by Holley Trent
The man with the gun knelt in front of Calvin and furrowed his forehead. “You understand me in that form?”
Calvin nodded.
It was a smart question. Sometimes, when a shifter took their animal form, the beast part of their consciousness took over so thoroughly that they would later have no recollection of anything that had happened.
Calvin wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t bring himself back from the brink.
He had Julia to thank for that. The wolf in him got what he wanted.
“I should shoot you for being a shit to her,” the red-eyed man said, “but I know you’ll heal the wound. Doubt you have silver in this thing.”
Calvin rolled his eyes, but according to his mother, that action was never particularly potent in his wolf form. Of course he’d heal it. He’d walked away from a fucking plane crash, and that was the moment in his life his wolf started demanding payback. He wanted his mate and was going to make Calvin’s life miserable until the man heeled.
“Why’d you come out here, Julia?” the red-eyed man asked.
“I…I can’t explain it. I’d just…teleported? I passed out and when I woke up, I felt like something was after me. I ran to keep it away from the house, but then I felt like you two were out here, and I panicked and just ran toward the road.”
“Teleported?” Red-eyes raised a brow.
Calvin gave Julia a proud little thump with his tail.
She was scary as shit, and he didn’t understand her one little bit, but she was his and he was exactly the sort of asshole who’d brag about his mate’s unusual abilities.
“I didn’t know I could do it until I did.” Julia knelt beside him slowly and shyly assessed his face.
She stared in his eyes as though she were looking for any resemblance of the man-shaped Calvin.
Hey. It’s me.
She gave his snout the tiniest little boop…and then shrieked and scuttled a couple of feet away when he licked her fingers.
He couldn’t help himself. He was a dog and dogs liked to see how things tasted.
“Any other weird abilities coming online?” Red-eyes asked her.
She furrowed her brow and rested an arm over Calvin’s back when he settled next to her.
“I don’t think so. What’s going to happen next?”
“No clue. You’re one of the unmarked ones. Without that magic drawing out your natural gifts, there’s no way of knowing if what you have will emerge or when it will.”
Unmarked ones?
Calvin had no idea what they were talking about, and being ignorant about things was how he and Julia had gotten messy so fast to begin with.
Exhaling a groan of resignation, he shifted back to his human shape so he could talk.
Julia, still clinging to his waist, stood with him, and pressed against his backside.
Registering his nudity, she pulled her arms free of his waist and took a step back.
She blushed but wore a little smile he didn’t need translation for.
All the same, he covered his junk with his hands. He could make her blush some more later and preferably not in front of the faux Winchester brothers.
“Is that why you hide out here?” she whispered, putting her back to the brother. “Because you’re a Wolf?”
He shrugged. “I was born a Wolf. I didn’t take a mate when I reached the age where most of my kind do, so I got a little bit unpredictable for a while. I could accidentally shift if I get too agitated. Can’t have that happening in public, so I figured it was safest if I kept to myself.”
He started to pull her close to him, but then remembering that he didn’t have on a single stitch of clothing, growled and looked to the sky. Apparently, he was going to have to grovel in his birthday suit and in close proximity to two strangers holding weapons.
He supposed he deserved that. “Look, I couldn’t hurt you, Julia. I promise. I’d just as soon gnaw my own leg off. The wolf inside of me wants you. I want you. I’m sorry for being distant, but…”
“You couldn’t trust me.” She frowned but laid her forehead against his chest.
He kissed the top of her head. “I…need you to believe in me, honey. It’s imprinted now. It’s you or no one. I can’t even begin to tell you how humbling it is for the choice to be taken out of my hands and put into Fate’s. Fate knew I’d get it wrong.”
“I’m a succubus.” Her voice was wretched, and her hot tears rolled down his chest.
Casting his cares to the wind, he wrapped his arms around her, held her tight, and buried his face in her hair. “Yeah, you told me that. Makes me wonder what else is out there in the world. Seems like we’re all keeping secrets instead of helping each other.”
“She can’t hurt you as long as she doesn’t get marked,” Red-eyes said, except his eyes were blue suddenly, just like Julia’s.
“What does that mean?” Calvin asked, turning Julia and using her body to cover his. “Marked?”
“The dark part of her gifts is latent because she hasn’t been marked by our father. She needs to stay away from him. That’s why this place is important. You know you’re basically in a psychic black hole, right? Having met you now, I suspect you know.”
Calvin shrugged. “Bought the land from an old witch. She may have used that as a selling point. Never thought it’d come in handy.”
“We’ve got the property warded all the way around the woods now, so you shouldn’t have to worry about demon scouts flitting around anymore and drawing our father here. We’ve been working on this on and off for a month but kept getting called away.”
The guy with the funny accent, wildly curly hair, the five o’clock shadow, and wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt was apparently demon spawn, too.
Funny. Calvin rubbed his chin contemplatively. They aren’t what I thought a demon’s kids would look like.
There weren’t even any horns or tails.
