Carter (Shifters Elite Book 3)

  Carter

  Shifters Elite

  Ava Benton

  Contents

  Shifters Elite: Carter

  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

  Afterword

  Shifters Elite: Carter

  A former Special Forces wolf shifter.

  Carter’s assignment to keep a journalist safe is job one. Finding out she’s the one for him, that complicates matters.

  A sexy hottie with her own skeletons.

  Alice isn’t your average girl. And learning that the story she’s been covering involves people who shift into animals, well, that could be the story of a lifetime. Or one that puts her life in danger.

  Now the one that’s here to protect her becomes so much more than a protector. And the shifters are so much more than she’d ever thought.

  — More Ava Benton shifters are coming! —

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  1

  Carter

  The important thing about being an alpha male working with three other alphas was learning how to put the alpha stuff away and stay quiet in the middle of a storm.

  And a hell of a storm was brewing in what used to be a sanctuary for me and my team.

  My cousin Slate stood in the center of the room, glaring up at the TV screen with his hands on his hips. He had walked into the house in a mood, like he knew he would have to battle. And he was right.

  Mary wasn’t happy.

  Neither was Slate’s brother, Roan. His eyes practically glared burning holes into the back of Slate’s head.

  “What do you mean, you’re going to spend weekends in Iowa?” Mary tilted her head to the side and glared down at Slate from the screen on the wall.

  “This is what I need. He gets to split his time with his girlfriend,” Slate said, pointing to Roan.

  They were talking about Roan’s girlfriend, Hope.

  “Hope lives nearby. She doesn’t live in another state,” Mary reminded Slate.

  We never had mothers, any of us, but I had the feeling that if we did, our mom would sound like Mary. Exasperated, most of the time. Who could blame her? We didn’t make life easy.

  Slate’s eyes went dark with anger. “I see. So, when I fall in love, it should be with a girl who either lives in Montana or who’s willing to relocate to Montana. Got it.”

  Roan looked like he was ready to take the rivalry with his brother to the next level—by ripping his head off.

  Meanwhile, I looked at Drew and was glad we didn’t have the rivalry drama they did. I could tell he felt the same way.

  “Don’t be immature,” Mary groaned. “This is difficult enough without you acting like a child.”

  “This isn’t negotiable,” he said as he folded his arms and planted his feet. “I’m a grown ass man and I love this girl and I’m going to Iowa to see her as often as I can. It’s not like she lives in a major city.”

  “Do they even have those in Iowa?” I snorted.

  Mary glared at me.

  I shrugged.

  She knew I couldn’t resist the chance to crack a joke.

  “I feel like the four of you have forgotten why you live where you do,” Mary said in a dangerously low voice. She folded her hands on the top of her desk and took a deep breath. Oh, no. Not a deep breath. Anything but a deep breath.

  A shudder of discomfort ran through the room. Maybe it was just me.

  “I don’t think we need a reminder,” Roan said, trying to cut her off.

  “I didn’t ask you what you think,” she hissed.

  That shut him up. Not much could make his mouth snap shut like that, but she didn’t even have to raise her voice.

  Her eyes drifted over the four of us, sitting in the rec room of our Montana home. “This arrangement was made with your safety in mind. I realize it’s easy to forget something like that when you’ve been out of danger for so long. The threat isn’t immediate. You feel safe. But nothing has changed. To the government, you’re a liability. They don’t want the rest of the world knowing what they did to your fathers. They don’t want them to know the reasons behind what they did to you, either—the reason they framed you, just to get you out of the picture. If you make yourselves known, there will be trouble. And I don’t care how remote this farmhouse is—you don’t exactly blend in. Somebody’s bound to talk about that extremely large guy who visits Maggie every weekend.”

  “I could be careful.” Slate didn’t sound as sure of himself as he did before.

  “I’m sure you could.” She rolled her eyes. “You know as well as I do how many eyes there are out there. Everywhere. Just where you least expect them.”

  “I won’t give her up,” he growled.

  I felt sorry for him, I really did. I wasn’t sure I would be any easier for Mary to deal with than he was if I loved somebody. Love was something we couldn’t afford to indulge ourselves in.

  “I don’t expect you to,” Mary sighed. “I’ll have to give this some thought and get back to you. In the meantime, I’m happy to fly this girl out to you. She can stay with Hope, maybe?”

  Roan let out a strangled sigh of his own, but nodded. “I wouldn’t mind her having a little company when we’re not around—especially with the baby coming.”

  “The what?” Mary’s jaw dropped.

  So did mine and Dale’s.

  But not Roan, who grinned a little sheepishly.

  “Yeah. She wasn’t sure if we should tell anybody yet, since it’s still pretty early. But we’re expecting a baby.”

