“And I could have lost you. I’d do it again without hesitation.”
“But you saved me, Russ. You came to my rescue and you saved me.”
“No, baby. You saved yourself. I just helped you to do it.”
Chapter Ten
2 Months Later
~Daniela~
Trigger bounded back and forth between the porch and the open gate where the men brought up my leather sectional. Watching the three of them sweat under the noonday sun came as a reward for deferring to Russ’ old-fashioned terms. Women weren’t supposed to lift heavy things if a man could do it for them. I sipped lemonade and grinned as taut muscles shifted under suntanned flesh. They were a sexy gradient of skin tones, beginning with Russ’ country tan and ending with Taylor’s caramel brown. Ian was somewhere in between, the product of a mixed marriage with Native American blood. I’d finally dug that information out of him and made him promise to tell me stories about the Ojibwe Nation.
“Man, can we take a break yet? She’s been working us all day,” Taylor complained during the next trip to Russ’ truck, setting one of my boxes down too heavily. Glassware clinked from inside it.
“Hey, buddy. You break my expensive dishes and you can forget eating dinner. I’ll open you a can of tuna,” I called out in a teasing threat.
“Yes, ma’am!” Taylor quickly replied.
Russ was too much of a gentleman to allow me to participate in moving my belongings. When moving day came, he recruited his two pals to help instead.
“How the hell did you get so much stuff in eight months?” Ian asked. “Where did all of this come from?”
I nodded toward Russ, my enabler who either encouraged me to spend on a whim, or later returned to buy the things he saw me eyeballing too closely in the store. Protesting his frequent but generous purchases had been a waste of time. Russ insisted that he had earned the money, and if it couldn’t bring us happiness, what good was it to have it at all? Between all the new acquisitions and what I’d received after the divorce from friends and family helping me out with my new start in life, I had a truckload of boxes.
“Figures,” my former landlord grumbled.
At first, Ian wasn’t so happy about Russ deciding to spill the beans about their military group. He understood the reason, and knew it was inevitable, but it didn’t make him happy that a civilian knew about their world. I assuaged them of their worries by promising I’d never tell a soul, as long as they let me see them in their natural states, of course. They were as handsome as a bear, eagle, and mountain lion as they had been as men, only their fur and feathers permitted me to stroke them without shame.
“How soon do you need me to finish the clean-up on the house, Ian?” I asked him.
“Take your time. I’m not planning to rent it out again. Hell, I might move in myself and enjoy small-town life for a while. I haven’t lived here in years.”
“It’s a nice town,” I agreed.
While they worked, I whipped together a pan of chicken enchiladas and later baked sugar cookies to give the hard working fellas a carb rush. After they were gone, Russ and I returned to our porch where we opened a bottle of wine and watched the sunset. The moment was bittersweet, the beginning of a new life with a man I loved and a farewell to the single existence I created in the wake of my divorce.
Even my family loved him once they finally had the chance to meet him the night I killed Michael. He’d earned my father’s respect once we told him the gun Russ gave me was responsible for my dirtbag ex meeting his end. Then my mother hugged me tightly and Russ even tighter, because if not for his insistence on learning to use a weapon, I would have been dead. I had no idea how he kept a straight face through the pain.
Russ became quiet after his buddies were gone. He was throwing a ball across the yard for Trigger to chase and occasionally return to us; he was so silent I had to fret.
“You’re not regretting it, are you?” I asked suddenly to break the silence between us.
Russ laughed and patted my thigh. “Too late to change your mind now. I don’t think you could bribe Taylor to come back and move things again,” he teased.
“I know... I just... I’m glad for the chance to start over. What’s on your mind?”
Sensing the heavy emotion in my heart, or perhaps seeing it on my face, Russ turned to me and cupped one hand to my cheek. I turned my head and brushed my lips against his palm.
“You are. I was thinking about how much... I love you, Daniela, and I want you to be happy. Here with me and Trigger.”
