The Protector's Heart (Wilde Creek Three) (5 page)

Mal turned slowly and faced her. Her back was
straight with determination, but her eyes were haunted. Once more
he found himself struggling not to offer her comfort. His wolf was
genuinely aggravated that she was scared and he couldn’t help
her.

“I can help with the security, if you’d like.
I have a security company.”

Her head tilted just slightly in curiosity.
“I thought you were Brynn’s bodyguard.”

“That’s my pack job. I’m a protector, and
that means I protect who the alpha says, and he says Brynn. As a
sideline, though, I co-own L&M Security.”

“You’re the ‘M’, who is the ‘L’?”

“My best friend Lucian.”

“Is he a wolf?”

“No, he’s human. He’s got a…complicated life,
and he travels quite extensively, but he does what he can for the
company now until his life settles down.” Not that Malachi ever
expected that to happen. Lucian wasn’t planning to retire from his
real job anytime soon.

“I don’t want to put you out.”

He blinked, not sure what she was talking
about, and then he realized she meant him helping with her home’s
security. “It’s not a big deal. I saw the security company sign in
the flower bed out front, and judging from the system you have in
here, it wouldn’t take much for me to upgrade it so you’d feel
safer.”

“Gosh, I don’t know what that would feel
like.” She rubbed her arms.

His heart panged. “I want that for you.”

She blinked, tilting her head up until she
was looking into his eyes. She stepped closer to him, the sweet
wildflower scent of her skin making his mouth water. “Safety?”

He nodded, not daring to open his mouth
because he really wasn’t sure he wouldn’t say something completely
idiotic like
please be mine forever
.

Something splashed loudly and he looked over
her head to see that the milk had boiled over. She gasped and
lurched toward the stove, lifting the pan as he grabbed a towel and
turned off the gas.

She cursed under her breath and carried the
pot to the counter, setting it on a hot pad. He sopped up the
spilled milk and wrung the towel out in the sink. Within a few
minutes, they were sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace
drinking hot chocolate, both of their mugs topped with
marshmallows.

While they stared into the fire, they talked
about everything and nothing, the sort of light conversation that
people tend to make when they don’t want to talk about the elephant
in the room. For Malachi, that particular elephant was wearing a
giant flashing sign that read, ‘You’re my mate.’ From what little
he’d learned about Nila’s ex, he’d spent the better part of their
relationship treating her like property and terrifying her. She
didn’t need Malachi acting all ‘me Tarzan, you Jane.’ He really
wished that relationships came with a manual so he could flip to
the table of contents and figure out where to start.

Nila put her empty mug on the coffee table
and turned to face him. She blinked slowly, fatigue showing on her
face, and then her eyes closed and didn’t open again, as her
breathing evened out.

Shit. He should go like right fucking now. As
if on cue, his phone buzzed and a text from Mia read, “I hope you
got home safely. They just declared a state of emergency because of
the road conditions.”

“I’m safe,” he texted back.

“Home?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“Oh that’s mature.” She signed off that she
loved him, and he replied back the same, sliding his phone onto the
table and yawning.

“I’m stuck here, sweetheart,” he
whispered.

Nila’s answer was a sigh, as she snuggled
into the cushions.

Being stuck wasn’t such a bad thing after
all.

Chapter 5

Nila yawned and stretched, rubbing her eyes.
She looked to the right and was surprised by what she saw. Malachi
was leaning against the arm of the couch, his head propped up on
one hand, and his other arm holding Jack as he slept, snuggled
against him.

She swallowed hard at the sight. She’d never
seen anything sweeter. A blanket was covering her, and she knew
that Malachi had done that for her, and also must have caught Jack
before he woke her up. She was oddly grateful, but wary at the same
time. Glad that he’d helped Jack, but concerned that he’d stayed
the night. Why hadn’t he gone home?

