After hanging up, she redialed his number and prayed he would answer. The call went to voice mail again. With no other recourse, she waited for the beep and prepared to leave a message she’d hoped she could say in person. “Hey, Parker. It’s me. Becca. I tried to catch you before you left, but…well, you can tell I didn’t get you. I wanted to say I’m sorry. Fuck, that’s not it really. I wanted to say I love you. Not just then but now. I saw you, and I just knew. You’re still the one for me. It’s crazy of me to throw this on you, but I want another chance with you. Don’t shut me out. Call me. Please.”
She pressed end on the call and sighed. When someone touched her shoulder, she yelped and spun around. “Oh, Parker!”
His expression turned serious. “Did you mean it?”
“You heard it?” Her cheeks warmed with chagrin when he nodded. “I meant every word. I never should’ve left. I’ll do anything if you’ll give me another a chance.”
“But you’re here, and I’m in Raleigh. It’ll never work. I won’t ask you to move home.”
She shook her head. “I don’t care where I live. I only want to be with you.”
He pulled away when she would’ve hugged him. “Is this a joke? Was it really that simple?”
She wiped her tears, pretending the moisture dampening her cheeks didn’t exist. “I’m sorry for not realizing what I’d given up and for avoiding you all this time. I want to come home. I want to be with you. I love you, Parker, and I hope you can forgive me.”
He tilted his head to the side and studied her. “You really mean it?”
She nodded. “Completely.”
He whooped and grabbed her behind the thighs, lifting her into his arms and rubbing his cheek into her belly. “You’re coming back with me.”
She laughed and looked down at him. “Well, there are a few things I have to take care of first, but then yes. I’m coming home.”
Parker lowered her to the ground. Her body slid against the hard planes of his form, and heat poured through her. He touched her cheek gently, reverently. “I’ll catch a later flight.”
Happiness bubbled over, and she grinned. “Does that mean you’re staying the night with me?”
He lowered his head and pressed a simple kiss to her lips. “Tonight, and every other night for the rest of our lives.”
She kissed him back, unable to get enough of him. “There are logistics I have to handle on my end, transferring my headquarters to North Carolina, meeting with my employees.”
“I don’t care how long it takes,” Parker promised. “I’ll stay with you.”
“But your garage—”
“Can be handled by Zeke until I return,” he answered. “Stop worrying. I’ve got this. Nothing will stand in my way.”
She glanced at him before looking away. “Do you feel the same? You’re saying you want me to come home, but—”
“Becca.” He touched her chin and lifted her gaze back to his. “I adore you. No one ever took your place in my heart. If you’re asking if I still love you, then the answer is a resounding yes. I never gave up on hoping you’d return to me. Maybe I was stubborn and filled with pride, but you held my heart from the very first moment I saw you. I’d be stupid if I didn’t love you.”
“And you forgive me for taking so long to realize it?”
His eyes crinkled at the corners. “It took longer than necessary perhaps, but this morning was well worth the wait.”
She blushed. “Definitely.”
He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “And there’s more to come.”
She shivered with desire. “Now?”
He slid a hand around her hip and stroked the curve of her ass. “You’re ready again?”
“Always.” She went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “There are a lot of years to make up for, so many things I’ve imagined I would do to you.”
“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” Parker asked with a strangled laugh.
She nuzzled his chest with her nose. “I love you.”
He gripped the sides of her face and gazed at her. “I’m so in love with you. Promise me you’ll never leave me again.”
She returned his gaze. The promise of the future strengthened her tone. “I promise. I’ll never let anything threaten what we have. Happy Valentine’s Day.”
“We found love on Valentine’s. Corny, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.” He grinned, and the light she’d missed returned to his eyes. “The first of many more to come.”
END
~ About Christy Gissendaner ~
Christy Gissendaner is a romantic comedy author and believes that laughter and love should go hand in hand.
She lives in Alabama with her husband and three sons and is always hard at work on her next novel, but in her spare time she loves blackjack, karaoke, and anything resembling a vacation!