A field of tears shimmered over my sight, distorting Russ from my vision. His thumb swept over my left cheek to clear it away once they began to fall. “
“I am happy.” Happier than I’d ever been. “Russ, I love you. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
And I knew Russell would never become unworthy of that love. In the few months since our first date, my bear had more than proven he deserved every ounce of my affection.
Author’s Note: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading my work. If you enjoyed this, please leave a review so that other readers can find my work. Reviews help authors continue to do what we love — write for you!
Did you love Russ and Dani? If you did, prepare to catch up with them in the next Wild Operatives novella, Let Us Prey as Ian finds a true love of his own.
All of my stories are connected. Stop and buy Training the Alpha, my werewolf paranormal romance starring Ian’s god daughter Ceres. It’s a ménage with a twist.
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Continue on for a look at the first chapter of Saved by the Dragon. Take a chance with Chloe and Saul to tide you over. Also available on Audiobook.
Saved by the Dragon – sneak peek
Thunder cracked overhead, a grim herald of what was to come. Barely a minute later, the sky seemed to split open and unleash a torrent of freezing cold rain. And Chloe Ellis was caught without her umbrella, clutching a rocky wall nearly a hundred feet off the ground.
Shit!
She hadn’t anticipated the weatherman’s predicted 20% chance of rain would come with a furious thunderstorm. Within an hour of her climb, dark clouds had swept over the topaz blue skies and eclipsed the sun. Lightning flashed in the distance.
“Well damn, what do I do now?” She wedged her body into the crack leading toward the high summit, hoping to escape the brunt of the wind and rain.
Of the three options available to her, none held any appeal. She could stay hanging where she was and hope the rain passed soon, attempt to make her way down, or keep pressing for the cliffs.
Wiping water from her face, she gazed around for an alternative. The fissure in the rock face widened several feet above her, so she made her way up and breathed a quiet prayer of thanks for the small ledge at the top. It was a place to rest safely and wait out the storm.
The narrow shelf extended farther than she’d thought at first glance. Chloe wriggled back into the crawlspace to get out of the rain. Loose grit shifted beneath her hands, skittered down a dark passage. She fetched a flashlight from her backpack and eased down the crumbling slope. Water ran in narrow rivulets from the mountain shelf behind her, plastering her hair to the back of her neck.
Should have brought Freddy with me, she thought. Now, I’m here alone, and hiding from the rain.
Freddy, her on-again off-again boyfriend, had practically begged to come along on this trip. He wanted to work things out; promised he’d be a changed man. They could camp and make love under the stars. Of course, he was only the most recent train wreck in a chain of failed romances.
Before Freddy, she had dated Malcolm; the hottie at the law firm where she practiced her paralegal work. Dating him had been a dream. He had a sweet personality, a stable income as a lawyer, and he seemed to love her dearly.... Until she returned a day ahead of schedule from a visit to care for her ailing father.
Chloe had walked into their shared home
to discover Malcolm urging his weekend lay to hide in the closet.
Four years. She swept it all down the drain that day and refused to hear out his ridiculous excuses about becoming too drunk to say no. How he’d come out to drink with pals, who later wouldn’t excuse his behavior and ratted him out because they’d warned him not to do it. Three of them broke the bro code in an effort to step in for their friend.
So she went against her better judgment and began to date Freddy; Malcolm’s physical trainer, and a man with a body like an Olympian. The sex was great, and the way he treated her was even better.
Or so it had seemed.
Their first fight came four months into the relationship when his jealous persona arose. He didn’t want her to have male friends because it wasn’t appropriate, and no man merely wanted to be her friend. They’d want to fuck her too. They had another fight in the days prior to her little decision to go away for a weekend alone.
What made me think I could do this alone without him? It was foolish, dumb, and dangerous, Chloe thought. Freddy knew what he was doing on the mountain peaks. They’d bonded over a mutual lust for the outdoors during the initial stages of their dating. It wouldn’t have been the first time they went away for a weekend in the wilderness.
