by Tamsin Baker
“Who?”
“The girl. What was her name?”
“Annaline.” His beautiful lips twisted. “I don’t know. We never saw her again.”
“Did you love her?”
“I thought I did. But that was before I met you.”
Rollicking warmth filled my chest. “But when we met, you were all about fulfilling The Prophesy. Your feelings were for your soulmate, not for me personally.”
“At first, yes. Then I got to know you, Tiffany, the person, and mortality took on even more importance, because it meant spending the rest of my life with you.”
“You say the nicest things.” I pushed back my chair. Show and tell had outworn its welcome. Time now for more serious exploits.
I skirted the table and straddled his thighs. “You also do the nicest things.” I rubbed my wet center against the ridge of his erection. His breath hitched, his gaze deepening to rich, forest green. “Speaking of prophesies . . . I’m thinking about the mates of body and soul part right now.”
His palms cupped my butt, his touch so hot, so alive.
His mouth found my neck, his hot tongue laving the mark made complete by his love. My eyes fluttered closed and I shuddered, with the thought, his attention.
Yes. Our half hearts were now whole and I’d stopped questioning the verity of The Prophesy and the possibility of what other legends walked the earth outside of the books that made them renowned.
I could accept everything, endure anything, with this man by my side. Even Richard had been relegated from nuisance to nothing but an annoying blip in my past. Gideon promised a future and the nightmares of the past no longer wielded their power.
His mouth trailed down my throat, his tongue flicking between my breasts.
My breath hitched as he pulled back.
His fingers smoothed the lines either side of my mouth. “A kiss for your thoughts.”
I opened my eyes. “A kiss?”
Devastating lips slid into a devastating smile. “Better than a penny.”
I winked. “Depends on the kiss.”
He quirked a brow. “That sounds like a challenge.”
“If it walks like a duck.” I grinned.
“Then a challenge, it is.” He tangled his hands through my hair, twisted a curl around a finger, tugging me closer. So close, until his breath stroked my lips, his taste tantalized my tongue. “That means you go first. For a kiss.”
*
He imagined my thoughts to be good. And they were, mostly. But for undercurrents, which had faded over the past weeks.
So much had changed, so many fantasies fulfilled. Through mutual trust and honesty. Going forward, if I wanted to share the rest of my life with this man, the least I could do was share it wholly. That meant my skeletons, long burnt and buried, were about to be unearthed.
“You asked me once why I chose Louisiana as my home.” I closed my eyes, bracing against the darkness and memories I could never quite shake. “Aside from the added benefit of being as far as possible from Richard, it’s one place my father always said he would never, ever set foot.”
His brows bounded skyward. “Your father? I thought he was dead.”
A familiar burn roiled through my chest. “That would have been preferable.”
“Why?” His fingers continued to tangle in my hair. Calming. Comforting. Filling me with strength to share what I’d never shared before.
“Because he killed my mother and, if I hadn’t run that night, he would have killed me too.”
“Fuck, Tiff. I’m so sorry.” His hand left my hair to cup my jaw, his thumb lightly smoothing away the lines of my frown. “What happened?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know much, and I never found out why he snapped when he did.” I inhaled, fresh, soul-calming oxygen fueling my strength to continue. “My earliest childhood memories are peppered with minor bruises and cutting words. Mom threatened to leave more than once, and maybe that night she decided to follow through. Or maybe he’d had enough of playing cat and mouse. Whatever the reason, he grabbed a knife from the counter and stabbed her seventeen times.”
“Hell.” He looked like he wanted to hit someone. Preferably the man who’d stolen my mother and forever changed my life. “Where were you when all this happened?”
“At a party with friends. Maybe if I’d been home . . .” I swallowed, pushing back the familiar guilt, the familiar fear. “The last time I saw my father, he was kneeling over my mother, covered head-to-toe in her blood. He looked up as I walked in, blood-red eyes cold, callous, devoid of emotion. He’d always been cruel, but that day something made me turn and run, and I never, ever looked back.”
“Damn. Where is he now?” He shook his head, as if unable to believe it.
There were times I felt the same, until I recalled the metallic smack of blood hitting the back of my throat, and the burn of muscles as I ran faster and further than I’d ever run before.
“I don’t know. I ran to a friend’s and called the police, but before they could pick me up, I ran again. I kept running for two years, working odd jobs for cash until I’d saved enough to leave the country for good. I first moved to Washington, and you know how that worked out. The only good thing to come out of that fiasco was my citizenship. I couldn’t stay, so I closed my eyes and pointed, and picked Louisiana.”
His palms skimmed my shoulders to cup my biceps, massaging up and down as if to rub away the chill of my past. “Do you believe in fate?”
Eyes of ocean green dragged me deeper into his soul, and I followed, willingly. “I do now.”
“Me, too.” His thumb brushed my lips. “It wasn’t chance that saw your finger find Louisiana.”
I grinned. “It was your voodoo magic.”
His brow arched, all sexy and seductive. “I thought you liked my voodoo magic.”
“Just one of your many talents.” I walked my fingertips down his chest, freeing his shirt buttons from their confines. “Think I’ve earned that kiss?”
