Rocked by her Alpha: Lyric Hounds, #1

By Mina Carter

Her ideal men are long dead, but apparently it's time to get back to the land of the living. 

Archeologist Melody Simmons spends her days sifting through shit…fossilized werewolf shit. Since her last romance ended badly, she's been off men… the ones that haven't been dead for a couple of hundred years anyway. Close to proving that her current site is significant, she is blindsided when her cousin books her a blind date through an exclusive agency.  

Knowing some battles are better left alone, she doesn't expect much… a nice meal and an overnight stay at a fancy hotel… instead, she finds her date is hotter than hades and better yet? He's a werewolf. A lean, muscled, longhaired alpha werewolf she suddenly wants to test all those theories about werewolf stamina with…

He wants a woman who doesn't know who he is, he doesn't expect to find his mate. 

Werewolf rockstar and lead singer of the Lyric Hounds, Aaron Rixx has it all. Talent, fame, riches… but he'd give it all up for a woman who sees the man and not the rockstar. In a fit of… something, he books a date with an exclusive and very discrete agency. At the very least, he might get a night of sex and some alone time to write and compose new material for the band. 

The instant he meets his date though, all bets are off. She's small, curvy, beautiful… and the one thing he never thought he could have: his mate. Now all he has to do is convince her of that. 

But missing siblings and car accidents conspire to keep them apart, and he loses her. Can he find his mate again before a crazy fan decides that the best way to remove the competition for his affection is permanently?

**Previously released with a different publisher under the title 'Melody's Wolf'**

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mina Carter
• Release date: Dec 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386706588

Mina Carter

Mina Carter was born and raised in Middle Earth (otherwise known as the Midlands, England). After a slew of careers ranging from logistics to land-surveying she can now be found in the wilds of Leicestershire with her husband, daughter and a cat who moved in and never left. Suffering the curse of eternal curiosity, Mina never tires of learning new skills which has led to Aromatherapy, Corsetry, Chain-maille making, Welding, Canoeing, Shooting, and pole-dancing to name but a few. A full-time author and cover artist, Mina can usually be found hunched over a keyboard or graphics tablet, frantically trying to get the images and words in her head out and onto the screen before they drive her mad. She's addicted to coffee and Dairy-lea cheese triangles.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Sifting through garwulf—werewolf guard dog—shit on a Friday night. Melody Simmons chuckled to herself. Never let it be said that she didn’t know how to party.

In her defense though, the garwulf shit in question was at least fifth century and thankfully well fossilized. It was also the best lead she’d had in weeks that her latest dig site was onto something. If she was right, it could be the most significant find of its type in recent years, confirming the existence of werewolf clans in the area at least four hundred years earlier than previously thought.

Better than that, the settlement they’d painstakingly uncovered on the Claremont Estate was looking more like it was a Viking werewolf settlement rather than the Anglo-Saxon one they’d expected.

For anyone else, it would have been tomatoes, tomahtoes—a find was a find—but for a nonhuman cultural archeologist like Mel, it was gold dust. That, and if she could prove the werewolf connection, Lord Claremont, who was funding the dig, had promised the staff a bonus.

She blew her bangs out of her face as she sorted the fossilized turds into different groups. Really, she hadn’t been sure what the guy was on when he’d offered a monetary incentive if they found evidence of werewolves. It wasn’t like they could just pull a lycanthrope presence out of thin air… she knew that some less scrupulous members of her profession might have colored the truth a little. Found evidence that might suggest and strung the guy along to get the money, but Mel wasn’t like that.

Never had been. Never would be.

Her honesty and due diligence paid dividends. A few times she’d been called in on other digs to verify her peers’ findings as correct. It seemed she was a benchmark. Which was nice, but it didn’t pay the bills. And since her car, Betty, was on her last legs, a bonus would be nice and, really, couldn’t come quickly enough.

…and I wanna ride…that sttttooooooorrrrrmmm!

Loud music blared behind her, making her jump and almost lose the tray of samples she’d just picked up. Turning to load them into the carrier, she cast an annoyed glance over at the second section of the tent behind her.

Her research assistant, Tasha, was hunched over pot samples, her brush flicking and swishing as she carefully cleaned dirt away. Huge headphones were clamped down over her ears, but, for the fourth time today, the wireless had reset, routing the sound through the speakers on all the equipment in the dig’s main tent .

"Tash… TASH!" She was forced to yell to get the girl’s attention, but Tash didn’t move, focused on the pot in her hands as she warbled along to whatever rock band was playing. Lyric Dogs or something, Mel had no idea. Unlike Tash, she didn’t follow the latest trends. In music or anything else. If it hadn’t been dead and buried at least two hundred years, preferably longer, she wasn’t interested. Period.

