His laughter, deep and hearty, shook the entire bed. “I’d heard a changeling’s appetite was big at first. Didn’t realize it also meant this.”
She lifted a brow and put her hands on her hips. “What are you complaining for? I thought vampires had much higher sex drives than humans. Afraid you can’t keep up?”
Something naughty gleamed in his eye as he propped himself up on one elbow. “Did the future Mrs. Carrera just issue me a challenge?”
“I think Mr. Carrera is scared.”
He narrowed his eyes. “No one calls me scared and gets away with it. Care to take it back?”
That was what she’d been hoping for.
“No.” She spun, bolted out the bedroom door, and sprinted down the hallway buck naked. It was times like these that made her thankful they had moved her father into the carriage house instead of the mansion.
The attack from the Darkblood female had almost killed her, but Mateo had conquered his fear of being unable to control his dark nature and rushed her back to the mansion. They’d tried to revive her, but even with Brenna’s medical training, Selena had lost too much blood.
She didn’t remember much about that night, thank goodness, but she did remember one thing: Mateo bent over her, tears streaming down his face as he wrestled with the decision of whether or not to try turning her. It was a risky proposition at best. He’d told her later that her lips had been turning blue when she’d whispered for him to do it.
She let out a little squeal as footsteps pounded on the floor behind her. She ran down the back stairway and into the kitchen, where a lemon cake was cooling on the counter. She’d been testing and perfecting various food items to be included on the resort’s menu when the place opened for business next month. When they’d moved her father out of his house, Mateo was the one who’d found her mother’s original recipe lodged behind an old cookbook. Both she and her father had been ecstatic.
“You saved my daughter and found this recipe?” Tears had welled up in her father’s eyes as he’d pulled Mateo into a warm, fatherly embrace.
He’d been horrified to learn that his lady friend was a vampire and had nearly killed Selena, but he was so grateful to Mateo, Brenna and the other Guardians for their role in saving her. After getting clearance from the Council not to wipe his memory, Mateo had asked him if he’d be the resort’s head of maintenance and operations, and her father had gladly accepted.
Just as Selena reached the door on the other side of the kitchen, Mateo’s strong arms circled her waist and she shrieked.
“You think you’re fast,” he growled from behind, “but I am faster.”
Before she knew what was happening, he threw her over his shoulder and headed back the way they had come.
“Oh no you don’t,” she laughed, struggling against him.
He hesitated. “So you want me to have my way with you right here?”
She looked around. “In the kitchen? Oh my God, Mateo, no!”
There was that gleam in his eye, challenging her to defy him again. “Guess you should’ve thought about that before you led me here on your little chase.”
His dominant, aggressive nature was intoxicating, and she couldn’t help but test those boundaries. After all, she’d made testing and perfecting her business.
Setting her on the edge of the counter, he pushed her knees apart, exposing her sex to him. “Christ, Selena. Every inch of you is gorgeous.” His mouth was hot against her and she cried out, fingers latching onto his hair as he kissed and licked and sucked her. Her release came hard and fast. The man definitely knew what he was doing.
She was still panting, her inner muscles still spasming, when he withdrew and rose to his full height. Fangs out, he growled possessively. “You’re mine, and if you run again, I’ll catch you.”
Good. She was counting on it.
Then he lifted her onto his shaft. “This isn’t going to be slow.”
And he was right. Just three hard thrusts had her shattering around him. He pulled her hair, exposing the curve of her neck. With his cock pulsing inside her, his mouth came down hard, and she felt the delicious sting of his bite. This incredible sensation would never grow old, she thought as she held his head in place, stroking his back while he drank.
When he was done, he drew away from her and sealed the marks with a gentle stroke of his tongue. “When we were apart, I felt lost, as if someone had pulled a thread and unraveled my soul. But then you untangled the knots and put me back together. I love you, Selena.”
Her heart swelled, feeling as if it would burst from happiness. “And I love you, Mateo.”
He’d saved her life more than once. First by leaving her, then by returning and fighting the darkness that had driven him away. Her man was fearsome and powerful, and she couldn’t wait to spend forever with him.
The End
About Laurie London
Laurie London is the NY Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Sweetblood and Iron Portal series—dark, sexy paranormal romance, set primarily in the Pacific Northwest. To learn about the other books in the Sweetblood World and sign up for her newsletter (get a free coloring page), visit her website.
www.laurielondonbooks.com
Fae Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Selene Charles
Fae Bridge Over Troubled Waters by Selene Charles
Mercer McCarrick of the Silver Creek shifters is in trouble and only Scarlett Smith, Vampire Detective, can save him from the hangman’s noose…
It’s a well-known fact that shifters and vampires don’t get along. At all. But Scarlett would never dream of letting her step-brother (and secret love of her life) hang for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. And she believes him too. Only problem is, she’s the only one who does. The evidence isn’t good. There’s a dead fae on shifter land, and Mercer’s DNA is all over the body. Scarlett has only hours to prove her brother’s innocence or risk losing him forever. But when the truth finally comes to light, Scarlett’s world and everything she thought she knew will be rocked to its foundation, leaving her questioning who she really is, and worse yet, who she can really trust…
Chapter 1
I stared at the beautiful corpse as the grains of sand in the hourglass of Mercer’s life dwindled swiftly by.
