“Oh, is that your master plan then?”
“Maybe,” he said, smirking as their eyes met and held. “Or maybe I just want to hold a beautiful woman in my arms all night while we wait out this storm.”
Before Betty was able to say anything else, her cell phone rang. Eyes hooded, she stepped over to the table and picked it up, pressing the green button to answer it. “Hello? Yeah, I had to stay here because of the storm. I’m fine. Really. Nobody tried to abduct me or anything, I promise. I’ll just stay here till closing time tomorrow, I’m sure this weather will have blown over by then. I’ll call you if anything comes up—yes. All right. You be safe, too. Good night.”
Betty clicked off the phone and set it down again.
“Is that your mom or something?” asked Ted as she came and sat down beside him, leaning against his shoulder with a slightly melancholy look on her face. “Hey, what’s wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” she replied. “She’s not my mom, but she did raise me. Her name is Allie, and we worry about each other sometimes. My life—it’s really hard, living where I do. As you can imagine, sometimes scientists need to keep secrets about their work, and keep it safe from other people who want to take it away from them. One of our experiments is so important that another group wants to steal it, and she’s worried they’re going to try to harm me to get it. So of course she would worry when I didn’t come home, right?”
“Wow,” said Ted, pulling her closer. “It sounds like you have it pretty rough. I don’t blame you for wanting to have a day off with me, if that’s what you have to look forward to at home.”
Betty sighed. “It’s not all that bad, silly,” she told him. “You may not know it to look at me, but I’m actually one of the lead scientists researching a very important artifact. I work here during the day to make money, but my real job begins there. If we could unlock the secrets of the thing I am working on, who knows what we might be able to accomplish as a result?”
“What kind of thing?” Ted asked as he kissed the top of her head.
Betty could feel the beating of his heart speed up just a little, and she suddenly felt cautious. Like maybe she’d said more than she should. Maintaining her own reactions so he couldn’t tell she’d noticed, she replied, “That’s top secret, I’m afraid. I could tell you, but then I would have to kill you.”
“Would you?” he asked, and then he threaded his fingers into her hair and used it to pull her head backwards to look into her eyes. He moved down, pressing his forehead to hers as they stared at each other, and then he moved in for another kiss. This one was much hotter than the last, making Betty melt in its heat. It obviously wasn’t the tender, hold you all night kind of kiss he’d been going for before. He knew—he knew that she had noticed.
She could no longer regulate her heart as it flared into a wild fury, flapping its wings within her chest. Ted laid her back on the sofa and moved on top of her, his hands sliding down her arms and then gripping her ass, tugging her so she was laying more fully beneath him.
Betty moaned softly into his mouth when he pressed his rock-hard erection against her thigh. Her senses reeled, and she began to wonder if she was wrong, if she was just too suspicious, if the change in his pulse had been all about this instead. But she was never wrong.
However, this was one attack she was willing to meet with full force. Her hands came up and gripped his ass in turn, and she pulled him more fully against her, wrapping her legs around the back of his knees. That action had Ted more excited still. He moved against her, and his tongue danced inside her mouth, intentionally arousing.
He really thought he could seduce her secrets from her. And if he kept doing what he was doing, he might just succeed. She needed to stop, to think, to breathe again! She should never have allowed herself to get this close to an outsider. Now, she was paying the price for her temerity. The trouble was, the price was much too sweet. She wanted to savor it for a while.
Then, the dogs began to bark frantically. One of them yelped, and fell silent. Both of them froze at the sound, and then sat up and looked warily at each other.
“What was that?” asked Betty, moving to get up.
“That was rotten timing,” Ted replied.
With a sense of shock, she realized she’d let down her guard completely. Now as she reached out with her heightened senses, she could smell them. Four of the lions from last night. Her eyes flashed, knowing that she didn’t want to transform right here, right now, just in case she might still be able to salvage the situation with Ted.
“You know those enemies I’ve been going on about?” she said softly, her body already in action as it headed for the trap door before her mind even realized she’d told it to. “Well, some of them are just outside the door. If I were you, I’d come with me rather than contending with them. Our people lose more good men that way than anything else. Come on.”
Throwing on an appropriately fearful face, Ted followed Betty as she opened the trap door and stepped down into another one below. “I’ll get the lock,” he offered as he stepped inside and pulled shut both the trap door and the door that covered the hole they’d climbed down into. Betty watched as he turned the latch, satisfied that he’d done it correctly.
“What is this place?” he asked as he looked around.
“This corridor leads down into a massive network of ice caves,” Betty explained. “Nobody knows they are here but the members of Raven Clan. We use them to get around without the need to brave the weather, but you need to be careful down here. One wrong move can cause some really dire consequences.”
“Wow, I never would have guessed these were here in a million years,” Ted said with a strange little smile. “It’s like your own private winter wonderland. Are any of these caves set up to live in?”
“There are a few camps, here and there,” she nodded. “Come on, I’ll take you to one of them now. We’ll be able to get some rest while we figure out what to do next.”
Ted nodded as he fell in step behind Betty. One day with her, and he was already learning more than his father had discovered in years. Just as he’d told him when he arrived, all they needed was the right approach, and they would soon have the artifact back where it belonged.
