Firefighter Wolves Shifters
A Paranormal Romance Series Boxset
Brittany White
Copyright © 2020 by Brittany White
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
Obsessed with the Alpha Wolf
1. Ben
2. Lana
3. Lana
4. Ben
5. Lana
6. Ben
7. Lana
8. Ben
9. Lana
10. Ben
11. Lana
12. Ben
13. Lana
14. Ben
15. Ben
16. Lana
17. Ben
18. Lana
19. Ben
Epilogue
Craved by the Alpha Wold
20. Josh
21. Harper
22. Harper
23. Josh
24. Josh
25. Harper
26. Josh
27. Josh
28. Harper
29. Harper
30. Harper
31. Josh
32. Harper
33. Josh
34. Harper
36. Harper
37. Josh
38. Josh
39. Harper
40. Josh
41. Harper
42. Josh
43. Josh
44. Harper
45. Harper
Epilogue
Claimed by the Alpha Wolf
46. Derek
47. Grace
48. Derek
49. Grace
50. Derek
51. Grace
52. Derek
53. Grace
54. Derek
55. Grace
56. Derek
57. Grace
58. Derek
59. Grace
60. Derek
61. Grace
62. Derek
63. Grace
64. Derek
Epilogue
Seduced by the Alpha Wolf
65. Jason
66. Alicia
67. Jason
68. Alicia
69. Jason
70. Alicia
71. Jason
72. Alicia
73. Jason
74. Alicia
75. Jason
76. Alicia
77. Jason
78. Alicia
79. Jason
80. Alicia
81. Jason
82. Alicia
83. Jason
Epilogue
Bear Next Door (EXCERPT)
Chapter 1
Also by Brittany White
About the Author
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Obsessed with the Alpha Wolf
1
Ben
Ben Stokes paced back and forth in the confines of his tiny office as if he was an animal in a cage, and raked his fingers through his hair. A restless energy had been pulsing through him all day. He could smell ozone in the air, and there was an electric feeling coursing through his muscles. It was like a storm was coming, but the clear sky outside told him that it wasn’t the weather that was driving him nuts. It was something else approaching.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the floor if you keep pacing like that.”
Ben looked sharply toward the door where his brother Josh leaned against the door frame. He stopped pacing and stood in the middle of the office as he tried to compose himself. Something was happening to him, something he’d never experienced, and he didn’t want his brother to know it.
“Was there something you wanted?” Ben hoped whatever it was, it could be dealt with quickly because he didn’t think he could hide his agitation for long from someone who knew him as well Josh did.
“I want to know what’s up with you?” Josh sat down in the seat across from Ben’s desk and put his feet up on the edge. “You seem a little broodier than usual.”
“According to you, I’m always a broody asshole, so I don’t see how this is any different.” He reached out and swept Josh’s feet off his desk, trying to act as normal as possible. This time was different and he knew it; he just didn’t want the pack to know it, too.
Josh sighed as his feet came to rest back on the floor. He gave Ben a penetrating stare which Ben returned. Their eyes locked for several moments before Josh’s eyes fell away.
“If you are afraid that whatever is bugging you will get back to the pack, it won’t.” Josh stood and closed the door to Ben’s office. “We’re behind a closed door, so anything you say now will be private.”
Josh wasn’t only his brother, but his second-in-command. And he wasn’t stupid; Ben had to tell him something. But how to explain the feeling that something was happening, something that would change the dynamic of the pack? Would change him? How could he explain it to Josh when he didn’t even know what it was himself?
He decided to tell Josh what he did know.
“I’m feeling the weight of being Alpha. Dad told me it would happen eventually, but I haven’t really felt it until now.”
“You’ve been Alpha for twelve years; you are bound to feel the weight of the responsibility at some point. It’s what makes you a good leader—the fact that you do feel responsible, that you want what’s best for the pack. It doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. It’s not weak to open up.”
Ben nodded, but his brother’s words didn’t lessen his stress or calm his building anxiety. And while he knew that he could always use Josh as a sounding board and that nothing he said to him would go any further, he couldn’t bring himself to open up about something he didn’t yet understand.
“I need to run.” Maybe that was all he needed to make the restless feeling inside him go away.
