Her Guardian Harem: Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance Read online

  Her Guardian Harem

  Savannah Skye

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Introduction

  During her time on the werewolf squad, ex-cop Marley Philips almost died in the line of duty. The new plan now that she’s taken early retirement? Drink to forget, and cut herself off from the rest of the world. It’s working pretty well until a werewolf she put behind bars a few years back shows up at her door. Only he doesn’t want revenge. He wants her help finding his missing girlfriend, Lovely.

  When circumstances drag Marley back into the life she so desperately tried to leave behind, she finds that she isn’t the only one hunting for the missing Lovely. Three werewolf males are also trying to find her, each one sexier and more lethal than the last. Can Marley save Lovely before it’s too late? And, more importantly, can she save her own heart from being obliterated by the three alpha males hellbent on mixing business with pleasure?

  Chapter 1

  The rain ran in rivulets down my window as I sat staring out into the November night, nursing a glass of cheap bourbon. I raised the drink to my lips and winced at the ache in my side. On nights like this I always get a twinge from the old scars. I’ve no idea why the weather should have that effect, maybe it’s just the memory.

  It was on a night like this, just over a year ago, that I got a call-out to a local bar where three werewolves were making trouble and threatening the human patrons. Two of them backed down when I showed up – they’d been drinking and knew that things had gotten out of hand – but the third went for me. I knew how to fight werewolves, I’d been trained for this before joining the Werewolf Squad, but sometimes you can do everything right and shit still doesn’t go your way. He was bigger than me and stronger than me but I was used to that and I had him on the ground with my knee in his back, but when I reached for my cuffs, he reared back at me, twisting from my grip and swiping a clawed hand toward my side.

  I can still remember the shock of pain as his claws sliced through my flesh, like three bolts of lightning. I went down hard. When back-up arrived shortly after, I was lying in an expanding pool of my own blood, dead to the world.

  I nearly stayed that way.

  The doctors said I was technically dead for a while there. I don’t know if that’s just something they say to people but I had no trouble believing it. Although I had lost consciousness, I was sure I had some memory of going, of losing more than consciousness. I felt I could remember being yanked back and fighting against myself to stay this time.

  It was a few weeks before I was back on my feet, and the scars from the wolf’s claws would be with me the rest of my life; three livid, white lines just below my rib cage, the skin around them raised slightly like channels dug into my skin. A reminder of what had happened, and of what had come close to happening.

  I quit the force straight after. Everyone said they understood, but I don’t know how they could. What they meant was that they understood me being scared of werewolves after what had happened to me, and so did not blame me for not wanting to work around them anymore. But I wasn’t scared of them – if I was, then I would never have come to live here, a werewolf-heavy district, where I was outnumbered ten to one. Perhaps it was that fact that I wasn’t afraid that had made me quit. I had survived them once, I could survive them again. I had lost my fear of wolves and that was a dangerous thing for someone who worked in werewolf crime. Lack of fear got you killed. Maybe my instincts of self-preservation were strong enough to make me walk away.

  But the truth was, I didn’t know why I quit. It just felt like the right thing to do.

  Since then, I’d been here mostly, a shitty apartment in the heart of MacKenzie Territory. The MacKenzie were one of the four werewolf packs who lived in the city alongside humans, carefully observing the boundaries of each other’s territories while humans never even knew when they crossed from one to the next. I was living off my pension, which was fine - what with the injury and all – but wouldn’t last forever. Certainly not if I kept drinking like this.

  I poured the rest of the glass down my throat and reached for a refill. On nights like tonight I need something to numb the memories, and drink was my drug of choice. Before all this happened, I had had a life, friends and family, but I turned my back on all of them. I just couldn’t handle them right now. They would all have been very understanding and would have asked me how I was doing and what they could do to help. That wasn’t what I wanted. I moved here to cut myself off from everyone I knew, and even from my own species. All I wanted was to sit in a room and marinade myself in cheap alcohol. It didn’t make me happy, but I couldn’t think of anything that would.

  I did miss sex. That much I was willing to admit. Cops tend to run pretty hot – if you have a job that shows you, day after day, how short and brutal life can be, then you tend to grab the moments of pleasure wherever you can, and when I was on the force I had never been shy about grabbing. I had a high sex drive and that hadn’t changed, I just wasn’t feeding it, which made matters worse. Sometimes I thought about going out, meeting someone in a bar and going back to their place for one, mattress-breaking, wall-shaking night of passion that leaves bruises that last as long as my scars. But that would mean talking to people and dealing with people and would probably have repercussions somewhere down the line. I could barely look at other people at the moment, let alone touch them.

  I’d more or less decided to spend another evening voiding my brain with drink when there was a knock at the door. I say a knock; it was more like a thump. Not like someone was deliberately banging on my door, but more like they just didn’t know how to be any gentler. Maybe that’s reading a lot into a knock.

