by M. L. Briers
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
HIS MATE
BROTHERS
AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’
By
M. L. BRIERS
Copyright © 2018, M L Briers
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced whatsoever without written permission of the author, except for brief exerts in reviews. Any unauthorised reproduction or distribution of the material herein is illegal and may result in criminal proceedings. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded to the internet or distributed via electronic or print without prior consent.
Note from the Author;
All names, places, and incidents contained herein are purely fictional and have no basis in actual events or linked to actual Humans, Witches, Vampires, Werewolves, Lycans, Werebears or persons living, dead or undead.
Copyright © 2018, Cover Design by; Rebecca Pau at The Final Wrap.
Table of Contents
HIS MATE
BROTHERS
AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER ONE
~
“Where is she?” Alf demanded.
It took a lot of self-control not to squeeze the mobile phone too tightly in his hand and crush it like he wanted to crush someone’s skull. But he was mad – spitting nails mad – and when he got hold of the human who was writing on her stupid blog and bad-mouthing him and his company, well, the fur was going to fly.
“How many times do you need to be told? Not here and how did you get this number?” The female on the other end wasn’t so good at giving out information, but she was really damn good at stomping all over his very last nerve with her attitude.
Alf didn’t know how he managed to hold on to the rumble of a growl that was forming in his chest, but he did – just. He tried to remember that the woman that he was talking to wasn’t the woman that he’d like to strangle, or, she’d said she wasn’t. But, it was still hard to hold onto his temper when she was being so evasive with him.
“Well, when will she be back?” He could sidestep questions too. Miss Sexy voice wasn’t the only one who could dodge the issue.
“Look…”
“I have her address…”
“Is that a threat?” She demanded, and Alf wasn’t entirely sure that his head wasn’t about to explode. It was certainly throbbing like a ticking time-bomb.
Death by blog – what a way to go.
“When I threaten you, you’ll know it!”
“Is that a threat?” She demanded.
Alf considered the desk in front of him – oh, how he’d love to headbutt it until it was matchsticks. Females were – annoying, irrational, and hard to handle. Even worse still, they were a complete and total enigma to him and most of the men on the planet.
This damn female didn’t seem to be an exception to that rule.
He might have been an alpha, but women didn’t come with a manual, and even if he’d wanted to, and spent a lifetime doing it, he guessed that he still wouldn’t figure them out.
He’d planned to send the damn keyboard warrior some nice flowers – although, he’d rather like it if they were poisonous, not deadly poisonous, well … no, just poisonous enough to keep her from her damn keyboard. Maybe some chocolates – he was still debating lacing them with arsenic.
Hell, he’d send her anything that she wanted just so that she might feel some guilt over what she was doing, and maybe then she would stop trashing his business online. People that did that baffled him. Where were all the nice people in the world?
He’d lost orders, and he knew it was down to her stupid blog because the customers had quoted it – word for poisonous word. It had to stop, or more to the point, she needed stopping, one way or the other.
“I think you’ll find that I’m more a man of actions than threats.”
Alf was trying to calm things down, but it was just so damn hard to be rational when dealing with a female – this female – most females.
“Now that definitely sounds like a threat to me,” she said, and Alf groaned as he rolled his eyes before closing them for a brief second in the hope of calming his temper.
“It’s not a damn threat…!” he shouted into the mobile.
His eyes snapped open as his temper refused to be quashed, just as his brother, and a resident thorn in his side, Clark, strolled up to the doorway and offered him the kind of smirk that deserved a fist in the face in reply. Boy, did he want to growl?
“Sounded like a threat…” she said.
“But, if I don’t get to speak to her soon…”
“What? More threats?”
Alf roared in annoyance. He wrenched the phone from his ear and jabbed at it with one meaty finger until the screen cracked and the phone rolled over and played dead.
“Another phone bites the dust.” Clark chucked and then ducked as the handset shot toward him, narrowly missing his head, and shattered into pieces when it hit the far wall behind him.
That sound was oddly unsatisfying to Alf. It usually made him feel slightly better to kill something.
“It’s definitely dead now. Well done, Alpha, another enemy slain.” Clark chuckled again as he straightened up and did a double take of the look that his brother was offering him – it sort of reminded him of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
“I wish she was…” Alf growled, fisting his large hands at his sides and resisting the urge to rip his office apart until they had enough firewood for a pack cookout.
