Science Fiction Romance: Biomechanical Hearts (Space Sci-Fi Love Triangle) (New Adult Paranormal Fantasy)

by Olivia Myers

  It was her turn to scatter nips and licks on his thighs and in the crease where his leg met his hip. She dragged her tongue through those tantalizing grooves, staring up into his glittering dark eyes as her hand pumped his shaft with tight, long strokes.

  “Lexi, baby…please.”

  Lexi licked a stripe along his length. Duke threw back his head and gave a shout of pleasure as her tongue flicked and rubbed against him.

  She could have happily stayed there, sucking and licking until he spilled on her tongue, but Duke tugged at her shoulders, urging her up.

  “Wait, baby, wait. Come here.”

  He caught her around her waist and lifted her up to his lips, pressing her along the entire naked length of his body. His shaft pulsed, hot and hard against her belly as he kissed her. He caressed her ribs and palmed her breasts to tease her aching nipples for a moment before gliding his rough palms up to cup her face.

  Drawing back just enough to meet her eyes, he stroked his slightly crooked nose alongside hers.

  “I want to be inside you again, Lex.”

  The words sent such a vivid spiral of pleasure through her body that Lexi gasped and shivered, goosebumps chasing themselves across her skin.

  “Oh, Christ. Yes!”

  She shoved at his shoulders frantically, urging him backward. Understanding, Duke swept his arm across the desk behind him, sending all the papers — including her meticulous business plans — fluttering across the floor.

  The office looked like a tornado had blown through it, but Lexi didn’t care. All she cared about at the moment was Duke.

  He lifted himself onto the desk in a maneuver that tensed his biceps and pecs and belly in a delicious display of muscle. Lexi’s mouth watered at the sight and she shuddered with the need to be touching him again.

  She got her wish a second later when he reached out his hand.

  Lexi paused. For a split second, she paused. She contemplated stopping. Stepping back instead of stepping forward. Putting her clothes on and walking out of the room and out of the bar and keeping to her ‘no repeats, no relationships’ rule. Keeping safe.

  Duke’s brows drew down.

  “Don’t be coward, Blondie.”

  Her chin came up. “Fuck you, boss.”

  His grin was bright and broad and heart-meltingly gorgeous. If she hadn’t been in love already, that would have done it.

  “That’s what I thought we were doing.” He wiggled his fingers.

  Lexi slid her hand into his and let him pull her up onto his lap. His cock slid against her inner thigh.

  Staring into his eyes, she reached down and wrapped her hand around his shaft. She guided him into her, rocking downward to sheathe him completely. Her right hand dug into the muscle of his shoulder as he filled her, stretched her.

  He stroked her hair back from her face, caressed down the long muscles of her back and curled his fingers around the soft flesh of her buttocks. His lips quirked as he squeezed gently.

  “I knew you were trouble the first second I saw you,” he said, rubbing his lips along her jaw.

  Lexi wrapped her arms around his neck and began to move her hips, lifting up and sliding down in a slow, rocking rhythm as inevitable as the tide. She chuckled at his words.

  “Shut up and kiss me, you moron.”

  He did. He kissed her and tightened his grip on her ass, urging her to ride him. The wood of the desk creaked under them, providing an almost musical sounding counterpoint to their gasps and moans and sliding flesh.

  He kissed her, and she kissed him back, feeling the pleasure like a wave washing through her, rising and crashing and ebbing only to rise and crash again. He kissed her while she called his name, swallowing the sound and then giving her her own name back while his body shuddered and spasmed inside hers.

  Duke kissed her as she lay limp and panting against his sweat-slick chest. He kissed her hair and her eyelids and the tip of her nose. He kissed her breasts and her chin and lips. Her lips, over and over until they were swollen and sore, and she still didn’t want him to stop. She didn’t think she’d ever want him to stop.

  Yeah, she was definitely in trouble.

  Lexi huffed a ragged laugh against the warm, smooth flesh of his shoulder.

