COWBOY ROMANCE: Devon (Western Contemporary Alpha Male Bride Romance) (The Steele Brothers Book 2)

by Amanda Boone

  Tears poured out of Tessa’s eyes. “You. Can’t. Do. This.”

  He pressed his palm to her face.

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  His hand shook. “I’ve already decided.”

  She knew what to say. She had to say it. She was in his head. She just had to move one or two things around. “You can’t do this. You can’t let them get to me. You can’t let me die inside.”

  He looked at her. That had gotten his attention. “I’m not letting anyone die.”

  Tessa gulped. Her whole body was covered, filled, flooded with devotion. She wouldn’t see him go. She had visions of the two of them in this magical Kaharan settlement together. She imagined a whole different life for herself, and now for him too.

  “You’re letting yourself die, and me too. I followed your call out into the middle of nowhere. I believed in you. If you don’t come save me, if you don’t find me, I’ll never survive. One day these tests, they’ll go too far. You are killing me.” She rested her hand on his chest, her whole body shaking because she knew this had to work, because she couldn’t do it without him. “Just like your niece. Just like your whole family.” The words oozed from her mouth, the vilest of poisons.

  He threw her off himself and stood up, looking away from her as his choked breathes echoed off the walls.

  Oh no.

  Tessa went after him anyway. “I won’t let you do this, Jrym. I believe in you!”

  He turned on her, his eyes wild like fire. “You want me for yourself!”

  Tessa gasped. She had done it. “You can’t deny me.”

  He huffed and huffed and ran toward that heavy door—desperate movements.

  As he wrapped his hands around the lever, Tessa caught up with him. “I’m out there. Just come to me! Leave all of your unhappiness behind. Come to me! We could start a whole new life. You can forget you ever wanted to end it.” She had to dig so deep into herself that she reached a place she promised herself she would never visit, a place she had locked up because she had to survive. Because she couldn’t break.

  “If you don’t come for me, no one will.” Her sobs were weak, defeated. “They’ll just take me back inside. The way they guard me, I’m sure that no one even knows I exist…except for you. If you don’t want me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  His face crumpled as he looked into her eyes. “I want you.”

  Tessa huffed out a breath of relief as he rested his chin on the top of her head.

  “For some insane reason I want you more than anyone else.”

  “So stop this. Find me.”

  But he slowly shook his head.

  “Why?” Tessa cried.

  “Because I’m done with living and nothing can change that.” With that, he yanked open the door and disappeared outside.

  Without thinking, Tessa ran out after him only to find a fire raging through the building.

  Chapter Six

  Jrym’s eyes flashed open to a control board and scalding heat.

  “Jrym! Come on! We’re far too close! If you’re not here in the next thirty seconds, I will have to disengage without you!”

  Anxiety spilled out all around him. His own sweat blinded him. He glared at the gauge. It was broken. It wouldn’t tell him where he was. But when he glanced through the windshield, he realized he didn’t need it to. All he could see was the super star.

  “Autopilot, Jrym. Come on! I can’t live with myself if I let you go like this!”

  “What have I done?” Jrym felt a tinge of regret. That beautiful woman. She was gone. He would die in minutes without ever having met her.

  “JRYM!” And, what’s worse, she needed him. She had pled for him and he had turned his back. He was disgusted with himself, but what could he do?

  ***

  Tessa sobbed as quietly as she could into the night. That had been her chance, her very last chance, and she had blown it. Now he was gone, millions of miles away. Now she had no one coming to save her. Now she had no future.

  Unless…

  With a start, she realized that there were moments in that dream when she felt she was looking at him from the inside out, when she felt all that warmth while he talked about the fire. Oh, and the actual fire. She wasn’t in his dreams. She was with him. In his head. They weren’t communicating. She had unwittingly used her powers to seek him out. So she squeezed her eyes shut and tried again.

  ***

  “Jrym!” she yelled at the top of her lungs as she raced through the seared halls of that office building. Since he had disappeared, she’d have to follow her intuition to get to him. But she knew he was in there somewhere. She ran up the stairs, floor after floor after floor, looking for him, begging for him, until finally there he was, standing and facing the window, flames licking everything around him.

  He turned as if he had been waiting for her, a strange smile in his eye.

  She didn’t hesitate. She had no idea how much time she had left as it was. In any moment he could vanish. So she crossed the flames for him and clutched his shoulders, a forcing him to look at her.

  “Stay with me.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “No.” She had to blink away the sweat running down her eyebrow. Her skin throbbed and pinched from the heat. “I will not let you say that to me.”

  He tried to look away from her scalding gaze, but she wouldn’t let him. She took his face in both of her hands, because she refused to let him go. Then an urge overtook her until it was the only thing she could think to do. She hopped up to her tiptoes and pressed her lips against his.

  She didn’t know what to expect. She had never done this kind of thing before.

  But as soon as he melted into her, his hands searching her from the inside out, his lips dancing with hers, his tongue jutting into her mouth, as soon as her body responded and he lit her on fire the way that those flames could never do, she knew she had made the right choice.