“You’re still trying to get hold of that call them out blogger woman?” Clark snorted his contempt for the woman and her blog.
“She’s as slippery as a damn eel…”
“Eel’s,” Clark said, giving a mock shiver as he pulled a face of pure disgust at the thought.
“As devious as a witch…”
“Don’t mention the W word. We don’t want seven years bad luck�
�” Clark frowned.
“That’s mirrors, you idiot,” Alf growled back and enjoyed every moment of that rumble as it went through his chest.
He hated having to keep his inner beast on a leash, the monster within, but it was necessary when dealing with the outside world. And she was the outside world, only invading his territory via her blog.
“You can’t say the M word?”
“You can’t break the M word-mirrors, you idiot.” He corrected himself and bit down on the need to shift and run like the damn devil was on his beast’s tail.
“Why would you break a mirror? Although, it would be a nice change from phones for you…”
“I’m going there,” Alf growled out.
“Where?” Clark hated it when people knew what the hell they were talking about but didn’t think to share it with others.
“It’s just a few towns over…” Alf growled at the thought of the satisfaction he would get from making that trip.
He snatched up the piece of paper with the address scribbled on it and eyed it like it was the enemy. His mind was racing.
“What is?”
“Right damn now,” Alf growled again as he stalked towards the door and shoved his brother out of the way.
“Don’t mind me…” Clark tossed up a hand in disbelief, but his brother was already stalking down the hallway away from him.
“I’m going to make her sorry she was ever born.”
“Good luck with that … wait!” His eyes snapped wide as his brain kicked in. “Who?”
Clark followed on behind him, but Alf kept going, muttering curses and growling like a wildling as he stormed through the house. Some things were better taken care of face-to-face.
~
~
~
“Jerk!” Harper chuckled as she cut off the call and swiveled around in her office chair with a big beaming smile on her face and satisfaction running through her veins.
“Playing with fire,” Joy said with a shake of her head at her best friend’s antics.
She wasn’t as impressed with her Harper’s performance as Harper seemed to be. The witch always had a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way, and from what she could hear from the rather one-sided conversation – this time was no different.
“Can you believe that guy was threatening me?” Harper snorted her contempt for the man as Joy lifted her eyes from the glossy magazine in her hands and winced.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” Harper scowled.
“Well, you are trashing his business all over the internet. If you did that to me then I’d threaten you as well,” Joy said with a small, teasing smile, and a cutesy shrug of her shoulders.
“If you sold shoddy goods, which you don’t…” Harper pointed out.
“Thank you…”
“Welcome. Then I’d call you out on call them out. Someone has to stick up for the little guy and girl, right?”
“You go, girl!” Joy punched the air, and they both chuckled. “But, seriously, stop now. The man has had enough,” she warned her.
“I’ll stop when he stops making handmade, luxury boxes that fall apart when you put something in them.”
“To be fair – you were trying to stuff way too much into it…” Joy berated her.
“If it was that well made then it wouldn’t have exploded like that!” Harper was unrepentant.
“If you hadn’t tried sitting on it to wedge the stuff inside then it might have survived.” Joy sniggered at the memory of her friend flat on her backside on the floor with pieces of the poor box all around her. “It’s not a suitcase, and you are packing a little extra in your bagging area.”
“Take that back!” Harper hissed.
CHAPTER TWO
~
“Nope. Not until you stop picking on that poor guy.” Joy shrugged.
“He needs to stop making defective products and charging the earth for them,” Harper rallied.
“So, it’s about the price tag now?”
“No, that’s just a side issue,” Harper said as she raised her chin in defiance.
“Well, I’m telling you, nothing good can come of you baiting the man,” she warned.
“We’ll see…”
“Yes, sooner rather than later if he carries out his threats.”
“What did you hear?”
“Just that he threatened you.”
“He claims that he knows where I live…”
“Well, that’s not good!” Joy pushed up in the chair and folded the magazine in her lap. “I live here as well!”
“Wow, how … mercenary of you,” Harper berated her.
“I’ve seen the movies, and it’s always the friend who gets caught in the crossfire.” Joy scowled. She certainly didn’t like the sound of that.
“Well, perhaps now would be a good time to practice ducking.” With a flick of her wrist and a touch of magic, an apple flew from the bowl and shot towards Joy, who snapped out her hand and caught it. “Nice catch.”
