Melanie [Eminence Shifters] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  Eminence Shifters

  Melanie

  After a childhood tragedy, Melanie Cook had shut out all people from her life, preferring to be alone over getting hurt again. On duty one night, she is attacked by a mountain lion shifter and thrust into a world she never knew existed.

  She is put into protective custody by four enormous and handsome men, men she just can't seem to stop desiring. She is feeling things she never imagined she would. These men threaten to break her years of disciplined solitude.

  Finn, Cooper, Hunter, and Dane Frederick have lived a long time waiting to find their mate. They find her on a night of blood and death. Determined to keep her safe and to make her theirs, they take her home. But explaining the existence of shifters to their human mate, and having her accept them for who they are, is not easy with the continued threat on her life.

  Genre: Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre, Paranormal, Shape-shifter

  Length: 36,072 words

  MELANIE

  Eminence Shifters

  Ashley Malkin

  MENAGE AMOUR

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  ABOUT THE E-BOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED: Your non-refundable purchase of this e-book allows you to only ONE LEGAL copy for your own personal reading on your own personal computer or device. You do not have resell or distribution rights without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner of this book. This book cannot be copied in any format, sold, or otherwise transferred from your computer to another through upload to a file sharing peer to peer program, for free or for a fee, or as a prize in any contest. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. Distribution of this e-book, in whole or in part, online, offline, in print or in any way or any other method currently known or yet to be invented, is forbidden. If you do not want this book anymore, you must delete it from your computer.

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  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Amour

  MELANIE

  Copyright © 2014 by Ashley Malkin

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62741-999-4

  First E-book Publication: July 2014

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

  If you have purchased this copy of Melanie by Ashley Malkin from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Ashley Malkin’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Malkin’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  www.BookStrand.com

  DEDICATION

  Dedicated to everyone in this jaded world who still believes in true love.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  MELANIE

  Eminence Shifters

  ASHLEY MALKIN

  Copyright © 2014

  Chapter 1

  It had been a long week for Melanie. As a nurse in the local hospital, a seven-night stretch was a real drag on her energy levels. The silver lining was that this was her last night. She had seven whole nights off after this shift. Her last night in the ER was shaping up to be the worst, however. Being a Saturday, it was never going to be an easy night for the staff, but this night was just insane.

  “Full moons bring out all the crazies,” said the ER registrar, Dr. Jelowitz. “We just got the call that an ambulance is five minutes out with a man who seems to have been wrestling a mountain lion.”

  Melanie sighed but slipped easily into her practiced routine and began to get sponges and IV supplies organized. Melanie’s friend Penny ran up to her and took the bags of IV solution out of Melanie’s arms.

  “I’ll do that, Mel. Can you go with Dr. Jelowitz to meet the patient? He hates trainees when things are bloody.”

  Five minutes later Melanie found herself outside in the hospital’s ambulance bay, shivering in the icy-cold winter air, wondering how anyone came to be attacked by a mountain lion in downtown Buena Vista, Colorado. The siren snapped her out of her musings and she got ready for the incoming frenzy, adrenaline spiking in her freezing veins.

  As the ambulance pulled to a stop, Dr. Jelowitz and Melanie moved forward as a team to open the back doors. Melanie was suddenly thrown to the ground when the back doors of the ambulance were seemingly blasted off their hinges.

  The force of the fall slammed Melanie’s head onto the concrete and the air whooshed from her lungs. She struggled against the blackness and pain, to try to remain conscious.

  Everything was moving so slowly and it seemed to be happening at the end of a long, dim tunnel.

  She was watching a man, or was it a man dressed as a horror-film mummy, throwing an ambulance officer at Dr. Jelowitz?

  She shook her head, blinking rapidly to try to clear her vision. Melanie couldn’t believe what was unfolding in front of her. People didn’t get thrown around like that. She concluded she must be unconscious and dreaming.

  Swiping at her watery eyes, she looked up to see a huge mountain lion with its jaws around Dr. Jelowitz’s throat.

  “What the fuck is that?” Melanie said with a gasp. The blood-soaked head swiveled toward those words, its golden eyes glowing and feral.

  One leap and it was on Melanie before she could even attempt to try to escape. It grabbed her leg in its massive bloody jaws and shook its head with a deafening snarl. Melanie was thrown across the emergency bay, her flight ending with a sickening thump as she collided with the bricks of the hospital. Melanie sunk instantly into darkness.

