Reign: A Royal Military Romance

by Roxie Noir

  When she finished she felt limp and sweaty, but wonderfully satisfied.

  “Don’t stop,” gasped Jake, half-growling through his teeth. “Oh God, don’t — ohhhh...”

  His eyes squeezed shut and Ariana felt him empty himself deep inside her, his hands so tight on her hips she thought they might leave bruises.

  Breathing hard, she bent down and kissed him and he kissed her back, hard, his lips almost trembling. Then she rolled off and tucked herself against his side, drifting off to sleep.

  Jake was almost afraid to breathe, worried that any movement he made might erase what had just happened. He played it over and over again in his head: take off your shirt, she’d said, her fingers already undoing the buttons. When he’d come to her door, he’d only intended to talk to her, straighten things out, and beg her not to leave yet, but her pull had been so strong and so fierce that he’d been utterly powerless against her.

  Not that he had any problem with what had just happened. It was the most right he’d felt in years.

  Snuggled into his side, his arm around her, Ariana moved a little and Jake looked down. Her eyes opened.

  “Was I asleep?” she said.

  “Sort of,” he answered.

  She yawned and turned onto her back, still pressed against him. “Sorry,” she said.

  He moved his hand and took a strand of her hair out of her eyes. “I don’t mind.”

  Ariana draped one arm across his torso, trailing her fingers through the fur there. She seemed like she was thinking about something, and Jake let her be, just for a moment. It wasn’t like he could think of anything to say at the moment, either.

  “I don’t usually do this,” she said. “Sleep with people I barely know. Actually, I’ve never done this before.”

  Jake picked her hand up and kissed it, then let it fall back to his chest, where it curled against him again.

  “Me either,” he said. “I just came over to ask you not to leave yet, I didn’t mean for ...this... to happen. I just can’t resist you.”

  Ariana said nothing, but she blushed, just a little.

  “I don’t know if I can stay,” she said. “I think Theresa has to get home.”

  “Please?” Jake asked. “Now that I’ve met you I can’t just let you go. Please.”

  Ariana wriggled.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

  “There’s that log book,” Jake suggested.

  “That’s probably got a couple days’ worth of follow-up questions,” she said.

  Then she went quiet for a few minutes.

  “I guess I should go,” Jake finally said, though he didn’t get up. “You should get some rest.”

  “Stay,” Ariana said.

  “If you insist,” he said, putting both his arms around her. They fell asleep that way.

  When Jake woke up the next morning, he didn’t know where he was for a split second, and then the previous night came rushing back to him. He turned his head to kiss Ariana good morning, but she wasn’t there. He felt her pillow in alarm, but it was cold.

  Quickly, he sat up and put on his pants. Part of him knew that he was worrying needlessly — she was probably at breakfast or something — but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stand to lose what he had only just barely gotten the night before.

  Right as he was about to leave the room to look for her, the door unlocked and Ariana came in, balancing two cardboard coffee cups. He rushed to help her, grabbing one.

  “Are you leaving?” she asked.

  “I was going to go look for you,” he said.

  “Sorry, I woke up really early,” Ariana said. She sat in one of the armchairs in the room and sipped at her coffee.

  “Well, good morning, beautiful,” he said, kissing her on the forehead.

  “I called the CRF,” she said.

  Jake raised his eyebrows and waited.

  “They agreed that I should stay here for at least another couple of days and look into things,” she said, and Jake heaved a sigh of relief. “Honestly, besides us there’s only one part-time employee, and she’ll have her hands full with Theresa’s worker’s comp for a while,” she said. “I don’t think they’re going to be paying me much attention for a while.” She sipped her coffee again.

  Jake couldn’t help himself. He grinned so hard he thought his face might crack open.

  “You’re not going back yet?” he asked.

  “Not yet.”

  He took her coffee cup out of her hand and set it on the side table.

  “Want to do some Bigfoot research right now?” he asked, pulling her onto his lap. He kissed her, and even though she rolled her eyes, she kissed him back.

  Forests & Fate, Part 2: Alpha Country

  Prologue

  The sun had just slipped behind the jagged mountains, leaving everything different shades of blue. The grizzly bear ambled along the lake’s rocky shoreline, sniffing here and there, looking over its shoulder. It looked like it was contemplating the lake, thinking carefully about how the rocks smelled, slowly coming to some sort of conclusion.

  Finally, the bear stood still, carefully watching one single spot off in the trees. It stood like that for minutes, expectantly, both ears perked in that direction.

  The lake was remote and at high altitude, a difficult place to get to for even the most hardcore, punishment-loving backpackers. The bears had this part of the Canadian Rockies to themselves, and they certainly knew it.

  At last, the trees shook a little and the bear on the shore moved his ears back and forth, just a little. Then the other bear charged out of the trees at top speed: this one was a little darker in color and a little smaller, though they were both big, even for grizzlies — almost four feet high at the shoulder, nearly seven standing on their back legs.

  The bear on the lake waited until the new bear was almost up to it, then reared onto his back legs, roaring at the new bear, which stopped it its tracks to rear up and roar back. The sound echoed from the stark, rocky mountains and from the smooth, glass-like lake.

