by Brianna West
I couldn’t believe I was wearing his clothes!
The shirt was more fitted to be a dress on me than a shirt, as it reached all the way down to mid-thigh. Pulling the hem, I read the lettering upside down.
“Save a horse. Ride a cowboy?” I asked, stare wandering back up to find the laughing expression of the man knelt in front of me, his massive shoulders shaking.
Recovering with his chest pushed out proudly, Bernie fingered absently through his wet hair and chuckled happily. “It was my very first phrase shirt. The start of this epic cowboy you now know as Bernie the super powerful Guardian!”
My mouth twitched, seconds from smiling. “And how long ago was that, Bernard?”
Bernie leaned forward, face at chest level as his hands took hold of my thighs. Ticklish sensation sparked from where his hands held me. It stirred the recently calmed arousal inside of me.
“A woman never tells her age,” Bernie responded cutely, giggling when I made a face in my obvious confusion, “I’m a few hundred years old, if that’s what you’re getting at, princess. Ah, practically an old man.” Cheeks flushing, Bernie fanned his face and mumbled something along the lines of feeling like a cradle-snatcher.
However, my attention was focused on the images which cluttered the wall of the staircase we had climbed to get here. From my previous studies of humans, that sort of advancement in their species hadn’t come until recently.
So, finding that I wasn’t able to withhold my interest in the reason he appeared to be a child in many of them, I started to say, “But those images hanging along the wall of the stairwell…”
Bernie perked up, chuckling eagerly. “You were looking?”
“I only…” My eyes wandered away from the excitement in his face, my feelings for him amplifying with how affectionate his expression was, “—I merely wondered. From my studies, humans have not had such a capability for image-capturing for that length of time. In my brief inspection, they were taken when you were quite young. Hence, I suspected you quite young. But to be many centuries old…it doesn’t fit.”
Bernie nodded, taking a seat next to me. He reached long arms towards me, giving me very little time to react before he was lifting my body and settling me brazenly onto his lap. My breath startled as I unintentionally clung to him, the moisture of his body sliding beneath my palms. Then, collecting myself after internally squealing, I gave his ear a hard tug to mask my embarrassment as telling heat flushed into my face and body. Laughing happily, Bernie’s arms constricted around my shoulders and effectively trapped me.
“Ma is a pretty powerful witch,” he explained with a gentle smile, fingering through my loose, already dried hair, “She made those photos from her memories. She always said it was to ‘play the part’ here in this small town, because folks talk. But I know it’s just ‘cause she loves us and enjoys being surrounded by our childhood, when life was much simpler.”
A mother’s love, it was something I’d never truly experienced. Not that I could remember. And my father was already too far gone when I’d been born to feel any sort of affection from him. Instead, all my love and care came from Yaniv and Anric. So, unable to contain my curiosity, I was eager to know more about Bernie and his life with a mother’s affection.
“But she and your father never stayed together?”
Bernie’s eyes glimmered despondently, suggesting that I was right to think his father was a rather sore subject. “Ma doesn’t like to talk about what happened, but she loved him. I know that much. He was…responsible for lots of folks, so being tied down to one wasn’t really something he could do.”
He sighed with a faraway smile, hands idly rubbing along the shirt he had forced me into wearing. “What I knew of the old tiger was that he loved her just as much as she loved him. And for reasons, he left her all alone. Wasn’t too sure what those reasons were. He never said, and neither has Ma in all this time.”
The sadness in Bernie’s eyes made me want to touch him and take away, even if just for a moment, the despair and torment. And seeing how I’d already broken so many of my own rules tonight, I thought it wouldn’t do much more harm to break another. Reaching up slowly, I pressed the palm of my hand against Bernie’s strained jaw and smoothed over the flesh with a small sighing breath.
“What truly made you the King of the Tigers, Bernie?” I asked softly, tenderly stroking his face and watching the surprise and disbelief replace the sadness once occupying my Guardian’s expression, “What made you leave it and join the Promiscus Guardians?”