Discover more about Christy Gissendaner here
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Also by Christy Gissendaner
Buy the Tybee Island Shifters series
In Too Deep
Tybee Island Shifters Book One
Christy Gissendaner
He’ll risk everything for the love of one human.
Agreeing to be her good friend’s bridesmaid, Emma Anderson jets off to Tybee Island for the wedding. Her dress is perfect and her shoes are adorable, but her friend’s elegant beachside home hides an ancient secret…one that threatens to expose a secret society of werewolves.
Drake Randolph has watched his sister’s friend grow into a ravishing woman, but he’s always kept his distance. As the heir to the Randolph fortune and the alpha of the Secret Society of Savannah Lycanthropes, Drake cannot afford to draw the innocent little brunette into the dangerous lycan world.
Passion between them soon blazes hotter than the Georgia summer. But when the wrong woman is kidnapped to prevent the wedding of a lycan to a mortal, Drake must risk everything to save Emma from the ones who will see the downfall of all he holds dear.
CRASH ME ONCE… by Jayne Ripley
CHAPTER ONE
Dropship One from the GX177 Wolfstar
Nue Darvolk, moon seven of the Tapalla halo
A good run always brought the color, the fun, and the pleasure of life back to the center of Cennla Bowar’s mind. Running as a wolf through the wild recharged her, revved her engines, made her energized and horny and alive. She loved the flood of endorphins and adrenaline. Loved the rush of her blood pumping hard, with her head full of the scents from a thousand alien plants and strange creatures. The blur of the world speeding past never failed to thrill her. She was a hunter. She was fast and free, and she loved it.
But eventually the best runs had to end, even for lycanari. That didn’t mean her fun had to stop though. Cenn loped into the clearing where they’d landed the dropship, a small cargo-forager craft from her pack’s deep space cruiser the Wolfstar. She wasn’t anywhere near ready to shift back to her human form and head onboard. Her inner wolf disliked the cold metal and confined spaces on starships, but her human understood that if you wanted off-world freedom, you had to sacrifice the forests and mountains and plains. But both her inner human and her inner wolf agreed on plenty of other things. Once you had a chance to run, you ran. Once you had the chance to fuck, you fucked. If you could do both in one day-cycle, that day was a victory for everyone.
Cenn lifted her muzzle and scented the air, then turned in a circle and loosed a long howl. The spur-of-the-moment race back to the dropship from the dylios ore shaft was over, and her wolf was triumphant. She couldn’t help but use a victory howl to taunt Redlan with the fact that she had won. Redlan’s gray wolf might be bigger, but she was much faster. Point proven yet again. She might even be the fastest in the Wolfstar pack, though there were still a few other wolves she had yet to run against.
She cocked her head and listened for an answering howl from Redlan, but there was no response. She paced in a circle, her ears twitching. The urge to whine tugged at her, but she clamped down on it because she wouldn’t give him the pleasure of her worry. If he hadn’t been so slow in the first place…
Still, she didn’t hear any sounds from him running through the red-shaded foliage. Plenty of other intriguing sounds though—the most interesting was the cautious steps of a prey creature moving through the underbrush. From the scent, it was one of the sleek orange-white ruminants that lived in this alien forest. She turned toward it, her ears swiveling to home in on the prey. Maybe this run would end in a catch-and-release hunt, a celebration for locating and mining so much pristine ore with only four digger robots. After they hunted, there would be fucking. Plenty of it. The hard, fast, dirty and joyous fucking that made for a perfect planet-side foraging excursion.
A huge stone-gray shape bounded out of the brush and jumped on her, knocking her over. She rolled with her fall and came up on all fours, growling and showing teeth. Redlan’s huge wolf brushed up against her, giving her face a quick lick. He didn’t smell of fear, just gave off a steady power that made her wolf immediately respond. He’d always been rock-solid, both in body and personality. It was one of the reasons why she…why she felt the way she did about him. Her wolf always wanted to think mate, to claim love, but her human half was more leery. Even though she and Redlan had spent plenty of time indulging in all sorts of wicked delights in the privacy of their bunk, he had never claimed her in front of the Wolfstar pack.
