by Zoe Chant
The Dragon’s Pregnant Mate
Shifter Dads, #4
By Zoe Chant
Copyright Zoe Chant 2019
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
Chapter 1: Elizabeth
Chapter 2: Malachi
Chapter 3: Elizabeth
Chapter 4: Malachi
Chapter 5: Elizabeth
Chapter 6: Malachi
Chapter 7: Elizabeth
Chapter 8: Malachi
Chapter 9: Elizabeth
Chapter 10: Malachi
Chapter 11: Elizabeth
Chapter 12: Malachi
Chapter 13: Elizabeth
Chapter 14: Malachi
Chapter 15: Elizabeth
Chapter 16: Malachi
Chapter 17: Elizabeth
Chapter 18: Malachi
Chapter 19: Elizabeth
Epilogue: Elizabeth
A note from Zoe Chant
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Chapter 1: Elizabeth
Elizabeth stepped out of the DA’s office, letting out her breath in a shaky gasp.
She’d done it. She’d turned all of her carefully-collected evidence over to the district attorney. Her boss, her pack leader, Victor Leone, was going to go to prison for a very, very long time.
It wasn’t only because of her. She’d been working from the inside, but there’d been more people involved.
Victor had started a vendetta against another shifter pack, and they’d retaliated hard—not with violence, but with legal action.
Which was a weird way for shifters to act. Elizabeth had always thought that she was the strange one, wanting to keep everyone conforming to human laws, adapting to the modern world. Most of Victor’s pack hadn’t appreciated that. They liked the medieval, lion-eat-lion world they’d been raised in.
She wasn’t complaining, though, that was for sure. The timing had been perfect. The DA was practically salivating over the chance to take down the powerful Leone family—she’d told Elizabeth, Your evidence is the coffin, and the Oak Ridge sheriff’s is the nail.
Bless Sheriff Cohen, in that case. Elizabeth wanted as many nails in Victor’s coffin as she could dig up.
Although it wasn’t her job to dig them up any longer.
That was what was making her so shaky—enough that she was looking around for a chair. There weren’t any in the long hallway, so she started making her way, slowly and carefully, to the exit.
She didn’t have anything to do any longer.
For years, ever since she’d graduated from law school and gone to work for the Leone family, her life had been all about Victor and his pack. For months now, her life had been about taking down Victor and his pack.
She’d worked every waking hour, and plenty of hours when she should’ve been asleep. She’d been on fire with the need for justice, for revenge for Michael Russo, for a new future for the pack.
A future where babies could grow up in a different world. A modern one, not a medieval one.
A future where her baby wouldn’t have to learn how to kill to survive.
But now she’d done all she could. Elizabeth might be a lawyer, but she was a witness in this case, not the prosecutor. She couldn’t, professionally speaking, work on the case any longer. That was the DA’s job.
Her hands were trembling with the release of adrenaline. All done. All done.
She pushed the door open with an effort, stepped out into the cold late-fall air—and froze.
Nevin was waiting for her, standing on the steps, huge and imposing. He wore short sleeves, not caring about the cold. He never did.
“It was you,” he said blankly.
“Nevin—”
“Victor said someone had to be working on this from the inside. He said there was a traitor. I thought he was just worked up, that it was Katie or Lila scraping together evidence from when they lived with the pack—but it wasn’t, was it? You betrayed the pack.”
Elizabeth took a deep breath. God, she was exhausted. And suddenly, she didn’t care anymore. If the information was out...well, might as well admit everything.
“I’m pregnant, Nevin,” she said.
His eyes went wide. For a second, she wondered, she hoped—
Then his face turned into a snarl. “And what, you thought you’d teach the baby to be a pack traitor?”
“I thought I didn’t want a baby born into this awful place!” she snapped. “With a criminal for a pack leader? A man who murders his own?”
“Maybe everyone would’ve been fine if they’d learned how to be loyal,” Nevin growled, his expression settling into a stone-faced mask.
Nevin was Victor’s enforcer, Elizabeth reminded herself. He wasn’t just the man she’d been sort-of-dating a few months ago.
Or really, he’d always been Victor’s enforcer, and the reason she’d called it off was because he was too cruel, too willing to obey any order Victor gave him, no matter how brutal.
There was a reason she hadn’t told him she was pregnant until now.
“Goodbye, Nevin,” she said firmly.
In that moment, his face changed.
Elizabeth’s blood chilled in her veins at the sight of him. She’d always known Nevin was a violent man, but she’d never been afraid of him before.
She bolted for her car. She didn’t look back to see if he was behind her, didn’t let herself wonder if he’d shifted into his lion form.
She hit the button on her keys, tore open the door, and slid into the driver’s seat. Key in the ignition. Door shut. Car on.
When she dared to look, Nevin was—oh God, just outside the window.
“This isn’t over,” he snarled at her, his voice clearly audible through the glass. “Just because I can’t do anything on a public street—”
Elizabeth hit the gas. Whatever else he’d been about to say faded away as she tore out of the parking lot.