  “I guess repeats aren’t so bad after all.”

  She kissed the laughter from his lips and started all over again.

  THE END

  The Castle’s Dark Secrets

  Coughing great clouds of smoke like wispy, black plumes, the train pulled into the tiny rail station of Nebelstatt, a town in the Austrian Alps. It was a bright, cold day in November. Flakes of snow floated by the carriage window and clung to it. Celia Barnette looked out onto the desolate, pure whiteness—the towering mountains with their perilous, clear beauty; the lakes that collected at the base of the mountains like large, liquid pupils. They filled her with a strange terror, as though the mountains and the frozen lakes were concealing some dreadful mystery.

  She stashed her headphones and mp3 player back into her knapsack. As she collected her other luggage, the same thought came to her that had been running through her mind these past three weeks. What was she doing here?

  Celia was one of the last passengers to disembark from the train. Most of the others had gotten off either the day before or earlier that morning when the train passed through the valley.

  “Where are you headin’ to, miss?” the porter asked Celia. He was difficult to understand, his speech being a strange kind of German she had never heard before: garbled and twisted, as though he were speaking through something in his mouth other than his chewed cigarette.

  “I don’t need the help, thank you,” she replied somewhat haughtily. She had been told to be aloof and short with the townspeople in Nebelstatt until she knew that they could be trusted. Pierre had told her this. He was an old colleague from the university where they’d studied together. Pierre was the one who had sent her the letter informing her of what had happened. Pierre was the one she’d be meeting in this tiny, cold village. How he’d ended up here after a prestigious undergraduate career, she wanted very much to find out.

  “Suit y’self. Jus’ make sure you know where you’re going. Visitors can get lost here,” huffed the man.

  It was the third time Celia had been told this. Nebelstatt, it seemed, was not a place acclimated to visitors. Celia could have guessed this by the few straggling people she saw disembark the train. There was an old, hunched man with a brown coat and a shady look about him like a French anarchist, a grey woman wearing a headscarf and a woolen skirt, carrying a sack of potatoes, a mother bundled up like a snowman with the hands of her two children clasped firmly in hers. She gave Celia a disapproving look, and Celia couldn’t tell if it was because Celia was traveling alone, or because of Celia’s casual, rather American outfit of jeans and a down jacket.

  What was she doing among these people?

  As soon as the thought occurred to her, she was reminded of the phone call she’d received from Pierre, the letters that had arrived shortly thereafter. Email wouldn’t work—there was no internet service in the village. He’d gone all the way down to Kramposhof to deliver those letters because there was no reliable mail service in Nebelstatt. This place was beyond remote, and yet she’d been called here at the whims of a stranger.

  Thomas Bly. She remembered the first time she’d heard the name. Pierre had spoken it with a kind of reverence. How it had come to haunt her in the weeks to come!

  “But I’ve never known any Thomas Bly,” she’d pleaded into the phone. “There has to be some mistake here.”

  “If there has been any mistake, it has been in very poor taste,” Pierre had replied in his soft, formalized English. “But I am simply telling you what is already known. Believe me, I am as in the dark as you. Even in the town everyone is awfully confused.”

  “But it’s absurd!” she said. “How could a man I’ve never met, in a place I’ve never visited, expect me to appraise the entire est
ate left by a woman I’ve never heard of before? It’s madness! And you said that Thomas is hardly ever at home—”

  “Very seldom at home.”

  “—very seldom at home, so how does he expect me to do the job properly if I don’t even know what sort of a job he wants done?”

  “I’ve spoken to Monsieur Bly about this subject,” Pierre replied. “He stated quite simply that he wants everything gone and the castle sold. He made no mention of any special—how do you say—sentimentalities. I believe he wants everything gone, and he thinks you’re the best appraiser for the job.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Celia said. “Pierre, I don’t trust this man and I don’t trust this job. No rational person does something like this.”

  “Monsieur Bly is strange,” Pierre conceded. “But it appears he trusts you. Perhaps this will be enough for you to do the job.”

