Day Care Dragon (Bodyguard Shifters Book 4) Read online

  Day Care Dragon

  (Bodyguard Shifters #4)

  by Zoe Chant

  Copyright Zoe Chant 2018

  All Rights Reserved

  Author’s Note

  This book stands alone and contains a complete HEA romance. However, if you’d like to read the earlier books in the series, you can find them here:

  Bearista (Derek and Gaby’s book)

  Pet Rescue Panther (Ben and Tessa’s book)

  Bear in a Bookshop (Gunnar and Melody’s book)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: Darius

  Chapter Two: Loretta

  Chapter Three: Darius

  Chapter Four: Loretta

  Chapter Five: Darius

  Chapter Six: Loretta

  Chapter Seven: Darius

  Chapter Eight: Loretta

  Chapter Nine: Darius

  Chapter Ten: Loretta

  Chapter Eleven: Darius

  Chapter Twelve: Loretta

  Chapter Thirteen: Darius

  Chapter Fourteen: Darius

  Chapter Fifteen: Loretta

  Chapter Sixteen: Darius

  Chapter Seventeen: Loretta

  Chapter Eighteen: Loretta

  Chapter Nineteen: Loretta

  Chapter Twenty: Darius

  Chapter Twenty-One: Loretta

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Darius

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Loretta

  Epilogue: Several Months Later

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Preview: Bears of Pinerock County complete series!

  Chapter One: Darius

  "Maddox! Get in here."

  "Right now, boss?" said the voice over the office intercom.

  "Now!" Darius snapped. He released the intercom and went back to furiously typing a hotly worded letter to the small army of lawyers that he kept on retainer.

  Screens bracketed his field of vision. There were no less than three different computer screens on his desktop, a big flat-screen TV on the wall with the sound turned off, and another showing him the stock ticker, where currently the stock in four different companies he owned was tanking.

  And to add insult to injury, the "E" key on his sleek, very expensive ergonomic keyboard was sticking. Darius snarled and pounded it with draconic strength, driving his finger two inches deep into the plastic.

  Dammit.

  He did tend to go through keyboards.

  Also, that hurt.

  We shall destroy that object utterly, for daring to hurt us, his inner dragon hissed, coiling and uncoiling inside his chest. We shall bite it to bits!

  No, we will destroy something else instead, Darius replied. Or rather, someone else. For having the barefaced audacity to attack our business empire, this fool will have his own business torn down, and we will salt the earth where he once lived.

  Tear him apart! his dragon agreed.

  Later, perhaps. First we shall sue him until he wishes he was dead.

  Hissing softly under his breath with his dragon's displeasure, Darius took another keyboard from the stack of them inside one of his larger desk drawers, plugged it in, and finished the email with a clatter of keys. Back in the day, he'd had a typing pool of secretaries to do this kind of work for him, because that's how things were done in that time. He rather liked the trend nowadays to do such things oneself. No intermediaries between himself and his business dealings.

  Also, where was Maddox? —aha. He heard the soft sound of the door opening and closing, and then the near-silent whisper of his bodyguard's feet crossing the polished floor of his vast office.

  He didn't really need a bodyguard, but Darius was acutely sensitive to the matter of appearances. Humans respected you more when you showed up in a nice car driven by someone else, and they respected you a lot more if you had a large muscular individual hovering at your shoulder throughout negotiations.

  Also, if someone did try to kill him, transforming into a dragon and eating them would cause such a lot of paperwork. Better to just let Maddox handle it.

  "Maddox—" he began, glancing up, and stopped.

  His bodyguard was a large man, a very large man, without a spare ounce of fat on him anywhere. And right now, all of Maddox (and there was a lot of Maddox) was on display, because he was completely naked.

  Also wet.

  After having left a trail of water across the floor, Maddox silently took a seat in the chair in front of Darius's desk, and stared at his boss as if daring him to make something of it.