He waggled his brows. “With interest.”
I pushed aside the fabric and smoothed my palms over hot, healthy, live skin. “Ooh, I like the sound of interest.”
“One thing you should know about me and my debts.” He grinned. “I always, always pay up.”
“I kinda hoped you’d say that.”
His lips crushed mine. Or maybe it happened in reverse. All I know is that our mouths melded, our tongues tangling in a battle for more.
I wanted more.
I pushed back his shirt the same time he struggled to rid me of my top. His mouth found my neck. “Mmm.” The vibrations rocked me to my core.
He tilted his hips and the friction increased.
Fuck.
His palms found my midriff, spanning higher, caressing and cupping my breasts. I was slowly getting used to the heat of his touch. The heat of his cock as it stroked me towards mindlessness. And I wanted to feel it now. Later. Forever.
I never wanted it to stop.
Chapter 39
Gideon
Three hundred and forty-seven years had passed and my heart finally beat like it was twenty-nine.
Frost clung to the air like icicles cling to snow-kissed trees and it was a wonder to feel its bite. I raised the covers up over my shoulders and moved closer to the warm, wonderful body spooned into my front.
I felt the heated rush of blood through my veins. The heavy throb of live, pulsing flesh, still so new.
Day two of mortality.
The Prophesy had fucked up.
Was that even possible?
Not that I was questioning or complaining. I was alive. Mortal. It didn’t matter that the antidote flowed through Tiff’s blood, it could no longer harm me.
I swept my hand up over her stomach, spreading my fingers out, pressing my palm against the beat of her heart. Two hearts made whole. It got that part right.
The body in my arms shifted. Stretched.
A soft, contented mewl escaped her lips. I
kissed the curve of her shoulder and her breath caught.
I loved that sound. All of her sounds—the happy sighs when we kissed, the contented purrs as I stroked her skin, the passionate screams as I entered her, the fervent pleas just moments before she came.
She captured my hand and inched it upwards to cup her breast. “I could get used to this.”
I grinned into her neck. “That’s the plan.”
I teased her nipple into a taut, tantalizing bud then moved to the next. My cock nudged her ass, and she curved back, deliciously cupping it more.
She twisted, just enough to capture my mouth in a kiss. Then she spread her legs and reached between them to grasp my shaft in her hand. Slowly, fucking magically, she began to stroke. Fire flooded my balls, filling my cock, making me burn and so fucking ready.
That’s when she shifted her ass, stroking the precum from my head before easing the tip through her folds and into her heat.
Nerve endings fired like Fourth of July fireworks. I slowly bucked my hips, entering and leaving her in a delicious slide that saw me fighting for breath.
“Gideon.”
I ran my fingers down her tummy, through the strip of tight curls to her clit. “Tell me what you want.”
She gasped. “You.”
One word and my heart skipped a beat, then galloped like a horse in its first ever race. “I’m yours.”
“I want to see you.”
I withdrew and she turned to face me. I kissed the tip of her nose, the upward bow of her lips, the curve of her jaw. Pushing up over her body, I pressed my cock into her flesh and lost myself in her sultry heat.
“Gideon.”
My name on her lips was like birdsong on a sun-drenched summer morning. I slid deeper still, then stopped. “Tell me what you want.”
“This.” She splayed her hands over my hips, skimming them across my chest, up and over my shoulders. “Your body, heart and soul. Forever.”
“You have them.” I kissed her lips. “And now?”
Her gaze locked mine, oceans of blue dragging me in and drowning me in their hazy depths. “Love me, Gideon.”
“With all my beating heart.”
I slid in, balls deep, then withdrew, my gaze never once leaving hers. I watched as my love dragged her deeper into passion, her lips parted, emitting short, breathless pants as she rose then fell into climax.
Her flesh pulsed, dragging me deeper still, milking my cock into my own, mind-wrenching orgasm. She consumed me, body and soul, promising a life that spanned mortality and beyond happiness.
“Every time I think it can’t get better, it does.” She stroked my ego as readily as she stroked my soul.
“I aim to please.” I rolled off and onto my back.
She curved into my side, one arm resting beneath her ear, the other sketching circles over my chest. “And you do that very, very well.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, a cat-got-the-cream smile playing on her lips, her hand circling my ribs, dancing across the steady d-dum coming from deep within my chest. “Your heart. It’s beating.”
I grinned, easing her over again, sliding inside, her life and mine forever combining as one. “Only for you.”
Epilogue
Damon
3 months later . . .
Rip out one gray and they say two will grow back.
Not that I’d know. I hadn’t sprouted a single gray hair in the past five hundred years, and didn’t expect any to appear anytime soon.
I pushed out of the comfort of my chair and moved to the window, to the billow of gray churning across the once blue sky. I rolled my shoulders in an effort to iron out the kinks. No go. The restlessness after Gideon’s pairing grew greater by the day. Not that I wasn’t happy for my friend. I was. Happy he’d found his soulmate. Happier still, he’d found mortality and escaped The Change.
Vamps might no longer be human, but our residual weaknesses still plague our souls. Not jealousy so much as a twinge of “what about me?”