Ben turned toward the door as Josh stood up.
“Are you sure that it all it is?” Concern pulled Josh’s brows together. His brother knew him better than anyone, and Ben knew that he wasn't fooled by his talk about the ‘weight of responsibility’. But that was all Ben could tell him for now.
“Yeah, that’s all it is. I need to get out of my head for a while.” He quickly schooled his features into an impassive mask and walked out of his office with Josh behind him.
The firefighters, all members of his pack, clustered inside the station turned and looked at him. Ben made sure he had his game face on. He didn’t want them to see something in his expression he wasn't ready for them to see yet. To do so might cause chaos and disorder within the ranks of the pack, and until Ben knew more about the cause of the feeling racing inside him, he wanted the pack to be calm.
“I’m fine. I just need a run.” The hardness in his tone made Josh’s eyes dart away, and Ben knew that there wouldn’t be any more questions from him, at least not tonight. “You’re in charge until I get back. Don’t let the town burn down.”
“As if that would happen.” Josh rolled his eyes and moved away.
Ben continued on toward the door and rubbed the back of his neck as he felt eyes on him. He glanced over to see Derek, a member of the pack, watching him. He’d been doing a little too much of that lately, as if he was waiting for some sign of weakness. Ben gave him a hard look and the other wolf quickly looked away.
Ben knew without a doubt that Derek would become a
problem at some point. He may be backing down today, but that was not always going to be the case. Thankfully, it wasn’t a problem he would have to deal with today.
Ben left the fire station with a shake of his head. He was already in a place where the ground felt shaky beneath his feet without causing more trouble for himself. He could handle Derek if and when the time came.
As he moved away from the station, the feeling of restlessness deepened inside him. Fortunately, he would not have to delay his change. The fire station sat on the Shadowbrook estate, and it had been home to his pack for as long as there had been a pack. There were no prying human eyes here that might see something they shouldn’t.
Ben quickly stripped out of his clothes and embraced his change. As his muscles shifted and his bones cracked, he hoped the feelings coursing inside him would lessen once he embraced his animal side.
As soon as he was a wolf, he took off into the trees surrounding the Shadowbrook estate, trying to outrun the restlessness that had plagued him all day. But no matter how fast he ran, no matter how hard his paws hit the ground, there was no outrunning the electricity that made his hair stand on end and he was no closer to answers.
He got back to the station and shifted back into his human form. Once he was dressed, he walked back in. Josh saw him and turned to him with his arms wide open and a smug grin on his face.
“See? The town didn’t burn down while I was in charge.”
As if to mock him, an alarm sounded overhead and the grin fell from Josh’s face as he and the other members of the pack rushed to answer the alarm’s call.
“You sure about that?” Ben yelled as he sprinted beside his brother. One good thing about a fire in town was that it would hopefully be enough to drive the foreboding feeling that something was about to happen out of him.
2
Lana
Lana Deary’s hands tightened around the steering wheel of her Honda Civic as she took Exit 2 from I-90 W to merge onto US-20 W. God, was she ready to do this? To uproot her life and make a complete change?
As she made her way to Lenox with dawn causing creeping fingers of light to streak across the sky and set the colors of fall alight on the trees whizzing by, she questioned her decision for the hundredth time since she’d bought the bookstore.
Her phone chimed and she pressed the button on the steering wheel to open the call.
“If you’re calling to talk me out of this, you’re too late.” Lana kept her eyes on the road as her best friend Harper’s husky laugh rang out over the phone’s speaker.
“If I thought I could talk you out of this, I would have done it before you bought the bookstore. If you want to walk away from your career, away from Boston, who am I to stop you?”
There was a note in Harper’s voice that implied she still thought Lana was insane for walking away from her corporate job and her beautiful condo in Boston. “I know you think I’m crazy for doing this.”
“I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.” Lana sighed as she tried to relax her hands on the steering wheel. “I saw the looks my colleagues gave me on my last day, overheard the whispers about how stupid I am to walk away from my position as head copywriter.”
There was a beat of silence in the car, and she knew that Harper was carefully choosing what she was going to say next.
“I know you weren’t happy, even before what happened to your mother. I’m just trying to understand why now? And why Lenox?”
