Free Immortal Ops: New & Lengthened 2016 Anniversary Edition by Mandy M. Roth Page B

house. He knew he was anal about it, but the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with was lying there, needing his protection , and he’d be damned if he wouldn’t give it.  
    Spend the rest of my life with?
    That phrase struck him with some force. He’d had many women in his immortally long life. He’d never once wanted to claim one as his own, as a mate. Peren made him crave that. To have her walk with him as his mate would be the greatest gift ever. He dared not wish for it, fearing that the gods would punish him for being so selfish as to think a woman as perfect as Peren would accept him, but it didn’t matter, she made him want to offer her the world regardless of the potential backlash.  
    Reluctantly, he pulled away from her and walked toward the bedroom door. Her eyes were closed when he looked back at her. She’d had a long night. What had her friend downstairs said?Now he remembered. It was her twenty-fourth birthday. Well over a century separated them, age-wise. Thankfully, he didn’t look a day over thirty. Most people had a hard time believing he was even that old. No, age wouldn’t be the major barrier between them; his condition would.  
    He’d read her fears as she ran from him in the woods. He knew that shifters had attacked her more than once now and that one had been responsible for the death of her mother. Peren wouldn’t want to be near him if she knew what he really was. Telling her seemed so unimportant next to touching her.  
    He walked to the room down the hall from his and tapped on the door lightly. He opened the door slowly and heard the sounds of sex. He looked in to see his field operator, Lance, pumping himself into Peren’s blonde friend, Melanie. He had her bent over before him. Lance looked over at him and smiled wide as he ran his fingers down the girl’s back. She was too busy holding on to the bedrails, screaming out for Lance to fuck her harder, to even notice Lukian standing there.  
    Lukian concentrated on Lance’s thrusts, not out of the need to watch him have sex with her, but out of the need to make sure that Lance was using protection. He was. Lukian backed out of the room, nodding his head softly.  
    Can’t risk getting a human pregnant. It could kill her .  
    He’d tried to instill that in his men’s heads from day one. He was the only one on the team who had been born a lycan. One had survived an attack. The rest were man-made. Roi was part wolf, like him. In fact, it had been Lukian’s own DNA injected into Roi. Green was part panther, as was Lance. Wilson was part rat and Jon was part tiger. They had most of the bases covered. It was an odd grouping. In nature, these animals would never run together, but in their unit it worked out well. He was the alpha male, their captain. No one questioned him. He’d never really given them a reason to until Peren.  
    His team had been brought in to eliminate her. They answered to the highest men in the military and no one else, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think that the orders came from there. No, someone with a shitload of money had wanted Peren out of the picture and almost had their way tonight. Almost.  
    Lukian walked down the stairs quietly and listened as Roi and the other girl, Missy, argued in the kitchen. She still wanted to go home and Roi was still trying to convince her that it was too dangerous. Lukian stopped and laughed when he heard Missy call Roi a pig’s asshole—again. Yep, Roi had finally met his match.  
    He continued down the hall to the basement door. He was pleased with himself for setting up nearly twelve of these types of safe houses around the states. He’d managed to set up more than fifty in foreign countries over the past twenty years. It was always easier to do bizarre things in other countries. Americans, post 9/11, had become more vigilant. Everyone was suspicious of everyone now.  
    He pushed the door open and headed down to Green’s lab. He turned the