She lifted the leg that had been draped along his back, put her bare foot to his collarbone, and kicked him back so that he sprawled on the floor. As he went down, she came on top of him, straddling his hips, and he opened his mouth, that fabulously sensual, wickedly clever mouth still slick with her pleasure, and before he could say anything, she dove down to kiss him hard.
He muttered something guttural and flexed his hips as he grabbed her by the back of the neck, and this time they didn’t kiss so much as eat at each other’s mouths, rough with an escalating urgency that spread like a wildfire. Time burned away. They both felt for the fastening of his jeans, trying to help each other and tangling their fingers. When the fastening finally came undone, he yanked the zipper down and she closed her fingers over his erection.
Hell’s bells, he was a big sonovabitch there too. He really was going to kill her. She eased up so that she could look down the rippling contours of his long, muscled torso. His penis was as beautiful as the rest of him, with a velvet-soft, broad head, and a thick, hard length.
“Ooh, Precious,” she said, looking up at him with a quick grin, and sudden laughter creased his face. Then his laughter vaporized as she stroked him, all the way down to his balls which had drawn up tight, and he shuddered all over.
She guided him to her entrance. He stopped her, hands shaking. “Condom?”
She shook her head and whispered, “No need.” She had used an IUD until her mid-thirties. Once she was sure she wasn’t cut out to parent a child, she’d settled the issue permanently with surgery.
When his resistance vanished, she eased down on him. She had a thought that she ought to warn him to take this part slow, since those were the only muscles in her body that she hadn’t exercised in a while. But he was so gentle as he pushed up, while his expression was so drawn with need, she went a little crazy and impaled herself on him in one painful, glorious movement.
Then he was seated in her all the way, and they stared at each other. The slanting evening sunshine spilled in through a nearby window and fell over them in a rain of gold. He pulled on her t-shirt and she sat straight up to drag it over her head, and to remove her bra too. His gaze was wide, wondering. Her breasts weren’t very big, and she didn’t think they were interesting, but he touched them with a reverence that made her eyes moisten.
I love you, she told him silently. You impossibly wonderful man.
Because she could say whatever she wanted in her own head. Because she could confess it all, as he began to flex underneath her, moving gently. He stroked her breast, stroked her face, and then their bodies came together just right, and she arched her back as she peaked again. Her pleasure must have hurtled him forward, because he gripped her by the hips again, hard, pumping up once, twice, and then he groaned and climaxed along with her.
She fell forward, sprawling on him, and fought to get control of her breathing. His arms closed around her, and there was nothing more perfect than the moment when he was still inside her and he held her so tightly. He whispered her name.
They hadn’t even gotten his shirt or his jeans off. Man, she really knew how to trash herself. She pressed a kiss to his hot, damp neck and thought, I’m a goddamn idiot.
Luis rolled her over and made love to her again. And again.
Here was the fun bit: clearly she hadn’t had a Wyr lover before, because she was all wide-eyed astonishment at his stamina, and she didn’t connect to the significance of his multiple orgasms.
That last time, they had managed to get to their feet. The sun had set but the light was not fully gone, and he’d finally kicked off the last of his clothes. He swiped the cards out of the way, bent her over the table and took her from behind.
He knew she was wrecked, exhausted. He had wrung every climax he could out of her, so that last time was pure, greedy selfishness on his part, an orgiastic wallow in her magnificent, athletic body. She just laughed as he plunged urgently into her. She reached behind, gripped him by the back of his neck and held on as he bit her shoulder, growled and twisted up in one final, exquisite spasm.
Afterward, he stood at the counter, still nude, and ate a lukewarm dinner, while she sat at the table and collected the scattered cards with slow, tired movements. She had grabbed a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around her torso. Her hair was tangled and she had bite marks down her neck.
He stared at the marks he had made. He’d really gone to town, marking her, and she had egged him on. She had marked him too, and he had loved her ferocity. It was the only time he had ever been frustrated with his own rapid healing, because he wanted to wear every single scratch she had given him.
Gods, he couldn’t wait until they made love again. When Wyr mated, they did so for life, and the mating period was a bit frenzied for a couple of months.
She haphazardly stacked the cards together and set the deck aside.
“I don’t know if I got them all,” she said, her voice blurred with tiredness. “I don’t think I can count right now.”
“We can check later.” He put the other two meals in the fridge.
She put her head in her hands. “Luis, I’m still leaving in the morning.”
He walked over to the table as he thought of how to answer. “I know. Let’s go to bed.”
He happened to glance down at the Tarot deck as he spoke. Inanna, the goddess of Love, lay at the top of the deck. The hand painted card was quite stunning, actually. Inanna was a golden woman, and seven lions pulled her chariot.
He tapped the card. Yeah, there was a reason why the goddess was so fierce and surrounded by lions. Sometimes love was a dance, and maybe sometimes, for some people, it was hearts and flowers.
Occasionally it was an all-or-nothing battle.
He figured things might get downright tricky for a little while. He didn’t need the message from the Tarot spread he had laid out earlier; he already knew he was at a crossroads.