So she kept waiting.
Thing was, she didn’t like to wait. She would win him any way she had to and do anything she must. Then again, after everything she’d already done, and all the time they’d spent together, why hadn’t he claimed her by now? They were so compatible in everything from personality to kinks. So…why? Her ears flattened. Her good feelings, so vibrant only moments ago, began to drain away.
No, she decided as soon as she realized where her thoughts were headed. She refused to feel down. She wouldn’t let her self-confidence take the blow. Her wolf was a fighter.
Beside her, Redlan caught scent of the prey creature she’d heard earlier and he wheeled to face it. She had only a glimpse of the prey bounding off through the sunset-colored trees and oddly shaped oval bushes before it vanished. But the scent trail was right there, as unmistakable and easy to follow as a neon path. She whined, wanting to chase it down—anything to distract her from her worries and to recapture the thrill of running.
He chuffed and bumped her, pressing close to her in a comforting way but making it clear their fun was over. For now anyway.
Groxx it then. She’d have some other fun. Her body was still revved from the pure physicality of the run. She ached to be pinned against the nearest tree and fucked until she was panting and screaming and exhausted. Time for Plan B.
Redlan shifted form first. That was his right as a higher-ranking crewman and wolf in pack status. The swirl of energy enveloped him as his cell structure changed and the shift spread throughout his body. Light and heat pulsed from him as he transformed back into his human shape. She’d always found watching the change fascinating. Lycanari were descended from humanity, but genetic manipulations had split them off into race of people who could shift at will into Old Earth wolves. Wolves had been extinct in the universe until Ketron Dimedes, considered a mad geneticist by most of his peers, had created the lycanari in a lab.
She watched eagerly as Redlan finished his change into a man. He wasn’t handsome in the traditional sense, but he was rough-featured and strong, with intelligent amber eyes that could be diamond-hard when he wanted, sparkle with fun, or burn with lust. So his face might not win any sector-wide beauty contests, but his body, oh groxx… Her wolf joined her in an appreciative whimper. His naked body was worthy of admiration. Not that she’d ever tell him. The stars knew the man’s ego didn’t need any boosting.
Her tongue lolling unabashedly, she settled down to enjoy every moment of the view as he stretched and worked out the lingering soreness from their hard run. His chest was wide and heavily muscled and his thick shoulders and big biceps solid as a blast door. The ridges of his abs made her whine with the desire to shift back to human and run her tongue along them, then sliding further down, down, until she could get her mouth on that large cock he had swinging between his thighs. Oh stars, a man shouldn’t look that good.
He glanced at her and raised a thick eyebrow. “You plan on changing? Or are you going to stay furred all the way back to the Wolfstar so you don’t have to help me catalogue the ore haul?”
She growled playfully and concentrated, envisioning her change in her mind as she shifted back to her human form. The transformation never hurt. It always felt as if her wolf and human sides were in perfect balance for an instant—then she leaned toward one or the other and the change happened, a kind of energy explosion. The heat and flash of light happened as the process turned her from one form to the next in a release of radiation in multiple spectrums, a reconfiguring on the molecular level. She went from being low to the ground on all fours, her world flooded with scents and sounds, back to standing up straight, a lean and lithe human. Shifting from wolf to human felt like waking up from some vivid dream. Disappointing and always a little sad.
The disappointment didn’t last. Redlan stared at her with frank, intense desire. Heat pooled at the junction of her thighs because his look—his need—was hot enough to spark her into flames. That was one of the things she loved about him. He never bothered to hide his lust. He drank her nakedness in like a man who hadn’t sipped sweetness in years. Her nipples tightened into hard points as his gaze lingered on her face before sliding down her body like a caress to her breasts, and then lower, down to her stomach, her pussy, and finally to her legs until he had captured and admired the whole of her. When he met her eyes again, she felt light-headed, as if he had touched her with his stare and peaked her arousal to a near-unbearable level. His cock had twitched and stiffened as he’d caressed her with that scorching stare. It jutted from his body—hard, long, and tempting—and oh did she ever want to wrap her hands around it.