  Mary smiled—but it was a tight smile. Not completely happy. “I’m glad for you.”

  Meanwhile, I knew what she was thinking about. The same thing we were all thinking about, I would bet. We were wondering how Hope would handle the pregnancy, being human and everything.

  Slate clapped Roan on the back, then looked at me. “Uncle Slate. I guess I could get used to that.”

  “How did I know you would make this all about you?” Roan asked with a chuckle.

  I reached over to shake his hand, but pulled back at the last second. “You sure the kid’s yours? Nothing against Hope. Just didn’t know you had it in you.”

  He rolled his eyes and shook my hand with a laugh.

  Mary cleared her throat to pull attention back to herself. “There was another reason for this call,” she said. “Something a little more official—and something which I think will hit fairly close to home for all of you.”

  And there went all the good energy. There was a palpable tension in the room all of a sudden. That was the thing about us—we could screw off, joke around, get on each other’s nerves. But we were all dead serious about the work we did. There had only been a short break since our last job—we had been back at the Montana house for less than a week, since it took a little extra time for Slate to be released from the hospital outside Orlando, and he had only returned home from Maggie’s farm this morning with his big announcement about splitting his time.

  “I hate to assign you to a case so soon after the one you just closed, but a situation has arisen out in Santa Monica which I’ve been monitoring for the past several weeks. Things are about to come to a head, and I feel it would be best for you to go out ther
e and help the person involved—the people involved, in fact.”

  “Who are these people?” Roan sat down and cracked his knuckles.

  “Members of a nomadic group which travels around the country. They’ve been spotted in Canada and Mexico, as well. There are roughly forty to fifty of them, total, and they live in relative seclusion even with such large numbers. They don’t bother anybody, and they typically go undisturbed. Think of them as modern-day gypsies.”

  “Gypsies weren’t exactly accepted when they set up their caravans,” I pointed out.

  “Times have changed,” Mary snapped. “However, as I said, something has come up. A journalist out there has brought attention to the group. She writes for the online version of a major newspaper and has been writing two or even three articles a week about the different individuals, how they live together, what their routines are like. Where they’ve been, what they do when they settle down in a new place.”

  “What’s the problem with that?” Drew asked.

  For the first time in all the years I had known her, Mary looked uncomfortable. She was usually the most honest, ball busting, no-holds-barred person I knew. She had a good heart—I could always tell that right away, it was sort of a sixth sense I had—but she took absolutely no shit and was generally too busy to waste time mincing words. But just then, she looked like she wished my brother had asked any other question.

  “They’re not exactly what you’d call normal, productive members of society,” Mary began. “I mean, there has to be a reason why they live on the road, doesn’t there? Nobody adopts that sort of lifestyle if there isn’t some larger reason behind it. And in this case, there’s a very large reason.”

  She’d said it had something to do with us, hadn’t she? I jumped in. “Are they like us?” I asked. “On the run from the government, something like that?”

  “And Carter gets the gold star,” she said, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. She looked tired, troubled. Like she could use a drink.

  “How else are they like us?” Slate asked. He sounded suspicious, so he was starting to clue in like I had.

  “They’re shifters.”

  “But not just shifters,” I murmured. Didn’t we just find out that there were thousands of shifters all over the country, all part of one clan or another? There was no reason for shifters to live on the run if they were accepted, the way Vincent and his clan were.

  She shook her head. “No. They’re like you. They were created, not born of the long bloodlines from the Old Country.”

  It was like she punched me in the stomach. I felt nauseated, breathless. Angry.

  It was Roan who caught his breath first. “How the hell do we not know about this?” he asked, jumping up with his fists clenched. “All these years—”

  “All these years, these shifters have lived outside of society. Under the radar.” She waved her hands to cut through our grumbling and head-shaking. “The experiments performed on your fathers and a number of others were kept highly classified, then destroyed once the program was shut down. There was never a record of how many test subjects there were in total. Even the subjects themselves weren’t aware of their place in the overall scheme of the program—your fathers knew because they signed up together, but they knew nothing of the others. This was deliberate.”

  “We weren’t alone. We were never alone.” I couldn’t believe it. My entire life, I thought of us as four of a kind—well, six, including our dads. But they were gone. It was just us, alone. Having the image of my entire life thrown upside down in one afternoon call from Mary wasn’t easy to adjust to.

  “No. You weren’t. I’m sorry. Had I known for sure, I would’ve told you. I swear.” And she did look apologetic, genuinely sorry. I believed her.

  “How do you know about them now? I mean, a bunch of articles don’t mean anything.”

  “Not to me. Not if I hadn’t heard through the grapevine that some of the same people who didn’t want you around anymore don’t want word of these shifters to get out.”