  ***

  Jrym lunged toward the abort button with everything in him. That was it. She was it. He felt the spaceship power down, but they were still hurling toward the sun. “Alec!” he roared. “I’m coming!”

  He sprinted down the melted halls of that ship, thoughts bouncing around in his head. Where had this woman come from? A creature so powerful she could make him feel this way. It was like they were destined to find each other, destined to bond. Suddenly madness was not the only option. Suddenly he wasn’t alone. Suddenly he had sprung back from the dead and into the world of the living.

  Tessa. Oh powerful Tessa. She had saved him from himself, from eternal fire. Now he had to find her, because for the first time he saw a future for himself, a future with her.

  Epilogue.

  Tessa was exhausted. She had spent the better part of her first night in the real world sending mental signals to Jrym, but now she could feel him close by. Real close. She could feel the rustle in the wind, the disturbance of the grass.

  No.

  She could see it. A light beamed from the stars.

  But then there was the rustle of the men looking for her on the ground. They wouldn’t yell for her. No. That would startle her. They had thought that much through. But the rustling was more than enough to spook her.

  But that light…

  “Climb down.”

  It was Jrym’s voice in her head.

  She followed his instructions, nothing but complete trust in him. As her feet hit the cool mud, she felt strong hands wrap around her waist. She peered through the darkness at that body, at Jrym disguised as a security guard.

  Even in the shadows she could see that he was smiling. Not a cynical smile, not an insulting one, a real one.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck, relief drowning her. “Oh God. You came.”

  He chuckled into her ear. “If we’re going to be real Kaharans, you’re gonna have to stop saying that.”

  Tessa smirked. “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

  He shook her playfully, planting a kis
s on her forehead.

  She had to stifle her giggles.

  “Come on,” he said. “I need to finish this extraction.”

  With that, he took her away.

  THE END

  Bred by the Alien Lord

  Kahara Lords

  Book 10

  (Can be read as a standalone book)

  By: Lindsay Blanc

  advances, wowing her, surprising her. She didn’t like the way he read her.

  She swept his body with her gaze, watched the way he sat in his thick, leather jacket. Her eyes were like lasers, grabbing every bit of detail inside that bar, looking for anything to latch onto and use as a spring board for an intelligent comment. But Hobbes and Wollstonecraft had no place in a bar, and for all of his articulate phrases, she doubted he cared. So, she settled with a disappointing, “Are you at university?”

  Her next sip of bourbon drowned out his response. She tried her best to look past the seductive way his lips folded around each word that came out of his mouth and actually catch the meaning behind them.

  She labored, with her tongue wet from the bitter liquid, to commit his name, Paran, to memory, to come up with a snarky response to his admission of being out of school and out of a job for almost two years now, or even to his declaration of complete dedication to the study of human beings.

  A psychologist. She was falling for a psychologist. Her heart thudded from the way his eyes rolled a little out of focus when he wasn’t entirely sure of himself. Her skin burned for the coy excuses he found to place a hand on hers, to fiddle with her blouse, to “fix” her hair.

  Goosebumps sprouted on the back of her neck when he placed his hand on her chin. She had only finished half of their first drink together, but suddenly she felt overwhelmed. The blood rushed to her head as he leaned in toward her, his lips dangling toward hers. The inside of the bar, which she had been only too aware of just a couple of moments before, receded to a mere blur in the periphery. The snippets of conversation that tugged at her nerves were dulled by the sensation of his warm breath on her skin.

  Their lips touched, as if to fulfil the necessary end to a night of enriching conversation. His tongue jutted into her mouth, the strong muscle commanding the very pulse in her veins. One kiss led to another. One step after another, until he was paying her bill and leading her outside.

  Evelyn let her cunt throb for him and her body heat as he pealed layer after layer of her January garb off and discarded it on his plush rug. He lowered her onto the ground, her bare back searching for warmth in the thick carpet.

  She wrapped her legs around his waist, her fingers digging into his expansive back. His member dangled onto her belly, the throbbing organ sliding up against her skin as he pressed his body down onto hers.

  Evelyn decided not to question it. She stopped looking for the missing link that took his Ten body and made it the Four she was expecting. She stopped seeking out the catastrophic end to this amazing night. She shut her eyes and let him enter her.

  It was the best sex she had ever had.

  Chapter One

  Nine Years Later

  Evelyn watched her meeting room fill up with college juniors. Metaphysics. One after another, the hip bodies took themselves from the door to the conference table, dropping their Herschel bags on the carpet next to their chairs, slipping their Apple phones and their MacBooks out, depositing the readings she knew they would have only skimmed on the table in front of them.

  She glanced down at her own stack of books as she slipped her phone out of her back pocket. It was her third recitation that morning. Two agonizing, hour-long, one-sided conversations about Aristotle. He was basic, elementary. If anything, it should have been a leisurely discussion they could have all accomplished in their sleep.

  Evelyn had been out of the game for almost half a decade. Now here she was, in her second year as a professor of politics, hating herself and everything around her, except for the thesis that was her motivation and her son, who remained convinced that she was the best thing to ever happen to the universe.

