly opposed to the idea of finding a mate and settling down to have children together, but until he knew something about whoever his mate was going to be, he couldn’t rightfully make any sort of decision.
Another sigh pulled from his lips, and just then the phone started to ring urgently at his elbow.
A soft yelp of surprise left his lips as his body twitched, but he was already acting on instinct and had the phone pressed against his ear immediately. “This is EMT-I Bo Everett, what’s the emergency?”
“Hi there Bo,” a calm voice said into his ear; the 911 dispatcher’s voice was as monotone and soothing as ever. “We just got several calls in at once about a motorcycle crash out on the corner of 5th and Wentworth Drive. One guy says it’s a large stereotypical biker-type man and that he’s banged up pretty badly. Bleeding and not really conscious. Another said it looked as though he lost control of his bike because of the rain.”
“Got it,” Bo said firmly, glancing out the window to see that the rest of the crew was waiting for him to get to them with news of what was going on and where they were to be headed. “5th and Wentworth Drive, motorcycle crash with possible concussion and open wounds.”
“You got it,” the dispatcher confirmed. “I’ve got the witnesses on the line so I’ll tell them you’re on the way.”
The call ended and Bo dropped the phone back down on its base. Leaping up to his feet, he charged around from the call station to the door nearby that led out to the garage. The others were already piling into the ambulance, leaving only one of the rear doors open. Already, the wheels of the rig were turning as Jason jammed his foot on the gas.
Bo didn’t mind. He was the fastest of them all; he had always been one of the fastest for his entire life due to his wolf nature, and he caught up to the team before they had picked up any speed at all. Eric simply leaned out of the way as Bo leapt up inside, shutting the other door and latching it firmly behind him.
“Where we headed to?” Jason said over his shoulder as he cut across the parking spots of the near-empty garage. His voice was low and rough, mostly due to the two packs a day that he smoked like a bald, shiny-headed chimney.
Bo relayed the information to them, and Eric gave an impatient sight. “Are you kidding me? Who crashes in this weather anymore?”
“Must be an out-of-towner,” Hannah ventured cautiously from where she sat in the front passenger seat, earning her a slight nod of approval.
“Might be. You know anything else about this, Bo?”
He shook his head calmly, although in truth his heart was already starting to pound just a little with excitement. “Nope. I already said all I know.”
Eric sighed. “Ah, well. I guess we’ll find out when we get there, won’t we? Or not. That much isn’t our business.”
Bo tuned him out at that point, because the paramedic was more repeating the words to Hannah to remind her of that fact, instead of trying to continue the conversation. Hannah was mellowing down since Bo first worked with her, but she still didn’t quite understand that an ambulance played a single very specific part in things. They showed up, tended to wounds, offered a ride, or didn’t; any other details, such as the circumstances leading up to the emergency, or what happened afterwards, was none of their concern. It was too easy to get obsessed or overly invested in one particular person. Even deaths were something you had to mourn and then almost immediately get over.
You would go crazy if you didn’t.
Jason had the whirling red-and-blue lights turned on as they left the hospital grounds, but not the siren as of yet because the nature of the situation wasn’t the most pressing in the whole world. The guy wasn’t in death throes, apparently. By the time they arrived, the police probably would have already set up to block the road for them.
Bo leaned back against the wall, feet planted firmly against the bumping and rocking floor of the ambulance. Jason picked up speed, swerving around corners and cutting into traffic using sharp bursts of acceleration, causing the rear of the vehicle to jostle around in all sorts of random ways. The equipment shook around, metal rattling and loose pieces here and there rolling back and forth in their containers. He almost liked the sound of it all, the rhythm of urgency threaded through the steady thrum of the powerful engine.
Even after three years, he still found himself getting tense with anticipation. He imagined that even Jason and Eric still felt that rush, although they were far better at hiding it than he was. It was just the adrenaline, the wondering of what exactly they would find. It didn’t exactly block his thinking. In fact, he thought even faster about all the possible things he might need to treat the crashed motorcyclist.
In only ten minutes, they pulled onto the proper block. A thin drizzle of rain fell from the overcast Seattle sky, smudging the blazing lights of the police cruisers parked on both sides of the street. The officers were out, their blue uniforms vivid smudged against the rain-dark concrete. Waving their arms and shouting, they held back a curious crowd of onlookers.
Jason slammed on the brakes and Bo clutched at one of the stretcher boards latched to the wall of the ambulance, the only time he had needed to hang onto something for the whole journey. His keen eyes cut across the scene as the driver swerved around through the thin cleared line that the police had marked for them with orange-striped traffic cones. Slumped against the nearby fire hydrant was a man.
Bo’s eyes widened a little bit. The 911 lady wasn’t wrong. He’s huge.
The man was definitely gigantic, with a broad chest and wide shoulders that strained the leather of his dampened jacket. Otherwise, there wasn’t much information about him that the omega could gather just by looking at him. He was slumped over, head down with his soaked hair hanging in front of his face.
Except...
He voiced it out loud. “Look, Eric. Blood on the ground, diluted by the rain.”
The puddle beneath the man was vaguely reddish, and not just because of the police lights.
Eric nodded. “I saw it too. Good eyes, as always. Let’s get going.”
The moment Jason pulled to a stop, Eric threw the back doors of the ambulance wide open. Bo tossed him one of the basic medical kits, taking another for himself as they both hopped out of the vehicle.
Hannah followed, a little slower. Eric didn’t even look at her as he spoke. “Get ready with the stretchers, Hannah. Just in case.”
“Right.”
Jason stayed in the ambulance, gaze sharp as he watched the others. His job as driver was part security, part speed. If he
stepped out, it became that much easier for someone to potentially break into the ambulance and steal it. It also cut down on the time necessary to get going again.
A police officer met them as the omega and the paramedic jogged the short distance towards the patient. “You guys up to date?”
“We are,” Eric said, his voice clipped and professional. “Is he drunk?”
If there was alcohol in the man’s system, their options for medicating him were severely limited.
“Nope,” the officer replied as they grew nearer. “He looks pretty damn aware of everything. Kind of depressed, though. Mighta been a suicide attempt, not sure. Says his name is Ryker. Pretty cooperative, surprisingly.”
“Thanks.”
The police officer nodded and broke away from them, turning abruptly to rejoin the others.
Bo stopped abruptly as a very distinct smell struck his nose. Eric was still moving on and speaking, dropping down to his knees to break into his kit, but Bo couldn’t move.
The smell was diluted beneath the copper reek of blood, even further covered by the wetness of rain, but it was quite distinct all the same: wild and musky and free.
The man was a shifter, clearly. A shifter, but not only that: an alpha. An omega like Bo could have almost hidden under the barrage of all these scents, but an alpha’s scent was too strong to be covered entirely by anything.
Bo took another deep sniff of the damp air, and confirmed any remaining suspicion. An alpha and a shifter; what was left to make this situation even more of a coincidence?
That the patient should be a wolf, of course.
“Bo! Dammit, don’t freeze!”
He snapped back to himself and looked around quickly, blushing at his own incompetence. What the hell is wrong with me? I’ve seen other shifters before! You dummy!
Luckily, it didn’t seem like anyone but Eric had noticed his incompetence.
Wild Ride: An M/M Shifter Mpreg Romance Bundle Page 1
