Best Lesbian Romance 2011

by Radclyffe

  The opening to my old hideout looked dank and cramped and shadowed in a way that embarrassed me and made me wonder what had possessed me to bring a girl here.

  “I haven’t been here in a while; maybe we should forget it,” I said, scratching the back of my head.

  “It’s through here?” Her voice was excited, up for anything. She got down on her hands and knees and started wiggling through the opening. My face heated up watching her from behind, her ass so sexy, her back arched to crawl through the small space in the rock. I worried about her knees. In five seconds she was out of sight, just her toes visible in the dappled sunlight on the other side.

  “Holy shit, this is beautiful!”

  I was way smaller the last time I had come here, but I crouched down and crawled through, the rock hard and rough under my weight.

  The space opened up, a small chamber carpeted in soft, thick moss. The walls were formed by massive granite boulders, smoothed down and spit out by long-ago glaciers, clustering together against the hill to hide this space, an old, secret privacy. The sky was an intense blue above us, with small shreds of sunlight filtering down through the trees on the hillside. She was staring around in wonder, her knees pressing into the damp, moss-covered earth. She sat down, arranging herself, and looked over at me.

  “So, how many girls have you brought here?” she asked, her head cocked, smiling in this way that said she was a good sport but I’d better be careful about answering.

  “I’ve never brought a girl here,” I said. “The girls I’ve dated are too city to appreciate this.”

  She looked away, her face a shutter slowly closing.

  “I’m not really your type, am I,” she said, like she was sad, but also resigned.

  I was baffled. I looked at her, her body so ripe and luscious that her handmade bikini didn’t even begin to contain it. I felt a pain in my heart, a hairline fracture, watching this girl lose her confidence. She was sitting there in a swimsuit she had been taught her whole life she did not have a right to wear, and she looked so fucking beautiful I thought I might hyperventilate or dissolve if I didn’t get my hands on her soon. How could she possibly not be aware of her effect on me?

  “You are exactly my type. I’ve just never met anyone like you before.”

  She looked at me, curiously. “Ditto,” she said, and I laughed, because that’s always what the emotionally stunted guy says in the movies after the girl says, “I love you.”

  “No, I mean it,” she said. “That’s kind of how I feel about you too.”

  She was serious. I saw it in the crease forming on her brow.

  “Come here,” she said. All her insecurity gone, her body opened up like an invitation.

  Her feet were closest to me so I went for those first, raised her toes to my lips. Her giggles turned to a low moan as I ran my tongue over her instep.

  “Taylor, come here.”

  She grabbed me and, lying back, pulled me to her; water-logged clothing pressed between us. Her mouth found mine and I couldn’t remember ever feeling anything more soft than my bottom lip between hers, her skin under my hands or her body pressed underneath me.

  It was the easiest thing in the world to slip her breasts from her bikini top, slip her nipple into my mouth. She was so generous with her response, with her body. It made my heart ache in my chest the way she opened herself to me, gave me access. It made me painfully hard the way her body moved in waves under me. The way she sighed and moaned, arched her back, cried out when my teeth found her neck.

  I wanted to please her until there was no question in her mind that she was a goddess, no question that she deserved every second of pleasure I could give her. The beast in me wanted to get rough with her, sink my teeth into that luscious flesh and watch the colors bloom under her skin. I wanted to mark her, make her irrevocably mine.

  Words fell from our mouths in clusters between kisses.

  You feel so good. I’ve wanted this for so long. I love your body, you are so fucking beautiful. I love the weight of you on top of me. Yes, please, just like that, yes.

  It felt ridiculously good to hear the word baby come out of her mouth, all soft and rolling off her tongue, and know she was talking to me. It felt ridiculously good to slip my fingers between her legs and into all that hot wetness, watching her eyes roll back and her limbs go weak as I slid in and out of her. I found a spot inside her and when I stroked it at the right angle the most glorious sounds came out of her mouth. I wanted to make her come with a fierceness that surprised me, made all my muscles tense and my teeth close on her neck a bit harder than I meant to.

  With a sharp cry, she convulsed around my fingers, spurts of her come splashing her thighs and soaking into the moss. I kissed away the pain I had caused, held her until the convulsions stopped and she came back to herself. Slowly she opened her eyes and looked into mine, the light and shadow from the leaves above playing on her beautiful face.