Oh for heaven’s sake… Striding over, she lifted an earpiece off Tash’s head. Switch settings, hon. You’re deafening me!

Oh my god, I’m sorry! Tash grimaced, reaching for her phone instantly. "I swear I need to send these back. The wireless is so glitchy!"

That’s what you get when you go for all these newfangled things. Mel flicked a gesture at the phone / headphones combo and then patted her pocket. A small media player was clipped to it, nestled neatly next to a row of pens, the in-ear headphones looped around her neck ready for when she needed them.

Yeah, well, Tash shot back with a grin, "some of us don’t just work with the past, we live in the past… Wired headphones? Com’on, that’s positively back in the Dark Ages!"

Mel chuckled as she turned back to her own table, the racket cutting off abruptly as Tash reset the link and it routed back solely through her headset. Dark Ages, really? When she’d been Tasha’s age, they’d only had…

Yeah, right, and that was enough of that. She wasn’t that much older than Tasha, only around ten years. But, hell did it feel like a lifetime sometimes. Especially in a chilly tent with the damp creeping into her bones. She eyed the pile of trays to go through. One more and then she’d bag up and head to the hotel, perhaps call her brother, Barrett. A personal protection specialist, he’d been traveling to a new assignment today, and…

She checked her watch. Yes, he should have arrived by now so his cell would be back on. If she was lucky, she might grab a five-minute conversation with him before he had to rush off.

Pulling another tray toward her, she set about studying another section of dirt. More shit. Great. But, if she was right, some of this would yield the evidence she needed. Because of the shape-shifting nature of lycanthropes, it was difficult to work out when a village or settlement was actually a werewolf one.

The best, and most reliable, way was if there was evidence of garwulf . Like werewolves, they shifted form, to something almost humanoid but not. The stories said they were originally the reverse of a werewolf—a wolf who turned into a man—but over the years they’d degenerated until their shifted form was something far more animalistic.

Whatever, she didn’t know about the ins and outs of genetic devolution. All that mattered to Mel was that werewolf shit looked like plain old humanity’s while garwulf shit… that she could identify without a shadow of a doubt.

Carefully breaking apart a clump of dirt, she grinned, her eyes already picking out the telltale markers she was looking for.

Yes! she breathed, unable to resist a little fist pump. Undignified for a doctor but she didn’t care. Looked like Betty was getting her new tires for the winter.

That looks promising, a voice announced from the entrance of the tent.

She looked up as Lord Claremont, Dustin as he’d told her many times to call him, ducked through the semi-open flap. Average height with a softness around the midriff that spoke of easy living, the fluffy tuft of blond hair on the top of his head reminded her of a baby chick. Not that she’d ever dare tell him that. She’d needed this job before she realized what was here. Now… she wanted to see it through to the end and dig up whatever secrets were still buried.

If she was lucky, she might even prove there had been a Viking werewolf king present in the British Isles…

Yes, very promising, she replied with a smile, her find still in her gloved hands. Carefully, she sectioned it off from the rest and put it in its own box. It needs verification, but I’m fairly certain we’ve found garwulf droppings.

Really? Dustin’s hopeful but blank look told her he had no idea what she meant.

They’re really rare now, she explained. They’re bigger than natural wolves, but not as big as weres in their animal forms. Werewolf packs used them as companions and like we would guard dogs. Usually, only the bigger packs though. From what we know, they were a marker of rank and social status. So the more garwulf a pack had, the more influential it was.

Oh? Dustin’s eyes lit up. So, could we be looking at something, or someone…more important?

She shrugged a little. Hard to say at the moment because it could be the presence of a lone garwulf, but if there were a lot, then yes, definitely. From the size of the settlement and the preliminary survey, we could be looking at an Alpha Chief.

As soon as the words left her mouth, she had to bite back a grimace. A look of glee crossed Dustin’s face. The moment she’d met him it had been apparent the guy had a hard-on to prove that the Claremont line was descended from werewolves. Obviously it wasn’t enough to be the landed gentry . He wanted paranormal blood as well.

Of course, he said, his dry, slightly nasal voice so archetypal of the British upper class that Mel suspected they must clone them somewhere. "I’d always had my suspicions. The Claremont line have always been that little bit…you know…more than even the other nobility. An Alpha Chief… that’s like werewolf royalty, isn’t it? That would explain everything."

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It seemed everyone wanted to be descended from something these days—be it werewolves, gargoyles or the fae.