Desired by the Pack: Part One: A BBW Paranormal Romance

Desired by the Pack

Part One

A
BBW Paranormal Romance

Emma Storm

Also available now

DESIRED BY THE PACK: PART TWO

1

The Peace River Guardians alpha pack rolled up to the dive bar shortly after midnight. Motorcycles and pick-up trucks crowded the cracked, oil-stained lot. Chrome glittered under the full moon and clear autumn sky. Where the moonlight didn’t reach, a cluster of men conducted their likely illegal business.

“Beck. You think this is it?” The question came from the driver’s seat.

Thomas Becker, alpha of the Guardians, nodded.
“Fits the description.”

“Half the roadhouses along Highway 101 fit the description.” Cross, the Guardians’ lieutenant, maneuvered
dangerously close to the rear tire of a Harley Davidson while backing his silver pick-up into a cramped parking space.

Cross wasn’t far off the mark. Beck could count on one hand the number of bars he’d walked into in his twenty-seven years, and they’d all looked like this.

“By the looks of the lot, you’d think it was a Friday night before a long weekend,” Cross said.

Beck grunted and drummed his fingers on the passenger door arm rest. His experience with bars was limited but he knew a thing or two about the kinds of people who spent time in remote watering holes like this one. Outlaws and their groupies didn’t need the calendar’s permission to go on a bender. And if money meant a thing to him, Beck would bet more than half the people gathered in that squat brick building were hunting something besides a hangover, anyway.

Memories rolled over him while he studied the flat, bland front of the building. Beck hadn’t known a lot of women—unmated werewolf females were harder and harder to come by, while human females weren’t worth the trouble—but he’d known his share. Only one he’d wanted to keep, though, and he’d found her in a place like this.

Lost her in a place like this, too, when she’d chosen to reject the magnetic attraction that affected both of them, and walked away with a human male, leaving Beck staring after her and wondering what the hell had happened. They were enjoying each other’s company one minute, flirting with words the way humans do and with scents the way wolves
do, and the next minute, she locked him out. He should have gone after her, but at the time he was a nineteen-year-old warrior slated for battle, little more than a grunt in a large, militaristic pack.

And she’d made it very clear she had no use for, in her words, a flea-ridden dog like him.

Not for the first time, he turned her parting words over in his mind, wondering why she’d uttered them. The yearning in her stormy blue eyes had conveyed a very different message, one he would answer differently now that he led three Earth-bound packs assigned to a less deadly mission.

Anders, the Guardians’ alpha second, spoke from the extended cab’s back seat. “I do not like this.
Too many people, too much steel. Wolves do not belong here.”

“Not my pick either,” Beck said, forcing his head into the present. “But the crowd serves a purpose.”

All the testosterone inside would hide the aggression rolling off Anders, whose wolf-born nature didn’t have the first idea of how to blend in. At a glance, Anders was unassuming. He didn’t tower above half the population the way Beck did, and he wasn’t as broad and muscular as Cross. Anders had a young face and smooth jaw, like a lot of first or second year college students. But Anders’ average-guy image stopped there. All the distaste he felt for the human form showed in his golden hazel eyes, which gleamed with a promise of injury to anyone who crossed him.

No, Anders wasn’t likely to draw any attention. In a hole like this, everybody smelled like a predator.

Cross cut the engine and Beck opened his door. Even before his booted feet touched the pavement, the odors of motor oil and gasoline slammed into him. His inner wolf shuddered. While Cross, Anders, and the pack’s two scouts, Maverick and Jared, got out of the truck, Beck sifted through the layers of stink in search of something to soothe his wolf long enough for the Guardians to conduct their business. He was looking for the green scent of grass, or a hint of mud to tide the wolf over, but what he found…

What he found hit him like a fist to the gut, or a pair of warm, parted lips gliding along his throat. Ignoring the pack, he closed his eyes and breathed her deep into his body.

Musky, sweet, like caramelized sugar. He knew that scent, hadn’t forgotten it in the eight years since she’d sashayed her cushiony, heart-shaped ass away from him. Tonight, her scent was charged with a little extra something specific to all werewolf females in Heat, a moonlit liquor that threatened to do him in.

Beck started moving, powered more by instinct than thought. He sensed his pack mates behind and to his sides, heard Maverick mutter something to Cross, and those familiar things reined Beck in. He had to keep his head on straight, whether he had four loyal men at his back or not.

The pack cut a path through the parked bikes. A bald kid wearing leather that exposed the ink on his biceps watched the Guardians warily but didn’t attempt to stop them.

Smart kid.
Beck checked him with a look, making eye contact to verify they were all on the same page, and then Cross pulled the door open.

The yeasty odor of beer and unwashed bodies rolled through the door, momentarily muting the female’s scent.

Beck stopped there in the doorway and forced himself to focus. He wasn’t there to find a woman, not even one who’d haunted him for eight years. Area werewolves had a media problem and Beck needed to know whether that problem was his to resolve or whether the whole thing was a hoax he could ignore.

“At the bar.”
Anders spoke from his right.

At Beck’s nod, the Guardians made their way through the throng and joined Allen Moore, the wolf-born human who had arranged the meet-up.

As the pack gathered, that end of the bar cleared out, responding to something more primal than fear, an innate awareness of the bigger, badder monster. It was just about impossible to consume enough alcohol to mute the feral vibes that clung to even the most laid-back werewolves if they gathered in force.

Allen, an arson investigator and damned useful man to know, raised his hand to get the bartender’s attention. Five pint glasses appeared a moment later.