The pebbles beneath her feet shifted. She slid forward and lost her balance, and in the process of attempting to regain her footing, landed heavily on her butt and slid down the cave’s treacherous slope like a reluctant toddler at the playground. She screamed all the while and scraped her nails uselessly against the rocky wall at either side. Eventually, she reached the end and became airborne.
All sense of time fell away as Chloe tumbled through the air with the debris from the shaft, arms and legs flailing uselessly at the air like a baby bird falling from its nest the first time. Merciless and unyielding rock caught her, although she landed on her ankle and crumpled soon after. White-hot pain exploded through her entire leg; worse than anything she’d ever experienced before.
“Fuck!” she swore, loudly, after all who would hear. Her flashlight tumbled from her hands and rolled across the cavern floor. The wobbling light danced over the rough-hewn walls in a dizzying display until the small device rolled to a stop. She’d have to crawl to reach it and risk scraping her knees and hands to high hell in the process.
Nearly thirty minutes had passed before she was able to stop crying. Instead of feeling strong and adventurous, she felt weak and miserable. Her wet clothes and the damp environment worsened her ordeal. Of course, Chloe had also learned a very valuable lesson about adventuring without a partner.
After a while she climbed up from the ground and gingerly tried to apply weight to her left ankle. A merciless twinge, striking her joint with the ferocity of a hammer blow, forced her to immediately draw her foot off the ground again. The nearby stalagmite became her leaning post while she waited for the nausea to settle.
“Okay. Chloe, think,” she told herself, while salty tears leaked down her cheeks. Her voice echoed across the cavern. “This is a popular climb. I just need to... to wait for the rain to stop and listen. Call for help.”
It wasn’t in her plans to die alone and in the dark recesses of some unknown cave. Unfortunately, cell phone signals wouldn’t reach the outside world. She confirmed it at a glance.
Once she eased down to the cave floor, Chloe tried to pull herself together. A search through her pack produced a basic first aid kit, emergency blanket, a few energy bars, and some dehydrated meals. Being injured didn’t change the fact that her activities had provoked a ravenous hunger that couldn’t be sated by a tiny little rectangle of granola and dried cranberries that she had brought with her.
She rifled through the first aid kit and removed the small bottle of ibuprofen. She popped two into her mouth and swallowed them dry. The Band-Aids and antibiotic cream were useless, so she shoved the box back into her bag and leaned against the cavern wall to wallow in her misery. This vacation sucked. Freddy was probably getting his dick sucked by some ditzy bitch in a pink sports bra and booty shorts while she suffered in the dark.
“Have you become lost?”
The voice promptly shook her from a daydreaming state.
Or maybe I’m hallucinating...
The shirtless man who stepped into her field of vision belonged in a gym commercial with his rippling muscles and washboard abs. His wavy blonde hair touched his broad shoulders and curled at the tips, and a reddish scruff covered his jawline. Although her tastes usually ran to black hair and blue eyes like tall, dark, and handsome Freddy, something about the fair-haired stranger lured her like a siren’s call.
She would definitely make an exception for the bearded Viking in the cave.
“Are you among the hearing impaired?”
“What?” Delusions weren’t supposed to speak, were they? The sudden realization that help had arrived filled her with relief. Chloe pushed to her feet and promptly cried out. Her forward stumble knocked her straight into the stranger’s strong arms.
“You are injured.”
“My ankle,” she sobbed. She hadn’t realized how cold she was until held in his embrace. The man radiated heat like the sun on a cloudless summer day. Given the dire need to become warm, she had no reservations about wriggling in against his chest. The thought did occur to her that she should ask why a random, sexy stranger was in a dark cave system - and shirtless - until she saw the incredibly heavy backpack at his feet.
Maybe he was an axe murderer hiding out from the police, and planned to kill and eat her over his own camp fire. Hell if she knew, but at least she’d get warm before he did it.
The Right to Bear Arms: BBW Military Paranormal Romance (Wild Operatives, #1) Page 10