I had hours to solve this case. And maybe even not that anymore. They’d come and taken him away in handcuffs not even an hour past, making sure to beat him black and blue before they did.
I’d screamed, raged at them to let him go. That they had the wrong man, but they’d all turned deaf ears to me. The last thing I’d told Merc before they’d tossed him into the back of the carriage was, “I’ll get you out, brother. I swear it by all that is above and below, I swear it.”
A gnat buzzed around my head, but I ignored its high-pitched drone and tried not to sink into the depression threatening to choke the breath from my tight lungs.
Each second I failed to solve this strange case was another second that drew him closer to the hangman’s noose.
Rubbing my clammy hands together, I scoured the scene for hidden clues. Things the cops may have missed on the first pass through. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to focus on the task at hand when all you want to do is rush back to that jail cell and hold him, tell him it will be okay? Shifters don’t do well in cages; I could only imagine the tortures going through Mercer’s mind. The fear, the rage, the violence that always beat at a hair trigger cadence inside a shifter’s wild heart.
I wet my lips, knowing I could be no use to Mercer anywhere but where I was at right now. My name is Scarlett Smith, vampire advisor to the local Paranormal Investigative Unit—or PIU for short—of Silver Creek, Tennessee.
I solve crimes of a paranormal persuasion for a living. It’s what I do, and I’m damn good at it. When I have time. When I have days and not hours to piece the clues together. When my back’s not up against the wall, and I’m not trying desperately to save the life of the one person I love more than any other i
n all of creation.
Focus, Scarlett. Just focus…
I blew out a heavy panicked breath and tried to pretend it all away. Tried to imagine that this was just another scene, another case, that the stakes weren’t life or death, and finally, finally I was able to temper the horror just a little.
There isn’t much in this life or the next that can compare to the hypnotic beauty of the sidhe-court.
The fae, who looked no older than twenty-five, if a day—but who was no doubt several thousand, if not tens of thousands of years old—floated as gracefully as a burnt orange leaf on a still lake in the midst of an overcast and gloomy winter’s day. He stuck out because he should not be there.
His eyes were open and still an electrifying shade of aquamarine blue. The type of blue that only a master glassblower could craft, with threads of deepest azure and cloudless, airy cerulean sprinkled throughout.
Hair the color of gold and fire—indicative of the Summer court—undulated on soft waves behind him, giving him a macabre sense of movement and life.
Skin as pale as milk in moonlight sparkled from the dappling rays of sunlight tapping like piano keys across his smooth form. Be they male or female, all fae held a certain femininity to their features. Soft and long and thin, but all of it oddly appealing to either sex whether you were gay or straight.
He wore no clothing, which wasn’t in and of itself terribly odd.
But the bite wounds at his neck certainly were. Prelim reports were coming back that this was a shifter kill. Easy to assume when the death so obviously occurred on shifter land. Not to mention the anonymous phone call placing Mercer at the scene of the crime.
Mercer had sworn an oath that he was innocent of this crime. And I believed him.
Not because he was Mercer, though he was and that meant everything to me, but because there was no sense in this kill. No justification or reason for it. I’d been pouring drinks alongside Merc all night, if he’d killed this fae, I’d have known.
Mercer can’t lie worth a damn. Not to me anyway. His innocence or lack thereof would have been plastered all over his face long before the badges had shown up to haul him out. But Mercer had been his normal, goofball self with me all night.
I stared at the nude body. There wasn’t a stitch of clothing or jewelry on the corpse, yeah it might be floating in a scummy pond, but it was almost like he’d been scrubbed clean first before being dumped there.
He was a prop. I couldn’t prove it. Not just yet. But I knew it to be a fact. I’d worked homicide with PIU for over twenty years before retiring last fall. The grass around the pond wasn’t trampled down. If there’d been a life or death struggle here, the evidence would have been everywhere. I sniffed; there was blood on his neck, but none in the grass.
Again, how could that be if this was the murder scene?
Short answer was, it couldn’t. But that wasn’t enough to prove Merc’s innocence.
I’d barged my way into this crime scene. A. It was set on shifter territory, my domain. And B. There was no way in hell I was going to let Mercer take the wrap for something I know he hadn’t done.
I continued to study the body. The way it floated almost peacefully in the reeds. There were no twigs or brambles caught up in the hair. It gleamed like freshly poured gold and undulated in soft waves behind him. Apart from the badly lacerated neck, the fae had suffered no other injuries.
Finding a dead body didn’t really worry me.
No, what bothered me more than just about anything was that the wound was far too simple to have caused this sidhe’s death.
You see within the Veiler community—which is just my all-encompassing word for anything paranormal—faes are nearly impossible to extinguish.
I even heard once of a sidhe getting his head torn clean off and coming back from that injury. Of course, the fae in question had been Orin, a master over death. But still, why hadn’t this wound healed?
And more to the question, since it wasn’t healing, why hadn’t the fae faded?
There’s a reason why you never stumble across a dead fae…because the moment the breath of life is well and truly extinguished from them they cease to be. One second they are and the next they aren’t. Faes have no soul.