  ***

  Nebelstatt was built on a hillside and carved down the middle by a single, cobblestone road. It was hundreds of years old but none of the locals knew for certain how old. The town was so ancient as to have passed into reverence, where any mention of its age or its past history was irrelevant.

  The road, bordered by guest houses and restaurants, ran up a small incline for about five hundred meters before it hit a greater rise in the hillside and dissipated into smaller, gravel pathways. These pathways led into the distant wilderness alongside the forest until eventually they reached the castle, roughly two miles’ walk away from the town.

  Save for the castle, which, having been built next to a sizeable lake, was nearly always covered by the dense mist, Celia was able to make out most of the landscape as she trudged up the hillside to her hotel. Yet the snow was beginning to fall thicker and faster and the air to turn colder, and it wouldn’t be long before everything was obscured by the untimely blizzard.

  She was thankful when she reached her hotel. Like most other buildings in the village, it was ancient and looked to be falling to pieces. The timber was cracked, slates were missing from the patio, and the chimney gurgled and puffed smoke asthmatically.

  Inside was a little more promising. There was a merry fire burning in the corner of the room, alongside a shelf which was stacked with board games and books written in French, German, and some local dialect that Celia had never heard of. No one was waiting behind the reception desk but there was a cumbersome room key resting on a note scribbled in the strange language.

  She put the note into her coat pocket and hiked across the hotel to her room: 118. The key was old and stubborn and seemed not to fit into the lock. With a lot of prying and grunting the door eventually swung open. The action released fumes of something burning.

  Oh God, Celia thought, in her exhausted state of mind. The room is on fire.

  The jolt of terror caused a bright surge of energy to resound in her body, which was swallowed up almost immediately by the exhaustion she felt after her two days on the train. I don’t even have the strength to run, she thought. I would let this fire eat me alive and not even have the power to defend myself.

  “So you are going to stand there for the rest of the evening until the freeze sets in?” said a voice in French: delicate, soft and formalized.

  Celia, having been so overwhelmed by her panicked exhaustion, had failed to notice the little figure in the corner of the room, jabbing at the fire with the poker.

  “Pierre!” she cried, dropping her baggage and swallowing him in her hug. He embraced her warmly, somewhat embarrassed.

  “Maybe you thought I was dying?” he said, prying her away with a wry little smile.

  “Oh no, oh God, oh, Pierre,” Celia stumbled over her words. “No, Pierre. It’s just such a relief to see somebody I know. These people on the train and in the village. They are so distant and mean! It was hideous being around them. You wouldn’t believe how exhausted I am.”

  She put her hands over her eyes, scrubbing away the happy tears.

  “Ah, dear,” Pierre smiled at her, embracing her warmly. “I am afraid you will not think me good company after all.” He let her go and sternly turned her to face the side table, where he’d set a kettle and two cups.

  “You see,” he said solemnly, “I’ve let the coffee burn.”

  Celia opened her mouth and began to laugh. She laughed helplessly for five minutes. She felt the great weight of her journey and the strange objective that had driven her so far away cause a strange, somewhat mad sensation to come boiling up inside her. And at the end of her journey who was there to meet her in her hotel but Pierre? A strange, adorable Frenchman wearing striped yellow socks and a gold-trimmed waistcoat as if he were planning on going to the opera that night instead of staying in some rumble-down hotel to see her into town. It was such a bizarre scene there was nothing to do but laugh.

  Celia had to rub tears from her eyes once she stopped laughing. Pierre was holding her and trying to calm her but she could tell that he was confused. Probably about as confused as she was.

  “You are very tired,” he said.

  “I’m a lot of things, Pierre. I think I am more confused than anything. It has been a strange few weeks.”

  “We shall have a drink and speak about it, then.”

  “But,” she frowned, “but you’ve burnt the coffee.”

  He retreated to the other corner of the room where a backpack was leaning against the wall and returned to the desk with two bottles of wine.

