Red Hot Alphas: 11 Novels of Sexy, Bad Boy, Alpha Males (Red Hot Boxed Sets Book 2)

by Jo Raven

She touched the bump on her head again.

  Where was she?

  She eased over against the other wall and ran her fingers over it. It was smooth too. Well, she had to find a door somewhere. So, she’d keep going. She continued her journey, inching along the wall.

  There was a sound from the other side of the room.

  High pitched, almost a whine.

  It gave Calla chills.

  She paused for a moment, shaking with fear. And then she started to move again. She needed to find a door. She needed to find a way out of here, wherever here was.

  She didn’t know how she’d hurt her head, but she guessed that whoever had put her in this room had done that to her. Must have knocked her unconscious. She didn’t know why anyone would want to put her in a room. She wasn’t the kind of woman that generally got captured, when it came down to that. Even for ritual animal sacrifices. She was pretty sure they wanted nubile virgins for that sort of thing.

  Calla was neither nubile nor a virgin. She was thirty-two years old. She was a tall woman, so she’d managed to put on pounds in her late twenties without looking fat, but that seemed to catch up to her in her thirties. So now she was a chubby woman, and she was also tall, so she towered over everyone and looked like she might crush them. The only thing that she reassured herself about when she looked in the mirror was that she hadn’t lost her shape yet. Though she was thick and padded all over, her waist still dipped in, her hips still swelled.

  Of course, she only reassured herself of this when she was wearing clothes. She tried not to see herself naked if possible. When she did, all she saw was flesh—backs of her legs dimpled with cellulite, her ample belly jiggling. It was horrific.

  Chad had always told her to shut up when she complained about her body, claiming that she was only pleasantly plump, and that he liked a little “cushion for the pushin’.” But when she saw Irene, the woman was the opposite of “cushiony,” even two months pregnant.

  Irene was the kind of woman who’d get captured and terrorized. She was the type of woman a madman would want for his sacrifice.

  Calla was… too old, too fat, and too pathetic.

  She bit down on her lip, fighting tears.

  This wasn’t doing her any good. She didn’t need to berate herself for her looks while she was trapped in this dark, silent room.

  Buck up, she told herself. Someone out there thinks you’re attractive enough to be terrorized.

  The thought was so ridiculous that she laughed—a high-pitched, frenzied sound escaped her lips. And then she clamped her hands down over her mouth. What was she doing?

  The animal would hear her.

  And she did hear it stirring, its footsteps on the floor.

  She listened to its feet moving. And it didn’t quite sound like the gait of an animal. There were only two feet—not four.

  Could it be…?

  “Hello?” she suddenly called out. She didn’t think. She just spoke. If there was a person in here, someone else besides the animal, then maybe that person could help her.

  An answering noise—a strangled moan—bestial.

  The footsteps were still coming.

  Oh…

  Oh, wait. Calla was remembering something, remembering… But that had been so much earlier in the evening, and she’d gone so many other places in the carnival since then. It couldn’t… Besides, those sorts of things were all for show. They weren’t real. Hadn’t she seen that it was just a man in a costume? Hadn’t she seen—

  The shadows in front of her moved, and he took shape in front of her.

  She couldn’t see him well, because it was so dark, but she could see the swells of his upper arms, the edge of his chin.

  He was huge, just as he’d been when she saw him before. He loomed over her, head-and-shoulders taller than Calla, like a monster or a giant.

  Her back was against the wall, and she had nowhere to go. She darted to one side.

  The monster lunged at her.

  She screamed.

  He grasped her by the shoulders, driving her back into the wall. His body pressed into hers, pinning her there. She was unable to move, the wall at her back, his hard and hot body at her front. Her soft curves gave for him. She’d never been this close to this sort of a man. Not a man so huge, so muscular, not an ounce of fat on him. He was so solid.

  Despite herself, she could feel that it was growing warm between her legs. The feel of this man against her was arousing.

  But when she looked into his shadowed face, all that was there was savagery.

  He bared his teeth, and he made a noise deep in the back of his throat.

  She whimpered. What was he going to do to her? Was she going to survive this? Maybe she was still a sacrifice of some sort. Maybe this man-beast-thing had an appetite that couldn’t be sated with willing women. What girl would agree to be with this thing? He was barely human.

  Calla wasn’t sure what was wrong with him. Maybe he was brain damaged. Mentally challenged.

  As perfectly put together as his body was, his mind was…

  She cringed from him.

  And then…

  Something happened that she wasn’t expecting.

  The man-beast-thing let go of her shoulder. He reached up to touch her face, and his fingers were just a brushing caress against her skin. He traced the outline of her jaw.

  She choked out a gasp.

  His eyebrows knitted together, and he struggled to make his mouth work. He pressed his lips together and released them, and let out some strange noise, a staccato plosive consonant sound—something between a “b” and “p.” He made it over and over again.

  And then, seemingly frustrated, he drove his fist into the wall beside her head.

  Calla started, letting out a little cry.