/>   Chapter 2

  As a sheriff of the small Colorado mountain town of Eminence, Hunter Frederick had little to no desire to ever venture anywhere else. He had done his travelling in the Marines and that had exhausted his wanderlust. For him, Eminence had it all. Luckily for Hunter, his twin Dane, and his elder twin brothers, Finn and Cooper, all felt the same, so he was surrounded by his family.

  Finn was Hunter’s eldest brother and he had recently taken over from their father, Theo, as Alpha of their pride of mountain lion shifters. Finn’s twin, Cooper, was Beta. Hunter and Dane were the pride enforcers. They also went into local law enforcement for jobs, to help them keep the local human population in the dark as to the existence of shifters in their town.

  Tonight, however, Hunter was in Buena Vista, three hours from home, trying to clean up a mammoth “cluster fuck” as his brother, and deputy sheriff, Dane had called it. All caused by a rogue shifter from their pride in Eminence. As Hunter raced through the night toward the local hospital, he had time to kick himself for letting Curtis get away.

  The shifter in question, Curtis Adams, had wandered into their pride lands about ten years ago. Hunter’s father, as Alpha, had accepted the man’s appeal to stay and he had lived in a small cabin on the very edge of their pride territory. Curtis was rarely seen around town, never socialized, and so was left in peace.

  A week ago, a young girl from town had run into the sheriff’s station a bloody mess. The poor thing was walking home from her job at the local ice-cream parlor, when Curtis had pulled up in his pickup and insisted, with his fists, on taking her for a ride. She had escaped him by making a break for it at the only stoplight in town, and running straight into the sheriff’s station directly opposite. Hunter was on duty that night and had taken her to the local clinic and taken her statement. She had given a good description of Curtis and his pickup. Curtis’s truck was found abandoned on the outskirts of Eminence, the girl’s blood in the cab making it fairly certain that he was indeed guilty.

  Kidnapping was against the law, but risking the exposure of shifters to humans was a crime against the pride, and Curtis knew that the Alpha’s punishment was not going to be as easy as just going to jail. So Curtis was on the run, and it was Hunter’s job to track him and bring him back to Finn for punishment.

  Hunter had caught up to him just twenty minutes ago. Buena Vista was a very populated area and that had worked in Curtis’s favor. Hunter had finally got his claws into him in a wooded area on the outskirts of town. Unfortunately, it was well used in the evenings by locals walking their dogs. A mountain lion attacking a man had attracted the attention of one of those dog walkers and they had called 9-1-1. Curtis had deliberately not shifted, and the ambulance had provided him a means of escape. Hunter had had to run back into the cover of the woods, find his truck, and do some ambulance chasing.

  He arrived at the hospital’s ambulance bay and raced to the only ambulance there. He had hoped at best to find Curtis still there, or, failing that, a fresh scent to follow. Instead he walked into the aftermath of Curtis’s bloody escape. Two paramedics and a local doctor were dead, and an ER nurse was injured.

  Hunter had put on his sheriff’s uniform and was able to mingle with the local law enforcement to see if he could find out if Curtis had compromised the shifter’s race. The fatalities were appalling. The only living witness was the ER nurse.

  Hunter pulled out his cell phone and pushed Dane’s number. He had to fill him in, and ask him to come down and continue the track on Curtis, while he waited here for the nurse to wake up so he could interview her. He stepped over to the wall of the ER, out of the way of all the police.

  “Oh my God!” Hunter cried out, forgetting he had dialed Dane.

  “Hunter, what’s wrong?” came Dane’s worried voice over the phone line.

  “Shit,” was all he could say to Dane, trying to keep standing as his knees threatened to collapse under him.

  “Hunter, man, are you okay? What’s happened? Are you hurt? Talk to me,” Dane persisted.

  Hunter looked at the ground. There was blood under his feet. Still fresh. The scent in his nostrils was overpowering. His chest tightened. His fangs threatened to erupt from his gums. His nail beds itched as his claws moved to the surface, ready to emerge. He knew from the glow around him that his eyes were a glowing, bright amber color.

  Dane’s voice penetrated Hunter’s brain at last.

  “Her blood, it’s everywhere. God, Dane, he hurt her,” Hunter finally said, gasping into the phone still pressed to his ear.

  “Hurt who? Her who? Hunter, are you hurt?”

