Rogue Mate, The Moltiare Collection: Bk1 (Sample)(Available on Amazon/SW)

Prologue

(Present Day)

“There’s my baby.” She whispered as she brushed a gentle hand over her child’s cheek, “My sweet baby.”

The little man was sound asleep in her arms, but he had every right to be. After all, with nearly every member of the pack ogling over him and the trip home, it had been a very tiring day.

He had been the second birth that the pack had seen in two years. The birth rate among the wolves had only just been on the rise, so nearly every pregnancy was a surprise. A pleasant bundle of surprise.

Her fingers traced over the mark that was inlayed on her child’s shoulder. It was a witch’s mark, the mark of Flidias, the same as her own and her father’s before her. For them it had meant Shape shifter, giving and abnormal amount of control over their animal spirits and the way that they changed form, but she wondered if he would be different. She wondered if he would be more like his older sister who bore the mark of Fama, or like his aunt and grandmother who bore the mark of Pronoea.

What gift had the gods chosen to bestow upon him?

She felt the presence of the man beside her before he even spoke. It seemed that motherhood had fine-tuned her senses more than she had ever hoped for, so much that she felt that she could almost feel and smell all of the places that this man had been before he even made his way up the steps. How could she absorb this much, she wondered, from a man that smelled of wood chips, mint, and death?

Perhaps because her sister had told her that he’d be coming. With the mark of Pronoea burning behind her ear, her sister had told her the man would come to ask questions, that he would be here out of a friendship rather than the duty that followed him, and that she would have nothing to fear.

She still knew that she would, however. Even now the fear was nipping at the corners of her mind while she struggled to keep calm, but it was only natural to feel that way about a creature that lived his life feeding off of those that she lived next to. Vampires and Shifters had never mixed well.

“Jessica Ryland?” he called to her from the doorway, keeping his distance from the mother and her pups.

She lifted her head for a moment, her eyes adjusting to the darkness to make out his full black attire. His slacks and button up shirt suggested professionalism, or maybe a taste for finer things that he had acquired over time, but the way he leaned casually against the open door, with neither a smile nor scowl on his face, suggested exactly what her sister had told her. He was a man with questions, and a man that would not willingly risk a life unless it was meant to be taken.

“You were expecting me?” she could tell by the confusion in his voice that he hadn’t expected her to know, “Were you told by who sent me?”

“Keep it down.” She whispered, and all but ignored his first two inquires.

His eyes drifted over the child in her arms and the child that slept in a crib not far from where she sat, not altogether pleased by her statement, but respecting it nonetheless.

“I’m Darrius Moltiare.” He began again with a quieter voice, “Although I’m sure that a woman of your background knows exactly what I am…”

The inkling of suspicion inside of him was confirmed as he watched the fear rise slightly in her aura.

“But how is it that you almost know who I am?”

She considered his words for a moment before she began lifting herself from the rocking chair. Her son stirred quietly in her hands as she carefully placed him back onto the soft blankets that he had ruffled when he had begun crying a few hours before hand. She ignored the tremors in her movements as she bent to kiss his forehead and moved across the room to do the same to her daughter. Perhaps the nerves and the instinctive need to protect what was hers would fade once she got him away from her kids.

His eyes had a metallic sheen to them, she noticed as she came to stand before him, one that made them look almost golden in the light.

“I’m going to make myself some tea,” she stated calmly, “if you would like to join me downstairs.”

Darrius’s eyes rested open hers shortly before they flicked back towards each of the children. A mother defending her pups, he mused as she shifted slightly on her feet to block his view.

“I would be my pleasure.”