He still had time. He could pull away from Claudia. He didn’t have to mate irrevocably with her.
But if there was anyone in this wide, wicked world who deserved the kind of devotion he had to give, it was her. He might have to leverage and scheme, but he would do his goddamn best to convince her of that. And well, damn it, once you started walking a warrior’s path, you pretty much had to accept that you ran the risk of living a short life.
They would burn each other up. They would burn too fast. But they would burn brightly.
You gonna help me out any here? he asked the goddess. He supposed it was a prayer of sorts. Inanna smiled out of the card and said nothing.
He followed Claudia to the bed alcove and curled his body around hers. She turned her face into his shoulder and fell asleep immediately, while he held her for the rest of the night.
Things were going to get interesting in the morning.
Early the next morning, Luis left.
“Good-bye,” Claudia said gently when she kissed him.
His expression set, he returned her kiss, hard, and said nothing.
She refused to let that hurt her feelings. Once Luis was gone, she ate part of her meat loaf dinner for breakfast and threw the rest away. Then she straightened the trailer one last time. She did count the cards in the Tarot deck to make sure she’d found them all. On impulse, she shuffled them and flipped over the first seven. Not a single one of the Major Arcana showed up.
Somehow that didn’t surprise her. She stacked the cards in their box, threw the box in the bag on top of the paperbacks again, and set the bag in her back seat. Much later, she distinctly remembered that, when she looked for the deck in every nook and cranny of the car but couldn’t find it.
When she was done packing up the car, she went to hug Jackson good-bye. He gave her a rib bruising in return. “You better not disappear for good,” he said.
“I’ll call you next week,” she said. “And I’ll come back to visit late summer.”
He sucked a tooth and grumbled. “That’s all right, then.”
As sh
e pulled away from the house, her heart emptied until she felt hollow and light as air.
A dusty Jeep pulled up behind her as she drove down the street, and when she saw it in her rearview mirror, suddenly she was full up again and twisted with riotous emotion.
Damn it, what was Luis up to?
He followed her sedately through town. The Jeep turned into a parking space at the gas station/fast-food joint/casino, while she pulled up to a pump.
Her jaw angled out. She decided to ignore him, as she went about the business of filling up her gas tank.
A full Greyhound bus pulled into the parking lot. She gritted her teeth and watched with resignation as the occupants disembarked and headed indoors. There were several small family units, a few retirees, a couple of Light Fae teenagers, and a young medusa wearing goth makeup, with her short, slim head snakes wrapped for travel.
So much for short lines and a quick getaway. Claudia wasn’t about to head into the desert without at least a couple bottles of water in the car, even if she was traveling on a major highway. After filling her tank, she sucked it up and went inside to the Food Mart.
Eventually she made her way outside again, having acquired half a dozen bottles of water and a shortened temper.
She found Luis lounging against the wall in the sunshine, a duffle bag at his feet. He wore scuffed boots, faded jeans, a gray t-shirt, his black leather jacket and a scowl. She looked at his strong, graceful neck, where his satin-brown skin disappeared under his shirt, and she wanted to bite him again, to claw at that perfection while she took him into her body. Surely the gods had not been fair when they’d made that man so damn beautiful.
She dragged her gaze away and squinted at the early morning sun. “What are you doing here, Precious?”
Luis said, “I’m not done having sex with you yet.”
It took a split second for that to sink in. She spun on her heel, spoiling for a fight.
He gave her a slow smile that was both remarkably sweet and naughty at the same time. His grandmother must have warned him that smile might land him in jail or at the wrong end of a shotgun at a wedding.
Her expression compressed. Then the edge of her mouth took on a slight, unwilling tilt. “I spent most of my adult life in the army. You think you can shock me with that kind of shit?”
His smile widened. He stepped close and ran the tip of his finger lightly down her cheek. “I got time off for good behavior, and injuries incurred on the job. I was coming back to the house to tell you, but you were already taking off. I’ve called someone to come pick up the Jeep. I don’t have to be back at work for at least another month, maybe even six weeks if I sound pathetic enough over the phone. I figure that means I get to hang out with you for a while.”
Doubts crowded in. She felt uncharacteristically torn between what she wanted so badly and what her mind told her was the right path to take. “This is a terrible idea.”
He gave her an exasperated look. “Did I ask you what you thought?”
She bit the inside of her cheek. She couldn’t make herself tell him to go away. It wasn’t right to tell him he could come. She turned and stalked back to her car. He had gotten her so rattled, she had forgotten to lock her doors, and she never forgot to lock her doors. As she threw the bottled water in the back and climbed into the car, he set his duffle bag in the back seat and angled his long body into the passenger’s side.
Claudia slapped her hands on the steering wheel. “Luis.”
He settled back, the picture of contentment. “Shut up and drive.”
All the passengers were back on board the Greyhound bus when it pulled onto the highway fifteen minutes later.
On the bus, the medusa opened up her new pack of gum and popped a piece of Bubble Yum into her mouth.
