by Gina Kincade
“I…”
He cut off her words with a searing kiss. His lips dominated hers, blurring the fine line between pleasure and pain. Hearing his fingers brush down the wall sent a rush of fire throughout her entire being. The flames lingered in her taut nipples, which bore into his steely muscles. Her wet flesh, accosted by the growth of his erection, produced heat. Yet, when he grabbed her hips, she flinched before the shock settled into her body already trembling with need. Memories of intertwined limbs flowed willfully through her mind, binding her to him again.
Her fingers dug into his arms, and he wrenched her hips to his. The sinew in his biceps pulled as tight as a corset’s laces. Removing her clothing bore no challenge for him as he ripped the fabric like paper. Emboldened, she made short work of extracting the last bits of material from his frame. He picked her up, and she wrapped her legs around him unashamed. Clutching at his shoulders for support, she slipped her wet flesh over his erection.
Having only one bed to use, the one she laid upon now, he fell onto it with her. With nothing gentle in his movements, their erratic heartbeats mingled together she wantonly begged him for more. The air of a civilized man of the ton left in the glimmer of his eyes. More an animal, he separated their bodies to ravage her with branding kisses and caresses down her torso. She whimpered first at the loss of being inside him, until that soft cry turned into a long, guttural moan.
As his hand fell heavy on her mound, she arched up, requiring more of him than just his warm palm on her skin. His fingers ran roughly over her engorged nub before moving on in haste. Grabbing her ass, he raised her sopping core of need to his mouth. As he claimed her with fondling licks and coddling sucks, she quivered against his lips as her orgasm tore through her. Like a crazed animal, he remounted her before the contractions passed. As her inner walls embraced the thrust of his cock, she fell asleep, spent from her day, with a grin on her face.
Chapter Five
Finally exhausted after his fight with the shape he had become, Edmund laid under the moon at the edge of the water. Even in this form, a sort of dizziness pervaded his senses, while his heart beat in irregular palpitations. Bewildered, he tried to process the impossibility of what he saw and what he felt. He reviewed the day. Curling his fin-tipped tail up around one side of him, he sighed hard as the unbelievable events began to unfold in his mind. Some odd instinct that sought comfort covered his body with a fan of his wings.
He'd set out after returning from Gloucester to find Aubrey gone. Taking off the way she did with only a note had left an ache in his heart worse than any illness. He truly loved her and had reread her note over and over again, trying to read between the lines to discover what had gone wrong. Later, he tried to decipher it again several times in a pitiful attempt to have some connection to her. Finally going to Lady Sanderly, she'd told him of his mother’s visit to Aubrey. No one had any idea as to all that had been said, and he had no time and no inclination to stick around to try to find some semblance of truth in his mother’s lies.
His mother had slipped information in her anger and frustration with him as he'd packed. However, he had forced it aside each time it crept into his mind. The absurdities remained too ridiculous and too much to bear without Aubrey there to comfort him. Then again, his current form bore much the same confusion. With his animal-like head at full ache, he had to wonder if his mother’s accusation that Aubrey had magical powers had been proven more than accurate. Oddly, it was the only thing that made sense in this crazy predicament. If that piece of information had been proven true, so could be the rest of what she said. He could no longer deny his shape any more than he could shake it off, or wake himself up from a bad dream as he'd hoped it to be. His brain felt as if it would burst, and the urge to run at full speed clawed at him.
He resisted continuing on about it. He had been through enough pain already. Seeing her room and finding in it no clothes, not even a spare hairpin, had crushed him. One thing he did know without a shadow of a doubt, his mother had threatened Aubrey with something scary enough to make her flee. He knew his mother quite capable of anything. He hoped Aubrey had left only to protect Lord and Lady Sanderly from his mother’s lies, rather than flee the love he'd offered.
After gaining the name of the friends of his mother’s with whom Aubrey traveled, he had followed them by inquiring about them at each inn until he got a lead. He kept the process going until the last inn had said they'd put her on a boat, alone, set for Ireland. Speaking to the ship’s captain with his money, as was his mother’s way, he did know she got safely to Ireland. Relief had been found until he'd stumbled upon the information that she had enquired of someone who could take her to some island.
He had then met Ger and barely retained his sanity. He seemed quite the rake. It incensed him to think of her alone with him on his tiny sailing vessel or on a deserted island. However, he needed to be cordial enough to have the journeyman get him there also. Then, he would entertain thoughts of murder.
Even though foolish beyond permission to wager the man had not at least propositioned a girl like Aubrey, with a slight method to his madness he had to look beyond it to get to her. First things first, it mattered little to him what it all cost. As he had reasoned to her many times, he might as well be in for a pound as a penny. He had it in his head to win her back no matter the money or social ramifications or the sacrifice or even his damn pride. Being without her all this time had been excruciating beyond anything his mother had ever done or said to him before. Set to fight her now, to fight the whole world, he'd have Aubrey for his own again.
After days upon days of travel, he'd begun to feel the weariness of his sudden trip. He had worried so she would not be on the deserted island, until Ger had been convinced at the right price to admit to having taken a woman named Aubrey to this place.