“Nice shot.” Joy grinned before sinking her teeth into the apple and taking what proved to be a juicy bite. “Nice apple.”
“Trust me; the guy isn’t going to turn up here. Men like him are all talk and no pants.”
“No pants?” Joy grinned as she pictured some big tall muscle man like the models that she’d just been ogling in her magazine, with big thick legs on display and a decided lack of pants. “It’s been a while since our doorstep has seen any action.”
“Well, if he does show up; I’ll send him your way.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I’m single at heart,” she lied.
She wasn’t, there just seemed to be a lack of suitors around the town, and she did so hate going out of her catchment area, and by catchment, she meant exactly that.
“Sure you are,” Harper chuckled. “You much prefer to swoon over guys in books than get out there in the real world and run the gauntlet of the dating circuit.”
“Pot – kettle. Besides it’s called a gauntlet for a reason.” She sighed. “Don’t you sometimes wish that Mr. Right would just turn up and everything would just fall into place – like you didn’t have to go through all that hassle of dating because you just knew that he was the one…?”
“Are you crazy?!” Harper jumped to her feet, swiveled, yanked open the top drawer of her desk and grabbed a fresh cleansing stick.
“With the sage – again?” Joy grumbled, dropping her face in her hands and groaning as Harper drew on her magic and lit the end.
“Bite your tongue…”
She hit her with a zap of magic that made her do just that, and Joy yelped, snapping straight up in the chair, before cursing. Harper only hoped that her friend had done it in time to save herself.
“What’s got your panties in a damn twirl this time?” Joy sounded as if she was still chewing on the apple as she pressed the tip of her sore tongue against the roof of her mouth.
“Mates!” Harper snapped, dabbing the end of the sage against a plate and blowing it into smoldering life.
“Mates?” Joy snorted at the thought.
“You all but called a possible mate to you…”
“Did not!” Joy snapped at her friend.
“Did too!”
“Did so not in a million years to stupid infinity and back again … and don’t you come near me with that…”
“Too bad – you need cleansing.” Harper blew the smoke towards her, and Joy coughed and waved at the air in front of her to bat it away.
“You need a psychiatrist, but am I pushing that in your face?”
“You’ll thank me when your mate doesn’t show up!”
“Okay, genius, how will I know that he doesn’t show up when he didn’t show up?”
Both of them stopped, narrowed their eyes in confusion, and thought that one over.
“Exactly,” Harper announced.
Joy pushed up from the chair with a snort. She tipped her chin up in defiance and for effect, and sidestepped h
er friend as she started towards the door.
“Stop following me,” Joy hissed back over her shoulder.
“Just watching the condemned woman in her natural habitat,” Harper teased, and yet, she felt uneasy.
Something felt as if it was settling over them, squatting, waiting … had Joy tempted fate?
She didn’t know what it was, but she was going to spend the rest of the day cleaning the house of bad feelings, scrubbing and cleansing their auras to the bone – just in case because when you were a witch, you could never be too careful.
~
~
~
“Think about it this way…” Clark offered, but his older brother cut him off.
“I don’t want to think about it any damn way,” Alf growled back as he tried to ignore his brother, but it was damned hard to do when the man took up so much space in the front of the pickup truck.
He’d muscled his way into the vehicle, but that didn’t mean that Alf was glad to have him along for the ride, or wanted to hear what he had to say on the subject – any subject. He just wanted to get where he was going, fast, and preferably in silence.
He was determined to stop the blogger woman from publishing one more bad word about his company – however much it killed her to do it. The thought of wringing her neck was a tempting one, even if his beast did growl a warning at him.
Oh, he could just imagine the bookish woman with her glasses perched on the end of her long, thin nose, and a twitch under her right eye from spending too much time in front of a computer screen. Hell, he’d even bet that her flat, spread backside had molded into the chair, or the chair had molded around her.
“But still,” Clark continued, and Alf groaned inwardly.
“Why don’t you go into power save mode?”
“Why won’t you face the fact that this is a very bad idea…?”
“Oh, is it?” Alf growled back.
“Think about it,” Clark teased him with a song in his voice, and he knew how much Alf hated that.
“How about I just think about all the ways I can kill you?”
“Sounds like fun – can you do it after you pull a U-turn and head back home?”