  Trying to breathe through his mouth didn’t help. There was so much of her blood he could scent it even stronger when it breezed over his tongue with his deep, labored breathing. “My mate” was screaming through all of his body’s cells.

  He would have been able to easily scent her if she were standing here. But with her spilled blood pooled at his feet it was like he was drowning in her scent. Arousal and rage warred within him. Rage at Curtis for hurting his mate, and arousal, wild and untethered, at finally finding her.

  “It’s her, Dane. I have found our mate. Curtis found her first and he has hurt her. I am standing in her blood as we speak.”

  “Fuck,” was all he heard from Dane.

  “I don’t know how bad she is hurt, I am going to find out right now. I will call you as soon as I know. I can’t keep tracking Curtis. I have to stay with her. Shit, Dane, send help now.”

  With that, Hunter hung up, and using the power of pure rage, got his wobbly legs to work as he stalked into the hospital in search of his mate. After sixty years on this earth he had found her, he was going to see her, and she was fucking hurt by that lowlife. Hunter was incensed. If he wasn’t going to be killed before, well, Curtis would certainly be dead when Hunter caught him.

  Hunter knew that Dane would be letting the twins know that he had found his mate, and he expected calls from them very shortly to find out how badly she had been hurt. Hunter’s mother had three mates, brothers, Theo, Chris, and Paul. All the Alphas in their family had shared a mate with their brothers, so the odds were more than good that this woman would be mate to all four Fredrick brothers. Hunter had enjoyed sharing sexual partners in the past with one, or all, of his brothers, so if it was fated that they were all to share this mate, he knew it would work very well for them.

  “Let her not be hurt too badly,” he muttered under his breath, striding through the doors to the ER like a man on fire. After his time in the Marines, Hunter had become jaded and didn’t think anyone seemed to be listening when people prayed, but even without laying eyes on her, he was praying hard for his mate.

  Chapter 3

  The normal sounds of the ER began to filter into Melanie’s mind. She wondered if she had fallen asleep on shift. She struggled to sit up, beginning to panic. She had never fallen asleep on duty before. That was when the pain hit her, her head feeling as though it was going to split right open. Her chest felt as though she had a car on top of it, squeezing the bones and making breathing very, very hard.

  A hand on her shoulder stopped her mental rundown of which pain was worse and made her efforts to sit up more frantic.

  “Lie still, princess,” said a deep, gravelly voice, the hand gently but firmly pushing her down into a reclining position and keeping the pressure there.

  Who was princess? Melanie wondered, confusion seeping into her pain-filled head.

  “Can you open those eyes, Melanie?” the voice said again.

  Was it a doctor? Had she crashed out on the desk? Why was she in so much pain? That was when she remembered. It all came back in a rush, forcing a huge rush of air into her lungs and a gasp from her lips as the pain in her chest intensified. Her eyes flew open and the light from the bright room shot pain into her already throbbing head. The ambulance, the man, the blood, the mountain lion. Groaning, Melanie remembered it all.

  “Where am I?” Melanie asked, squinting to cut out
some of the light piercing her brain, and turning her head toward the voice.

  Sitting in a chair next to her was a huge man in a sheriff’s uniform. Melanie took in her surroundings. She was lying on an ER bed, an IV in her hand. The same hand that the huge man was holding. It was a nice warm hand. She was cold but he was so very warm and sending tingles up her arm.

  The nice warm man began to speak again. “You are in the hospital where you work, princess. You were hurt. How are you feeling?”

  * * * *

  Hunter was so relieved to see Melanie awake. She had only been unconscious for about an hour, and that was a good thing according to the doctors. An MRI had shown no cerebral bleeding. There was, however, a deep laceration to her scalp and a concussion, as well as the lacerations to her left calf.

  An hour ago Hunter had stridden into the ER and found Melanie in the middle of a mass of activity. He had not yet known her name. He had just followed his nose until he got to her. If he had thought the scent of her blood in the emergency bay had nearly brought him to his knees, it was nothing to what the sight of her small unconscious body on the examination table had done to him.

  He had stumbled back against a glass window, feeling all of his blood fall to his feet in seconds. There lay his mate. This should not have been how he first laid eyes upon the woman who would now be his entire world for the rest of his days. She had lain unmoving, while doctors and nurses moved about her, doing God knows what. She had tubes and leads everywhere it seemed. The noise of beeping had been his only reassurance that she was still alive.