My question wasn’t accusatory, simply inquisitive. Despite my own sense of duty towards my role as princess, I could understand his leaving the role he never knew he would receive, from the way it had been explained to me.
But I was desperate to know. I wanted to discover everything I could about him. It was my secret wish to understand this outward mask and its purpose in my Guardian’s life; the very reason it was created.
The sharp sensation in my chest was infinitely more painful knowing that he and I shared so much in common. Things of which I would’ve never expected he and I might share. Since I had fled the notion of remaining a perfect princess, I decided I’d ask what I wished to know.
Just for tonight.
Bernie’s hand covered mine, his eyes glowing brightly before he was turning and pressing a kiss into my palm, the brush of his lips stirring the internal ache inside my heart. “You really can’t do that, princess.”
My breathing ceased at the clearly tormented face he was making. “Do what, Bernie?”
Amber eyes rose and met mine in a moment where the air felt dense and unbreathable. “You can’t just strip me bare and prod at old wounds, darling. I don’t know what to do when you look at me like that. It makes me want to hold you close and tell you everything in this shredded heart of mine.”
It was evident that Bernie intended to sound playful, but every word, every action, was shrouded with the true depth of his pain as it lived inside his glowing amber eyes and the shadowed lines of his face. His pain was so deep and palpable that it couldn’t be contained. Much like the overwhelming heartache I was currently experiencing in face of it.
I wanted to kiss away his sadness.
“I’m not the man you think I am, princess,” he said, body tensing, “But I want to be. I’ll tell you everything, promise. But just for tonight, can you let me stay the Bernie I’ve always been?”
My heart was breaking at the anxious way he pleaded me. “I haven’t the right to press you for more than you’re willing to say, Bernard,” I said, voice unnaturally reserved.
Bernie caressed my face with a sweet smile. “See, princess, that’s where you’re wrong. You deserve absolutely everything this cowboy can give you. Much more. And believe me, I want to tell you, and I will. But just for tonight, I want to selfishly stay in this little paradise we’ve created for ourselves. Can’t I?”
Bernie’s mouth touched mine as if to put an end to any further conversation. Our bodies naturally drew together, melding skin-to-skin with a passion dramatically different from before. Every kiss and slide of our lips, every movement of our bodies, was deliberate and charged with the desire to feel each other anywhere within immediate reach.
Our heady, frantic pants blended between us as Bernie cradled my face in his large hands, his chest heaving in great breaths of air. His eyes scored down to where I straddled him, my hips swiveling impatiently for more of the pleasure only he could give.
Eyes illuminated brilliantly, Bernie kissed me again, deftly twisting and repositioning our bodies as he urgently tasted my mouth with me pinned down to the bed beneath him. A carnal, animalistic growl reverberated between us as Bernie’s control nearly broke when my voice came out in a needy moan.
Arching, I pressed my chest shamelessly into his. “Bernie!”
I was already craving his penetrating touch, seeking it with my body as I melded further into him. Much like before, my yearning for Bernie had become irrepressibl
e, and I was boldly joining our bodies in any way possible. I wanted to touch him the way he touched me. I wanted to taste every patch of flesh my lips and tongue could reach.
I latched onto his throat, causing the Guardian to tense and groan throatily when I suckled the freshly washed skin. His pulse throbbed against my lips as I nibbled where I could reach, feeling the way he responded to each one of my bites and kisses. I grew bolder the more he responded. It was rather intoxicating the way he so honestly expressed his desires, and it made me wish to answer them with my own honest yearning by doing whatever I wished to do.
“Holy smokes, princess, you’re going to make me lose my mind if you keep nibbling at me like that.”
His voice was husky, dropping to a deep, beastlike octave that gave me more reason to quiver as he tried to take back the control he was very quickly losing. My mouth traveled over his collarbone, then trailed down to where his heart thudded violently against my desperate touch. The muscle in his torso visibly tautened as I scraped my teeth over his chest and then gazed back to where his gorgeous tiger eyes glowed and swirled wildly with desire to let the beast inside finally break free.