  I got to my feet and walked across the room, more or less managing to walk in a straight line. I looked through the peephole – always a good idea in this district – and saw a massive face that was immediately familiar, though it took me a moment to recall where from.

  The thumps echoed on the door again, accompanied by a voice.

  “Officer Philips? I know you’re in there, Officer Philips.”

  Officer Philips – Marley to my friends – is me, so he was right about that. But this was not a man I desperately wanted to see, because the last time I had seen him, I had been on the witness stand giving evidence against him. It was a serious surprise to see Dog – a nickname that referred to how faithful he was. He shouldn’t have been out for years.

  “I need to talk.”

  That was hard to believe. Of course, the dumbest thing for a convicted werewolf to do, if he is lucky enough to get out early, is go and kill the cop who helped put him in jail, but Dog was never bright. Werewolves are, by nature, direct rather than conniving – they’re not big planners – but they are usually smart in their own way. Dog was dumb in every way. It was amazing he’d ever had the brains to rob the betting shop where he had worked, and inevitable that he had been caught.

  “Officer Philips? I need your help.”

  I don’t know why that made me reach for the door handle. Maybe it was because the massive Dog could have kicked in the door
without any difficulty and yet hadn’t. Maybe it was because, even at his trial, I had felt sorry for the big lug. Maybe I’m just a sucker for someone who asks for help.

  “Good evening, Officer Philips,” Dog rumbled, looming above me like a sasquatch that had gotten badly lost.

  “It’s just Marley now, Dog,” I explained. “I quit the force.”

  “Okay, Miss Philips. Can I come in?”

  I stepped back and Dog ducked through the door to enter.

  “Nice place.”

  It wasn’t, but he’d spent the last two years in a jail cell so I guess it all depends what you’re used to.

  “Drink?” I asked.

  “Thanks, Miss Philips.”

  “You can call me Marley.”

  “I’ll try.”

  I poured him a glass of whisky, my eyes flashing towards the drawer where I still kept my gun loaded with silver bullets.

  “How come you’re out, Dog? You’ve gotta have at least five years left to do. You finally make a deal?” Dog had never told anyone where the money he had stolen had gone.

  Dog shook his head. “Reprieve, Miss Philips. New evidence come to light. Always said I was innocent.”

  I passed him the glass and moved as casually as I could towards the drawer. If Dog had been innocent all this time then he might well want revenge on someone who had helped put him away.

  “Well, that’s great, Dog.”

  He shrugged. “Prison’s not so bad.”

  “Still, I’m sorry if you feel I’m responsible for sending you there.”

  He shrugged again. “You was just following the evidence, Miss Philips. I remember. You was always fair to me. You tried to help if you could. But the evidence…” He shook his head. “I was framed.”

  I sipped at my drink. “If you know something, Dog, take it to the police, don’t go after them yourself.”

  “I don’t want to hurt nobody.”

  Seen like this, you could easily believe him. But Dog had issues, and could go from gentle giant to bull in a china shop in seconds flat. He had a list of violent crimes to his name that had aided in his conviction.

  “Why are you here, Dog?” I came to the crux of the matter.

  “I’m trying to find my girl, Miss Philips. Trying to find Lovely.”

  Lovely. That was the stage name of the singer whom Dog had been seeing. She worked in an underground wolf club where Dog occasionally picked up shifts as a bouncer, to supplement his regular income at the betting shop, as a bouncer. She had been young – nineteen at the time – and very beautiful, with copper hair piled up on her head and an incredible figure, which made an average singer the most popular act the club had. More than a few young werewolves at the club had wanted her, and then seen Dog glaring at them. That was the sort of thing that made his temper flare.

  “How come you’re looking for her?”

  Dog frowned, his large face pulling into deep creases of confusion. “She’s my girl. I’ve been away awhile but she said she’d wait for me. And I’m out sooner than either of us expected so I’m sure she’s waited. Only, I can’t find her.”

  “You tried The Silver Fox?” The club where Lovely had sung, and danced a little.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Her apartment?”

  “Never knew where she lived.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Dog, I don’t know either. If I remember rightly, the only address we had for her was the Fox.”

  Dog nodded. “She stayed there some nights.”

  I was glad that I could honestly tell him I knew nothing, because even had I had the information he was looking for, I couldn’t have told him. It had been Lovely’s evidence more than anything else that had put Dog in jail.

  “Okay.” Dog nodded his big head. “If you hear anything, I’m in the rats’ nest.”

  He scratched down an address onto the back of a water bill lying on my table.

  “Goodnight, Miss Philips.”