Beck ignored his. He didn’t want to wash the female’s scent off his tongue. A quick visual sweep of the crowd revealed several women, even a few who caught his eye, but none who fit the scent. His wolf wanted to hunt for her in earnest. Beck overruled the instinct-driven beast.

“What do you have?” Cross asked the question and took a deep drink from one of the foam-topped glasses.

Allen put one elbow on the bar top and swiveled to face the pack of them. He was clean-cut, in his late forties, and had the air of a man who had faced worse threats than a bar full of bikers. Grabbing his phone from the bar, he slid his nicotine-stained fingers across the screen a few times before handing it to Beck.

A video flickered on the screen, small but clear. At first Beck could only see the neat houses lined up close enough to give his wolf a case of claustrophobia. The video either didn’t have sound or the bar was too noisy for Beck to make out the commentary. What he couldn’t hear didn’t matter as much as what he could
see, and that made his eyes narrow.

Cross shifted beside him. A long, low whistle blew past his lips. “That’s not good.”

“No.” Grim, Beck watched the rest of the video while headlines flashed at the bottom of the screen, saying things like “possible bear” and “enormous wolf running on two legs”. The existence of werewolves was as much public record as the existence of vampires, but the media was playing it strangely safe.

The clip ended. Beck looked up at Allen. “Are there other videos?”

“That’s the only official one, but it was shot by the Tri-State News.”

“That’s a residential neighborhood,” Cross said. “What was a news crew doing there?”

Allen’s jaw bulged as he filled his cheeks with air, then blew it out fast. “Unexplained fire in an impossible location.”

Beck raised an eyebrow and Allen elaborated.

“There was a man-made pond in the neighborhood. A kid reported a fire on the pond. It’s temporarily being called a chemical fire, but that’s about as likely as a supernatural cause.”

The only creature Beck knew of that could create fire on water was a Ravager, a being made entirely of solar flames. He would rather accept the chemical explanation but the coincidence of a creature resembling a werewolf in its warrior form sighted near a suspicious fire was too great to ignore.

Passing Allen’s phone to Jared, one of the pack’s two scouts, Beck said, “Take a look around the neighborhood and see what you find.”

Shoulders visibly slumping with relief, Allen rubbed his hand across his face. “Thank you. Listen, fires are breaking out across the whole damn continent. Some are a result of those vampire issues in the cities but vampires don’t explain wildfires in swamp land in winter.”

“What’s public opinion? Any other so-called sightings?” Animosity toward shifters--toward non-humans of all stripe--was at an all-time high. The rural areas were filling with people trying to escape the cities. Beck was fine with that--to an extent. He didn’t want to cage humans in with lawless vampires, but he didn’t want people in the forests either.

Werewolves didn’t number the way vampires did, at least not earth-side. The shifters not waging war in the Light Realms could ill-afford to lose lives to human fear, which grew more and more violent every day.

“The usual,” Allen said after a pull from his glass. “Punishments from God. Global warming. Monsters trying to burn the humans out.”

Beck crossed his arms over his chest and rocked back on his heels, digesting that. The burnt sugar goodness teased across his nostrils. Pink lips, a rounded cheek, and a dark ponytail caught his eye, quickly vanishing behind the broad shoulders of a biker standing up at the wrong moment. His wolf went on high alert.

An air of unease rolled through the crowd, as if the collective intoxicated brain had suddenly caught wind of something dangerous. Beck looked around but nobody was staring back at him.

Nobody except
her
, and her blue-gray eyes darted away as soon as their gazes met.

“Impossible,” he murmured, staring at her hourglass silhouette.
Impossible, but undeniable. Eight years hadn’t changed anything. She was still all hips, ass and breasts offsetting a narrow waist. Built for claiming. Female fashion was kinder to full-figured women than it had been years ago, and the jeans she wore hugged her body instead of trying to hide it. Beck’s fingers itched. He wanted to wrap them around her waist and pull her close the way he should have done back then.

“What do you want to do about this?” Cross’s question called Beck away from the desire coiling inside him.

Tearing his attention away from the soft woman with overflowing assets, he nodded at Jared. “Get a ride with Allen. Let me know what you find.”

Allen rose from his stool. He threw a roll of cash on the bar. The bills would cover Allen and the Guardians, because that was one of many supporting roles wolf-blooded humans played.

Friends, family, contacts. Eyes and ears and financial support when necessary.

It wasn’t necessary for Allen to bankroll the Guardians but Beck let it happen because it was a point of pride for the investigator whose wife enjoyed a good life on safe, protected Guardian land.

Beck scanned the bar again, once again drawn back to her. After signaling the bartender for another shot, she leaned on her elbows, pushing her breasts together, showing cleavage so deep, he could die in it. More than one other man in the bar noticed, including the other Guardians. Anders wore a hard expression as he stared at her, like he was hungry for a taste but repulsed by the idea of taking a bite. Cross and Maverick were just openly appreciative.

“Mav, take a walk outside,” he said. “I think we’re going to be here a while longer, but I don’t want any surprises sneaking up on us.”

Beck caught her scent again, so close, his entire body responded, hardening in preparation to mate. Already, his wolf considered her theirs. Beck denied the beast a lot of things in the interest of prioritizing his humanity, but he had no intention of denying either of them the ripe woman at the other end of the bar.

January Cabot knocked back a shot, willing it to drown her guilt as it burned down her throat. Three years out of nursing school and she still couldn’t cope with the way humans left their own to suffer.