Sailing had most displeased him. Growing up on the harrowing tales of the seas’ destructive abilities, a healthy respect had formed. Finding himself at the mercy of the sailing vessel and the sea once again, he had pushed aside thoughts of the ships that had gone down in the channel. At those times, just like now, when his own musings bamboozled him, he turned his thoughts to Aubrey.
His heart and his soul combined, without her, no life could be had to live. He'd always been set to marry her. He'd just to convince her and everyone else to go along with his plan. Even if an insane thing to attempt, he'd been more than willing to risk a bit of scandal to make her his forever. Now, he just had to find the girl who stole his heart and then disappeared in his absence.
He had not raised a breeze when his mother hastily proposed a trip to Gloucester, because he had hoped he could secure a home for him and Aubrey in upper northern England while there. It would've give them a place away from London to live if and when they needed to be free of London’s opinions and ways.
Just this past morning, he had found joy in the hope of having her back in his arms soon, and of surprising her with his official proposal and the gift of a home. After endless hours of floating on eerily calm water, he had chosen to get a few hours of sleep to help pass the time. When he had awoken again, he had been delighted with the sight of land and the sun gilding the slight waves. Ger had assured him she would be on this island, but since arriving, he had not seen another living soul. On the other hand, he had been transformed into something he did not even recognize as an animal or a beast. He now suspicioned this covering he wore did not occur apart from some havey-cavey doings on her part given no other rationalization had worked to prove him still human.
If he could ignore the wings and scales right in front of his eyes, he would deny it had happened. At first, he had thought it a dream and had tried to wake himself. However, the more he as this beast ran and flew at outlandish speeds, the more it became apparent he was indeed awake. The sure strength of his muscles and the intricacy of his movements had to be beyond the clarity of a sleeping mind. When things got too real to continue with the dream scenario, he deemed it a hallucinatio
n brought on by stress and excess exposure to the sun. Indeed, his thoughts had been reduced to mere babble anyway. By the time he had spent hours thrashing around the island, the reality of his plight had became undeniably realistic.
He'd begun to identify with his new instincts for a time, liking the Herculean virility of his new being. Yet, he still did not have the mental capacity somehow to wrap his mind around how it could be true. The disbelief continued to spasm within him. He could almost feel the veins inside of his head restricting and the blood thumping through them.
The soreness that now chastised him, he deemed nothing compared to the affliction of the actual transformation. It had been slow only in the sense that each part of his body became something else within its own time. However, the actual individual metamorphoses had been quick with powerful bursts of blinding, yet fleeting affliction. First the wing things had sprouted out of his back. A sudden shift and a brief expansion had plagued him as if some creature lurked within him like in a strange serial novel he had once read. Then, he swore the creature had broken free through the muscles and skin of his back. Doubling over, he had not even realized what was happening as something attached to his ribs and spine with a weighted compression. Almost instantaneously, he had felt the urge to move whatever it was. The oddity of the sensations was quickly masked as his muscles began moving in a rhythm, and large thin sheets of wings moved back and forth around him at his will.
Not even granted time to contemplate the troublesome change, his middle stretched as the affliction rendered him close to unconsciousness. He found the base of his torso sprouting a long tail just as his arms and legs thickened and lengthened to support his new massive form. His belly faced the ground as his chest stuck out, both full and weighty. Oddly enough, as he stared in a haunting disbelief at the thick skin covering him, he had an emphatic sense of his brawniness. With a strong urge to run at a great speed and fly up off the ground posthaste, he began moving maddeningly about, not able to give his frazzled thoughts time to process. His body’s urges took over as he became a slave to the form he did not know.
Agony seemed an issue of the past as his long tail sprouted fins. He did collapse to the ground, momentarily confused by his desires to run the land, fly the air, and swim the sea. An animalistic fortitude prevailed, making him do one after another. The compression and expansions of his muscles foreign, they moved him gracefully nonetheless. Without a looking glass he still had no inkling as to his true appearance. However, he could surmise by the mere distance between his eyes and the ground just how enormous he now stood. Even placing a clawed and scaly foot thing, which used to be a hand, out in front of his face did not tell him anything because the sensations of the appendage were all new to him.
Exasperated, he grew sensitive to being confined within this ill-favored form, a man within a beast trying to shake off the form. His brain still operated the same despite trying to process the unbelievable while trying to decipher and obey the new needs of the animal. The closest description he could come up with, he'd become a flying, aquatic dragon. The portion of his brain still human within him laughed. If sensible reasonings were pence and crowns, he would not be able to come to terms with any merchant. His thoughts clanged about in his head like carriage wheels on shoddy roads. The fact he indeed did not even fit in among the beasts of the world distressed him. He could be classified as a monster of the sea, a bird of the air, and a predator of the land.
Despite it all, just within the short span of time he had laid there, a resurgence of his power coursed through him in currents of warmth. He least understood the potent state of ecstasy that permeated this physique. Blood pulsed through him, thumping from arousal. In this form, he not even sure he had sexual organs, his fiendish tendencies thrived. The insistent urges coiled within his considerable abdominal area, bringing his breathing to pants.