  “I’m so glad it’s you,” she mumbled and pulled my lips down to hers.

  Even with all the heat our bodies generated, the combination of the lengthening shadows and our wet clothing had us shivering and covered in gooseflesh before long. We crawled from our hideaway searching for some afternoon sun. We found a nice patch stretching across the bed in the guest room and discovered just how squeaky one of those old brass bed frames can be. I am truly surprised we didn’t break the thing—and that we haven’t since.

  It was dark before we dragged ourselves to the kitchen, starving. Lilly was adorable in one of my button-ups, only the middle two buttons fastened, the fabric straining against the gorgeous abundance of her chest.

  There was all the expected awkwardness of sharing a kitchen for the first time with someone you are newly in love with. Despite the fact that the kitchen is large, with plenty of counter space, I couldn’t seem to be anywhere but right on top of her. We were light-headed from sex hormones and lack of food, and we could barely keep our hands off each other long enough to produce anything edible. Finally Lilly kicked me out to go milk the goats and, in the absence of my distractions, conjured up some culinary magic.

  Eating that first meal together, I remember wondering how each bite of food could possibly make it past the swollen mass my heart had become, and how the hell I was going to convince this woman to marry me and start some crazy family with me in a falling-down farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.

  It was a lot easier than I expected, but that’s another story.

  WHEN HEARTS RUN FREE

  Radclyffe writing as L. L. Raand

  I’d only been a Were for a few weeks, but I knew I shouldn’t even be looking at the Alpha of the Adirondack lupus pack, let alone lusting after her. Then again, I’d never been very good at following protocol—probably if I had, I wouldn’t have found myself in a moonlit clearing deep in the mountains of Upstate New York about to undergo my first fully conscious shift. If I’d been following the rules, I probably wouldn’t have tried to sedate the teenager in the throes of Werefever either, but by the time the police had found her in an alley she was so far gone she was seizing. She was going to die without treatment, and there wasn’t time to wait for the Were medic on call to get to the ER. As it turned out, I was too late, and the girl died. But not before she bit me.

  I don’t remember much of what happened after her teeth sank into my wrist like two rows of razor blades, sharp and bright. Even when the flesh tore and my instruments slipped through my fingers on a river of red, I didn’t feel the pain. The burn came later, at the same time as the fever. Then the dreams. Fragments of images flickered through my rioting brain, scattered patches of light and dark like broken bits of sunshine littered over the forest floor—chasing me while I ran, the hunter and the hunted. My muscles screamed, my bones shattered and in the back of my mind always the low, throaty growl urging me to run. Run. Run.

  When I woke, my head was clear, my stomach hollow with hunger and everything was different. Beyond the closed door of my hospital r
oom, I heard the staff conversing at the nurses’ station at the other end of the hall as clearly as if they were standing beside my bed. I gasped and instantly gagged on the miasma of hospital smells deluging me—cafeteria food, antiseptic, disease, the living and the dead.

  “Breathe slowly through your mouth. It will help,” a voice as rich and lush as dark chocolate said from somewhere in the shadows of my room. “After a while you’ll learn to filter out the sounds and smells, when you want to.”

  “What happened?” My memory was still patchy.

  A blonde appeared beside my bed. She was about my age, late twenties or early thirties and a few inches above average, putting her near my height. Lithe and on the muscular side of lean, wearing a faded green T-shirt tucked into blue jeans. Beneath the smooth skin of her exposed arms the muscles were etched and taut. “You were turned four days ago by an insurgi, a rogue Were. A wolf Were.”

  “A wolf Were,” I said, a statement more than a question. She nodded. “You?”

  “Born and bred,” she said with a hint of a grin. “My name is Sylvan. Your sponsor, Roger, will be by later. He’ll help you through the transition.”

  “So, what’s next?” I pushed myself up in bed and took stock. For someone whose system had just undergone a violent, rapid mutation at the genetic, subcellular level, I felt pretty damn good. In fact, I felt terrific. I was hungry. And I was horny. I breathed deeply and smelled female. I took another look at the blonde, noting the thrust of her small breasts beneath the green cotton, the smooth, flat plane of her abdomen, the gentle flare of her hips, the tight length of her thighs. The hunger in my belly moved lower, mutated like my cells into something fierce and untamed.

