In hiding from her violent ex, Izzy Ross has made a peaceful life for herself and her young son in the isolated Highland village of Ardknocken. Handsome men with a criminal record aren’t high on her list, but when work dries up, she’s forced to ask Glenn for a menial cleaning job at the big, dusty house.
Their mutual attraction turns all their preconceived notions upside down, and stirs the mansion’s legendary ghost. Attracting the kind of media attention that could force Glenn to make a perilous choice to save the woman he’s grown to love.
Warning: Contains a mansion full of unlikely heroes, liberal and colorful use of Scottish slang, a medieval ghost, and enough hot sex to spice up the chilliest Highland night.
Enjoy the following excerpt for In His Wildest Dreams: “What’s to think about?” Chrissy demanded, following him into the house. “Money like that would solve more than a few immediate problems!”
Glenn could hear the car’s engine starting up outside. He shrugged but kept walking toward the dark oak staircase. “Whether or not we want them here. They’re making TV programmes about haunted houses, so they’d be under our feet day and night.”
“Meeting tonight, then?” Chrissy pursued.
Without turning, he could see the pound signs in her eyes. With the TV money, they could buy the new equipment now and still deal with the most necessary of the house repairs. Though she’d have to sell the idea of visitors to more grumpy ex-cons that him.
When he’d first got out of prison, Glenn couldn’t bear being indoors, even in the pouring rain or howling gales. But here at Ardknocken, it never felt like being enclosed. The house was too big, too gracious. Light poured in its big, Victorian windows, flooded all the way down the main stairwell from the huge skylight in the roof. It was why he’d first let others stay here, because even if you heard their voices, you never needed to see their owners, let alone walk into them. Unless you chose.
He chose now to leave the rest of the outhouse roof until tomorrow. Instead, he felt the urge to play, solely for his own amusement. And making these choices for himself was still a pleasing novelty. He leapt up the stairs two at a time, stretching his legs out, and strode along the landing to the next flight, which he took at equal speed.
At the end of the next hall, he pushed open his bedroom door and went in, swiping up his favourite acoustic guitar as he went. Then he sat cross-legged on his unmade bed, by the window, the guitar resting on his thighs as he gazed out over the rugged landscape to the scattered village and the sea beyond. Farther to the right, the hills loomed tall and ancient, reminding him of his own and everyone else’s tiny place in the hugeness of the world.
He strummed the guitar once, and then he saw her, the woman who’d been haunting his waking visions for months, a fraction of a second before the world altered.
That was different. The tilt into the dream usually happened first. Perhaps it had just been hard to perceive, because in the dream, he was still in bed, just not with the guitar. And it wasn’t this bed or this room.
But the really important thing was, he lay naked, cradled between the bare hips of a woman, pushing slowly and exquisitely inside her. Her long, black hair spilled over the white pillow. Her huge, liquid-brown eyes stared up into his with aching passion as she clung to him, undulating beneath him, massaging him with her strong internal muscles as he moved within her.
He was so struck with her expression, with his effect on her, that it was several moments before he recognized his own state of physical bliss—something he seemed to have no control over. He didn’t choose how or when to move, he just did, sliding in and out of her, arching to bend his head and kiss her beautiful dusk-peaked breasts. She thrust upward, pushing her nipple into his mouth, and he sucked on it, making her moan and writhe. She had such beautiful breasts, full and pert, a perfect fill, surely, even for his big hands. He wanted to try, to see if the hand that caressed her was his, but he was stroking lower down, holding her hips steady, moving her as he fucked her.
He plunged faster now, licking the tiny beads of perspiration from her brow as she moaned and gasped with increasing intensity. Her fingers ran up and down his spine, digging, clutching. Her wet, silken heat surrounding his cock was bliss. He could stay here all day and into the night. Oh yes. Sex. Orgasm.
When the storm broke over her, a smile split her face like sunshine, and yet tears spilled from the corners of her eyes as she writhed and convulsed beneath him. He took her mouth, swallowing her cries, driving into her again and again until, finally— He sat on his own unmade bed, the guitar barely held in his slack hands.
Glenn squeezed his eyes shut in desperation, but the vision had gone.
Fuck and fuck and fuck! If he had to have dreams like that when he was still bloody awake, could whatever sent them not at least let him finish the job? How could he concentrate on music with a hard-on like this?
Impatiently, he shoved the guitar onto the bed and tried to calm his galloping heart. Although he’d never laid eyes on her in real life—real life just wasn’t that good to him—he’d dreamed of this girl before. So often, in fact, that they could be married. The first time, he’d still been in prison, but since coming here, the dreams had intensified in quality as well as quantity. Usually, he was screwing her, and they both seemed to be having a lot of fun with that, but he never came before he woke up.