  The man-thing growled. He backed away from her, clenching his hands into fists. He threw his head back and let out a shrill howl of frustration. Then he retreated back into the darkness, leaving Calla to sag against the wall, struggling to catch her breath.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Earlier that day, Calla went to the carnival on a whim. She had been spending the day lying on her couch watching Netflix, which was how she spent most of her days. It was summer, and she wasn’t teaching. She’d been on vacation for about two weeks, and it was nearly July.

  Calla usually felt her summer vacations went by faster than she ever imagined they would. Each one seemed to be over before she knew it. People made a lot of noise about the idea that teachers got three months off, but it wasn’t really three months. It was about eight weeks, two weeks in June, the whole of July, and then two weeks in August. It was still quite a long vacation, of course, and Calla was grateful of it. Well, generally speaking, she was. This summer, however, it was interminable. The last two weeks had quite possibly been the longest of Calla’s life.

  She hadn’t been sure how she’d handle it. This would be her first summer without Chad, and it had been nearly seven years since she’d had a summer alone. That was so long ago that she barely remembered what it was like to be alone. Furthermore, she’d been a completely different person seven years ago. She’d been twenty-five, and there had been enormous opportunities for a twenty-five-year-old to get into in the summer. Especially a twenty-five-year-old who’d been thin.

  Occasionally, Calla considered going out for a few drinks. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. For one thing, the only bars she knew of were places that she’d frequented when she was twenty-five. She didn’t know what kind of bars thirty-somethings went to. Really, bars should advertise these sorts of things. She wished there were signs that said things like, “Finnegan’s: We welcome newly-divorced singles!” But maybe that was a depressing thing to put on a sign. God knew, everyone on earth wanted to pretend as if marriage was forever, when it was obvious that most marriages didn’t make it.

  Still, Calla had never wanted to be a statistic. She’d been sure that her bond with Chad was strong.

  She’d been
wrong.

  There were other reasons she didn’t go to bars, of course. One of the big ones was her body. She wasn’t attractive anymore, and she knew it. She rarely even bothered trying to look attractive. It hadn’t seemed important with Chad, who never seemed to care if she was wearing makeup or what her hair looked like or what she was wearing. She’d settled into a comfortable habit of wearing flowered blouses with drawstring linen pants. It was dressy enough to wear to work and comfortable enough for lounging at home. At this point, it was pretty much all she owned. But she couldn’t wear it to a bar. It was frumpy and English-teacher looking. She was an English teacher, but she didn’t want to advertise that at a bar.

  Calla had tried on a few of her old pairs of jeans, but all of them had been too tight, and she couldn’t stand wearing them. They were far too uncomfortable. Not to mention that even the baggiest of shirts over top didn’t quite camouflage the fact that her gut was hanging out over her pants.

  Very well, then, she thought. She’d just go buy new clothes. That would be a nice change of pace for her. She could pamper herself a bit. She deserved it after the year she’d had. So she took herself off to the stores to go shopping. She was gone for a long time.

  Shopping was no longer fun. Not at her age, at her size. She bought all of her linen things online from a boutique store that specialized in such things. Those kinds of clothes were meant to be flowing, so the size wasn’t very important. She didn’t need to try them on before she purchased. So, she hadn’t really been shopping in quite a while. She hadn’t known what to expect.

  She remembered shopping when she was younger. It was an exciting experience, flipping through racks and racks of clothes, selecting her size, and then going to try it all on. Everything fit back then, but she would decide which things looked better on her, and which things were cheaper, and which things she wanted the most.

  Now, the first problem was that she wasn’t quite sure of her size. The first trip to the changing room resulted in nothing usable, because all the clothes she’d picked out were too small. She had to face the fact that she was that size now.

  But that size wasn’t in the regular store. No, it was only in the plus-sized section.

  And there was less selection in the plus-sized section. Not to mention the fact that the clothes were just uglier.

  Anyway, those clothes didn’t fit either. Not really. Apparently, being plus sized meant that you had a very thick waist, according to the manufacturers of these clothes.

  It wasn’t as if Calla’s waist wasn’t ample, because it was. But the ratio of her hips to her waist was different than what the manufacturers seemed to have in mind. Which meant that the regular-sized pants would have fit her waist—that is, if she could have got them over her hips. And the plus-sized clothes fit her hips but gaped at her waist.

  Calla compromised. Leggings. There was no way that she could go wrong with leggings, right?

  She found herself a short summer dress, put it on over the leggings, bought the outfit, and left the store.

  But when she got home, and she tried it on, she wasn’t sure what she’d been thinking. She couldn’t go out in public like this. The leggings clung to her legs far too tightly, and she could see the dimples of cellulite. Her legs looked horrific.

  No. This was not an acceptable outfit.

  But she wasn’t going shopping ever again, she’d decided. That was far too depressing and futile of an exercise to be repeated.

  So, Calla had yet to go out for drinks. She’d yet to leave her house for any reason other than to go to the grocery store, as a matter of fact. She remembered that once, when she was in college, she’d been so depressed after a break up that she had pretty much stopped eating. She’d lost a lot of weight, which had been the only silver-lining to the break up.