  "When I said I wanted you now," Darius said after a moment, "I assumed it would have been implied that putting on clothes first would have been acceptable."

  "You weren't specific," Maddox said, and crossed his arms. He leaned back in the chair with a creak of Italian leather, into which water was currently soaking. Not to mention his naked ass leaving an imprint in the seat.

  Darius glared at him. Maddox stared back, impassive. And then Darius smiled, very faintly.

  "Well played," he said. He did appreciate a formidable opponent, and he hadn't realized when he had hired Maddox that there was a lot of intelligence lurking under the bull shifter's bodybuilder exterior. It was the main reason why he'd opted to not only keep Maddox around, but give him the run of Darius's inner sanctum, a privilege his hirelings (and especially those of the muscle-for-hire type) did not normally get.

  Still ... "Would you care for a towel?"

  "Nope." Maddox crossed his legs. Darius decided he was probably going to burn that chair. "Did you go to bed at all last night, boss?"

  Impertinent. Deep in his heart of hearts, Darius enjoyed the challenge of dealing with those rare employees who weren't intimidated by his money or the alpha-dragon power that flowed through his soul. Still, his patience for dealing with such things when he hadn't slept in two days was slight.

  Unspeaking, he rose and went to make another cup of coffee.

  "That'd be a no, then," Maddox said from behind him. "Is this about the, er, Sharpe situation? Or a new situation?"

  Darius didn't reply immediately. Instead he palmed a recessed panel in the wall. It slid back to reveal a nook with a built-in sink, minifridge, and French press. As he poured the water, with Maddox watching patiently, Darius noticed for the first time that not all the light in the room was artificial. Through the tall windows behind his desk and chair, the sun was rising over the valley. Warm morning light filled his office, honey-gold.

  This office, with its combination of old and new—bookcases filled with cracked leather folios and large bound books, stretching up to the lofty ceiling; oil paintings on the walls; the huge built-in flatscreen on the wall, the electric shutters over the windows that could be raised and lowered at the tap of a button—and through the windows, the valley lying serene in the morning sun, and the mountains towering beyond, touched with pink and gold on their upper slopes ...

  This was the culmination of two hundred years of work. To everyone who knew him now, even his adult children, he had always been thus: a dragon clanlord at the height of his power, wealthy and influential, moving with equal comfort through the criminal underworld and the white-collar world of business.

  No hint remained of the frightened, lonely child he had once been. He'd obliterated all traces of his past and risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes. Everything he had, everything he was, he had built from scratch.

  No one—no one was going to take it from him.

  Especially a rival business upstart who had dared to challenge him, directly and personally ... who even now was attempting to steal Darius's business holdings by both fair means and foul.

  Darius added cream to Maddox's cup and nothing to his
own. He carried the cups back to his desk and handed one to his bodyguard.

  "I'm going to kill him," he said calmly. A quick glance at the stock ticker let him know that, with New York trading now open, his stocks had tanked still further.

  "Just tell me when and where, boss."

  "Not directly." Darius sipped his coffee. The heat burned his tongue; he found that small pain pleasurably distracting. "Oh no. An easy death is too good for this Rodan Sharpe. I am going to strip him of everything he owns. First his businesses, then his family, if he has any. I don't suppose there's been any progress on that front, has there?"

  Maddox shook his head. "No word on the street about this guy. If he came up through the mafia, no one knows about it. Your lawyers get anything?"

  "No," Darius snapped. "It's as if Sharpe showed up out of nowhere five years ago. Except he has to have come from somewhere—"

  "Boss!"

  Maddox's warning came just as Darius started to sit down, but Darius had already discovered, checking himself in mid-motion, that his chair now had a purring ball of orange cat in it. Toblerone, the cat that his cat-infested daughter-in-law had given him, must have come into the office with Maddox.

  He set the coffee cup on the edge of his desk, picked up Toblerone absently, and settled into the chair with the cat on his lap. His look dared Maddox to say anything about it.