Chapter 4
Betty was so worried about getting down into the main caves that she’d completely forgotten that she should have pretended she couldn’t see in the dark. But then she realized that Ted wouldn’t have been able to see either if he was an average human. Had the two of them given up their pretenses, or was it just a momentary lapse?
Either way, they found their way down into the main cave and picked their way carefully across the vast expanse. Their slow steps echoed off the icy walls, and that thought made Betty realized something else. They hadn’t grabbed their parkas or other warm clothing when they came down here.
Everything that Betty knew about an average lion told her that they would be very cold in a place like this. However, their research of the Raven artifact had long since told them that the lion shifters were nothing like real lions. They were much more like the mythological variety often depicted in Tibetan arts. In other words, much larger and quite capable of withstanding the cold.
In many ways, these Tibetan style lions weren’t much different than polar bears. They had no natural enemies in the wild, they were much bigger than any other animals in their region, and they were fierce fighters. Betty believed that whoever was the leader of the Roman group had assumed these lions were the strongest, fiercest creatures of their time, and that’s why such a creature had been chosen. In much the same way Allie must believe polar bears were the strongest creature. It made sense, in a way, but it didn’t explain why there were only male lions and female polar bears. That reason still eluded her.
“We’ve come to a domicile cave,” Betty announced some time later. “The temperature is just a little warmer inside, though. If we heated it up too much, we’d melt too much of the ice and end up getting everything even more
wet than it already is.”
Ted ran his hand along the smooth blue ice as they passed through the entrance. “Why doesn’t this ice get any frost on it? It seems completely smooth and clear, but very cold.”
“You’re touching the bottom of a glacier,” Betty told him. “It’s much colder beyond that outer layer there. We’re in a naturally occurring warm pocket right here. That was why it was chosen for the current purpose. See, we’ve placed dome tents inside that we can erect whenever we need them. They have built-in heaters inside, but because of the materials used to make the tent, almost all the heat can’t escape to warm the ice.”
“Clever,” said Ted with a smile. “Shall we get into this one that’s already erect then?”
“Are you sure you want to share?” Betty smirked. “We don’t have to down here, since there’s plenty of tents where this one comes from.”
“I would much rather share,” he told her. He stepped up behind her and leaned against her back as he wrapped his arms around her waist. His lips came down to nip at her ear as he asked, “Wouldn’t you?”
Betty sucked in a breath as she suppressed a little tremble. She was definitely playing with fire right now, but it was a fire she was sure she could handle. Let the man seduce her if he wished, he still wasn’t going to find out where the artifact was hidden either way. And she had the feeling that he would know exactly what he was doing.
“Oh!” she gasped lightly when she felt his hands slide up and locate her rather erect nipples. “Come on, get in the tent first at least. It’s too cold out here for this.”
“Woman, I could make you so hot you wouldn’t notice if it was absolute zero,” he told her in a low, sexy voice. Betty shivered, but cold had nothing to do with the response. She moved inside the tent, taking Ted along with her. He let go of her so she could zip shut the entrance and flip on the heat. It gave off a soft orange light.
“Careful, the floor is padded,” Betty told Ted as he moved across the small area and discovered some of the gear that had been left behind by the prior tenants. The first thing he did was unfold the sleeping roll that had been stashed to one side and spread it out on the floor near the heat, making it into a nice, soft bed for two. Then he looked inside a hamper and found a canteen full of water.
“This place was used recently,” he commented after taking a drink. “I wouldn’t say it’s even been a week gone by. I can still smell the scent of coupling on the air.”
“That’s likely,” Betty smirked. “Some of the Clan members come down into the caves to get some alone time. Less chance of being interrupted that way.”
“So this is make-out point?” Ted chuckled.
“Something like that,” said Betty with a grin as he pulled her with him onto the top of the sleeping bag.
“Well then, let’s make out,” he suggested, moving so that her head and shoulders were under the top half of his body. Betty giggled and looked up at him as he hovered above her. She found herself trying to put the features of the unknown lion to his face, and it was much too easy to do it. But try as she might, she could think of no reason to prevent his kisses when he moved down to give them. Not when they were so very sweet.
“Ted!” she gasped when he pressed his cock against her again. He brought a hand down and undid his pants, and Betty surprised herself by sliding her hand eagerly inside the gap. His soft moan when she took hold of his cock was all the reward she required, her courage bolstered by the sound.
“You do know what I am going to do with you now, don’t you, Betty?” he inquired with a wicked smile.
“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea,” she said breathlessly.
Ted’s hands came down to work at the button on her jeans, finally managing to get it out of the hole. He slowly worked down the zipper, kissing her all the while. Betty kissed him back, but her main fixation was entirely on what he was doing with his hands. She was curious if he was going to go right for something obvious, or maybe work his way there a bit more slowly, but she had no doubt where they were headed in any case. And damn that made her hot!
