Another peak grew up before her eyes, and she set out to climb it with sure strokes. She propelled herself forward with her knees screwed down into the soil. She thrust against his shaft, and every thrust pushed her up that long hill to the giddy place on top.
She raised her arms to the dawn, to the warming sunshine. She put her hands behind her head and let the endless beat sweep her back and forth, up and back, higher and higher. The air up there left her breathless and unconscious, but when she thought she couldn’t go on, Damen took over. He rammed his cock up into her from below to propel her onward to her destination.
Clouds surrounded her so she could no longer see the ground. She couldn’t see Damen or feel his pounding cock slamming into her rapturous cunt. She knew nothing but cosmic pleasure. It encompassed the whole universe, and she ceased to exist.
Chapter 17
Damen and Reyna lay tangled in each other’s arms. They kissed and caressed each other for hours until Reyna said, “We should get back. They’ll start to wonder where we are.”
His eyes popped open. “I thought you wanted to stay out here.”
“We can’t stay out here forever. Besides, I want to talk to Rose.”
“About what?”
“I want to tell her I’m staying on the planet.”
He stared at her. “When did you decide that?”
“Just now.”
“Just now, while we were lying here, or just now, while we were doing it?”
“Actually, I decided this morning when we first woke up. Actually, I’m not sure when I decided it.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“I’m sure now.”
“What will you say to her?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll decide when I see her. It won’t be real to me until I tell her.”
“We better go then.” He didn’t move.
They kissed some more. “We should go.”
“Do you want to walk there?”
“What’s the other option?”
“I fly you there. Are you ready for that?”
She gazed into his eyes. Could this really be happening? Was her dream really about to come true? “Yes, I’m ready.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t keep asking me that. I wouldn’t say I was ready if I wasn’t.”
“Are you ready to watch me change back? You won’t freak out again, will you?”
“I won’t freak out again. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”
He kissed her. “I know. I just don’t want to go yet.”
“Aren’t you hungry? Neither of us has eaten since yesterday.”
“I’m hungry, but I’m hungrier for you. I don’t want to let you go.”
“You’re taking me back to keep me. Once I tell Rose I’m staying, there won’t be anything stopping us from being together. We’ll be…”
He waited. “We’ll be what?”
“I was about to say we’ll be married, but we won’t be that until the team leaves.”
“Think of it any way you want. You’ll be mine, and there’s nothing you can do to change that.”
“I don’t want to change it. Now come on and pull up your pants. You don’t want to show up in the hall looking like that.” She gave his cock a tweak and made him yelp.
He grabbed at her tits and twisted her nipple. “You demon! I’ll teach you.”
She screeched and darted away from him. She snatched up her shirt and dove into her clothes. He pulled up his pants and stood a few paces away with a low chuckle dying on his lips. “Be careful how you play with me, baby. You could wind up with more than you bargained for.”
She started to make a wise crack in return, but before she could form the words, he changed before her eyes. He doubled in size, and the mighty purple dragon rose up to tower over her. His head whipped around and he let out an ear-splitting shriek that echoed through the forest.
Reyna stood back and watched until he completed his transformation. He blocked out the sun, and his head slipped back and forth before her eyes on its swaying neck. He turned to place his shoulder in front of her, and he lowered his head to just below her knees.
She came forward and put her foot on his head. With no effort at all, he lifted her off the ground. She sailed into the sky and swung her leg over his shoulders.
When he raised his head, she slotted down into a perfect seat between his neck and shoulders. His wings unfolded from his back, and a strong wind washed off them to thrash the tree branches.
In an instant, he took to the air. He beat his wings with surges of muscle between her legs. She clamped her knees around his neck, but she was never in any danger of falling off.
The breeze blew her hair out of her face, and the clouds slipped past faster. Mountains dropped away to nothing. She couldn’t see streams or individual trees anymore. The dark forest lay carpeted below her. The sun dipped below the clouds, and the planet curved across the far horizon.
He flew higher into that clear lavender sky. Harkniss Keep appeared to the right, but Damen didn’t turn toward it. He banked and cut along a different valley, heading east. He flew between cliffs and zoomed over waterfalls and back up into the sky again.
Reyna raised her arms above her head. A song of joy burst from her throat, but no one could hear it over the wind rushing in her ears. She shouted and sang and laughed to the heavens. She was alive for the first time. She was whole and free and alive.
Damen soared around in wide arcs and sharp turns. He dove toward the ground with lightning speed. Just before he crashed into the ground, he turned with a twitch of his wings to rocket straight up. He zigzagged right and left and cut spiral corkscrews in the air.
All too soon, he headed back to Harkniss Keep. Reyna sighed. She would have stayed out all day and never gotten tired of it, but she had unfinished business to attend to first.
Damen swooped into the mountainside and alighted at the eastern entrance. Reyna slid down and patted his scaly side. Never again would she shrink from his dragon form. She loved every inch of him with her whole heart. She would never give him up.