  At last, they stopped roaring and dropped back onto all fours.

  Then it got interesting.

  Simultaneously, the bears started to change: their fur retracted, their heads shrunk, they grew skinnier until they were humans. Two big, burly, naked, male humans who were still very hairy.

  “The fuck were you thinking?” growled the bigger one, the bear who’d been waiting by the lake. He had light brown hair and long sideburns, and he crouched on the pebbled lake shore, not looking at all cold even though it was well below freezing.

  The other man, dark-haired, bearded, and younger, shrugged. “I had to try,” he said.

  “Idiot.”

  The bearded man sat back on his heels and picked up a pebble an inch or two long, then hurled it at the lake. It sunk immediately. He sighed. “I never did learn to skip stones,” he said.

  “Tell me about the human,” the first man reminded him.

  “You know Jake?”

  The older man frowned. “Jake what?”

  The bearded man thought for a minute. “Started with a K?”

  The older man gave the younger one a long, irritated look, then spoke up. “Kodiak?”

  “That’s it!” he chucked another rock at the lake, with the same results as the first. “Anyway, he’s broken protocol and banged a human girl.”

  The older man nearly growled, showing his teeth. “It’s more than protocol,” he said through his teeth. “It’s our way of life. It’s our tradition. If one shifter mates with a human, what next? In fifty years the bloodline will be useless. We’ll be lucky if our grandchildren can shift into koalas.”

  “Koalas aren’t technically bears—“

  “Not the point.”

  “Sorry.”

  The older man snorted and looked around them. Then, fur began to emerge from his arms and neck.

  “Wait!” said the younger man.

  The older man stopped mid-shift, still human
enough to speak. “What?”

  “Can I come back now?”

  They stared at each other.

  “Please?”

  The older man considered him for a long time, the younger man dropping his eyes and fidgeting a little. “I’ll talk to the pack,” the older man said, reluctantly.

  “Thanks.”

  Then they both shifted all at once, fur sprouting, skulls growing, bodies widening. As bears, they sniffed each other once, tentatively, then set off to opposite ends of the cold alpine lake.

  1

  Ariana

  Ariana looked doubtfully at her tiny sublet kitchen. When she’d looked at the place the week before, she’d been in kind of a rush and hadn’t noted some important things about the place. Its lack of oven, for example. The fact that, while the stovetop technically had four burners, they were so tiny and close together that it was impossible to fit more than two pots on it at once.

  Also, the sublet hadn’t come with any cooking utensils beyond two dinged-up aluminum pots, a very dirty cast iron frying pan, and some silverware. Not even a baking sheet.

  Her grandmother had once told her, be a lamb in the kitchen and a lion in the bedroom, though given her current beau’s status of “man who turns into a bear sometimes,” it seemed like her grandmother had gotten the animals all wrong.

  Ariana’s phone rang in her pocket before she could fully contemplate which animals she should be in which rooms of the house, which was probably for the best. Caller ID said Jake, and she smiled.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  “Good evening, beautiful,” he said, his deep voice carrying even over the phone. As usual, Ariana blushed and wondered again when the honeymoon phase was going to wear off. “Hungry?”

  “Starving,” she said. “I want to have you over for dinner, but that’s... not looking like an option tonight.”

  “All I’ve got at the cabin is a deep freezer full of venison,” he said. Ariana, a lifelong city girl, wondered again how she’d ended up romantically entangled with a former lumberjack who lived deep in the woods and kept half a deer in his freezer.

  “Maybe we should get out of bed once in a while and go grocery shopping,” she said, teasing.

  “Why?” he said, and she could hear the grin in his voice.

  “Because you live too far out in the country for pizza delivery,” she said.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “Want to go out tonight? There’s a Lebanese place I’ve heard is good. It’s pretty new.”

  “I’d love to,” she said. She was beginning to sorely miss food that was more than meat-and-potatoes or Americanized Chinese food.

  “Meet you there in thirty minutes?” he said. “It’s about halfway between your place and my office.”

  “Sounds good,” she said. “I’ve just got to send off this one email and then I’ll be on my way.”

  They hung up and Ariana walked back into her tiny bedroom, which currently doubled as her office. Open on her laptop was an email, detailing her latest round of interviews concerning people who claimed they’d seen Bigfoot. None of them had really presented a compelling case, but she tried to make them sound like they were. After all, she’d gotten the Cryptid Research Foundation — the CRF — to pay for a month of this sublet on the premise that she had more Bigfoot research to do. She was really there so she could stay close to Jake, who she’d met just two weeks ago, but her boss didn’t need to know that.

  She knew her job as a cryptid researcher wasn’t normal, but it was pretty fun. Maybe she wasn’t doing the hard science she’d hoped for, but how many of her friends who worked at labs for pharmaceutical companies got to travel the world, looking for monsters? None, that was how many.

  Ariana hit send, and then noticed another new email in her inbox. She rolled her eyes. It was nearly nine at night on the east coast — why on earth were they emailing her at that hour?