  But it was a reminder that he had more than his business empire to lose. So much more.

  Where his desk had once been bare and austere, now it was dotted with photos. There was one of Tessa, his son's mate, holding a lovely infant with caramel-colored skin and a halo of brown curls. And there was Melody, his daughter, with her mate Gunnar's arm around her from behind, and a distinctly rounded curve to her stomach under her sundress. They were on a beach, with one of Melody's arms stretched out of frame to snap a selfie; a glimpse of their mobile book truck could be seen in the background. He'd just gotten that photo in his email a few days ago and had promptly had it printed and framed.

  Another grandchild. One by one, his clan was growing, replacing that which he had lost so long ago.

  Protective anger gathered in his chest, with a rustle of wings. How dare Sharpe threaten this. How dare he.

  There was one kind of picture conspicuously absent from his desktop, of course. No mate.

  At least he didn't have that to worry about—

  Loneliness sang through his dragon's heart. Darius ignored it. He was done, done seeking a cure for that loneliness in the arms of women with whom he shared no bond. He had two grown children from his earlier dalliances, which he could not regret, but he had no interest in pursuing that kind of relationship anymore. No more weakness. No more cracks that Sharpe could get a hook into.

  "You think he might go after your family?" Maddox asked, following Darius's gaze to the photos on the desk.

  "I don't know. So far it hasn't been his style. But ..." Darius stroked the cat absently, finding some comfort in the smoothness of the warm orange fur.

  He asked himself how much he trusted Maddox. You didn't have friends, as the head of a dragon clan. It wasn't a luxury he could afford. Talking about his affairs didn't come easily to him. But ... Maddox needed to be informed for practical purposes. Yes. That was it.

  "There's something else," he said. Leaning forward over the cat, he hit a few keys and then turned one of the flatscreen monitors so Maddox could see the headline: Fire damages Denver office tower.

  "One of yours?" Maddox asked.

  "Yes. Last night. After business hours, so there were no fatalities, but it'll be months repairing it, and I'll need to relocate or negotiate with the tenants who have offices there." He hissed through his teeth, his dragon stirring inside him.

  "Don't take this the wrong way," Maddox said, "but are you sure it was him?"

  "Yes, because," Darius said grimly, "this isn't the first time. It's the fourth act of sabotage or vandalism on one of my buildings in the last month. Always followed by a lunge for the throat at my corporate interests while I'm distracted. Once or twice could easily be opportunism. At this point, it's clearly not." His hands curled into fists. The cat stirred with a sleepy complaint as Darius's fingers dug into his back, and Darius flattened out his hand and smoothed the ruffled fur. "He's after me, Maddox. It's my business he's going after, but this one feels personal."

  "This isn't the first enemy you've had," Maddox said. "What makes Sharpe different?"

  "If I knew that," Darius said sharply, "I'd have dealt with it already."

  He didn't want to admit to Maddox that he hadn't made a direct move against Sharpe because he was afraid Sharpe might retaliate against his family. Didn't want to admit that he might have lost his edge that much. So far, Darius had been confining his counter-moves to the business world, that tense chess game of corporate takeover that he'd played so well, so ruthlessly, for so long.

  But he hadn't won those other games by adhering strictly to the rules. And in this game, he was starting to fall behind.

  It was the tension, that was part of it. The razor-wire edginess of not knowing where the next blow might come from, or when. It was making him sloppy.

  The thought had occurred to him that Sharpe might be a rival dragon, seeking to take over his clan. Darius had witnessed the fallout from one such coup recently; a power struggle within the Corcoran clan—a failed attempt to unseat the Corcoran clanlord, Heikon—had nearly taken the life of his daughter-in-law Tessa.

  But that had been an internal conflict, an attempted takeover by Heikon's brother. There was no one else in the Keegan clan besides Darius and his children. No potential rivals.

  That I know of ...