The small comm unit dangling from a strut on the dropship suddenly gave a long high-pitched beep, shattering the mood. Damn. If only they’d left the unit inside the ship where they could safely ignore it, but that was against landing-excursion protocol. Technically these wolf runs were also against protocol because they’d left the diggers in their tracks, but she’d never known anyone to get into much trouble for it.
“Groxx.” Redlan stomped toward the transmission unit. “Always interruptions.” He yanked the unit off its flexicord and activated it. “Dropship One, acknowledging. Go ahead.”
The voice that came over the subspace frequency belonged to a female wolf named Pixa, who worked communications on the Wolfstar’s bridge. “Dropship One, this is Wolfstar checking in. What is your status?”
“We’re all green and on schedule,” he replied. Cenn knew he wouldn’t tell them about the great dylios ore haul they’d managed to mine. The channel was encrypted, but sometimes space pirates had military-quality encryption breakers. If a space pirate galleon lurked in-system, then picking off a small dropship like theirs, full-loaded with ore, would be no problem at all.
“Good to hear, Dropship One. Long-range sensors are detecting significant sub-tectonic pressure on the surface. How’s it look on the ground? Any quakes?”
“No quakes yet. Keep your credits on the five-cycle, though,” he said, referring to one of the most popular games of chance played on all the major high-orbit casinos. “My luck’s been shaky lately.”
Cenn put her palm to her forehead and made sure Redlan noticed her shake her head at the awful joke. He grinned and winked at her.
Pixa either didn’t catch the bad joke or chose to ignore it. “Copy that. We’ll be waiting, Dropship One. Make it fast, there could be some groundquake danger.
This is Wolfstar signing off.”
Redlan tossed the transmission unit back into the cargo ship. It landed on the pile of flight suits and clothes they’d discarded when they’d first set off to escort the diggers. He turned and headed straight for her. The lust in his eyes made her knees weak.
She lifted her hand, her eyes widening. “You heard them. We have to—”
He reached her and swung her around effortlessly. She gasped as he pulled her tight to him from behind, so her ass was pushing up against his cock and her back against the hard muscles of his chest. She leaned her head back as he began to kiss upward along her neck. Desire pooled deep inside her—a warm, insistent need—as she surrendered to his touch, melting against him. One of his arms remained wrapped around her, pinning her to him. The other found her breast and began to caress her. Slowly. Lovingly. Teasing her nipple erect until her desire became an ache that threatened to drive every other thought from her mind.
She took a deep steadying breath and managed to pull away from him. It took more willpower than she’d thought she’d possessed, especially after the run had keyed her up and turned her all the way on. He let her go, but his hands lingered on her skin for as long as possible.
“What is it?” he asked, his brow knitting with concern.
“You heard Pixa. We need to secure the ore and leave this place in our afterblast.”
He frowned and waved a hand at his cock, raging hard after fondling her. “You do this to me. Torment.” His expression grew wicked, as if he knew her game and approved. “That’s what you like, you merciless female. You love to see me aching for you.”
“Yeah, I do. But…” She closed her eyes and forced herself to think of all the work they still had to do, not to mention the groundquake risk. They still had to ensure the diggers were loaded and secured on the dropship, catalogue the ore, and complete all the standard launch prep. Now that she was out of her wolf form, it was easier to think clearly—that was, when she wasn’t staring at his hard cock and when he was no longer touching her, driving her to light-headed distraction. It was easier to be the responsible supply-procurement first-class officer that the pack needed. If there was no time to hunt, there was certainly no time to fuck. Besides, the Wolfstar would be waiting on them.
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