  The subject line of the email was Please Read - From David Lycan. She’d told David, her boss and the very wealthy owner of the CRF, that he didn’t need to put “From David Lycan” in the subject line of every email he sent, but he’d kept on doing it anyway. She hadn’t even bothered trying to explain that “Please Read” was equally useless. By now it was just a funny anecdote she told her friends about how tech-illiterate her boss was.

  The email itself read:

  chupacabra sighting in n. mexico desert not far from juarez please keep situation on radar.

  Ariana wished that David would at least hire an assistant and start dictating his email. Sometimes the lack of grammar and punctuation hurt her eyes. This was a fairly standard email, though: when something got reported, it was her and her coworker Theresa’s job to stay on top of it, and then visit the area if there were more than a couple of reports in the same few week period.

  Of course, Theresa was thoroughly out of commission for another month or so, after being attacked two weeks ago by a mountain lion while looking for Bigfoot. Thankfully Jake had been there, and he’d managed to fight off the lion while Ariana dragged the other girl to safety.

  Still, Ariana didn’t relish the idea of heading into the desert to look for a goat-eating monster. It wasn’t the monster she was afraid of, of course — it was the drug-running cartels that she knew infested the area.

  Will do, she wrote back. Then she hit send, put on her rain jacket, and headed out her front door to meet Jake.

  Jake was already waiting in the restaurant, of course. Ariana considered herself punctual, but she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever beat Jake somewhere — the man was the very definition of early.

  He stood when he saw her, reached out, and bent down to give her a kiss.

  The feel of his lips made her melt just a little, and she leaned against him, wanting more, even though they were in the middle of a restaurant. Finally she tore herself away and looked up at him, to see his smiling, teasing eyes looking down at her.

  They sat.

  “How was your day?” he asked. He reached across the table and took her hand, holding it casually on the table.

  Ariana shrugged. “It was fine,” she said. “I interviewed a hiker by phone and tried to plot where these sightings are most common.” Normally, PDA like this — holding hands across the table, like they were in a movie or something — made her uncomfortable, but with Jake it felt oddly normal, like this was what she was supposed to be doing.

  He rubbed his thumb across the back of her hand, absentmindedly.

  “You?” she asked.

  Jake shrugged. “The usual office day. Issued some permits, sent a report in. Nothing spectacular.”

  “What’s good here?” she asked, picking up the menu with the other hand.

  “I’m not really sure,” he said. “I’ve never been before.”

  “Well, what do you like?”

  Jake was reading the menu like it was in Martian. “I like meat?” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “That’s a start. Do you like chicken, or beef better? And what about yogurt and cilantro, most of these come with spiced dipping sauces...”

  They figured it out and ordered — beef kofta for her, lamb shawarma for him — and sat, waiting for the food.

  “This last guy claimed he saw Bigfoot climb out of a lake and then fly off, so that’s a nonstarter,” said Ariana. “I wish people would just tell me when they take a shitload of shrooms and go off on their vision quests or whatever, it would make my job so much easier—“

  Ariana trailed off. Jake had frozen and was looking over her shoulder, not listening to her at all. She made a goofy face at him, sticking out her tongue, but he didn’t move at all.

  Finally she turned to look behind her, to see what he was staring at. All she saw was another couple, both tall and athletic, politely asking the hostess where they should sit. She frowned and kept looking, trying to figure out what had gotten Jake so weird all of a sudden.

  “Jake,” she whispered. “Hey.”

  Suddenly, he snapped out
of it and looked at Ariana. The intensity of his gaze frightened her for a moment, and she swallowed, her mouth dry.

  “What is it?” she asked. Impulsively, she looked over her shoulder one more time, but there was nothing there, just the couple.

  “I know them,” he murmured.

  “Want to invite them over?” she asked.

  “We’re not really friends,” he said, and before he could explain more, the waitress came over with their food.

  “Who had the lamb?” she asked.

  “Could we actually get that to go?” Jake said. “Sorry, something’s come up.”

  The waitress looked confused, but shrugged. “Sure,” she said, and left with their food.

  “What is going on,” Ariana said. “Why are you being so weird?”

  “Can I explain later?” he said, his eyes back on the couple. Ariana turned to look again, and realized that the woman was looking right at her as she pulled out a chair to sit.

  Embarrassed, she turned her head away.

  “They can see you staring,” she muttered.

  “I don’t care.”

  Ariana didn’t respond, her mind working at a thousand miles an hour. Is this what I get for dating someone I barely know? She wondered. Has he been this weird the whole time, and I didn’t notice because of the great sex?

  The waitress came back with their food and the check. Jake stood right away, put two twenties on the table, and grabbed the food.

  “That’s a big tip,” said Ariana doubtfully.

  “Come on,” he said, took her hand, and began walking out of the restaurant, right past the other couple.

  As they walked by them, Ariana snuck a look. The man had light brown hair and long sideburns, and even sitting down he looked tall and broad. He had the sort of muscles that came from a life spent working outside, not a life spent lifting weights. The woman was obviously strong and tall too, though more feminine and lithe. She had nearly jet-black hair, blue eyes, and very red lips.