Glenn stood up, pacing the length of the room. Fucking dreams. His mother had once told him they were second sight, but Glenn didn’t believe that. He made his own future, for good and ill. Except for the time he’d dreamed of Tommy Grant’s dead body in that bad-taste bathroom. The crime boss had been sprawled fully dressed in his own ridiculously ornate bath tub with his throat cut. Glenn would never have gone anywhere near Tommy’s house that night if it hadn’t been for the dream. But even then, it had only come true because Glenn had made it—he’d put the body in the bath because of the dream.
Anyhow, his chances of ever screwing a girl like the one in this dream were pretty damned remote. In fact his chances of screwing any girl at all weren’t good right now. In a village this size, they all knew who he was, and they all crossed the street to avoid him.
Mostly, he didn’t really mind. The girl in the dream had become an ideal, one that overshadowed real women. An excuse for loneliness, and for avoiding the squalor of pickups and sex that had little more meaning than your own fist.
He stopped his pacing at the window and gazed across at the sandy beach. It called to him as it often did. It was one of the reasons he’d bought this place, ramshackle old money-pit as it was. Grabbing up his waxed raincoat, he strode out of his room and downstairs to the front door, calling for the dog who was, no doubt, scrounging in the kitchen during the cooking lesson that would result in dinner.
The dog—called Screw because of his propensity to guard everything, from Glenn to his own dinner to whatever stick or garden rubbish he took a shine to—was a large, boisterous collie cross. At Glenn’s shout, he came bounding out of the back of the house like a released arrow and danced around Glenn as he strode outside.
Glenn still relished his ability to act on such impulses, to go where he pleased, when he pleased. Freedom.
Logic says wait. Their bodies scream go. And their spirit guides are playing dirty.
Cougar’s Courage
© 2013 Teresa Noelle Roberts
Duals and Donovans: The Different, Book 3
Toronto cop Cara Many-Winters Mackenzie is still reeling from her fiancé’s murder when her orderly life takes a turn toward the weird, complete with voices in her head and phantom bleeding wounds.
This violent awakening is the rise of her Different gift—a chaotic, Bugs-Bunny-on-crack magic that she must learn to control before it destroys her. There’s only one place to get help: her mother’s ancestral village, and a mentor who seems to have stepped straight out of the smoke of her erotic dreams.
Cougar Dual Jack Long-Claw reluctantly agrees to take Cara under his wing, though
he’d much rather take the beautiful city girl into his bed. As he guides her through a crash course in shamanic magic, sparks fly—some sexy, some snarky. But when an ancient enemy attacks the village, they must work together to hone a magical weapon against certain destruction.
Common sense tells them it’s a terrible time to fall in love. Their spirit guides have other ideas. And shamans who don’t listen to their spirit guides are dead shamans…
Warning: Hot shape-shifting feline hero. Strong but shell-shocked heroine. Snarky, meddling spirit guides. And lots and lots of sex: angry sex, crazy sex, magical sex, and just plain sexy sex.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Cougar’s Courage: “Officer Mackenzie?” The voice sounded like her captain’s, but Bell wasn’t known for his stealthy tread. Had Cara been that lost in thought?
Cara jumped a little and looked up from the incident report she was struggling with, the words dancing behind a rising headache and the pervading sense of anger and uselessness she’d been fighting since Phil’s death five months ago. She expected to see her captain’s bulky, blue-clad form looming over her with that awkward no, I’m not checking up on you expression that was way more annoying than open concern would be—and open concern had gotten annoying sometime before her fiancé’s grave was filled in.
Instead, she saw a totally unexpected person, a tiny, wiry old woman with long white braids, no taller than most ten-year-olds, who bristled with energy.
Cara’s rational brain took in a few things. Normally, civilians didn’t get into the squad room without an escort, but the elderly lady was alone. Maybe someone had dropped her off, said something about why she was there, and then left? If that were the case, that was bad even for the mess Cara had been for the past five months.
The visitor wore a pale buckskin dress ornamented with beads and porcupine quills, not a fashion statement but traditional Native clothing, and no coat despite the frigid February weather. Her silvery braids were fastened with rawhide strips. Not something you saw every day in Toronto. Maybe the old lady figured serious business like a visit to the police station merited her version of a weddings-and-funerals suit or dress uniform.
“May I help you, ma’am?” The unusual visitor had roused her curiosity, which could only be good.
“No, but I can help you, Cara.”
How did she know Cara’s first name? Her name plate just said Mackenzie.