She kept her hand on him while he changed. The next thing she knew, her hand rested on his shoulder—a man’s shoulder. He bent down and kissed her. “Good luck in there.”
“Where will I find you afterwards?”
“Come to my room. You can tell me how it went.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“Will she be fine, too?”
“I don’t know. It’s asking an awful lot, us splitting up after so many years together.”
“Maybe she’ll stay on the planet, too.”
“I doubt it. She’s a different kettle of fish.”
“You were a different kettle of fish, too, and look at you now.”
“I know. I just don’t want to build my hopes on something that will probably never happen.”
“Well, come to my room afterwards. If you’re upset, I can comfort you.”
“Thanks. I’ll come back there either way.”
He kissed her again. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re already doing it.”
THE END
Tales from Angondra
A Sci-Fi Romance
Complete Series (Books 1 – 6)
Ruth Anne Scott
#1 Alien Romance Series on Amazon.com
Book 1 – Abducted by Aliens
Chapter 1
Carmen Herrera shut the bakery door as quietly as she could, but the sleigh bells hanging from it made such a racket everyone in the place turned to stare at her. A statuesque woman behind the counter scanned her uniform up and down. “What can I do for you, Officer...” She peered at Carmen’s name tag. “Officer Herrera. I’m sorry we don’t serve donuts.”
Carmen blushed. “I’m not here for the donuts. I’m responding to a call-out regarding an abduction in the neighborhood.�
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The woman wiped her hands on her apron and nodded. She towered over Carmen with flowing curly blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. Decorative italic letters splashed across the front of her apron and matched the brochures on the counter: Penny’s Peppermints. “I made the call. I’m Penelope Ann King. I’m the owner of this bakery.”
Carmen looked around. All the customers listened to their conversation. “Did you know the girl who disappeared?”
Penelope Ann nodded. “I hire girls from the neighborhood to work here. It gives them a leg up in the world and gives them some experience of earning their own money doing something other than selling their bodies and dealing drugs. I hired Rosie three weeks ago, and she never missed a shift—until yesterday.”
“If she was selling her body or dealing drugs,” Carmen replied, “she may have gone back to her pimp. Maybe she didn’t want to slave away in a bakery anymore and wanted some easy money.”
Penelope Ann narrowed her eyes at Carmen. She could spike a bug on a needle at a hundred paces with those eyes, and something solid and powerful lurked under her white chef’s jacket. Carmen stiffened for the inevitable response. “Rosie loved working here. She planned to enroll in community college next semester. She never wanted to go back to the streets. She wouldn’t go back to her pimp unless he took her back by force.”
“Then there’s nothing we can do,” Carmen replied. “If she worked for him before, we don’t have any reason to believe she didn’t go willingly.”
Penelope Ann smacked her lips. “You cops are all the same. I should have known you would stick your big toe in the mud like this. We’re talking about a young girl’s life, and you have my word she didn’t go back to her pimp—not willingly, anyway. Are you really going to stand there and tell me you won’t do anything to help her?”
“I can’t do anything about it,” Carmen told her. “If she spent years working for some pimp on the East Side, and then spent three weeks working here,” she swept the bakery with her hand. “We would have to have something more than your word to interfere with her going back to him.” Carmen glanced toward the door. Now would be a good time to make her escape.
But Penelope Ann wasn’t finished. “It isn’t just Rosie. A lot of girls keep disappearing from this neighborhood, and they don’t turn up back on the streets, either. They just vanish, never to be seen again.”
Carmen nodded. “Our captain briefed us on that, but we don’t have the resources to investigate those disappearances. They go into the Cold Case archives. If we turn up any evidence for them, we’ll address them later.”
An African American woman in baby blue nurse’s scrubs stepped forward. Her fuzzy Afro surrounded her fresh face and set off her glinting brown eyes. “You have the resources to investigate them, but you won’t because the girls were runaways and drug addicts. You don’t have to lie about it. We know the truth.”
Carmen turned to her. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I know you.”
“You don’t know any of us,” the nurse shot back. “I’m Aria McCray, and I’ve lived in this neighborhood since the day I was born. Penelope Ann has been here since she was three and went to school with me and Marissa Evans.” She pointed to a slender woman sitting by the front window. Her fiery red hair glowed in the morning sun. “She’s been the head librarian at the Public Library for ten years, ever since she graduated from college. None of us knows you from Adam.”
Carmen shifted from one foot to the other. “Just because I only moved here a year ago doesn’t mean I don’t care about this neighborhood as much as you do. I don’t make the decisions on what cases to investigate. The department decides that.”
“Four of the girls who disappeared worked here,” Penelope Ann chimed in. “I gave them jobs and a place to live and extra food if they needed it. None of them lasted more than a month before they vanished. Now I want to know what you and your department are going to do about that.”
“Like I said...” Carmen began.