  “Wait. You mean this whoever they are is blabbing to the world about them being shifters?”

  Mary shook her head at Drew’s question. “No, no, but there have been pictures published with these articles. Somebody mentioned something to somebody else and on and on until the right person—or the wrong person, depending on how you look at it—caught wind of what was happening. You can imagine how unhappy this has made them.”

  “Oh, I can imagine,” Slate growled.

  I was sure we all could. It hadn’t been that long since we fled for our lives, once we found out there was a price on our heads. The government and our commanding officers couldn’t be held accountable for the missions they had sent us on, missions tailor made for our special qualifications. They made us do things none of us would ever forget just for the sake of following orders, but turned around and ruined our lives.

  “No matter what they do to the shifters themselves, they’re bound to seek out this journalist and shut them up.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “A.J. Clarke,” Mary replied. “We’re still looking for information on A.J. Clarke. I want the four of you out there now, right away, to infiltrate this group and warn them of what’s happening. And to protect this journalist—there’s no way they can know what they’ve stirred up, and they probably won’t be receptive to what you tell them at first. You’ll probably find the journalist—or journalists, if there are several—lurking around the group, but you can always go to the newspaper if that doesn’t work.”

  “We can be persuasive,” Roan said.

  “Try being gentle, too,” she warned. “You four can be pretty scary when you feel like it.”

  “It’s not the writer I want to scare,” Slate muttered.

  “Just keep your eyes on the assignment. No need to scare anybody. The jet needs refueling after getting back earlier.” Her eyes drifted over to where Slate sat—she had sent the jet out to meet him and bring him back.

  “We’ll be ready.” Roan ended the call and the four of us filed out to the stairs, then up to our rooms to pack.

  We were used to getting ready at the drop of a hat, and I already had a bag mostly packed. All I needed was climate-specific clothing. California meant a few pairs of shorts and a couple of swimsuits.

  I added sunscreen, too. I could dream.

  Roan was just coming out of his room as I walked out of mine.

  I wondered why he was frowning until I noticed that he was on the phone.

  “I know. But you know how last-minute these things can be.” He grimaced. “I forgot about that appointment. I’m sorry. I hate to miss it.”

  I hurried up and went downstairs to give him a little more privacy, but his call was over by the time he joined me in the foyer. “She has her first obstetrician appointment in two days, and I totally forgot.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry. You’ll be here for the next one.” It sounded lame, but what else was there to say?

  We didn’t exactly talk about our feelings, so it wasn’t like he would cry on my shoulder even if he needed to.

  I was glad when Drew and Slate filed downstairs.

  Slate looked particularly pissed off. “I just got home,” he snarled.

  “Yeah, well, nobody forced you to fly to Iowa and not tell anybody you were going.” Roan wasn’t in the mood.

  Neither was I—even though I would never forget how sick Slate was back in Florida, it didn’t mean he could get away with being a dick.

  “Yeah, it’s not like we didn’t have time to relax a little between jobs,” I reminded him as the four of us walked out to the car with bags in hand.

  “Shut it,” Slate warned.

  I would’ve assumed he was kidding in any other situation, but not right now.

  “It won’t take long for Drew and me to track this A.J. dude down. Once we do that and, like, pack him off and ship him someplace else, it’ll be easy to wrap things up. The shifters will know what to do to protec
t themselves if they’ve managed to stay underground this long.” I didn’t know if what I was saying was true or even possible, but I had to tell myself it was.

  Half the team didn’t want to leave—that was a new one.

  “Yeah, you two can just sit back and let us do the work,” Drew grinned. “Not like we don’t already.”

  Roan cracked a smile. “You wish.” It was a start.

  2

  Carter

  “Fuck,” Drew breathed as we stepped out onto the beach. “How can anybody not know who these people are?”

  I understood what he meant—the scent of dozens of shifters hit me like a slap in the face the second we got out of the car, a block away from the boardwalk. I had never smelled anything like it. It clouded my brain and made thinking straight pretty tough.

  “Holy hell,” Slate said, shaking his head. “I think we found the right place.” He took a deep breath and blew it out in a long sigh.

  And they had always been out there, roaming around without us knowing about them. I couldn’t believe it. We had a family all along. “We don’t even know if they would accept us,” I muttered.

  As usual, Drew understood what I was thinking. “We always had each other, bro. That was all we needed.”

  When I looked at him, it was like looking in a mirror. And he was right—it was like we shared one memory, the four of us.

  I couldn’t come up with a time when we weren’t in each other’s lives, and I liked it that way. I wanted it to stay that way.

  But for all our togetherness or whatever the hell it was, we also lived very lonely lives. Our fathers made it their mission to keep us sheltered from what the world might do to us. And that sort of experience tends to shape a young man’s mind. Does it ever.