  “Should I breathe slowly through my mouth now, too?” I barely contained the urge to vault over the short metal railing on the side of my bed and take her to the floor.

  “That probably won’t help.” She didn’t move back but held my gaze steadily. “You’re not human anymore. What you’re feeling right now is perfectly normal for a wolf.”

  “How many female wolves want to mate with other females?”

  A growl came from the other side of the room, and I realized we weren’t alone. Somehow I knew it was a bodyguard. A gravelly voice murmured, “Alpha,” with a warning note.

  I sniffed and smelled male, and my vision hazed with red. I shuddered, my spine tingling, my vocal cords quivering with a barely audible snarl.

  “Alpha, please. This is not advisable,” the male said, more urgently this time.

  Sylvan waved her hand as if to silence the cautionary voice and grinned again. The rims of her irises narrowed into a deep indigo band around flat black pupils. Her breasts rose and fell faster beneath her T-shirt. “More females than you might think.”

  “That’s good to know.” I clenched my fists, fighting to hold still, to force down the flames that scorched me from the inside out. Dimly, I registered a different kind of burning sensation in my palms, and when I glanced down, saw that my fingernails had elongated into short, curved dark claws. My hands bled from a series of crescent lacerations, but I felt no pain. Only want. “I think maybe you should leave. Something’s happening to me.” I sucked in a shaky breath. “I think I might be dangerous.”

  “You can’t hurt me,” she whispered, leaning over me now. Close, too close. Her scent, a mix of burning autumn leaves cut through with cinnamon and sweet clover, grew heavier, darker. “It’s your wolf. She wants to be free.”

  I panted, twisting beneath the sheets. “I think I might…Jesus, I want—”

  “But it’s too soon for you to control her.” She straightened and drifted back into the shadows. The pressure in my chest eased a fraction. “You’ll learn. You have two weeks until the next full moon. Welcome to the Adirondack Timberwolf pack, whelp.”

  I hadn’t seen her again, but I thought of her every spare minute when I wasn’t being poked, prodded and psychoanalyzed by the human physicians or being poked, prodded and indoctrinated into Were society by my sponsor. Her scent lingered like a haunting refrain, keeping me always on edge.

  Tonight the moon was full.

  “Ready?” Roger asked as the moon climbed to its zenith.

  “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t. I hadn’t had nearly enough time to adjust to the physical changes, let alone incorporate all the hierarchical social rules of the pack. But instinctively I knew that any show of weakness would be a mistake. I felt like I was coming out of my skin, and I guess I was.

  I tried to appear casual as I followed Roger toward the Pack. Maybe thirty or forty males and females gathered beneath the trees, milling restlessly in the slanting shafts of silvery moonlight. All of them moved with the powerful glide of predators. Some were already nude, others in the process of undressing.

  “Mutia,” a statuesque redhead growled as I passed.

  Mutt. To the regii, the purebreds—the natural-born Weres—I was less than a second-class citizen, I was a genetic blight. The US Order of Were Affairs had agreed to sponsor, i.e., indoctrinate, any human turned accidently, but not everyone in the Were population was happy about being forced to accept “genetic inferiors.”

  I was a physician. I knew I wasn’t inferior, not on any level. Once the mutation was complete, I was physiologically no different than any other lupus Were. Once trained, I would be able to shift at will, and I was already as fast, as strong and potentially as deadly as any other lupus female my size. Maybe more so—before my turning, I’d been a trained martial artist. I could fight. I loved competitive sparring. I loved winning.

  I could have told the Pack bitches who saw me as a threat that they had no worries, because I had no designs on their studs. None whatsoever. But I wasn’t going to crawl on my belly to be accepted or to avoid a fight. I hadn’t been at the bottom of the pack, any pack, since I was an intern a decade ago, so keeping my gaze down when the redheaded bitch challenged me, as Roger had instructed I do when the situation arose, took all my self-discipline. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I couldn’t completely suppress the growl that resonated in my throat. She snarled and took a step closer, and if I hadn’t caught a flicker of gold in the moonlight and seen her just at that moment, I probably would’ve done something stupid—like answered the bitch’s challenge right then and there and gotten my ass chewed up. Literally.