She drove wildly, shaking in her seat, her breath rasping in her ears. Nevin knew where she lived. She couldn’t go home. He might be driving to her apartment right now, settling himself in, waiting for her at her door—
The rearview mirror didn’t show his truck behind her. She turned right, turned right again. Still no sign of him. She pulled into a 7-11’s parking lot and fumbled for her phone.
Then she stared at it. Who could she call? No one in the pack, obviously. Her parents were out; they lived in California and couldn’t come help, and Victor had their addresses. God knew they wouldn’t be much help, anyway.
She had no job. She had no place to live. She had no pack.
And she had more than herself to think about, now.
Elizabeth reached down and touched her stomach, hand spread flat over the small swell that the baby had made already, then opened up a contact she hadn’t used since before Victor was arrested.
It rang, and rang, and she started to wonder what she would do if it went to voicemail. But finally, Lila’s voice said, “Elizabeth! What’s up?”
She sounded surprised and a little breathless. Maybe her kids were running her ragged, out there in Oak Ridge.
“I need your help,” Elizabeth said, and let go of her old life once and for all.
Chapter 2: Malachi
Malachi was just finishing the breakfast dishes when the call came in.
His cell was on the table, and it hummed loudly, vibrating against the wood. “Honey, can you check who that is?” Malachi asked over his shou
lder. His hands were soaking wet.
Hayley, who had finished her cereal but had not finished staring at her own phone, leaned over. “It’s Flynn. Can I answer it?”
“Please.” Malachi reached for a dishtowel.
“Hi, Flynn, what’s up?” Hayley leaned back in her chair.
Shifter hearing meant that Malachi could hear the other end of the conversation perfectly. “Hey, Hayley, your dad busy?”
“Doing the dishes.” Hayley leaned back in her chair, grinning up at Malachi when he stared down at her, making no move to give him the phone. “It’s not an emergency or anything, is it?”
“Not an emergency,” said Flynn, and Malachi sighed, because that meant he wasn’t getting his phone back until Hayley was good and ready. “Just wanted to give him the heads-up about something. Elizabeth, Victor’s lawyer, came into town last night.”
Hayley sat bolt upright, and Malachi held out his hand for the phone.
“She was that really glamorous-looking lady, right?” Hayley said quickly. “The one who turned over that evidence to help save Lila?”
“That’s the one.”
Malachi gave Hayley a look. Sighing, Hayley handed over the phone.
“Flynn,” he said. “Glad to know we’re briefing teenagers on security situations these days.”
Hayley rolled her eyes.
“What, you want me to keep it a secret? It’ll be all over town in about ten minutes, you know that.”
Malachi did know that. Keeping secrets in a town as small as Oak Ridge was essentially impossible. Especially secrets as...glamorous...as a turncoat member of an enemy pack arriving in town.
“So why is she here?”
“She says it’s because the pack knows she turned over the evidence and she was afraid for her life. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Nowhere else?” Malachi asked disbelievingly. “Than a place she’s been to twice, and people she’s hardly met?”
Flynn hesitated. “I believe her, Sheriff. I recommend you come talk to her, though. Form your own opinion.”
“I’ll do that,” Malachi said. “I’m going to run a patrol first, though. Check out the woods and make sure she didn’t bring any friends with her.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll stick around until you get here?”
“Thanks.” Malachi hung up and turned to Hayley.
“What?” she asked, the picture of innocence.
“When it’s a work call—”
“I know, I know,” she sighed. “I just—the only lawyer I’ve ever met is Mr. MacAllister, and he’s kind of boring.”
The mayor’s husband was the only attorney in the larger surrounding area; he was a soft-spoken, grandfatherly man who was extremely competent, but in a very unassuming way. Not at all like lawyers on TV, which Malachi assumed was Hayley’s basis for comparison.
“You thinking about law school?” he asked, as casually as he could manage.
“I don’t know, Dad,” she said. “Maybe if I’d met a few more lawyers, I’d have a better idea.”
“Right. Well, odds are you’ll end up meeting this one at some point, if she sticks around. You staying safe today?”
Hayley nodded obediently. “No plans this morning. I’m working later, and then Sarah and I are going to hang out at her place probably.”
“Okay. Don’t go anywhere alone unless you’re shifted.”
“Promise.”
Malachi kissed the top of her head and went to start his Saturday.
He took the Jeep to the edge of the woods, then stepped out and away from the vehicle before he shifted.
His dragon form was large enough that he had to make sure he had a good circle of space before shifting. He’d heard Lachlan’s mate Cam going on about conservation of mass a few times, sounding absolutely baffled at how science could allow a person to be a six-foot-three human one moment, and a twelve-foot-something dragon the next.
Malachi didn’t know how it worked. He was just grateful that it did, because it gave him the means to keep his town safe.
He patrolled the woods as thoroughly as one dragon could, checking all the convenient hiding places near town, the clearings where several shifters could gather at once, the couple of caves that might serve as bases.