Easing from the couch, she walked to the
front window and pulled back the curtain enough to see in the
morning sunlight that another foot of snow had blanketed the world
outside her door. She’d lured him into her home with hot chocolate
and marshmallows when she’d known that the snow wasn’t letting up.
A part of her knew that she’d been desperate for some kind of extra
protection, because the lack of electricity had meant the security
system was useless. But the bigger part of her knew that she just
hadn’t wanted Malachi to leave.

“It’s pretty bad out there.” Malachi’s voice
was soft and deep, and it wiggled down her spine, making her whole
body tighten.

She turned slowly and looked at him, so
comfortable on her couch with her son in his arms, Jack’s blue baby
blanket over top of them both. Malachi looked even more handsome
with his short hair mussed from sleep and a shadow of stubble on
his chin.

“I’m sorry you got stuck here.”

He smiled at her in a way that said he knew
exactly why she’d let him stay, even though she hadn’t consciously
made the choice. “I’m not.”

“I didn’t hear him.” She looked at her son,
his tawny head tucked into the crook of Malachi’s neck as if he
belonged there.

“I got him pretty quick. He just went right
back to sleep, but I think that he leaked on me.” He grinned
wryly.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay, I promise.”

She moved toward them and stopped next to the
couch. He looked up at her, and there was nothing sinister in his
eyes, no look that told her a fist might come flying at her at any
moment, or that a scathing insult might be hurled in her direction.
“It is okay, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

She took her still-sleeping son from him and
saw that Jack had indeed ‘leaked’ since Malachi’s dark shirt had an
even darker stain on it. Jack made a snuffling sound as he began to
wake, and she said, “I’ll be right back.”

When she came out of the bedroom after
changing Jack, she found Malachi, naked from the waist up, talking
on his cell.  “Okay, thanks, I appreciate it.”  He tucked
the phone into his back pocket and said, “A wolf from my pack works
for the power company, and he said that the power will be back on
this street in about an hour.  Do you have a shovel?”

She realized she was staring at his
chest.  His amazing chest.  When he cleared his throat
and said her name, lifting her eyes to meet his was possibly the
hardest thing she’d had to do.  Him and his damn lickable
chest.  “I’m sorry?”

“A shovel?”

She blinked.  “I can wash the shirt; you
don’t have to bury it.”

He laughed, and the sound was so sweet she
wanted to make him laugh again.  “No, sweetheart, I want to
shovel your driveway.  And you don’t have to wash the shirt, I
can do my own laundry.”

“You don’t have to shovel the drive.” He
called her sweetheart. She cursed herself for thinking that was
awesome.

“Well, I’ll give you two reasons why I
do.  One, I’m snowed in because the plows that came through
very early this morning blocked me in.”

When he didn’t continue, she swallowed the
lump in her throat and said, “What’s the second reason?”

He grabbed his coat from where he’d hung it
on the hooks by the front door and said, “Because I want to do it
for you.  You made me hot chocolate with marshmallows and you
let me crash on your couch when it had to be hard for you to do
that since we don’t know each other well.”

What he didn’t say was that he was a wolf,
and he knew she didn’t like his kind.  “The shovel is on the
porch.”

He went to the door, and as he pulled it
open, she said, “Malachi?”

“Yeah?”  He looked at her, his beautiful
blue eyes regarding her with nothing but kindness.

“Thank you.”

“It’s no hardship to shovel snow.”

“No, for everything.”  She hugged Jack a
little closer.  “Thank you for everything.”

He smiled at her, a dimple forming in one
cheek that made her think of wicked things, and walked out,
shutting the door firmly behind him.  By the time the drive
was shoveled, the power was back on and Jack was happily playing on
the floor with his toys while she went through the fridge and
salvaged what she could.

“Can I make you some breakfast?” she asked
when he stopped back in the house and picked up his shirt.

“No thank you, sweetheart. I have to get
going.  I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

He ducked down on one knee and brushed his
knuckle over Jack’s cheek.  “Take care, kiddo.  Thanks
for sharing your blanket with me.”

Jack banged two wooden blocks together,
giggled, and then looked at Malachi and said, “Carrot.”