  But not this time. No, she was ravenous in the wake of losing Chad. She ate and ate and ate. Calla didn’t really have much of a sweet tooth, but she had a weakness for salt, fat, and carbs. French fries, potato chips, pasta… Those were a few of her favorite things. She would buy those big bags of frozen French fries at the grocery store. Then she’d bake them in her oven. In the last five minutes, she’d cover them with cheddar cheese and bacon. (They sold little bags of already cooked and crumbled bacon. Calla thought it was basically the best thing in the world. She could eat bacon on pretty much anything.)

  She ate bacon cheese fries basically every day. She figured they were an appropriate breakfast food, containing both potatoes and bacon—which were certainly breakfasty—and she also ate them for lunch and dinner and for snacks.

  She was probably getting even fatter with every passing second.

  But she didn’t honestly know. A few years ago, she’d gotten rid of her scale. Weighing herself had only made her depressed, and she figured she was better off not knowing. At the time, she’d reasoned it didn’t matter as long as Chad still loved her, as long as he didn’t seem bothered by her weight gain.

  And he hadn’t seemed bothered. Nothing had ever seemed to bother Chad. It was one of the things she’d most admired about him. Calla herself was prone to worry. She got worked up over all kinds of possibilities, even ones that weren’t likely to come to pass. But Chad… he took everything in stride. And he was good at reassuring her. He’d sling an arm over her shoulders and say, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

  And she’d babble something to him, breathlessly enumerating all the worst-case scenarios she could possibly think of.

  He’d rub her shoulder. “Even if all that happens, Calla, we’ll still have each other, won’t we? So, it won’t be that bad.”

  But he’d lied, the asshole. Because he wasn’t here for her anymore, and they didn’t still have each other. He had Irene, and she had no one. Nothing.

  All she had was Netflix and cheese fries and a brand new outfit she didn’t dare wear out of the house.

  It was the thought of Chad that made her decide to go somewhere. She was starting to cry, thinking of how pathetic and lonely she was, missing him so much and wishing there was some way to get him back, when she shook herself and forced herself to stop it.

  You don’t need Chad, she told herself. You survived for twenty-five years before you met that man, and you can make it without him.

  It sounded nice in her head, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence to back up her assertion. After all, here she was falling apart in front of the Chromecast, stuffing her face with bacon cheese fries and crying. She didn’t seem like much of a survivor.

  “Well,” she said out loud, “I’ll just do something, then.” She got up off the couch, as if to punctuate her pronouncement.

  But what could she do?

  It was three in the afternoon, and she wasn’t going to go to a bar. No way. Far too early. She was trying to convince herself that she wasn’t pathetic. Getting drunk in the middle of the afternoon wasn’t going to do that.

  She picked up the newspaper, which had been delivered that morning. She kept meaning to cancel her subscription, because she never read the thing. It was a waste of money. But it wasn’t that much money, and she felt guilty, because she had watched that guy who wrote The Wire talk about how newspapers were struggling, and she wanted to support newspapers, so she never actually did cancel her subscription.

  Anyway, she flipped to the local section, because she knew there was a list of things to do in the area there, and she was determined to go somewhere.

  The first thing that jumped out at her was an article about the carnival. It was in town. There were rides and games and even some attractions. Calla hadn’t been to a carnival since she was a teenager. She thought she’d probably gone to the county fair her senior year of high school, rode some rides, eaten popcorn. She remembered having fun. She wasn’t sure why she’d never been to a carnival since.

  She’d always thought that she and Chad would do that sort of thing once they had children together.

  But of course, that was never going to happen.
/>
  That settled it. She wasn’t going to let a lack of children get in the way of her enjoying life. If she wanted to go to a carnival, then she would go. No one could stop her.

  However, she was still wearing her pajamas, and she couldn’t wear those.

  She went back to her bedroom—the room she used to share with Chad. He’d been gone for months, and she’d gotten rid of anything here that reminded her of him, but she couldn’t get rid of the room itself. And she couldn’t afford to live elsewhere. According to her agreement with Chad, she’d gotten the house in the divorce, but she’d also taken over the mortgage. So, she had the whole of that to pay on her own.

  Maybe she could sell the place, but with the market the way it was, it might take years. Meanwhile, she’d still be on the hook for the freaking mortgage.

  No, she was stuck. She had to live here, but that didn’t mean she had to stay here right now. She was going to escape this place and go to a carnival and have fun.

  She felt a surge of triumph at the thought, and she suddenly felt happier than she’d felt in months. Her face broke out into a big smile.

  Now, she just needed to get dressed. She peered over at her closet, at the rows of baggy shirts and linen pants.

  And then she looked at her new outfit, lying over a chair by the dresser, the tags still on the clothes. She was pretty sure she was going to return it.

  But, on impulse, she tugged the new clothes on. The leggings—which were half leggings, baring her calves—and the summery dress that went down about mid-thigh.

  She took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror.

  She didn’t actually look that bad, she realized. The dress covered the worst of the cellulite. And her legs actually didn’t look enormous in the tight leggings. She could see their actual shape, which was kind of nice. The summer dress was flowing enough that it skimmed over her belly and hips.

  She smiled again. Maybe she’d been too hard on herself. Sure, she wasn’t anyone’s idea of a perfect beauty, but maybe she looked okay… even a little bit pretty.

  She cocked her head to one side.