It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen—the moment when Bernie gave himself over to the beast.
Bernie’s mouth opened, his incisors sharpened to points as black stripes darkened along his body. His torso strained, the muscles somehow transforming, then hardening until they emulated stone. While the Guardian was rather large to begin with in his musculature, the additional definition gained in his partial transformation made him appear massive. It was an incredible sensation to be trapped beneath such power. One I would have never appreciated in another.
And though his appearance was only slightly altered, the feeling he exuded was primal and dangerous. He felt like the beast about to devour its prey. And if I hadn’t known him and the gentle Guardian he truly was, I would have felt stricken and immobilized by fear, because the intense power he permeated with a single glance was unmatched by any other I’d come to know in all my years. Even the high-demon hadn’t felt like this. However, what I desired so strongly that I was physically trembling because of it wasn’t something I would’ve ever imagined I’d yearn for. I wanted to submit to him. I wanted to be devoured by him.
I wanted to be his.
“Now you’ve gone and done it, princess. There’s not a chance that I’m letting you run away. Not now. Not ever,” he said with a voice that demanded I listen to every word spoken.
His body lowered, arresting mine with the fluid movement it managed in spite of its incredible size. Then, his hips thrust between my open thighs, forcing my voice to startle out of me.
“You’ll be all mine, right, darling?”
Inside, where everything had come alive from the very moment he had taken me inside his arms, I was changing. I was feeling all sorts of emotions. And though I wanted to do away with this night as soon as the morning came, there would never be a day in the future that I could. Having felt the change the minute we had joined bodies, I knew now what it was I’d denied my entire life.
No matter what I did, I would always be his.
Always.
~*~
I’d never slumbered so deeply, but when the haze of sleep finally began to clear away, the room around me shuddered and quaked.
“Are you crazy?!” I heard someone shout, “You bedded the princess?! How the…no, you know what, don’t say a damn thing. I can’t even look at you right now. Victor is going to have both our heads for this one.”
“Not here, sheesh,” Bernie’s pain-infused voice said quickly, “Let’s go discuss this somewhere the princess can’t hear.”
“Too late, you damn idiot. She’s already awake,” the familiar baritone said, jolting me fully out of my half-awake state.
Eyes opening, I sat up quickly and instantly felt the ache of my body from the previous night. Heated embarrassment became me when I realized just who was in the room, standing over the crouched and injured Bernie.
Carl looked at me closely before he was sighing a moment later with resignation. “We’re so going to get it. What did you do? Did you steal one of Ma’s love tonics?!”
Bernie stood, unusually angry. “I’d never do that to her! You know through our connection just what she means to me, Carl.”
The serious tone of Bernie’s voice had evidently taken his twin by surprise, but I was more concerned with my partially clad body, which I was resourcefully hiding with the bedding. Carl smoothed back his hair in agitation, mumbling under his breath as he turned his back and strode angrily from the room.
“I’ll see you two downstairs,” Carl said gruffly, his voice tainted with his frustration and something else. Something quite alarming as it sounded very close to guilt. “I’ve…there’s something you need to hear. Just…come downstairs when you’ve gotten dressed.”
I was stricken by the almost apologetic note to Carl’s voice. It made me instantly uneasy. Something had occurred, and with what Carl insinuated with his words and body language, it had everything to do with me, which made me immediately flit into action.
“Might I borrow your sister’s clothes?”
Bernie glanced to where I stood impatiently beside the bed, still wearing the shirt he had given me the night before. “What’s ours is yours, princess. Itzy would lend you anything of hers in a heartbeat. I’ll see you downstairs.”
The tone in Bernie’s voice was disconcerting, but I didn’t have time to worry over it as I rushed off towards the room Itzel had previously deemed hers. I searched out the dresser for something simple and easy to fight in, and headed downstairs after I’d chosen a simple black shirt and thin, leg-tight pant she disclosed that she wore on her nights in.