He didn’t put his hand inside her pants. Instead, he began to tug downward, bringing the underwear along for the ride. Betty lifted her hips slightly, letting him undress her. Then he sat back and pulled off his own pants as well, smiling devilishly as he watched the direction of her eyes. Betty couldn’t help but look at his cock right then, her eyes going wide with fright as well as blatant desire.
“Do you see what you made him do?” Ted chastised her. “There’ll be no getting along with him until he’s been fed now.”
Betty chuckled. “What does he like to eat?”
“Beautiful black girls, apparently,” he smirked. “I’ve never seen him quite as hungry as this before.”
“Well, what have you been feeding him then?” she laughed.
“Not a whole lot, since he’s not really into fish,” he replied.
Betty wasn’t sure she wanted to know exactly what he meant by that. Maybe it was better not to ask. Besides which, he didn’t let her ask anyway. He moved over her again, pressing his body to hers. Their sexes slid together, slickened by Betty’s wetness, but he didn’t try to put his cock inside her just yet. Instead, he kissed her. Endless sweet kisses that were so arousing she thought she would die.
His hands came up between their bodies, each one finding a breast to play with. He slid his thumbs back and forth over her hardened nipples, cupping the globes in his hands. He figured out just how fast to go and just how strongly to grab based on her reactions to his touch. Betty held back a whimper of delight, but even that gave him a clue to her desires.
“Wow, sweetheart, he’s drowning down there,” Ted chuckled. “Maybe we should feed her what she wants instead of the other way around.”
“They’ll both get what they want if they work together,” Betty pointed out.
“Yes, that’s exactly right,” he agreed.
Ted pressed inside of her, and Betty felt a slight, stinging pop, followed by nothing but pure pleasure. She moaned into his mouth before he got up onto his arms, taking his weight off of her chest as he began to move. Betty experimented a bit with the position of her legs until she was in the right spot, then did her best to keep the pace.
“You’re so damned wet,” Ted whispered as he pounded into her. “You’re so wet, and so tight; I never dreamed—”
“You’re just really huge,” Betty teased him, her pleasure at the fact clearly written on her face. “You feel so good in me!”
“You feel too good. I think he’s going to feed you sooner than I want him too,” he said, leaning forward to plant a kiss on her lips. Right afterwards, he gritted his teeth and leaned his forehead against hers. She felt his cock pulse hot liquid into her, and it felt so good she came right along with him. They breathlessly clung to each other, and then Ted’s arms relaxed as he lowered himself down next to her, holding her tightly to his chest.
“That was so delicious, we may even need to have dessert,” he said tiredly. “But not till after recess.”
“Yes, teacher,” Betty giggled. She kissed the tip of his nose before she snuggled contentedly against him. Lion or no lion, he had sure figured out how to make her roar.
*****
Betty woke later and found herself alone. Her heart began to pound with alarm as her eyes popped open. Catching the scent on the air and hearing the sound, she was aware that Ted had simply stepped outside to relieve himself. She was still staring at the entrance when he stepped inside again.
“Hey, sleepyhead, any idea what time it is now?” he asked her. “I’m sure my father and your people will be wondering about us if we stayed down here too long.”
“Mm, that is true,” Betty had to agree. “The only trouble is, I certainly can’t bring you back to the restaurant, and that’s where your snowmobile is parked. And I don’t think they’d want me to take you to the compound, all things considered, so I’m not sure where we should go.”
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br /> “All things considered, huh?” he repeated, his brow raised slightly.
“I mean, because Allie doesn’t know who you are and I wasn’t given permission to take you there, of course,” said Betty quickly, getting up and brushing past him to hide her guilty expression from his keen eyes. He let her finish what she was doing and return to the tent before he continued the discussion.
“So you’re telling me that you can’t just bring home a friend where you live?” he scoffed. “You have to ask for permission first?”
“There are reasons for caution, you must understand,” said Betty as she began to pull on her clothing again. Seeing her, Ted did the same.
“But I don’t understand,” he insisted. “What could be that important that you’re living as almost a prisoner in your own home?”
“I-it’s nothing,” Betty stammered. “It’s just a part of who I am, okay?”
“Don’t get so defensive,” he complained. “I was just trying to understand. You just said that you wanted me to, didn’t you?”
“Sorry,” she smirked. “I guess I’m not used to waking up next to somebody.”
“Me neither,” he agreed. “But you do look beautiful in the morning—or whatever it is.”
“Don’t tell me that!’ she scolded. “I would not even want to see a mirror right now.”
“Betty,” said Ted, turning her face to his. “Look up here, right in my eyes. You see this? It’s the only mirror you need when it’s just the two of us, okay? And what do my eyes tell you?”
“That you are delusional?” she chuckled.
“Well, besides that,” he grumbled, trying not to smirk.
“That I’m beautiful?” she asked dutifully.
“Exactly,” he smiled. “Now, what’s the plan?”
“I guess we’ll have to head back to the compound,” she sighed. “I just don’t think Allie is going to like it.”
“I don’t want to get you into any trouble,” Ted insisted. “If you just lead me to an exit near town, I’m sure I can find my way back on my own. After all, I don’t think it’s me that your enemies are trying to find.”
Unbreak My Heart: BWWM Romance (Brother From Money Book 20) Page 16