Protecting Medusa
Protecting Medusa
Elizabeth Andrews
Contents
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
Chapter 15
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Elizabeth Andrews
Protecting Medusa
The Medusa’s Daughters Trilogy, Book 2
* * *
Being the Medusa puts a real crimp in a woman’s social life. Lucky for Philomena Gregory, she gave up on men long before Athena’s curse landed on her head--she learned as a child men don’t stay, a lesson reinforced when she was a lovesick teenager. The hot naked man in her bathroom won’t change her mind.
Ryder Ware has waited six years to meet Mena in person. She’s managed to avoid him every time he’s visited his son, her nephew. Flirting on the phone and via email is no substitute when a man is so intrigued. But now that Athena’s Harvesters have found her, Mena has no choice but to let him keep her safe--and close, very close.
Philomena may have to accept his protection, but, even with chemistry hotter than Hades, she won’t change her mind about a relationship, even after a little sex. Or even a lot of sex. Good thing Ryder’s a patient man. After waiting years, what’s a few more weeks to convince the woman of his dreams he wants forever?
Forced to flee to ensure their family’s safety, Mena and Ryder mostly stay ahead of the Harvesters on her trail. The longer they’re together, the harder it is to keep believing all men are cut from the same cloth. Ryder may be bossy, but he proves he’ll be there when she needs him, even though she’d never have asked for his help. It will take a long time to break down her walls, but with the deadly Harvesters turning up everywhere they go, they may not have long enough.
Mena must decide if she can trust herself as much as she trusts Ryder. Otherwise, Athena’s curse on her family will mean her end, instead of her happily ever after.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Protecting Medusa
Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Andrews
Ebook ISBN: 9781734668940
Paperback ISBN: 9781734668957
Cover by Aleisha Knight Evans
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First Electronic publication: August 2021
First Paperback publication: August 2021
This book goes again to my husband and my two sons, as well as my father who is no longer with us. It’s for everyone who protects their family from harm, in big ways and in all the small ones, too, from making sure they have a safe place to live, to ensuring they stay dry in the rain. Family is important, and those who keep theirs protected have a difficult job. Thank you all.
THE LEGEND
Millennia ago, a beautiful young Gorgon made a fatal mistake, one her descendants still pay for today. She so angered Athena that the Goddess cursed Medusa, changing her lovely hair to snakes and causing her gaze to turn any living thing to stone. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Perseus then set out to kill the unfortunate Medusa.
Perseus didn’t know she’d already found a way to protect her descendants from some of the Goddess’s curse: she created an amulet which would transfer from one future Medusa to the next, either when she fell in love or died. This cup prevents the curse from wreaking constant havoc on the women’s lives, instead limiting it to once each month for the current Medusa. And you thought you had PMS from hell.
Along with the Goddess’s curse, Perseus’s descendants have also followed the Medusas through the centuries, trying to take the amulet as they hunt, or harvest, the Medusas. Over time, details about the amulet and how the curse passes from one Medusa to another have been lost or forgotten.
These Harvesters have so far failed to find the amulet, called Medusa’s Goblet, and, for several generations, have also failed to kill the reigning Medusas. But they persist and are closer now to achieving at least one of those tasks: finding the current Medusa.
A few years ago, one of their own fell in love with the Medusa he was destined to kill. Now his family is more determined to kill her successor, and they won’t let anyone stand in their way this time.
Chapter One
Ryder Ware stood at the window, watching the man stride along the road in the dark. The other man couldn’t see him, but Ryder remained frozen anyway, barely breathing. After tracking this guy for weeks, his patience had finally paid off. The man was a Harvester, and his quarry was one Philomena Gregory, the current Medusa.
Ryder wouldn’t allow the man to have her.
He watched as the Harvester walked toward him, not even bothering to skulk in the early dark of winter as he made his way toward Philomena’s mother’s house. The stranger must’ve believed no one was home, despite the faint light shining from between the living room curtains.
He knew exactly where the guy was heading. He’d have gone to the same spot if he were a Harvester. And Ryder would beat him there. Catch him off guard.
Ryder headed upstairs. He stripped and turned on the water in the bathtub, aiming the shower head straight down to minimize how wet he’d get, and waited at the back of the tub, curtain shut, pulse only beating slightly faster than normal. He could ignore the fruity-smelling shower gel and shampoo that he’d bet belonged to Philomena for a few minutes.
The guy thought he’d be getting one of the women by surprise, but he’d find out in a hurry he was dealing with someone much more dangerous.
Philomena parked beside her mother’s house. She’d arrived first, and she needed to get dinner on in a hurry. Once Jason got home, she’d be too distracted to focus on cooking.