When I came into the room, the two Guardians were standing opposite of each other, unnaturally silent. I treaded lightly, feeling the tension in the air and unable to completely disregard my shame from earlier. Carl’s eyes met mine before he gestured for me to come forward. Bernie’s body tensed when I stood beside him. It was evident that he knew exactly what Carl was about to say.
“Princess,” the other twin started, voice grave, “It’s your brother.”
My heart throbbed painfully inside my chest. “What about Vlad?”
“He was discovered this morning,” Carl said, palpable sadness entering his voice and making my chest instantly tight, “I’m so sorry, but there wasn’t anything we could do.”
My blood ran cold, everything but the words he uttered fleeing my head. “What…what do you mean?”
“Your brother…” Carl said, visibly struggling. Bernie wrapped an arm around my trembling shoulders, “—I’m so sorry, Nyla, but we didn’t find him in time. He was already gone by the time we arrived.”
For the very first time since my mother’s death, tears burst from my eyes and I collapsed heavily to my knees in despair.
Chapter Fifteen
~***~
Bernie cradled me into his chest, holding my trembling body as I wept. I couldn’t find it inside myself to think of anything but the anguish and heart-wrenching pain of losing my brother. So, I didn’t fight his hold. I just pressed my face into his neck and let the tears of my brother’s loss stream from my eyes without an effort to contain them.
Bernie’s hold tightened as Carl’s voice filtered in from behind him, the sway of his body slowing as he hesitated in his ascent up the stairs. “I’ll hold him off for as long as I can until the princess is well enough to speak with him.”
“Who?” Bernie asked, his voice rumbling almost angrily.
“You know who,” Carl remarked sternly.
I was able to calm myself enough to listen, because the way Carl spoke gave me a reason to hear what he was saying. Lifting my head from Bernie’s neck, I caught sight of the bedroom just before the Guardian was laying me down on the bed. Bernie’s eyes were fixed to me affectionately, the empathy clear in the soft glow before his back was turned and his presence shifted.
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“What, just like that, they’re taking her?”
Taking me?
Carl’s eyes trailed over to where I sat, obviously sympathetic, but he was, first and foremost, a Guardian. “Her purpose for coming has…she will need to return to her brother, the king, Bernie. Her fiancé is already on his way.”
“Anric?” I asked, voice raspy from crying, “He intends to retrieve me here?”
Carl’s expression darkened. “He insisted.”
Meaning he gave them no choice in the matter.
Bernie offered me an over-the-shoulder look before regarding his brother with the crossing of his arms. “She needs time, Carl. She can’t just go back when she’s hurting like this.”
Swallowing, I stood from where I had been resting, body still trembling but the emotion neatly tucked away and removed from my face. I was a princess first. My brother’s body would need an escort home for a proper burial, and I couldn’t be selfish to remain here.
Still, deep inside of me, I was burning with the desire to seek the demon responsible. To snuff out his very life at the end of my own sword. To avenge my brother, who had been victim to his own pain and as a result made poor decisions. I wished with all of my being to conquer the demon who did it myself.
But I was a princess to my King first, and thus, I would go back. Returning to my realm was what I knew was coming from the beginning. Even though my heart ultimately rejected the very notion of leaving Bernie, it was my responsibility to inevitably do so.
Lifting my chin, I regarded Carl with my usual authority and ignored the penetrating stare of the Guardian beside me. “No, you are quite right. I must return to my King and give Vlad a proper burial.”
Carl’s expression saddened when faced with my determination. “Very well, I’ll—”
“No,” the resonating baritone of the man beside me cut through, silencing Carl and causing the Guardian’s face to fall with utter astonishment.
Bernie took hold of my shoulders, his tiger eyes vibrant, practically blinding. His body was already in partial transformation as the barely-there stripes appeared on his face and along his exposed neck and collar. His fangs appeared the second his mouth opened.