Penelope Ann cut her off with a wave of her hand. “I know what you said. You said they went back to their pimps and their dealers, but we all know that’s not true. I used to see Carrie Townley standing on the street corner at ten o’clock at night, and I used to see Zoe Martin walking up and down in front of the shoe factory on Benson Street. Neither of them has come back. They disappeared off the face of the earth, and your department and your captain and you and every other cop in the world couldn’t give a flying.....”
Screeching tires drowned out the rest of her words. Carmen glanced out the window and saw the police paddy wagon pull up outside the bakery. She ran through what she would say to excuse herself from this situation before she faced Penelope Ann again. Then she noticed something that made her turn around again. The vehicle outside the bakery had no windshield and no driver’s side or passenger’s side windows. It was one solid white mass. It had no license plate, either.
Carmen opened her mouth to say something, but all at once, a blinding flash of light exploded through the bakery. Carmen’s ears popped, but no sound accompanied the flash. She blinked to clear her vision, and the next minute, she found herself sitting on the hard metal floor of the paddy wagon. Penelope Ann, Marissa, and Aria sat next to her. The four women exchanged glances.
“What the blazes is going on?” Aria snapped.
“We’re in the police van,” Penelope Ann rounded on Carmen. “Are we under arrest or something?”
Carmen shook her head. “This isn’t the police van. That’s what I thought at first, too, but this van has no windows and no license plate. I don’t know where we are, but we’re not with the police.”
The vehicle—or whatever it was—gave a lurch, and Carmen tumbled sideways. Nauseous vertigo seized her, and she braced herself with her hands against the floor. The vehicle spun faster and faster until no one could sit up straight anymore. They lay on the floor and groaned in agony.
Then the spinning stopped as suddenly as it started. The four women sat up and looked at one another. A gentle vibration hummed through the metal surrounding them.
“What’s happening?” Marissa whispered.
Carmen examined the tiny chamber, but there was nothing to see but bare white walls. “Whatever it is, we’re still moving.”
“Where are we going?” Penelope Ann asked.
“I wish I knew,” Carmen replied. “Someone has captured us and is taking us somewhere.”
“It must be the same people who kidnapped those girls,” Aria added.
Carmen turned on her. “What makes you say that? We have no evidence anyone kidnapped any girls. Anyway, we aren’t drug addicts and prostitutes and runaways. We’re professional women. I’m a police officer, you're a nurse, Penelope Ann owns the bakery, and Marissa is the librarian. We don't fit the profile.”
“But we’re all women,” Marissa told her. “If someone was abducting women from our neighborhood, maybe they saw a chance to catch four women at once. That’s how we wound up here.”
Carmen set her hands on her hips. “And how exactly did they catch us? How exactly did we wind up here? I don’t know about you, but no one even came near me. No one hit me over the head with a club, or put a handkerchief with chloroform over my nose and mouth, or a bag over my head, or anything like that. I was standing there, minding my own business, and then....” She trailed off.
The others stared at her and waited. Marissa raised an eyebrow. “And then?”
Carmen dropped her eyes. “Then I wound up here.”
“You’re the police officer here,” Marissa told her. “How do you explain our presence here, traveling somewhere against our will, if we weren’t abducted? Maybe no one hit us over the head or dragged us into a dark alley, but here we are. It seems to me we’ve been abducted.”
Carmen shrugged. “I can’t explain it, but I don’t want to say we’ve been abducted until I know for sure we have been. I don’t want to...”
Aria burst into ga
les of laughter. “I know. You don’t want to alarm the civilians, right?”
Carmen mumbled under her breath. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
“You weren’t going to say it,” Aria shot back, “but you were thinking it. Don’t insult our intelligence by beating around the bush. We all know we’ve been kidnapped by someone. How or why doesn’t really matter. What matters is what we’re going to do about it.”
“We can’t do anything about it,” Carmen replied. “We just have to wait until we get wherever it is we’re going. We’ll bide our time, and when the time comes, we’ll see how we’re going to get out of here.”
Chapter 2
Carmen stretched on her side and rested her head on her arm. She pretended to be asleep, but there was really no need. The other women paid no attention to her. Marissa really was asleep curled up in a corner of their little chamber, and Penelope Ann leaned against the wall with Aria’s head cradled on her outstretched legs. Both of them kept their eyes closed, but they weren’t asleep. Carmen was certain of that.
She studied the other women with a critical eye. She would have to watch all three of them and make sure none of them did anything to wreck her chances of escape. She couldn’t trust any of them. They were all too rebellious. None of them knew how to follow the instructions of a recognized authority like the police.
Marissa had too high an opinion of her own brain. She came up with every excuse to discredit Carmen’s authority. Penelope Ann had a secret that made her resist taking direction from anybody. Carmen couldn’t figure out what it was, but something hovered there hidden just below the surface. Penelope Ann would take some breaking in before Carmen could count on her to help her break out of this—whatever it was.
And Aria—what could you say about Aria? She had a mouth that belonged in the circus. It went off at the slightest provocation. Carmen would have to do a delicate balancing act between keeping her distance from Aria and keep her close enough to make sure she didn’t do the rest of them any damage.
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