Why Lenox indeed. Lana supposed that Harper thought that if she wanted to open a bookstore, she could have done that in Boston. But what Lana wanted was a complete break from her old life.
“If you could see it here, you’d understand why I chose Lenox. When the Johnson’s bookstore came up for sale, I had to grab it.” Harper was right: she hadn’t been happy for a while. The professional success she’d striven for and finally achieved hadn’t been the answer she was looking for. And her mother’s accident, which happened so suddenly, before she had the opportunity to mend fences with her, had only emphasized the feeling that something was missing from her life.
“But do you think it’s going to make you happy?”
That was the million-dollar question. Lana had no guarantee that this move was going to fill the void that had been growing inside her.
“I have to try. I have to see if this is what I’m missing.” The money she’d inherited from her mother, which had been enough to buy the store and give her a new start, had seemed like a sign that now was the time for her to grasp at her chance for a new life. “All I know is that if I don’t do this now, I’m always going to wonder what could have been.”
“Okay, I get it. And despite everyone telling you that you’re crazy, I think this is the gutsiest thing you have ever done. It takes a lot of nerve to walk away from everything you know and start this new adventure.”
Something eased inside Lana at Harper’s words. It was the first time since she’d bought the store and left her job that someone had told her that what she was doing was anything other than the biggest mistake of her life.
“I don't know how adventurous this is going to be—I’m only opening a bookstore after all. But I’m going to do the right thing for me.”
“And as soon as you get the bookstore up and running, I’m going to be your first customer.” Now that she knew this was what Lana needed, and that she couldn’t stop her regardless, Harper seemed to be ready to embrace the changes Lana had made to her life. “And you never know, you might meet someone special.”
Lana laughed out loud as her car drifted past the sign that welcomed her to Lenox. “Can I get the bookstore up and running before you have me married off?”
Love was definitely not in the plan just yet. She was only at the beginning of her new life, and romance would have to take a backseat to the work she had ahead of her.
“You never know. I’ll call you later and see how you’re doing.”
“Okay, and you better come see my store once it’s set up the way I want it. I’m holding you to your promise to be my first customer.”
Once Harper said goodbye, Lana ended the call and sighed. The tightness in her stomach, which had sat with her since she got up this morning, finally eased. She didn’t know about Harper’s notion of her meeting someone. If her past was anything to go by, she was not going to be as lucky in love as her friend seemed to believe she would be. If she hadn’t been able to meet the right man in Boston, what were the odds in a small town like Lenox?
She shoved aside all thoughts of love; that wasn’t why she left Boston. She left to start a new life that was right for her. And she was going to be busy enough getting her new bookstore and her new apartment, housed on the upper floor, in order for a while; she had more than enough to contend with without adding the complication of a relationship into the mix.
As she drove into the town proper, she really looked at it for the first time. The sun was rising, reflected in the old-fashioned lampposts and shop windows. She could breathe here, could slow her life down and be a part of something.
As she got closer to where her shop was located, the tightness that had left her came back. There was a crowd of people clustered in the square looking in the direction of the row of shops where her new home and business were nestled.
She parked the car and got out. It was too early in the morning for this kind of crowd, even if it was the high point of the tourist season. Something was wrong, and the acrid smell of smoke in the air told her that it wasn’t the joys of fall that people were looking at.
“Please don’t let it be the store.” Her feet felt like they were dragging through molasses as she made her way over to the cluster of people. She came to the edge of the crowd, but couldn’t clearly see what it was they were looking at. Someone’s business had been on fire, and Lana’s heart went out to whoever’s it was.
She turned to the person standing next to her, an older woman who must be a tourist if the fanny pack clasped aro
und her waist was any indication.
“What happened?”
“The bookstore was on fire. They just put it out.”
Lana’s heart plummeted down to her toes.
No.
Surely she was wrong. The woman was a tourist; how could she know the building was the bookstore?
Lana fought her way through the crowd to the front of it and out the other side. Cold washed over her body at the slight heat she could feel lingering in the air. The tourist hadn’t been wrong. Right there, before her eyes, was the building she’d sunk all her hopes and dreams for the future into, black and smoking against the backdrop of a small Massachusetts town.