  A lazy smile managed to find a place on her face as her mind wandered. She checked her phone again. Two minutes left. A sigh slipped from her lips. She couldn’t stand these moments of waiting when time held her hostage. Her mind would wander and she would daydream, and those daydreams would slip to reveal the memories they masked.

  But those eyes never faded. She remembered falling into them that night, with the taste of bourbon in her mouth and his, and again the next morning with the sun streaming through the window of his apartment.

  “Come with me.”

  Her heart raced. In a lifetime of feeling just short of fitting in and of draining herself so that she could hide her abilities, even from a father who believed in, no, expected them, she had never felt more accepted and terrified all at once. “Can you be any more cliché?” She had laughed about it.

  But Paran barely cracked a smile because it was a serious matter. “I don’t care how it sounds. I want you.”

  I want you.

  Those words hung in her head and, although it made no sense, she knew she felt it to. “How can you know that?”

  She remembered it clearly: He ran his hand through her hair like he had done it a million times in the past even though they had only entered the twelfth hour of knowing each other. “Your father never told you about the bonde?”

  She had scoffed. “Like I would believe a fairytale like that.”

  A knowing smile. “Not a fairytale. A prediction.”

  “How prophetic.”

  “We’re compatible biologically, which means emotionally and physically. One day, we won’t know how to exist without each other.”

  Evelyn’s own parents were evidence that this could happen, but fundamentally, she couldn’t reconcile it. It was hard enough teaching herself to be normal with her weird mind abilities and her supposedly alien father. Now, she couldn’t be just an auxiliary actor, an accessory to true Kaharan that was her father. Now, she had the face Kahara herself.

  Alien.

  Such an ugly word.

  Evelyn snuck out while Paran showered just an hour later and felt slimy about it. She threw her mind into her studies and stayed away from that bar, truly believing that she could run from this, but she didn’t bleed for nearly six weeks.

  A pregnancy test.

  Evelyn gave her eyes a squeeze, but it was too late. The memory was already behind her eyes. Nearly eight and a half years ago, she sat atop a toilet seat with her black lace panties around her ankles and her flip phone sitting open, the timer at three seconds. By the time it went off, she was already looking at the test.

  Lines. Dots. Plus sign. Minus sign. She used all kinds and they all told her she had a little person rolling around in her belly, a little person whose father she had only ever seen once in her life. Her heart dropped into the pit of her stomach, sweat sprouting out of the pores on her forehead. Fatigue gripped her eyes, the red balls burning in their sockets, leaking salty liquid down her cheeks.

  2006. She had choices. And yet, somehow, it didn’t feel like it. With two parents who were now making more money than they knew how to spend, she knew they would help her. But her father would insist on finding Paran and he would use everything in his power to make sure he succeeded in this. She made herself a deal. If she could justify it to herself—something beyond “I’m not ready,” something besides “I don’t want it”—if she could find a reason, she would get rid of it.

  Of course she couldn’t. She had the money. She had the means.

  And she hardly wanted to. This was a consequence of her night with Paran. And now that it had been deposited inside her, she didn’t want to get rid of it. That night stood out in the memory of her life like a sore thumb. He was unreal, a prince that the universe had concocted out of her wildest dreams. And now she would have a living talisman of it for the rest of her life. One that would love her and ground her, one that could fill the hole in her chest she
would sooner pretend wasn’t even there.

  By the time the last student on her roster settled into their place, her heart fluttered with the same excitement she had felt just ten years ago.

  Her class ended quicker than she thought it would, and before she knew it, she was sitting outside of one of the best private schools in the country, watching the stream of little children pour out of the doors and scanning the crowd for the little ones.

  There he was, little Pelyn. At eight years old, he had already found his perpetual smirk. He had a twinkle in his blue eyes that reminded her so much of his father, and the cut of his cheeks would eventually grow into a bone structure that could stop traffic.

  Evelyn hated how much she admired her own son. It made her feel inadequate, dependent, and vulnerable.

  “You got the stuff?” he asked as soon as he climbed into the backseat of her Volvo. He jutted his thin arm out toward her, his long fingers extended to their full length.

  Evelyn smirked, glancing up at him through the rearview mirror as she pulled out of the car-rider lane. “Not until you give me the deets.” Her smile grew wider at the sound of his groan.

  “We talked about families today.”

  Evelyn clenched her jaw, her hands tightening their grip on the steering wheel, because she knew what would come next. She wouldn’t dare check back in the rearview mirror to find her son gazing back at her with eyes so sharp they could see right through her.

  “Oh did you?” Her voice shook. Her head throbbed. Eight whole years and she had managed to avoid the question.

  “Mom?” He sounded nervous but resolved. Always ”but resolved.” No matter what he did, he was resolved. The little boy had more volition, more security in his own actions than she did in her entire life.

  “I have to write a story about family, and I have to draw a picture.”

  “That sounds interesting…” Her heart fluttered in her chest. She internally kicked herself. Why hadn’t she thought longer and harder about this moment? Why hadn’t she worked through each and every possible approach, prepared for everything, devised an exit strategy? Now all she could do was await execution.