Nila smiled at the sweet scene and said
goodbye to Malachi, closing and locking the door when he was
gone.  She turned and looked around the family room.  It
seemed empty now without Malachi’s big muscly body taking up room
on her couch.  “I hate to admit it, J-man, but I miss him
already.”

“Carrot.”

“You bet, sweetie.  Carrot.”

* * * * *

With the world unstuck from the snowfall of
the previous day, Nila drove to the daycare and dropped off Jack,
and then headed to the doctor’s office.  She liked her job and
the people she worked with, but she didn’t usually look forward to
working as much as she did that morning.  She pulled her car
into the parking lot and turned it off, staring at the big green
SUV that belonged to Malachi.

A little streak of jealousy sliced through
her, but she shoved it aside. Brynn’s life wasn’t totally idyllic.
Her mate had treated her pretty badly and left her floundering
while she was pregnant and he hid behind pack laws. She might be
loving life now, but she’d been really miserable not too long ago.
Nila could relate to that. She’d been pretty naive about wolves
when she met Damien. He seemed like a nice guy. He’d treated her
like a queen, said all the right things to ease her mind about her
concerns that she was a human and he wasn’t. He hadn’t let her near
his pack for the first few months of their relationship, and then
she found out she was pregnant. She had been taking the pill
faithfully the whole time and was surprised by the pregnancy, but
she and Damien were in love and he was excited by the thought of
having a child with her. He married her immediately and then he
took her to meet his pack.

What a rude awakening that was. She was
treated like a second-class citizen because she was human. The
females were hostile, some of them even threatening to harm her and
the baby because Damien was the son of the alpha and therefore a
prized male. It was that night, the first time she met his father,
that she saw the real Damien. His nice guy persona melted away so
fast that she wondered if she’d ever really seen it in the first
place.

Shaking her head to clear the dark thoughts,
she exhaled loudly and turned off the car. It rattled a bit as the
engine stopped, and she grimaced. She didn’t have the money to deal
with car repairs right now. She walked through the freshly salted
parking lot, the crunch of the salt under her boots loud in the
quiet morning, and opened the door of the clinic. She smiled at
Brynn and said hello, but walked through the door without saying
anything to Malachi as she made her way to the employee breakroom
to stow her things.

She wanted to believe that Malachi was
different from Damien, but she’d already been fooled once by a wolf
in sheep’s clothing. Jack counted on her to make good choices. He
might have a lousy biological father, but Nila could give him a
worthy step-dad, and that man would not be a wolf. She just
couldn’t risk Jack’s safety and happiness because Malachi happened
to make her heart thud irregularly in her chest.

She put the yogurt that Malachi had bought
for her on the shelf in the fridge and stared at the white
container with the strawberry and banana images on the front. He’d
even gotten her favorite brand, which showed just how much he’d
been paying attention to her.

She hated that her stomach flipped at the
idea of him watching her.

Gritting her teeth, she closed the fridge
door hard enough to make it rock back and forth. Then she smoothed
her hands down the front of her scrub top, which was covered with
pink and purple bunnies, and strode out to the front to get the
first patient. If she ignored Malachi long enough, he’d get the
hint and move on.

She hoped.

* * * * *

Malachi didn’t know what had happened between
yesterday and today, but Nila was acting like an ice queen toward
him. When she came to get the first patient, she ignored him so
expertly that he felt like he’d suddenly become invisible.

“Whoa,” Brynn said softly as Nila took the
young girl and her father to an exam room. “What the heck did you
do to her?”

He frowned. “Shoveled her driveway.”

“Oh, you bastard,” Brynn said, grinning.

He snorted, looking down the hallway, his
wolf whining. He didn’t like her ignoring him like that. Before
he’d spent time at her house, she’d kept her distance, but now he
was sure she was just trying hard not to look at him. Something had
happened to change her mind about him.

Brynn spun in the chair and folded her arms
across her chest, giving him a long look. “Acksel said you don’t
want to sit here all day anymore.”

“I talked to him about it yesterday. I’ll
still drive you to and from work, and pick you up for lunch anytime
you go out to eat, but I won’t be stuck here when I need to deal
with my company.”