The elderly woman extended a small, bony hand, and Cara instinctively took it. She expected it to be icy. Instead, it was hot. As soon as they touched, Cara felt like she was focusing properly on the other woman for the first time. She blinked and recognized her visitor at last. “Grand-mère? Is that you?”
It couldn’t be. Cara had been ten the last time she’d seen the elder of her mother’s village, and the old lady must have been over eighty then. But the woman nodded and smiled. It was an odd smile, like a tree smiling, serene in a way that you didn’t normally see on a human face. “Of course it is, silly. Who else would I be? It’s time to come home, Cara. Come to Couguar-Caché before it’s too late.”
Couguar-Caché—“hidden cougar” in French—her mother’s ancestral village. A place so remote Cara had never been able to find it on a map, even though she knew she’d been there as a little girl. Yeah, just where she wanted to visit in the depths of winter.
As the old woman spoke, the room closed in, leaving only Cara and Grand-mère. The rest of the squad room was still out there—Cara could hear voices, a ringing cell phone—but they were hidden somehow, masked by a fog. Grand-mère had been seated, but suddenly, with no transition Cara noticed, she was standing in an archway made of snow-weighted evergreen boughs. Behind her, where Cara should have seen Dalhousie’s chaotic desk and the captain’s neat one, was forest and snow, woodland twilight and the corner of a log cabin. A cold, bracing wind blew through the archway, smelling of snow and pine and wood smoke. Somewhere in the background, she could make out a tall man with long dark hair. He turned and looked through the weird portal straight at her with intense amber eyes. He was movie-star gorgeous.
That proved it. She’d dozed off at her desk—it wouldn’t be the first time since Phil had been killed, seeing that the busy squad room felt safer and less lonely than her empty bed—and was having a particularly vivid dream. It had to be a dream, right? Because no one else in the squad room was even glancing at her unusual visitor, when normally, on a quiet, snowy afternoon, Goulding, who was a wolf dual, would have been literally sniffing the air and the others would be leaning in, hoping for something interesting. It was the first time Grand-mère had joined the cast of beloved dead people who romped through Cara’s mind whenever she closed her eyes, but unlike the others, Grand-mère was cheerful. And she’d brought a very decorative man with her.
But Cara shouldn’t be dreaming about handsome imaginary men. In some ways, that was more disturbing than dreaming about bloody dead ones. The involuntary surge of interest reminded her of the real man she’d lost.
Cara jumped to her feet, hoping the movement would bring her back to reality. As soon as she moved, pain drove an iron spike into Cara’s head, blurring her vision so Grand-mère appeared transparent and blended oddly with the tree behind her. The wrist Cara had sprained playing hockey in college swelled and stiffened. One leg buckled, screaming with pain—the one she’d broken as a kid.
And blood began to pour from the place she’d been shot two years ago in a domestic gone horribly wrong. More people she hadn’t been able to save. Like her mother and father. Like Phil.
She leaned against her desk, frantically trying to stay upright, but the pain was too much. As she collapsed to the floor, faces swam around her—Phil, both as he’d been in life and with a great hole in his chest and a look of shock on his death-pale face; her mother, talking to the trees in the backyard as if they were answering; her red-faced, angry drunk of a father in his own Toronto police uniform, and in his coffin. The wife and children a perp had murdered before shooting her, then turning the gun to his own crazy head.
Suddenly, she was in that crazy head, the dead man’s life crashing on her like a wave. He’d tried to be a good, gentle man, but he’d fought a lifelong battle with the monsters in his head, and in the end he’d lost. She knew things about him she’d never read in any of the reports, horrible secondhand memories that made her wonder how he’d lived that long before putting a bullet to his head to stop the pain and made her comprehend, a little, why to him, killing his wife and babies seemed like saving them from an ugly world.
On the floor by her desk, bleeding, in shattering pain, Cara began to cry as she hadn’t been able to cry for Phil.
Grand-mère touched her cheek. “It’s time, Cara-child. You’re ready. He’s ready. Go to Couguar-Caché. Or share your mother’s fate.” The old woman knelt and kissed her forehead, then stepped back through the doorway of evergreen branches and vanished.
The squad room popped back into focus, the electric lights bright and jarring. Someone was leaning over her—Goulding, she thought, but her eyes couldn’t focus through the tears. She brushed him away and pushed to her feet.
For about half a second. Then her leg buckled again and the world turned black. The last thing she was aware of was Goulding’s strong arms catching her as she fell, and someone shouting to call for an ambulance.
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Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
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In Her Secret Fantasy Copyright © 2015 by Marie Treanor ISBN: 978-1-61922-642-5
Edited by
Linda Ingmanson Cover by Angela Waters 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 Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: February 2015
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In Her Secret Fantasy Page 22