I’m just a vampire, and not all that old for my kind, so I couldn’t really explain the particulars of why that is the way it is with them, just take my word for it.
Nothing about this situation was good.
Licking my front teeth, I stuck my hands in my pocket and glanced over at my one-time partner, Carter.
“Well?” I lifted a brow and still keeping my hands buried, pointed from inside my pocket at the beautiful dead. “How the hell are we gonna explain this one to Titania?”
Carter, who was far less human than I could have ever imagined when I’d first met him, shrugged giving me just as helpless a look as I knew I had painted across my face.
“Rock, paper, scissors?” I said quickly, shaking my head because neither one of us wanted to be the one to have to walk into the fairy sithen and give this news to their Queen.
Carter—six foot two of near solid muscle with skin black as a nice roasted coffee and eyes the color of a savannah sunset—gave me a grim smile. Once, I’d fancied myself in love with him, or at the very least in lust with him, but he’d betrayed me in a way I’m not sure I can ever truly forgive.
The chill November wind picked up then, brushing against my own pale flesh and I shivered. Though not from the cold.
Carter’s scent—which I’d once believed to be a result of a bout with cancer and chemo—tickled at my nose. The sweet scent of almonds and slow decay, it made me sick. Made me angry still that I hadn’t known, that I hadn’t at least suspected him for what he truly was.
But I guess when you really don’t want to see the truth; you don’t, even if it’s slapping you in the face.
He took a step toward me, reaching out a hand as though to grab hold of mine, but I jerked and took a quick step back, moving just out of reach. I saw the shift in his eyes, the hurt that flashed so quick before promptly being buried and shoved aside.
We’d been partners for over twenty years on the PIU. I’d eventually hung up the human badge, but had continued to help him whenever I could. Especially when the death occurred on Shifter land. And considering the Alpha of Silver Creek also happened to be Alpha over the whole of the North American continent, my territory spread far and wide.
I have a very unique skill set. I can see a crime unfold literally before my eyes. If I can touch an item held by or pinned on the dead, I get an impression of a victim’s final seconds.
Very few vampires can do what I can…empaths are rare, but rarer still is a freed one—the story of how that came to be for me is a story my step-brother and future Alpha to the Silver Creek Shifters—Mercer—would kill to protect.
I’m a vampire who’s been adopted by a shifter clan and is now partnered up with a man she’d been hunting for decades for some of the worst crimes against humanity. At one time I’d called him a heart thief, turned out, I’d been wrong. But he was a skin thief. “Carter” might look like my old friend, but beneath that sack of flesh he wore was a monster crawled up from the very pits of hell.
He swears he’s good now, a changed bogeyman. Truth is, I’m messed up and having a hard time dealing with the fact that my “best friend” actually died three years ago now.
I’m trying, Lord knows I’m trying to make this partnership work, because like it or not, Carter and I work like peanut butter and jelly. We fit. We solve crimes. Some of the most heinous and awful crimes committed by creatures both fair and foul.
I wanted to quit, but my Alpha gave me no choice. Make it work somehow. So that’s what I’ve got to do.
Carter clenched his jaw. “I’ll go, Scar. I’ll do it.”
I’d always wondered how it was that a human like Carter could walk unmolested amongst the Veilers.
I’d once asked Mercer how it was that he hadn’t re
alized Carter wasn’t human, but even the sensitive nose of a wolf had never picked up the lie. I now knew, Carter was one of the baddest of the bad in our world. There were times I felt like he was a dragon held on by the thinnest of leashes.
He stayed with me for reasons that were his own.
I think he might care for me, so far as something like him is capable of the emotion. But then…he’s lied to us all before.
All I know is I can never afford to trust Carter the way I used to. The way I still sometimes want to. But as the old adage goes, keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
I nodded. “Yeah. I seriously doubt Queen Titania would try to keep you.”
The fae were notorious for “kidnapping” that which they found unique. But the lovely immortals wouldn’t want to chain a thing like Carter.
Wetting his lips, he nodded as he looked back toward the placid pond.
“Does it seem to you that he was placed in the pond with an air of care and reverence?”
Peanut butter and jelly.
I hadn’t even had to tell him my hunch before he’d come to the same conclusion as I had. I grunted a nod.
“This wasn’t an act of passion.”
“Premeditated,” Carter finished for me, and I nodded again.
I had no doubt whatsoever now that someone, or something, had framed Mercer to take the fall. This death was too on the nose. Too perfect. A brownie—known for their incredible sense of smell—had pinged on Mercer due to four strands of gray wolf-fur found inside of the fae’s neck wound.
Veilers have resources humans lack, things like Brownies that have a sense of smell and a memory that can rival that of any machine. All they’d had to do to get her to lock onto Mercer was offer her a sample of his DNA collected from his home. It’d been a simple matter of compare and contrast. And since Brownies physically can’t lie, the samples are definitely his.
Taming the Vampire: Over 25 All New Paranormal Alpha Male Tales of Contemporary, Military, Shifters, Billionaires, Werewolves, Magic, Fae, Witches, Dragons, Demons & More Page 125