She went in the back door, balancing a grocery bag while she reset the alarm, then hit the light switch with her elbow as she continued into the kitchen.
She took her mother’s cast iron skillet from its hook over the counter and put it on the stove, turning the heat to high and dropping in some ground beef before she shed her coat. As she put away the rest of the groceries, the meat began to sizzle.
She rolled up her sleeves and dug a spatula out of the utensil drawer, but froze when she heard a creak from upstairs. She waited, then shook her head. It was a hundred year-old farmhouse.
She stirred the beef in the pan, adding chopped onions she’d picked up at the store--not out of laziness but because she knew she needed to move quickly after three days away and with an excitable six-year-old on his way home. She could take time tomorrow to do her own prep work for dinner.
The sound came again from upstairs. She set the spatula on the spoon rest and turned the flame under her pan down to low, then tugged up the hem of her long skirt to pull her dagger from its leather sheath on her thigh.
A loud thud reached her ears, and her heart beat faster.
Dear Gods, someone really was in the house.
She crept up the back steps, keeping to the edges where she knew her weight wouldn’t make the stairs creak, the smooth handle of her long knife comforting in her sweat-damp hand.
More thumping, accompanied by running water.
She frowned whe
n she got to the top of the steps, wincing as something hit the porcelain bathtub, followed by muffled cursing.
She stuck her head around the corner, but the partially-closed bathroom door at the other end of the hall blocked her view. All she could see were shadows.
Two people? In her mother’s bathroom? She wished she’d grabbed the phone on her way up so she could call the police. No, she should’ve called before coming upstairs. Too late now.
More thumping and a crash.
Her jaw clenched, and she stepped into the hallway, her pulse pounding in her ears.
“I’ve called the police,” she lied, moving slowly along the hall. Frigid air drifted toward her. Either the bathroom window was open, or something was seriously wrong with the furnace. She frowned, holding tighter to her knife.
A dark blur went out the window, and her eyes widened. It was quite a drop to the ground, even with all the snow mounded below from the big storms so far this winter.
When a large, naked man with a gun went to look out the window, she froze in the middle of the hall, her dagger shoulder high.
Naked.
She swallowed, and then he turned around. Her lungs stopped working.
“Hello, Philomena. Have I ever told you how much I love a woman who can handle a blade?” He caught the edge of the door and pulled it wide open.
She’d know that voice anywhere, and that face, even if she’d only seen him in photos. Ryder Ware, Jason’s father.
And wow, was she seeing him in person.
He smiled, a cocky grin that revealed dimples in both cheeks, his eyes dark like melted chocolate. Lower, wide shoulders, muscled chest with a veil of dark blond hair, darker yet where it narrowed over his muscle-rippled belly, leading to his groin.
Where he was visibly aroused and getting more so by the second.
She forced her gaze back to his face and found his expression had shifted to something dangerous. Predatory. She forced her lungs to take in some air. “Ryder. What are you doing here?” Besides standing naked in my mother’s bathroom. She inhaled slowly again, attempting to make her heartbeat slow down, but it just kept galloping along under her ribs. She hoped her sweater was heavy enough to hide the way her nipples had started to tighten. Leftover hormones, she told herself. Or the cold from the open window. Nothing to do with the nude man in front of her.
“Saving your life.” He winked at her, completely unselfconscious about his nakedness. Or his arousal.
She refused to look. Not that she had to. She had very good peripheral vision, and wow! “What are you talking about?”
“Harvester.” He clicked something on his gun and laid it on the counter beside the sink.
She went cold, colder than even the open window warranted. “What...I...how...” She didn’t want to think about all the implications in that one word, her eyes closing for a second before she met his gaze.
“I need to go after him.” He grabbed a pair of jeans from the rumpled heap of clothing on the floor, then paused, a wicked grin slanting over his face. “Are you done staring?”
Philomena realized she was staring, and scalding heat rushed to her face as she dragged her gaze up to his.
“We can continue this later, Mena.” He crossed the small room in one step and pressed a hard kiss onto her mouth, startling her. “Keep the alarm on.” Then he grabbed his gun, went to the open window, and ducked outside.
She rushed across the room in time to see Ryder roll to his bare feet in the snow, running across the yard behind the other man’s footprints as he shrugged the snow from his naked back.
When goosebumps lifted along her arms after several minutes of staring into the darkness, she realized she was freezing. And the shower still ran. Giving herself a shake, she lowered the window and flipped the lock, then frowned, wondering how someone had reached it to unlatch it. Pondering that, she turned off the water.
After six years of successfully avoiding Ryder in person, it seemed she’d finally have to deal with him.