He’d become minutely familiar with it all over the last couple of months, ever since a woman and her baby had arrived in town, fleeing her dangerous ex—an ex who had turned out to be a cruel and powerful leader of a pack of lion shifters.
Victor Leone had declared war on Oak Ridge when he couldn’t kidnap Katie and her baby son and force them to come back with him. And even though lions couldn’t stand up to dragons in a real fight, he’d persisted in haunting the surrounding woods, striking from the shadows, targeting women and children like the worst kind of coward.
Malachi had never wanted to be involved in a war, but if it had to happen, he wasn’t sorry to have won one against Victor.
And they had won—by using the law, not by vicious, underhanded tactics. Victor was in jail, the DA had denied him bail, and there was a mountain of evidence against him.
Collected both by Malachi’s people, and by one Elizabeth Montgomery, JD.
Malachi was grateful to Ms. Montgomery, that was for certain. But he wasn’t sure what her motives had been for turning traitor.
And he was certain that by coming to Oak Ridge to escape the pack, she’d rekindled a fire that Malachi thought he’d finally managed to stamp out.
He didn’t want to keep fighting this war. He wanted his town, his people, to stay safe and quiet and happy. He wanted his daughter to be able to walk around town safely, without having to shift and fly just in case something happened.
But it looked like that wasn’t in the cards just yet.
He scoured the woods until he was as satisfied as he was going to be that there wasn’t an encroaching lion army encamped there, then turned his flight path towards Flynn and Lila’s little house on the edge of town.
Even though Ms. Montgomery’s arrival meant the possibility of danger in Oak Ridge had increased yet again, Malachi had to admit he was looking forward to talking to the woman. He’d never spoken to her in person, and while he and Flynn had been compiling evidence, Malachi had itched to sit her down and run through everything she knew about Victor Leone.
It was a little late now, but at least he’d finally get his chance. If she was going to bring the lion pack’s attention back here, the least she could do in return was give up some information.
Long before he arrived at the house, his dragon ears picked up the exuberant sounds of Lila’s little daughter Sophia playing some kind of game. He smiled inwardly, despite the seriousness of the situation. When Hayley had been that age, all she had wanted to do was play pretend. Malachi and Amanda, his ex-wife, had spent many, many hours being superheroes or royalty or zoo animals.
He missed it sometimes. These days, their house was quiet—no little feet thumping around, no excited giggles. No wailing tantrums, either—except a few months ago when he’d absolutely forbidden Hayley to go to an unsupervised party—but the tantrums had been worth it. More than worth it.
As Malachi got closer to the house, though, he heard something he hadn’t been expecting. Was that—?
It was. He landed in the yard with the clear sounds of his own daughter’s voice drifting out of the house. What was Hayley doing here?
He shifted back to human, and frowning, went up to the front door. It opened before he could knock, Hayley standing in the doorway, smiling brightly at him.
“What—” he started, but before he could finish, Hayley interrupted, with that quick and light tone that meant she was trying to get away with something as fast as possible.
“Hey, Dad, nice to see you, I hope you don’t mind but I invited Elizabeth to come stay with us for a while?”
Malachi stared at her.
Then he lifted his gaze to take in the rest of the house. Lila and Flynn were nowhere to be
seen—though he could hear them upstairs, occupied with the kids.
Elizabeth Montgomery, though, was right there in the kitchen. She was perched on a chair, looking tired but immaculate, just like he remembered her. Blonde, beautiful in a magazine-model sort of way, wearing a pearl-gray suit with heels and a delicate silver necklace. For sitting at the kitchen table.
“Come in and shut the door, Dad, come on, you’re letting in the cold air.”
Well, there wasn’t much else he could do. He came in and shut the door.
Elizabeth stood up as he entered, coming forward with a hand held out. “Hayley misrepresented the situation a little,” she said right away. “I’m sorry. Of course I’m not imposing on you like that.”
Malachi took her hand to shake, but as he did, two things caught his attention.
One, Elizabeth was swaying a little, her hand trembling. As she’d stood up, her face had gone even paler than it had been.
Two, his shifter senses were picking up her scent, and it was—something he’d been intensely familiar with, a long time ago. Dark and rich and full of promise and growth, fragility and family.
Elizabeth was pregnant.
And in that moment, as he touched her hand for the first time, something changed.
Chapter 3: Elizabeth
Elizabeth was wondering if this had been a mistake.
She’d arrived in Oak Ridge late last night, getting lost on the winding roads despite a) GPS, and b) having been to Lila’s house once before. She hadn’t been able to eat all day—why did they call it morning sickness when it lasted twelve hours at a time?—and by the time she’d finally pulled into the drive, she’d been exhausted and dizzy. And very, very grateful that she hadn’t run herself off a dark mountain road into a ravine.
Lila had welcomed her, of course, pulling her into a hug and saying, “I’m so glad you called us. Come in, have something to eat, sit down.”
Elizabeth had relaxed just a little in Lila’s comfortable embrace—she had this motherly figure that made the hug soft and lovely and inviting—but the dizziness had started coming back, and she’d had to pull away and get herself together so she didn’t just collapse.