She had clocked the driver of the old car parked at the pump, a tall blonde woman who stepped into the Food Mart as she’d come out. As she’d sauntered past the island of gas pumps on her way back to the Greyhound, for a few, brief moments no one had been around except some hot guy by a dirty Jeep, and he had been busy talking on his cell phone.
One of the old car’s back doors was unlocked. She never wasted time questioning when opportunity or impulse struck. Neat and quick as a cat, she’d swiped what was on top of a canvas bag and stuffed it without looking into her own backpack.
Now she reached into her backpack to check out what she had scored.
She pulled out an old, painted wooden box. So far, so yawn.
The eight-year-old bratty boy who had been begging to pet her head snakes for the last ninety miles popped his head around the aisle seat. “Whaddaya doin’?”
“None of your business, kid,” she said. If he didn’t leave her alone, she might just let him pet her head snakes and get one of them to bite him. Blowing a bubble, she opened the box, pulled out the cards and looked through them.
Hey, maybe these weren’t so yawn after all.
Maybe these were actually pretty sweet.
About the Author
Thea Harrison resides in Colorado. She wrote her first book, a romance, when she was nineteen and had sixteen romances published under the name Amanda Carpenter.
She took a break from writing to collect a couple of graduate degrees and a grown child. Her graduate degrees are in Philanthropic Studies and Library Information Science, but her first love has always been writing fiction. She's back with her paranormal Elder Races series. You can check out her website at www.theaharrison.com, and also follow her on Twitter @TheaHarrison and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheaHarrison.
Look for these titles by Thea Harrison
Now Available:
A Story of the Elder Races
True Colors
Meeting your soulmate? Great. Preventing your possible murder? Even better.
True Colors
© 2011 Thea Harrison
Alice Clark, a Wyr and schoolteacher, has had two friends murdered in as many days, and she’s just found the body of a third. She arrives at the scene only minutes before Gideon Riehl, a wolf Wyr and current detective in the Wyr Division of Violent Crime—and, as Alice oh-so-inconveniently recognizes at first sight, her mate.
But the sudden connection Riehl and Alice feel is complicated when the murders are linked to a serial killer who last struck seven years ago, killing seven people in seven days. They have just one night before the killer strikes again. And every sign points to Alice as the next victim.
Warning: This book contains a hot police detective, a violent murderer on the hunt, and a heroine that can blend in anywhere…
Enjoy the following excerpt for True Colors:
Don’t move. Stay perfectly still.
The enormous monster plunged through the apartment with the lethal speed of a stealth bomber. A Molotov cocktail of pheromones and Power spewed through the blood-tainted air, the classic signs of a strong male Wyr in a rage. Alice clung to her perch, her heart knocking so hard she thought it was going to burst out of her chest. Had the murderer returned?
Then the monster slowed. Alice heard him utter vicious curses under his breath as he came upon Haley’s still-warm body. Alice took the New York subway daily to work. She thought she had heard it all but she learned a few things as she listened to him. Did he curse because he saw the murdered woman for the first time, or because he realized he had made some kind of mistake?
Alice had only just arrived at Haley’s apartment herself. She had found the door open and rushed inside to discover that her friend’s body had been laid out on her bed. Haley’s torso had been cut open, organs strewn across the flowered bedspread like a child’s abandoned toys.
Alice had gone numb at the sight, the normal cool gentle logic of her mind seizing in shock. Then she had heard someone running up the stairs. She had barely gotten to her hiding place before the monster appeared. If he was the murderer and he had returned to clean up some clue he had left behind, neither Alice nor the police would know what it was now.
He
prowled through Haley’s home in complete silence. Alice couldn’t even hear the soft pad of footsteps. Her awareness of him was excruciating, as though someone had stroked the flat of a razor blade along her bare skin with the smiling promise of a cut. His presence was a violation of Haley’s private space. He paused not two feet away from Alice, so close she could see the pocket of his worn leather jacket out of the corner of her eye and hear the almost imperceptible sound of his steady breathing.
She wanted to scream and strike at him. She wanted to run away and dial 911. The shadowed apartment hallway was a million miles long, the open front door too far away for her to make a run for it and hope she wouldn’t be noticed. She didn’t dare move, did not dare even shift her gaze for fear a glancing light might reflect off her eyes and give her position away. She hardly dared to breathe. The only thing she could do is taste the air and know that, if nothing else, she could recognize this man again by his scent. Underneath the scent of violence, he smelled warm and clean. If they were in any other kind of situation, she would have found his scent sexy. She fought the sudden urge to vomit.
Wait. If she could scent him, then what kind of trail had she left behind? Could he scent her as well? Would he be able to recognize her again, too? Oh gods.
Natural Evil
Thea Harrison
Attempted Murder. Passion. Betrayal. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.
Claudia Hunter is on a road trip through the Nevada desert when she sees the body of a dog on the side of the highway. Pulling over to investigate, she quickly determines that the enormous animal is clinging to life. While working to save him with the help of the local vet, Claudia realizes there’s something about the creature that seems more. Other. Wyr. Which makes this case of animal cruelty attempted murder.