Wild Ride: An M/M Shifter Mpreg Romance Bundle

by Preston Walker

  “I’ll be right out here if you need me,” Ryker said encouragingly. “You can do this.”

  “Leave!” Bo roared, shaking harder. Sweat covered his entire body, soaking his hair.

  Ryker winced and went out to wait in the living room. Mates could never be in the room when a pup was being born. It was simply tradition.

  Pacing back and forth endlessly, Ryker listened to the terrible shrieks and cries coming from the bedroom. He hated it. He hated all of it. Was it too late to go back and use a condom, to spare his love this pain?

  Then, just as alarmingly, Bo’s pained shrieks cut away and were replaced by a high, thin wail.

  Ryker burst back into the room, breath lodged in his chest, just in time to see the doctor handing a small bundle of flesh and stickiness to the omega. “Congratulations,” she said cheerfully. “It’s a little girl!”

  “A girl!” Ryker gasped, his mouth dropping open. A complete change had come over Bo. The omega was calm, almost hypnotized as he looked down at the child in his arms. Holding his breath, Ryker went over to take the first of countless looks at his daughter.

  Her head was elongated awkwardly, and she was covered in birthing fluids. Her eyes were mere angry slits, but the color peeking out from between pressed eyelids was as blue as could be. A thin fluff of pale hair was slicked against the top of her head. She was chubby and wrinkled and mottled red.

  And she was the most beautiful thing Ryker had ever seen. Everything about her was raw and new, and he was suddenly overcome with the realization that right here was a completely blank slate. She had no idea what anything was, or how to think or feel. He was going to watch her grow, and see how the world would shape her.

  It’s a miracle. I could do this again. And again and again.

  “Ryker?”

  He looked down at his mate, who had tears in his eyes. “Yes?”

  “Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “She is,” Ryker agreed, reaching down and stroking the angry lines of his daughter’s face with one finger. “Looks like her mom.”

  From behind him, the doctor let out a snort of amusement.

  “Do you think she’ll be an alpha or an omega?”

  Ryker looked down at the child and tried to imagine her grown. More than likely, she would be an omega. Females did tend to be. However, that wasn’t a sure thing. And the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he didn’t want to know. “I don’t know,” he said softly, “but I know she’ll be perfect no matter what.”

  “I think we should name her Merissa,” Bo said.

  Ryker gave a sad smile. “It’s a nice tribute. Merissa it is.”

  And now, only now, did he know that all the difficulties were over. He had a family, and his pack of bikers was slowly growing and gaining new members—some of which were coming from Bo’s old pack. The past was in the past. The future was now.

  Stealing His Heart

  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 One

  Crime was somewhat similar to cutting and eating a pineapple, in Houston Roosevelt’s experienced eyes. The outside could be stripped away to leave the sweetness beneath, the ripe flesh that dripped with goodness. However, there was always going to be that indestructible core within, casting aside the favor of the illusion that it was never there to begin with.

  Being a cop in New York City, Houston knew otherwise. The city was fraught with bitter cores, and the heavy presence of first aid responders only gave the illusion of that safety, that good sweetness. Really, there wasn’t much to be done for the core. Each one that was cleared away was present again somewhere else. It was a battle no one could win.

  “Maybe I’m losing it,” Houston grunted, as he stared out the tinted window of his police cruiser. He was parked in an area where people liked to speed through, drifting rapidly around the corner while completely ignoring both signs that called for a lowering of the speed limit and the one that forewarned the driver of an upcoming stop sign. It was a good place to try and meet his quota. Good work, if always a bit boring and untruthful. Well, perhaps untruthful wasn’t the best word for it; after all, the signs were there. However, Houston was completely aware of the fact that he was taking advantage of the way the city worked. This was merely a bad place to drive through. He was doing exactly what all the others did, culling away the bad motorists by giving them tickets, while being incapable of doing anything about the root of the problem.

  Houston lowered his window and pulled out a packet of cigarettes from his front breast pocket, grimacing a little at the grimy feel of his uniform. The stench of car exhaust and burning oil never left the city, filtering into homes and clothes until everything bore a constant vague reek. Even the sky was colored with emissions, tinged dirty brown like a truck that had been off-roading for quite some time. Some stains could never come clean, no matter how furiously a person might wash and scrub.

  Leaning out the window now, he placed one of the cigarettes between his lips and then leaned over awkwardly to fumble through his glove compartment for a lighter. His holstered pistol pressed uncomfortably against his hip as he did so, and he hastened his search for the lighter before finding it and straightening up. It was one of the flat, metallic square ones. A good one, not like those cheap colorful cylinders that came in four packs in the checkout lane of Walmart. It almost seemed a waste, or ironic or something—Houston was under no impression that he was good with words—to be using such a great lighter on such terrible cigarettes. They were basic menthols, the cheapest trash he could find. And his reasoning for that wasn’t so much addiction as it was a constant need to be doing something with his hands. He’d always been a fidgety kid, getting into trouble simply because he couldn’t hold still. Even in the orphanage, where the entire church grounds were accessible to a young shapeshifter with a sense of daring, he often felt like he was incapable of moving about as much as he liked.