“Our father has a distinct aversion to werewolves, so as long as she’s near you, he won’t come close. You’ll actually be able to go out in the world with Monsieur Furry. Isn’t that great, Julia?”
The other man had returned, wiping his bloody hands on what looked to be a very expensive pair of blue jeans. “He says werewolves smell like the seventh level of Dante’s Hell.”
Calvin huffed with indignation. “I smell amazing.”
Julia grunted her agreement.
“So, who the hell are you?” Calvin asked the newcomer.
The man blinked. “I’m Cupid.”
Apparently, Cupid was six-and-a-half feet tall, wore a ponytail, and had a fondness for cashmere sweaters.
Julia started up the driveway, laughing. “Claude’s the one with your gun. Charles is the other. They rescued me and brought me here.”
“Did they?”
Calvin supposed that meant he had to like them a little.
She wiped exploded creature bits from her cheeks and looked back at them all. “Calvin has coffee and frozen food,” she said to her brothers. “More importantly, running water. If you’ll excuse me, I need to get the lizard goop off.”
They followed.
Calvin suspected he would always follow her.
“I told my momma I’d die before I mated a Wolf,” he mused to himself, “but I never said anything about a cult-reared succubus. This should make the next pack meeting interesting. Hey, y’all. Meet my mate. Lick her and die.”
Claude let out a jolly peal of laughter. “I can’t wait to see that.”
From the front of the queue, Julia sighed. “I guess there are worse things than Wolf licks. Don’t be in such a hurry to show me what they are, though!”
EPILOGUE
Late Spring
Julia twirled the end of her long braid and waited while Calvin posed for yet another picture with fans.
He rejoined her side and looped his arm around her waist.
“Sorry,” she whispered, cringing. “I know you hate it.”
“Eventually, I’ll become n
umb to it, I’m sure,” he grumbled. “I’m still flummoxed that they all ignore you as if you weren’t standing there.”
“So am I. I keep thinking that the last time or the time before it were just flukes and that I didn’t have the ability after all.”
Calvin grunted and got Julia moving once more down the sidewalk. Now that Calvin’s inner wolf had simmered down and Calvin had returned to baseball, anonymity was once more a thing of the past. If it weren’t for the fact that he loved baseball so much, he might have reconsidered. His alternative activity would be to stay home and cuddle with Julia, but that wouldn’t make him any money.
“Your brother said it was an angel thing, right?”
Julia nodded. “I suppose it goes hand-in-hand with the disappearing ability. According to him, it takes some time to master, but I guess so far so good.”
“Damn right it’s good.”
The last thing she needed was to have her picture printed in every major gossip rag in the country. Someone would probably try to abduct her within a week. Not that Calvin would let her go without a fight. Wolves were possessive that way, and Julia didn’t mind so much because his possession came with tickles and laughter and coffee, although his mother was a champion nag.
Julia and Calvin paused in front of an Asheville shop window, and she admired the mannequin’s plaid shirt.
“You like it?” he asked.
“I do. I still can’t tell what’s stylish and what’s not, and my brothers would have preferred for me to keep the cult wear. They thought it was hilarious.”
“I would have preferred you keep it, too, and definitely not for the same reason.”
She elbowed him in the chest, and he wheezed as he exhaled.
He coughed and rubbed his sternum. “What’d you expect me to say?”
“No one even looks at me.”
“Everyone looks at you, apart from the ones shoving cameras in my face. You just don’t notice it because you’re not used to working crowds. For me, it’s like getting back on a bicycle after a lot of years. I’m okay at it, but it’s uncomfortable having been out of the spotlight for so long.”
“Maybe. I love the crowds. Makes me feel like I’m out in the world. Involved.”
“I know. And I’ll tolerate them for you.” Begrudgingly, he checked his watch. He wasn’t ready to see her go, but she counted on him to be responsible just like that pack of Wolves he led did. He grunted. Time was up. “Hey, honey, we’ll come back for the shirt. You’re going to be late for your class.”
Julia was trying to clean up her paper trail a bit and taking some general education courses so she could eventually get a proper GED and enroll in college. Unlike Calvin, she had a natural talent for academics and could probably be anything she wanted to be. She was keeping her options open.
There was so much about the world that she didn’t know about yet and she didn’t want to constrain herself to one path when she had such a long life ahead of her.
Pulling him by the hand toward the campus, she said, “Are you going to sit in the back and wait for me?”
“Nope. Told ya. Trying to get better about the creeper Wolf thing. I’ll go hang out at the baseball diamond and heckle the kids. Gotta make some phone calls anyway. The team’s travel agent messed up my itinerary again.”
The pleasant expression that had been such a mainstay on Julia’s face withdrew, and reflexively, he curled her in close to him.
He hated seeing her upset, and not because it was inconvenient, either. Her sadness broke something inside of him every single time, and so fixing what hurt her was simply self-preservation on his part. A Wolf couldn’t hurt his mate and not get the ache back twofold.
“I miss you when you travel,” she said against his chest. “I’m not used to being by myself. And the bed is cold. You keep buying me blankets but that doesn’t fix it.”
