The Alpha's Human Mate

“Enough!”

Erik slammed one of his fists onto the lectern, then grabbed his gavel and pounded the wooden podium. “Calm... down!”

Furiously, I typed away on my keyboard, trying my very best to keep up with the near-constant noise from the audience, but there was no way. Questions were coming from the left, and then an insult from the right, and someone even threw a bottle from way in the back.

“Alpha!” Seth, a young wolf, shouted above the crowd. “This is court! You can’t just show up and make us listen to you rant for half an hour and then tell us to be quiet! We’re wolves—”

“Some of us are,” Clay Tomkins, a proud hyena-shifter added. “Don’t be so exclusionary.”

Erik bared his teeth and for a second, his eyes went yellow. I swallowed hard, hoping he managed to control himself. If he lost his temper in the middle of a pack meeting, there would be a massive brawl and I’d be serving alcohol-soaked bandages at the reception instead of cocktails.

“Izzy!” Erik hissed. I typed it down.

“Isabel! Pay attention to me,” he said. Erik bent down to talk in my ear and narrowly avoided a chair that crashed into the wall above his head. “We need to go. I’m about to throttle that prick.” “Which one?” I asked.

He didn’t answer except to snarl.

I took a deep breath and pushed my carriage return. No matter what happened, I had to keep typing. It might sound crazy, but part of my job as the alpha’s personal assistant is to go to all these insane meetings and try to make sense of it so he can read over the notes later.

Don’t ask.

I heard the wood on the podium top start to crack. Erik wore out two or three lecterns a year like this, habitually stress-squeezing until they finally gave out.

Real bad month at the courthouse.

“I’ve made my decision,” Erik growled. “If you want to hear it, sit down and shut up!”

The crowd just kept on. Shouting, complaining; the whole courtroom was an endless drone punctuated with screams.

“Izzy?”

I turned to see Erik’s bright gold eyes flash. When he does that little thing with his eyes, it makes all my girl parts clench up. It’s some kind of werewolf magic, he’s told me, that makes human women ache for them. But he seemed to be doing it more lately. For a split second, I wondered if there was any significance to that, but then he smiled and my head started spinning.

“Izzy? You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said shaking my head. “Sorry, you stared at me in that way you have, and...”

“Oh,” he shook his dark hair from side to side and smiled at me, flashing his dimples and his eyes. “Sorry, didn’t mean to do any charming.”

How he could do that – make the whole chaotic shit-fest of a world around us vanish – was beyond me, but there he was, forcing my attention on him in the midst of a pack of screaming shifters.

Someone threw a chair.

“I want you,” he whispered, “to duck.”

“What?”

“Duck. I’m going to take care of this right about now.”

“I—”

“Now!”

I hesitated long enough to see someone else rear back and sling a briefcase toward Erik.

“Get down,” he shouted, pushing me off the chair and to the ground.

As quickly as I could, I scurried under the table, peeking around one of the legs in time to see the lectern that I had just ordered go sailing across the room and catch one of the chief complainants in the side of the head.

He might’ve well pulled out a hand grenade and yanked the pin.

No one moved.

The only thing I could hear was Erik’s ragged, heavy breathing beside me. He reached down and wiggled his fingers. Tentatively, I took his hand and pulled myself up. As soon as my eye-level went above the tabletop where my typewriter sat, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Every single person in the room – be they wolf, coyote, fox, or whatever the hell Leon is... some kind of lizard – was dead quiet and staring, open-mouthed, at Erik.

Duggan Degger, the town historian-cum-hedgehog, was characteristically tugging on his suspenders and shaking.

“Good,” Erik said, in a satisfied voice.

I hunched my shoulders and slid as quietly as I could into my chair.

I just about threw up when I adjusted my carriage return, and it let out a ding that turned a whole bunch of heads in my direction.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

Erik smiled at me again. Those damn eyes flashing, those stupid dimples that got me all clenched up... if it weren’t for all that, I’d want to punch him right in the mouth. Maybe I did anyway.

“It’s fine, Isabel,” Erik said, giving me another dashing smile and turning his attention back to the previously-rowdy audience. “Good! I’m glad we could come to an understanding about proper courtroom procedure. Now, could someone check on Devin? He’ll heal pretty quickly, but someone make sure he doesn’t have a concussion.”

I watched, wide-eyed, as Leon the mystery shifter crouched down and checked Devin’s pulse, then his eyes. He nodded, and returned to his seat.

“Excellent! Now, as you all know, we were here in the first place to work through a little problem that came up in the last week. One of our townspeople, Lucien,” he stuck his hand out, indicating the black-haired wolf with the ponytail, “wants to file a claim that his mate has been stalked and stolen by Flavius.”

Erik rifled through a folder.

Two years ago, fresh out of school and without a shred of experience to my name, I saw an online ad.

How many stories start like that?

This ad, it said there was a small town mayor in the Appalachians who needed a secretary. No experience necessary, it said. Oh, and also, there was in innocuous note in the ad about the town being ‘an organization looking to expand’ which is one of those phrases that just sorta flies past when you’re out of work and needing to pay bills.

Good God was I ever in for a shock.

Upon arriving, I was shown around town, and needless to say, the first time you see someone strip naked, crouch down and turn into a horse, it’s a whole different sort of immersion learning.

“Are you getting this down?” he asked me. I nodded.

“What is it, then?” I’d recognize Lucien’s high-pitched voice anywhere, even if I was face-down to a typewriter. “Do I get my request?”