  Having something to do with himself, such as smoking or cooking his own meals from scratch, helped lessen the feeling. It had also somewhat lessened with age, as he raged through puberty and emerged into adulthood in what he almost would have called a stable state of mind, but it was by no means gone.

  And sitting in a cruiser all day brought back all those memories of sitting in a stifling hot church pew in the middle of summer, shredding booklets into little curls of paper that littered the thin carpet beneath his feet.

  Puffing on his cigarette, he kept one eye on the traffic and mourned the fact that it was day.

  Houston was a shapeshifter; a wolf to be exact. He was a lone, dominant male with superhuman abilities of strength and speed that simply begged to be put to good use. A few others in the force were also shifters, and the higher-ups who had to be aware of their presence. In fact, they often made use of those abilities. Still, NYC was not shifter-friendly. NYC wasn’t anything friendly. Therefore, he and the others were only allowed to operate in animal form under the cover of darkness, or in very dire circumstances.

  Watching for speeders and stop-sign-runners in the middle of the afternoon was exactly none of those things. It drove him crazy to be so still. When he joined the force at the tender age of eighteen, the same day he left the orphanage, he never would have believed anyone if they had told him that ninety percent of being a cop was
sitting and watching and waiting for something to happen. The other ten percent, the pure action, was fantastic though. He craved it, lived for the chance to actually make a difference, to affect something. It made everything else worth it.

  Still, he was a wolf. Wolves were patient creatures when they were running. They could pursue a fleeing herd of prey for days on end, wearing the target down. They just weren’t much for waiting for that to happen.

  So, as Houston finished his cigarette and stubbed it out in his ash tray, he fidgeted around in the seat and immediately lit up another one.

  Suddenly, the radio on his dashboard gave an abrupt cough of static before going silent. Houston nearly dropped his cigarette, sliding his eyes toward the cheap device when it gave another little burst of white noise. Reluctantly putting out a perfectly good cig, he reached for the mouthpiece and pressed the button to speak into it. “This is cruiser eighty-six. What was that? Didn’t quite copy. Over.”

  “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

  He had long since stopped groaning at the joke. Over a decade now, and the others still treated it like it was brand new. You had to do that on the force, finding amusement in the simple places, or else you would go crazy from all of it.

  So, even though he rolled his eyes, he also smiled and let it enter his voice when he replied. “Okay, Neil Armstrong,” he grunted. “What’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a 10–30 in progress down at the Kay Jewelers on 136 West 34th Street.10–13.”

  Houston nodded a little to himself as the team dispatcher rattled off his stream of seemingly nonsense numbers. A 10–30 was a robbery. Someone was robbing a jewelry store. How cliché. And not even a particularly good one. A 10–13 meant an officer was already on the scene and requesting backup.

  He rolled up his window again and turned on his lights, feeling a familiar shiver run down his spine as faint beams of red and blue began to spiral around his cruiser. Pulling out into traffic without looking, he blazed on by the same stop sign that he had been watching carefully only moments ago. “Why a 10–13? Armed?”

  “Negative,” the dispatch replied, sounding slightly distant as though they were leaning over to look at something. “The situation seems uncertain. I don’t have a lot of concrete information here.”

  That didn’t seem good. “10–4,” Houston replied before dropping the mouthpiece of the radio and focusing on his driving. Robberies were a commonplace occurrence and some of them could be dangerous, but it was typically just a punk kid carrying around a Nerf gun spray-painted black while he chugged whiskey from behind the counter and gave away too much information to his captive audience. Something like this, where the bulk of information was unknown for whatever reason, was far more exciting of a prospect.

  The store was only a ten-minute drive from his current position. He made it in four, swerving almost sideways onto the proper street. Almost immediately, he could see that this was no ordinary robbery.

  The windows of the Kay Jewelers had been broken, but he could tell from the direction of the spray of broken glass that the breaking had been done from within. Enormous shards and full, jagged-edged panes of window lay all around the storefront. A curious crowd pressed against the limits of where they should have been, phones out and flashing, cameras recording eagerly as the officers already on the scene struggled to keep them under control.

  Houston’s lip curled with disgust as he parked hurriedly and then stepped out of the vehicle. He liked people well enough, which was why he became a police officer in the first place so that he could protect them, but crowds sucked. Good people went crazy in crowds. It was such a damn shame too.

  Sirens wailed faintly from the inside of the store, the burglar alarms loudly proclaiming what everyone in the area already knew. The raised voices that all demanded to be paid attention to were almost lost beneath the din of the crowd. Houston blocked it all out as he strode closer to the store, shoving his way through the thinnest part of the crowd to get to his nearest brother. He tapped the man on the shoulder.