“I know. It’s weird Wolf shit you inherit from being attached to me. Messes with your perception of temperatures a little. And trust me, being away makes me a sad puppy, too. Wolves don’t like to stray so far from their mates.”
He’d thought if he held out on making love to her, it might make it easier to be apart. Sex tended to bind supernatural creatures together in inextricable ways at times, especially when there was already an evident mate connection.
That hadn’t worked. Whether it was because Calvin had short-circuited his system by waiting so long to take a mate, he didn’t know, but he supposed things worked out for the best. Claude theorized that the mingling of their respective magics was gentler and slower than it might have been otherwise. If Calvin and Julia had gone at it fast and hard from the beginning, they might still be recovering from the collision.
Gentle was nice sometimes.
“Being apart is distracting,” Calvin said as they approached the classroom building. “Makes it hard to focus. It’s a wonder I’ve managed to strike anyone out.”
“Of course you have, and you’ll continue to do so. You’re Calvin F. Wolff, right?”
He snorted and then grinned to show her that his amusement wasn’t malicious. She was just too damned pure for her own good at times. “You really are my number one fan, aren’t ya?”
She harrumphed.
“You know the F doesn’t stand for Frank, right?”
“That fact has recently come to my attention.”
“Really?” He furrowed his brow. “When? You didn’t tell me.”
She fidgeted with the end of her braid again and climbed a couple of steps without answering.
Then she turned to him, cleared her throat, and looked to the sky as though not making eye contact with him would somehow sanitize what she had to say.
“My mind started wandering to unusual places and I put two and two together…that time you were playing with my hair and—”
Oh.
He covered her mouth in a hurry.
Yeah, he remembered that.
Apparently, Calvin had developed a long hair fetish in the past four months. A few weeks after she’d finally managed to get him on his back, they’d learned how wild he became when she teased that hair over his body.
It’d been a very long night, and definitely educational. For instance, Calvin learned that Julia was far more durable than she looked.
And Julia learned that Calvin would probably never, ever say no to her.
And that he said “Fuck” a lot when he was overwhelmed.
“We really are a pair, aren’t we?” she said when he removed his hand. She gave his forehead a lingering kiss. “Love you.”
“Love you more.” He swatted her bottom as she continued up the stairs. “I guess The Fates have a sense of humor.”
“I have it on good authority that Cupid would agree!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A shorter version of this story was first published in Crimson Romance’s Melt My Heart Valentine’s Day anthology with the title “A Demoness Matched.” It was the lone paranormal romance in a quartet of four stories! The others were very charming contemporary romances.
When I originally developed the Sons of Gulielmus series arc, the three novellas that ended up in the collection weren’t even a twinkle in my eye. But when the executive editor issued the submission call, I thought to myself, “Well…John [from A Demon in Waiting] has sisters. Maybe we should see how one is doing now.”
And now I can’t imagine this story—and the other novellas that come later—not being in the series.
Julia and Calvin become an integral part of the Sons of Gulielmus continuity, and you can also see some of Calvin’s influence in the Masters of Maria series, too! He’s one busy Wolf.
Remember, if you’re new to the series, you can see how all the stories in the collection connect on the Mortonville to Maria page on my website.
Each story in the series stands alone and has a happily-ever-after ending for the couple. You’ll see characters again and again because they weave in and out of each other’s stories. It’s a
community! In fact, John, Claude, and Charles appear throughout all three connected series (as do Gulielmus and Clarissa).
Keep reading past the author bio for a sneak peek at the next story in the Sons of Gulielmus series! Cupid in Love is about our favorite demigod cambion…and the missing person he wants to keep all to himself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Holley Trent is the author of dozens of works of diverse contemporary, paranormal, and erotic romance. Although raised in rural North Carolina, she currently resides on the Colorado Front Range. A Southern girl at heart, she occasionally wears flip-flops in winter and still sometimes forgets which time zone she’s in.
Learn more about her Desert Guards series at her website www.holleytrent.com. While you’re there, sign up for her paranormal romance newsletter so you don’t miss the next installment in the saga that starts with A Demon in Waiting.
A PEEK AT CUPID IN LOVE
From Chapter Two
Charles rubbed his hands dry on a rough paper towel and tossed the trash into the bin. He made his way through the tired restaurant and put his shoulder to the door, glad to see that Marion remained near her rig.
He’d wanted tonight to be it—no more chasing her and waiting until she was in just the right place to approach her. He’d wanted her to feel safe, unthreatened, and that was the only reason he hadn’t engaged her sooner.
That, and he didn’t know what he would if she rejected him. He was out of practice with the art of simple flirtation. In his trade, he hadn’t needed it.
She had an identical bearing and the same sensual, though self-conscious, walk as her older sister. He wondered if that was where their similarities stopped.
Ariel was so kind and accommodating, and although she and John were a perfectly matched pair, her grace had its limits. A woman like her would get sick of Charles’ bullshit in short order.