She shivered, and this time, it wasn’t from the cold, but from the mingled fear and adrenaline racing through her veins. Sheathing her dagger, she smoothed her skirt back down and returned to the kitchen, pushing thoughts of the bossy, sexy father of her nephew out of her head.
The beef was browning, and she dragged the spatula through it to loosen it from the bottom of the pan, before she dropped in chopped peppers and tomato sauce.
She hadn’t seen Jason or her mother in three long days, and she hadn’t imagined their reunion might occur like this.
She rubbed one hand over her forehead, trying to banish the mental image of Ryder, naked and aroused.
By what? she suddenly wondered. The thrill of the fight?
She supposed it was likely. She knew he was something of an adrenaline junkie. After all, his stint in the military had been rounded out by some secret missions he still couldn’t talk about, and she’d heard several stories from Jason about his dad jumping out of airplanes. Ryder had followed that up with some other secret intelligence agency job for a few years.
The only other possibility was that the arousal was because of her.
She laughed. Yeah, right. She knew she was reasonably attractive, but men didn’t fall to their knees at their first sight of her. Not even men who had flirted via email and over the phone as frequently as they were in contact. Actually, never, even when she’d dated with actual hope of finding ‘The One’. Or, um, leap to attention that way. Certainly not men who knew the sort of monster she truly was.
She swallowed hard, but her mind didn’t want to cooperate with her, making her senses all go haywire and sending heat into her belly. And he had kissed her.
A tap at the back door made her jump and drop the spatula into the meat and sauce.
Ryder stood outside, gun still in his hand, his face somber, though something sparked in his eyes when she got to the door and turned off the alarm. “Gone, but I know where to find him later,” he said shortly as he came inside.
She stepped away, desperate for something to distract her from his naked chest. The spatula. She fished it out of the bubbling pan and rinsed it at the sink. “You should have let us know you were coming.” It came out sharper than she intended.
He laughed as he leaned over the stove to inhale. “So you could keep avoiding me, Mena?”
She didn’t look at him right away, but her pulse tripled its pace. Of course he knew she’d been avoiding him all these years. The man wasn’t an idiot. “In case we had other plans,” she said instead, remaining at the sink instead of returning to the stove to stir their meal.
“As it happens, I spoke to Aggie this morning.” He grinned. “She knew I was coming.”
Philomena bit her lip and looked away for a second.
“What’s wrong, Mena?” He moved nearer. “Are you angry I didn’t give you another chance to hide, or are you still turned on?”
Her eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. “I was not.”
He touched her chin. “Liar.” His gaze flicked to the front of her sweater. “You are.”
She blushed furiously, aware of the way her nipples had tightened under her sweater again. Dammit. “Cold.”
He slid his thumb along her lower lip, his smile fading. “You don’t need to be embarrassed about it, Mena. The feelings are reciprocated,” he said softly. “You know that.”
She jerked away when he leaned nearer. Her heart raced crazily, and her legs felt like rubber. “I’m not interested in a relationship with you, other than as you are Jason’s father and I am his aunt.” He didn’t need to know she’d admired the photos Jason had of him, or that just the sound of his voice when he flirted on the phone caused her to shiver on occasion.
He lifted one eyebrow. “Desi’s been telling stories? After all this time?”
She moved around him to stir the sloppy joes. “Desi’s got nothing to do with it. Though, now that you mention it, her taste in men is known not to be very good, and my type is co
mpletely different from hers.”
For a second, he remained silent, but then Ryder laughed behind her. She ground her teeth together.
“I’ve seen your type, Mena, and your taste in men isn’t so hot. I think it’s time you tried a different flavor.” His hands settled on her shoulders, making her tense even more.
“You should get dressed. Mom and Jason will be here any minute,” she said, hearing the quaver in her voice. “And put your gun away.”
His breath warmed the top of her head, and she held her own, waiting. But he simply gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze and moved away.
Leaving her to wonder how he’d seen any of her dates.
Better than imagining him going upstairs to finish dressing.
She frowned into the skillet, stirring more vigorously than she needed to. Had he really been spying on her? For how long? She didn’t even remember the last date she’d had.
When her mother’s car pulled into the driveway beside hers, she inhaled deeply, forcing some of the tension from her shoulders and neck. After three days of forced solitude, she wanted to see her family. Very much.
Jason burst through the back door. “Aunt Phila!”
She smiled and held out her arms, bracing when he flung himself at her. “Hi, baby.” She scooped him up, even though he really was getting too big for that. She kissed one of his cheeks, then his mouth, then his other cheek, while he giggled. It was their ritual for whenever she’d been away. A kiss for each day they’d been apart.
He wrapped his arms around her neck, tight. “I missed you.”