She moaned into his mouth and he took the initiative to move his tongue over hers, deepening the kiss. Eventually, it wasn’t enough and he moved to nip at her jaw, her neck, her collarbone, any piece of skin he could reach before the fabric of her dress was in the way. To remedy this, she sat up and brought his hands to the zipper at the back of the dress, at the nape of her neck. He got the hint quickly and pulled the zipper down, cold air hitting the newly exposed skin on her back.
They peeled their clothes off in this fashion, zipper by zipper. Button by button. Eventually they were both down to the last barrier between them. She knew this was the point where he would hesitate, she could see it in his eyes, a war with his own nature. She removed her bra for him, carefully reaching back and undoing the clasp in a practiced flick of her fingers. It fell away and her hard nipples hit the air. His eyes were like saucers, his pupils blown out.
She wanted to feel that fire inside him, wanted him to know it didn’t scare her one bit. In fact, it excited her. She moved to straddle his lap, to settle herself against him and then she moved her hips over him. He was the one shuddering now as her own heat moved to caress him through the fabric of his boxers. She let out soft moans when she hit sensitive parts of herself. But she kept moving. It was a little like being a teenager again, grinding in her underwear on the couch, but whatever got her point across. Eventually, he decided to move her away, pausing only a moment to remove his boxers before he hovered over her in all his glory. She swallowed a lump in her throat and watched him with dark eyes of her own. She nodded down to her underwear and he gently slid his fingers beneath the waistband and pulled down, revealing the last little bit of hidden skin.
He took a breath. They stared into each other’s eyes now.
“We’re so far past the point of no return,” he breathed out. “But are you sure you want this?”
“Yes.”
And then it happened and she careened over the edge into pure bliss and she wasn’t sure she would ever recover.
#
It was only after they’d both come down from their mutual climaxes that she learned exactly what he meant when he said that sex had been the gateway to the shifter form. He said it was like needing to release energy.
“You’re going to see something I’ve never shown anyone,” he said with a shaky voice. “I mean I’ve slept with women before, but it was always a one-night stand kind of—”
“Drake.”
She placed a finger to his lips and then pulled it away, replacing it with the light touch of her own lips. She pulled back and held his hands tightly. She nodded and he nodded back, though entirely less sure of himself.
The transformation process was more beautiful than she ever could have imagined. She’d read about it, the anatomy of it, the physics. But it felt like there was some kind of real magic floating in the air as she watched his skin turn gold, his body moved like liquid as wings appeared, his legs became hind legs, his muscled arms into talons. The only thing still recognizable about him were the eyes, hot and dark as ever.
He waited there, a glorious vision in gold and heat. She tried not to stare but it was incredibly hard when he was so positively beautiful. It was interesting. She had never in her life felt like she could refer to anything as beautiful with as much conviction as she felt for the word now. That’s exactly what Drake was. He walked with more grace than she had ever seen in a creature, and moved towards the window, nudging it with his snout. She wanted to move to open it, but she was transfixed.
She’d never even seen what Trish’s transformation looked like. Now she was naked and staring at the unashamed beauty of the dragon in front of her, and the burning eyes of the man underneath. It was glorious and heavenly, and she was sure she would fall in love with him after this.
He opened the window himself and slipped out, taking to the sky like a shooting star so close to Earth. The moonlight dazzled off his scales, shined into her eyes from where he moved back and forth across the black night sky. He was a torch in the dark, something utterly beautiful to see. She felt it take all her breath away, steal every thought from her head. It was better than the sex, she realized. As wondrous and pleasurable as that had been, seeing him like this, in his trueness, was something she would gladly trade every orgasm in her life for.
He returned after a few minutes and transformed back into the man. His body was now covered in a sheen of sweat to match where the scales had glistened. He breathed heavily, his chest rising and falling and she was reminded of him just moments ago, breathing so heavily on his back as he lay next to her on the bed, coming down from the highs of their passion. She swallowed. She wanted to put her hands all over him. She wanted to taste that salt on his body and chase every drip through the bend and folds of his muscles. He stared at her with a similar passion.
Shifting, it turned out, really did do it for him.
They moved into each other, their hands reaching out for one another. Just as they touched, just as they were about to bring their lips together and make fiery heat once more in her apartment, disaster struck. The door of the apartment banged open with a crash and the sound of splinters. Alessia didn’t have time to be embarrassed about her own nakedness and the scene of shouting strangers barging into her apartment when she saw they had guns and masks.
Drake moved in front of her, shielding her vulnerable form with his own. She wanted to move him out of the way. He was no safer, no stronger. Shifter or not, he wasn’t bulletproof, and there were several men to just one of him.