Pushing his stomach area up off the sand, he gave in to flight. How he so easily pulled this massive form up off of the earth excited and thrilled, adrenaline still pumping through him creating heightened senses and a lightness in his enormous chest. The uppermost leaves smoothed over his belly. King of the jungle. No, Lord of the skies. Wait, Prince of the sea. With a sudden urge for a swim, he dove down vigorously. The water seemed to split open around him. However, it had not impressed upon him being swallowed up. As he surged deeper and deeper, he became aware of a sense of ownership over the waves. He feared no other water creature he passed.
The rapture of the moment rolled over him, quickening his already rapid pulse. With a few flips of his tail, he swam back towards the sunlight, burst out of a ripple of a wave, and flew into the air. His wings expanded, leaving a shower of water as his trail before he went up over the trees again. The high paled almost every achievement he'd ever physically experienced as a man, the beast's heart rate harder and faster, the breath longer and fiercer, the muscles stronger and not nearing fatigue.
Then, soaring, he spotted movement beneath him. His new eyesight beyond the scope of his mortal abilities, through the dense trees, he could hear the crunching of feet on the land. He sensed it human, linking on some energetic level, a gut instinct maybe, to the being, the man restrained within.
Lowering himself with a grace that rivaled his size, he stalked steadily the figure. Able to silently walk unfettered, he moved along on instinct alone. On the hunt, the erotic passions within him coursed like lava through his veins. Muscles feeling similar to the ones he had once known rippled with contractions. If he had been able, he'd have laughed out loud when he looked down to find the appendage only to find his investigation impeded by his rounded stomach area. Far from a gut of indulgence, it swelled out with majesty and power.
The figure had stopped. Upon moving in closer, he could determine the figure to be female. Stalking around her to get a better view, the still human part of his heart stopped at the sight of Aubrey. The glimpse of his clawed foot reminded him of the form he had been stricken with. He let loose a furious hiss which rumbled through his lungs without ever reaching his ears. The idea of not wanting to scare her ended up quickly replaced with the concept that she might have been the one to do this to him.
Was she indeed capable of magic, a supernatural power he had thought only to be a trick of the eye by those bent on taking money from those gullible enough to believe? A flash of anger melted into misery as he lowered his belly to the ground to watch her tend a garden.
Adding to the bile, sorrow and guilt settled in as he curled his form up into a ball, the ache in his heart sapping the energy he'd known just moments ago. He could again only imagine the lashing she had taken at the hands of his mother. Finally, suddenly chilled despite the glorious sun high in the sky, he acknowledged the fact that it was far past time to acknowledge she had not believed in him enough to protect her and to love her.
He looked at the curved, seductive beauty, indeed an intriguing piece of baggage as she always had been. Now, more than ever, she looked a beauty words failed to describe with her sun-darkened skin and free flowing hair. He could see her from the side with her womanly endowments bubbling up out of the silk of her dress. A remembrance of sensation tingled through what had once been his hand, knowing just how it felt to touch her.
When she turned in his direction, he faced each curve of her midsection. Even with the arch of her full thighs hidden by the light silk material, he saw them in his mind’s eye. He recalled how the pouch of her stomach rounded beautifully into the girth of her hips, offering a man more than enough to fill his hands.
As the heart of the man within pounded hard enough to torture, he had to continue to stifle the animal’s cries. His love ardently throbbed within him. Each time she bent over to pick from a vine, the swell of her breasts more fully presented themselves. Her movements magical, they held an allure known to few women. Her fingers tipped with deep red stains appeared to fondle each berry she picked. When she placed one in her mouth and a drop of juice trickled over her full bottom lip, he wanted to st
eal a kiss in order to taste the sweet nectar along with her flesh.
Each longing of the man within him seemed greater than any corporeal needs he had ever experienced. He indeed needed to touch her golden skin once more, to feast on her lips, and to plunge into her wet depths. He wanted to feel her hands on the skin he now desperately yearned to have again. A rage built of frustration forced him to stifle the groan or growl building in his chest as he wondered why a man of his years had lost all control over his urges. While this aura of love and lust swirled around him, rendering him a lump of muscle and scales, he had failed to notice another transformation. Only when he felt the earth beneath him intensifying in texture and temperature did he find himself a man again, lying naked on the richly colored soil.
Pulling himself to standing, each of his muscles seemed just a bit more formed than before. He still felt wondrously stalwart, like he owned the sky, the land, and the sea. With a confrontation surely afoot, he stuck out his chest, withholding the need to beat on it with his fists. Magically invincible, he took his first step to win her back. Without giving another thought to the beast he had been just a moment ago, he moved towards Aubrey fully erect in stance, unashamed of his natural presence.
As he emerged from the tree cover, she dropped her basket of food with a high-pitched scream that seared his eardrums. Then, she took off running before he could move again or utter a word.
Chapter Six
A tremor moved through Aubrey's body as she shut the door to her villa. Her hands stumbled over the wood until it registered she had no means of being secured. With her back now braced, she gasped, forcing her lungs to take in the much needed air.