  Sylvan, a phalanx of Weres behind her, stalked out of the woods into the clearing. She wore skintight black jeans and nothing else. Her breasts rode high and proud, the muscles in her chest and abdomen rippling seductively beneath moon-kissed skin. I could smell her across the clearing, her scent so heady my mouth literally watered. My sex tightened and desire choked my senses.

  “Sylvan.” I whispered, but a whisper among Weres might as well have been a shout.

  Utter silence fell over the Pack.

  “No!” Roger gripped my arm, but it was too late.

  She was all I could see, all I could smell, all I could sense, and I took a step forward, my eyes fixed on her face. I barely registered the slash of silver before my legs were cut out from under me and I fell hard, face first to the forest floor. The weight on my back crushed me into the rich loam, and I tasted blood where a tooth had cut my lip. A knee in the center of my back kept me pinned, and one iron-tight thigh rested alongside my hip. An arm bar on the back of my neck prevented me from raising my head, but I didn’t need to see. I could scent her, sense her, feel her heat—some part of me beyond words, beyond thought, knew her.

  “You forget yourself, whelp,” Sylvan rasped in my ear.

  I’d worn only a T-shirt and sweatpants in preparation for shifting, and I felt the hard points of her nipples against my shoulder blades as she leaned close. Flame surged from deep in my core and poured into my chest, driving my breath out on a moan.

  “I’m sorry, Alpha. I’m sorry,” I gasped, suddenly burning up. A soul-deep ache tore my muscle from bone, shattering my mind. A thousand knives scored my skin, flaying sanity along with my flesh. “I�
�oh, god…I can’t breathe…hurts…”

  “You’ll be all right,” Sylvan whispered, her mouth soft against my ear. “Let her come.” Then she rolled away, calling, “Roger!”

  I screamed. My world disintegrated in a fury of agony, and all I had to cling to was her scent, her voice, the weight of her flesh on my flesh. When I came into myself once more, I was surrounded by wolves. I shook my head, took a step, and fell. A nose nuzzled my neck, as if urging me to rise. I focused on the black muzzle and large dark eyes of the hovering wolf and recognized Roger’s scent. He lifted his lip in a wolfy smile, and I tried another step. Then another. I felt powerful in a way I never had before, my body and mind intimately attuned. I laughed and heard myself growl. Roger shouldered me forward. He was bigger than me, longer and taller, but glancing around, I realized that I was bigger than most of the females and some of the males. I stumbled again when I saw her, and this time, I kept my head down, stealing glances when no one was looking.

  She was almost pure silver with only a few fingers of black in her thick ruff and along the ridge of her powerful back. Larger than almost all the wolves in the Pack, she stalked the clearing, nosing some, growling at others, playfully nipping a few. I trembled as she drew near, but I did not drop my tail or my head as many others had done. I kept my head lower than hers, but I could not take my eyes away. She was too beautiful.

  She was the Pack Alpha, the leader of hundreds of Weres, not just when they were in pelt, but in every aspect of their lives. She led not simply by might, but also by intelligence. She commanded loyalty and was given it, because she was trusted, and because she had earned it. She was my Alpha, just as I was her wolf, and even though I was there not by divinity, but by accident, I felt like I was hers.

  Then with a flurry of snapping teeth and rumbling growls, she struck. And though I had never yielded in a battle, never run from a challenge, I did not fight back. Within seconds, I was on my back, her legs straddling my exposed underbelly, her teeth buried in the thick fur of my neck. I tilted my head back and gave her my throat, a soft whine escaping me. Her scent was overpowering now, enveloping me, drowning me, and still the fire inside me burned. She snarled, my throat in her jaws, and shook her head from side to side, reminding me, reminding every wolf within sight or hearing, who ruled the Adirondack Pack. Then she released her viselike grip on me, and I instinctively licked her face. Her wolf-gold eyes gleamed in the moonlight, and for just an instant, her chest and belly settled onto mine. Then she vaulted off, loped into the center of the clearing, raised her head to the moon and howled.