  Was it possible some distant relative might have survived? Perhaps a cousin in some other clan? If that was so, they were impossibly patient; they'd bided their time for two hundred years. It didn't make sense.

  "Boss," Maddox said, low—and as he said it, Darius's dragon stirred in sudden agitation.

  Maddox was looking not at the computer screen, but up at the flatscreen on the wall, still tuned to the news. Darius turned to see flames: more flames, not the office building from last night, but something new. Blocks of apartments, with smoke pouring from the ground floor, surrounded by fire trucks.

  This was live. This was happening right now.

  And it made his dragon go wild. It was all Darius could do to clamp down on the dragon's urge to smash the window, leap out, spread wings, fly, fly!

  "Yours?" Maddox said, his voice a low, angry rumble.

  "Mine," Darius confirmed. He could barely speak for the effort of keeping control of his upset dragon. He hadn't expected such a reaction from his beast, far more than to the office building fire the night before. The cat bristled and leaped down from his lap, vanishing under his desk. "This one's not too far to fly. I'm going there."

  "It's daylight out there. Someone might see you."

  "I'll fly high and fast," he snapped. "Go get some clothes on, and check that the mansion's defenses are ready. Just in case."

  Maddox nodded and rose quickly from the chair.

  "Take the cat," Darius added as an afterthought. "I don't want him unattended in my office."

  Maddox sighed and crouched down beside the chair. "C'mere, you little ..."

  Darius didn't stick around to watch what promised to be comedy gold—a naked Maddox chasing the cat around his office. He was too wound up, his dragon too desperate. Instead, he opened one of the windows behind his desk. Cool morning air, fragrant with the summer scents of wildflowers and growing things, flooded into the office.

  "I'll be back soon," Darius said, stepping up onto the sill. "Close the window when I'm gone."

  He didn't hear the answer. He was already stepping off, and letting his dragon burst out of him as he fell.

  Not for him, the calm, controlled shifts of lesser shifters. Darius's dragon surged forth, tearing out of him with a feeling somewhere between pain and relief. Great wings boomed on the air l
ike a ship's sails catching the wind; he felt the strain in muscles and tendons, and then he was soaring aloft, rising in the air as the wind streamed over his scales.

  His dragon had only one thing on its mind, and it was all he could do to get it to go high enough that the scattered clouds hid him.

  Urgent. Urgent. Get to building. Stop fire.

  What's gotten into you? Darius asked, but he only got a continuing sense of urgency, making it difficult to keep his thoughts focused.

  His dragon had never reacted like this to an abstract threat before. This was the kind of thing he'd expect if the threat was right in front of him—a challenge from another dragon, say.

  Perhaps his dragon sensed something about the situation that he could not. And Darius was in the habit of trusting his dragon.

  He beat his wings, flying across the mountains and following his dragon's anxious instincts leading him unerringly toward the city.

  Chapter Two: Loretta

  "No, no, no!" Loretta Somers moaned, digging through the cluttered cabinets and tossing half-empty boxes of cereal and chips onto the countertop.

  No coffee? How could she be out of coffee?

  Worse, how could she be expected to face two dozen four-year-olds without coffee? She'd have to either skip a shower, or walk two blocks over to the gas station to get a cup of coffee before her bus came, and risk missing her bus and being late to work. Which meant a room full of extra-hard-to-control four-year-olds, upset co-workers, and upset parents.

  Wait, wait—could it be—

  "Aha!" In the very back of one of the cabinets, behind the dust-covered jars of home-canned beets Aunt Jolene kept sending for Christmas and a bunch of Cup Noodles past their expiration dates, she unearthed an ancient, half-empty jar of instant coffee crystals. She sniffed it cautiously.

  Mmm. Coffee. Or at least something suitably coffee-like.

  In any case, it had caffeine in it. Sweet, sweet caffeine. She stirred two heaping spoonfuls into a mug of water and stuck it in the microwave.