  “It is a backup plan,” he said. “I know I am a very bad cook.”

  Celia laughed again, but it was a softer, quieter laugh. “What would I do without you, my dear?”

  “You would freeze in a snowstorm,” he answered bluntly as he uncorked one of the bottles.

  “Oh Pierre, that’s too much!” she said as he filled her glass nearly to the top.

  “Why, you have nowhere to be.”

  “Yes, but one little drink is going to knock me down like a bullet. And as for you? You’ve still got to make it home.”

  “Yes,” he filled his own glass to match hers “But I am French. I have been drinking wine since before I could write my name. And I have only two doors down to go before I am back home.”

  “You’ve taken a room at the hotel?”

  “For as long as you will remain here. You need a friend, I think. So,” he raised his glass, “to your very good health, Celia.”

  “And to you, dear Pierre,” she said. They drank.

  ***

  It did not take long for Celia to begin feeling the effects of the wine. Her head was already swimming from the high altitude and she had little resistance for the alcohol after passing two days in her exhaustion. Pierre pulled the ottoman out from its place at the foot of the bed so Celia could lie on it, facing the fire with her head on Pierre’s lap. He stroked her hair gently.

  “Pierre, what are you doing here?” she asked, slightly drunk.

  “I am here making love with you, my dear.”

  She giggled at his strange choice of words, but she asked him again.

  “I work in the valley, my dear. I study strange, ethnic languages and then I write books about them and about their people. For everyone except those who do it, it is pointless, boring work.”

  “You’re enjoying yourself?” she said sleepily.

  “I am enjoying myself with you.”

  “And about Bly,” she said. “How did you ever learn anything about him?”

  The stroking stopped. Celia turned upwards from her position on his lap and saw that his face had become rigid and rather fierce-looking. “Pierre?”

  “My dear,” he sighed and resumed stroking her head. “Let us leave work for the daytime. I would like to spend right now loving you.”

  “But Pierre,” she said, sounding stubborn. “I need to know something about the man. I feel completely lost where I am now. He is a complete mystery. That is what has been killing me.”

  “If you must know something,” said Pierre, “then know that he is a difficult man to talk a
bout. He is an even more difficult man to talk to. He has had a difficult life, I think. His father, George, was a very stern man. A military man. I believe Bly resents this difficult relationship with his father and this resentment makes him cruel. There is cruelty in him. I hope you do not have to spend much time with him apart from your work. I would spare you from his cruelty if I could, my dear.”

  Celia felt his tenderness like body heat. It filled her with satisfaction and desire. “Pierre, my sweet, it’s been too long without seeing you.” She leaned forward and kissed him delicately on the cheek. “Has it really been eight years?”

  Pierre tilted her head so that his lips faced hers. He took off his glasses and set them on the carpet. “Eight long years,” he said, and kissed her firmly on the mouth. “And after all this time, would you believe that I have been thinking of you?”

  But Celia did not answer. She cupped him by the side of his head and expanded the kiss, as though her mouth were a blossom opening just for him. She slipped her wet tongue into his mouth, delicately yet firmly, letting it fill him. “All this time,” she breathed in between the kisses. “Eight boring years.”

  Celia was light-headed. She hardly felt the presence of her own body. Pierre leaned her down on the ottoman, planting little warm kisses on her neck and throat. She could have been floating. She could have been a cloud. Pierre’s kisses were the little bursts of sun that penetrated through her being, filling her with light and warmth.

  As Pierre undressed her, she felt herself relax into a happy daze, like the place between sleeping and waking. She felt his soft hands on her skin and she felt the warmth of his kisses. All else melted away in his embrace. He was her lover of eight years ago, when their responsibilities were fewer, when life was simpler and wilder. As his kisses descended down her belly, as she ran her fingers through the beautiful, curly hair she remembered loving all those years ago, she felt that they two were descending the great ladder of years together. They were descending like the train, down, down into the valley, away from the cold and the storm, the snow and the confusion.