  “Goodnight, Dog. Sorry again.”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders once more. “Not your fault, Miss Philips. Somebody framed me.”

  The door closed behind Dog with a bang – he couldn’t help it, he was one of those naturally strong people, destined to be a bouncer, a wrestler or a mob enforcer. Dog had been all three in his time, and the rumor was that he had been fired from the latter two jobs for excessive violence.

  I sat back in my chair, the glass of whisky hanging forgotten from my hand.

  He hadn’t known where his own girlfriend lived.

  Thinking back, there had always been something not right about that relationship. Dog seemed to worship the ground Lovely walked on, and she was very affectionate in return, when he was around. There was certainly an advantage for a girl like her – a girl who flirted as naturally as breathing in and out - to be with a guy who scared off anyone who fancied his chances. And yet, there had been a distance. Everybody thought it was a weird relationship; Dog was more than twice Lovely’s age with a face that had not been handsome to start with and had then been punched, kicked and slammed into brick walls till it was barely a face. He was tall and strong, of course, and could certainly protect her. But Lovely could have her pick of werewolves; the most handsome, the most wealthy, the most powerful. Strength means a lot more in werewolf society than human, but even so; Dog? Most people – myself included – had just thought she was a bit scared of a boyfriend who could tear her limb from limb as easy as swatting a fly. The assumption was that he had made a play for her, she had been too sacred to say no, and so a fairly one-sided relationship had started.

  Maybe she had been a bit too keen to give evidence against him. Maybe we had been a bit too keen to believe it. All the evidence had been against Dog, and because he was obviously too dumb to do something as subtle as cover his tracks, we’d all bought it.

  I didn’t like the idea that I might have been involved in sending an innocent man to jail, even one with as many violent tendencies as Dog. It was hard not to like the guy, even as you assumed he was guilty of everything he was accused of. For all his criminality – and if he hadn’t robbed the betting shop he was guilty of a shit-ton more – Dog had a gentle soul and he loved hard. If he found Lovely – and he definitely wouldn’t give up looking – and learned that she had shacked up with someone else before the key had turned in his cell door, then there would be blood. He wouldn’t hurt her, though. Not if I read Dog right. He would blame the whole damn world before finding Lovely guilty of one damn thing.

  It would be nice to say that this brush with the outside world and my old life made me awake to what I had been missing lately. But with these few thoughts out of the way, I returned to drinking myself into an early grave, before staggering off to bed.

  The following morning, after throwing up the previous night’s drink – one good reason to buy the cheap stuff – I sat down in the kitchen to eat breakfast with the news on the TV. I was only half-watching, until a story came on that made me sit up.

  Dog’s murder wasn’t even the top story – werewolves killing each other was hardly news. Even in death he was life’s loser, an also-ran whose untimely killing wasn’t enough to make the city so much as look up from their cereal bowls.

  Chapter 2

  For about an hour after learning of Dog’s murder, I dithered, torn between reporting my encounter with him to the police, as was my civic duty, and ignoring it and getting drunk so I didn’t have to go to a police station. Facing that place that I had used to go every morning, back in what now seemed like another life, was not something I was keen to do, but didn’t I owe it to Dog? There was damn all else I could do for him now and I had been partly responsible for his losing two years of his life behind bars.

  In the end, I don’t think it was guilt or civic duty as much as curiosity that finally made the decision. I showered – something I had been doing far too infrequently of late – dressed smartly, put on make-up and looked in the mirror. There was a woman in there I almost remem
bered, as if I had seen her in a dream. She looked pretty good, and part of me thought I wouldn’t mind seeing her more often, though the rest of me thought that looking like this everyday was a lot of trouble to go to when lying on the sofa in unwashed sweats was an option.

  I headed out. The station looked like I remembered it; busy, untidy, smelling faintly of bleach and floor polish even though it never looked clean. Underpaid, overworked cops hurried here and there; in the waiting room, two officers fought to subdue a werewolf who had gotten bored of waiting to report a crime and decided to try the direct approach. I felt a little guilty line jumping but there are some perks to being an ex-cop.

  “Morning, Charlie,” I said with a grin.

  The man on the desk, who I don’t think I’d ever seen out of his padded swivel chair, looked up in confusion and then beamed.

  “Saints preserve us. Marley Philips. What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Good to see you, too.”

  “Well, it’s great to see you. I just won some money.”

  “How come?”

  “We had a book going on whether you were still alive.”

  That’s how it is with cops. You develop a relaxed attitude about death, even when it comes to those you work with.

  “Glad I could help.”

  “Are you wearing make-up?”

  “Something I’m trying.”

  Charlie shook his head. “It suits you and looks weird at the same time. Like putting make-up on a horse and finding out it looks damn sexy.”

  “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “I’d do you before the horse.”

  “Flatterer.”