  The other cop whirled around, a snarl of warning already on his lips before he recognized someone else on the force. “Dammit...” The cop read Houston’s badge quickly. “...Houston. You scared the shit out of me!”

  Houston shrugged and then rounded on the crowd, spreading his arms and striding toward them with his most intimidating expression. A snarl curled on the edges of his thin, pale lips, and his gray eyes flashed the color of steel. “Back it up!” he snapped. “Give us some room!”

  Even though he could tell through scent that all the people in front of him were only humans, he was still an alpha. He was a huge man; an immense man with a body that he proudly maintained. Everything about him spoke of power, from the way he looked to the musky pheromones pouring from his glands. They might not be able to smell it, but their brains were aware of it all the same. When he came at them, they backed away in a heartbeat.

  Snorting his satisfaction, Houston turned his back on them. They stayed where they were, wide-eyed and obviously intimidated.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked of the other officer, not bothering to get his name. The time for pleasantries was definitely not now.

  The other cop gave a soft swear, jerking his head in the direction of the store. “Chaos is what. No one knows what the hell happened. Seems like someone—probably some damn kid—did something that scared the entire store. They broke the windows and the door trying to get out. We gave chase to the kid but he went into the back alley. Just heard on my walkie before you got here—only a few seconds ago—that they lost sight of him. Hey, are you the Houston?”

  “I am,” Houston grunted. He eyed the scene of the crime once more, his discerning eye now noticing the fact that the door looked like it had been blasted off its hinges. The force of a crowd could do that quite easily, he knew, which meant that part of the story matched up. “Depending on what rumor you’ve heard, I’m either flattered or offended. Be careful which.”

  The other officer gave a tiny little laugh and a sideways glance, clearly uncertain if he was being joked with or not. “Well, you hear a lot of things. But seriously, this is going to look really bad for us if someone robs a tiny jewelry store in the middle of the day and all the witnesses are talking crazy shit. We need to get this guy. Was wondering if you might be willing to lend a hand.”

  A niggling sort of suspicion settled in the back of his mind. Normally when people were talking about having seen crazy shit, either drugs or a hysterical crowd mentality were involved. Then again, sometimes, there was another explanation.

  I’ll know soon enough.

  Houston nodded. “I’ll see what I can do. Do you know where...?”

  The other man turned and pointed straight down a nearby alleyway between the jewelry store and the nearby restaurant. “That’s where they...”

  Not bothering to hear the rest, Houston took off for the gap and left the other officer far behind him in only a few steps. Like everything else about him, his strides were huge.

  A few of the other officers glanced in his direction but he was clearly in his uniform and on a mission, so they didn’t bother him. He was glad for that. If his suspicions were true, he couldn’t afford any wasted time.

  Heading into the alley, he glanced around to take in his surroundings. For an alleyway, it was startlingly clean. He suspected that workers from the restaurant kept it cleared of most of the debris, since a bunch of moldy trash wasn’t likely to be very appetizing. It led straight back between the two buildings and then took a sharp turn to the right, leading to the back of the restaurant where they kept the dumpsters. Other than the trash, there was nothing else back here except for a tall wooden fence that had seen better days.

  Moving over to the right to hide himself in the shadow of the dumpster alcove, Houston growled softly in anticipation as he cast one final look around to make sure no one was going to see him. Then, he began to transform.

  Fur burst out across his bo
dy in a thick wave, covering him from head to toe. A thick, plumy tail emerged from the base of his spine, while his ears began to realign themselves and rise up to the top of his skull. His bones shifted and arranged themselves, and he dropped down onto four paws. His snout pushed out from the front of his face, sprouting sensitive whiskers. His nails became hard and inflexible, turning black.

  The entire process took less than a second and was as familiar to him as slipping into an old pair of jeans. It never felt strange to him, as he had been shifting since he was a newborn, although he supposed a human might be disturbed at being able to feel their body warping in on itself.

  Sniffing around, he immediately picked up on the scent of another shapeshifter. It was exactly as he’d thought, and he cringed a little at being right. No wonder the witnesses were so crazed if they thought they’d seen a human turn into an animal.

  Perhaps the only thing surprising about this was that the other shifter seemed to be a wolf as well. Wonders never ceased, he supposed.

  Dropping his snout to the ground, he turned in the direction where the scent led and realized that the other shifter must have leapt over the fence. The scent was fresh and incredibly vivid, which meant that the other officer had been telling the truth about this having taken place only a few moments ago.

  The fence was incredibly tall, however. Houston faced it and dropped down low to the ground, flattening his ears against his skull and digging his claws hard into the concrete. Gathering the strength in his muscles, feeling hard bulging beneath his fur, he pushed up from the ground and stretched out his front paws as far as he could reach. He hit the top of the fence with his soft stomach and let out an explosive grunt before flopping awkwardly over and landing roughly on his side.