Half a millennium and I was still no closer to salvation. With the responsibility of a coven to protect, and the current shit-storm on the horizon, it seemed unlikely the situation would change anytime soon.
A moment’s peace would have been welcome. But I’d learned pretty early in my leadership that wasn’t how the shit rolled. It slammed against your soul and stuck fast. No sooner had we diverted the whole flu antidote issue, but we’d landed face-first in a whole dung-heap of danger.
The air shifted and I bit back a sigh. “What is it, Aaron?” I turned to find my PA shuffling his feet in my doorway.
The swish of his almost silent tread from halfway down the corridor had alerted me to his approach. Plus, he’d started slathering himself with that god-awful aftershave shit. Waste of time. Smelling like the sunshine rose out of your ass wouldn’t attract your soulmate into your circle any faster.
Nothing would.
“Terillian wants to meet.” His voice rang thick with an Australian drawl despite the fact he’d left his distant home for the States just over two centuries ago. Every time he opened his mouth, I cringed. But he was blood. And blood ran thicker than any friendship I knew. Bar one.
“Terillian can go fuck himself.”
“He says we’re sheltering one of his clan and he wants her back.”
“Are we?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“So this is another power play?”
Aaron shrugged, the action echoing my thoughts. Terillian was a badass prick solely responsible for the rift between our two circles, and it was impossible for any rational, level-minded being to speculate on his plans. One thing I did know—the fact that he’d returned after a two hundred year sabbatical didn’t bode well for either of our sides.
I didn’t need Margherite’s prowess at fortune-telling to know that bloodshed loomed in both our futures. What I did need, was the foresight to stop it and end Terillian’s reign once and for all. Something we’d tried and failed at two centuries ago.
The memory still slumped heavy in my chest.
I sighed. “Call a meeting of the elders.”
Aaron hesitated, although this time he’d breached the doorway to stand three steps shy of my desk.
I didn’t even bother to hide the exasperation from my voice. “What?”
“Are you sure? Claudius is in the Maldives and you know how he’ll get if we end his holiday for no reason.”
No reason. What the fuck did that mean?
I’d refrained from calling on the council when the Flu A antidote threatened our mortality, our entire existence. I’d made the hard decisions, and run a successful mission with only their nod of approval from the sidelines. But this . . . this was different. It was Terillian. Akin to the devil absconding from the depths of hell, wielding his vengeance and waging terror on earth.
“I’m not sure a war is no reason.” I felt the descent of my fangs, the roar of a hurricane rising up from my chest. One day, he’d question me one too many times. “Call them.”
Aaron bowed, more a nod than a full-on bob, and I turned back to the thick sheet of rain masking my view.
Things were about to get nasty for the coven, with no guarantee we’d all get out alive.
I inhaled, bracing against the window ledge, as cold as the blood that bolted through my veins.
There was one thing I hated more than the threat of The Change. Werewolves.
Moonlight Bite
Elvina Payet
CHAPTER ONE
Amy Evans flung open the double wooden doors to paradise. “Stunning.” A warm breeze ruffled her long hair, flattened her sun dress against her thighs. Her skin tingled from the excitement racing through her veins. A few steps down the wooden patio and her sandals sank into the warm, white sand.
“I’m finally here.” Blue, sparkling water hugged the curved beach to her right and left, disappearing into the distance. White, foamy waves crashed rhythmically onto the shore, soothing her.
She closed her eyes, lifting her face to the sun. “Time for fun.” A kaleidoscope of images flashed through her mind—blackish-grey films delivering bad news, pain-laced breaths as she lay under pristine hospital bedding. Long needles fixed deep into her weak arms, pumping in chemicals to save her life.
Enough. Amy shook her head, wiping the memories away. Forget the past. She inhaled a salt-tinged, sun-warmed breath. This is home for the next week.
“There you are.”
Olivia, her friend and partner-in–fun came out of the bungalow. “I’ve been knocking for ages. I thought you’d fallen asleep.”
“Not a chance, even with the long flight and boat trip.”
Olivia clutched her stomach. “Don’t remind me. My stomach’s still not settled.” She hugged Amy. “Isn’t this place amazing?”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“What a fabulous view.” Olivia grinned. “I thought I had the perfect bungalow with my own rock pool.”
Cold shivers swam through Amy. “Seems too good to be true.”
“That’s what I thought when I heard about ‘Isle Ambroise’ from Pam at work. She raved about it and would love to come back if they permitted it.”
Amy frowned. “Yeah, that’s a strange rule.”
Her friend shrugged. “Maybe it’s the demand and the long waiting list. I still can’t believe how cheap this holiday is compared to other places.”
“How do they do it? Amy looked around. “Maybe we’ll find the facilities below standard or the food disgusting.”
“I doubt it. Not from the five star on-line reviews.” Olivia’s squeal of pleasure filled the air. “How lucky are we to get chosen?”
“You sure you didn’t bribe someone?”
“Nope.” Olivia giggled. “I didn’t expect us to get picked so soon.” She jiggled her hips in a happy dance. “Three months. Pam waited two years.”
“Luck was on our side.” A whirlwind of excitement swirled inside Amy. Time to have some fun.
“Come on, enough talking. We have some playing to do.”