“Drake Tekkin,” one of the men in the mask shouted.
“Him,” Drake said, identifying himself.
“You’re under arrest.”
“You’re not cops.”
“We’re worse.”
They moved in on him and he moved to fight back. She wanted to tell him not to, to let it happen. But she didn’t know what horrors awaited him, wherever they planned to take him. But watching him then, as he thrashed against so many men who beat him with the butts of their guns and shouted at him to stay down, she felt her knees shake. They opened his skin with a knife someone pulled out. A long stretch of a gash went down his back, crying out red almost instantly. He didn’t make a move to show he knew he had been struck, flailing at the men who overpowered him.
She couldn’t bring herself to move in to help. She stood there, helpless. She’d been pushed to the side by the scuffle and watched as so many hands that weren’t his own moved over his naked flesh in ways much less caring than her own. It was like a sick twist, an awful perversion of the joy they’d just felt now turned on its head.
“Who are you?”
A gun was now pointed in Alessia’s face, the flaring eyes behind the mask staring her down. From somewhere across the room, Drake shouted to leave her alone but was hit hard in the stomach with a boot that knocked all the wind out of his chest.
“A grad student,” she said, shaky.
“Are you a shifter or non?” he asked.
She didn’t know which answer he wanted. She tried to get a read on the situation, on which answer would give her the best chance at getting out of all this alive and unharmed. But she couldn’t read it, so she was left with nothing but the truth. “Non.”
He looked back to the other men and dragged himself up again. “Leave her out of this. She’s my teaching assistant.”
“What’s going on?” Alessia asked, feeling a little bit more daring as she watched the bruises blossom over Drake’s face and exposed flesh of his body.
“Nothing you need to worry about,” the man said.
“You broke into my apartment.”
“And now we’re leaving.”
It wasn’t good enough. But there were so many people here and they had guns. She was naked and small, and a little too afraid to be of any help to Drake as he was dragged away. She felt useless and limp, watching him go, feeling like she was no help at all. When they were gone, all that was left was blaring silence and the cold draft com
ing through her now broken door.
Chapter 15
She didn’t know how long she stood there. She should have felt obnoxious, she was standing in her apartment, stark naked, with the door wide open and the air pouring in. She was covered in a chill and didn’t know what to do. It had been both the most exciting and most shocking moment of her life in one. The range of emotions she’d gone through probably couldn’t be healthy and her mind felt like it followed slower than her body.
Once the goosebumps set into her skin, she felt like someone had awoken her, dumped her with cold water. Suddenly she was awake and alert in her apartment. A group of people in masks with guns had broken down her door and taken Drake hostage. She stood there naked and alone. She could go after them. But she rushed into her room to get dressed nonetheless. She moved quickly after them, trying to see if they left any traces of their direction. She found nothing. The traces that they’d been there—marks on the walls, evidence of the lock being picked—but no sign of where they were going.
They knew where she lived, they’d come to find him in her apartment. They’d broken into her building and into her unit. She was being watched. Did that mean they were the same people from the rally? Drake seemed to know them. He looked at them and talked with them with such recognition. But they could be something else. Alessia heard of organizations working to police shifters from within. Shifters working as their own law enforcement to detain those who broke unofficial rules.
Figuring out who they were might give her a clue to why he was taken, but it would do nothing to help her find him. She had no idea where to start looking if either of those cases were true. She needed help, she needed an extra mind working on this. As much as he would hate it, she needed Erik’s help. He was the only one with enough shifter knowledge that she knew, and he was her closest friend. She wasn’t exactly about to run to her professor and tell him that one of his colleagues was abducted from her apartment in the middle of the night. That being said, telling Erik wouldn’t be easy either.
She went back in her apartment through the gaping hole that was left of her door and went to her phone. She didn’t bother with texts. This wasn’t something passive. She wouldn’t sit around for him to maybe respond and maybe not. She needed help now, whether it was one in the morning or not.
“Hello?”
He was groggy, clearly asleep. But he picked up. Alessia wondered if she should feel a little guilty about that. He picked up because he saw it was her calling, she was sure. But she couldn’t do much where his feelings were concerned. She had bigger things to handle, so she’d use him as she could.
“I need you to come over,” she said urgently.
“What’s wrong?” Suddenly he was awake.
“I had a group of people, I think they were shifters. They broke into my apartment. Literally. My door is hanging off its hinges,” she said.
“What the hell? Are you okay? What did they want?” She could hear that he was moving now, putting on pants maybe, getting his keys.
Now came the part where she broke his heart just a little bit more. “They took Drake.”
There was a pause, inside of which were several silent questions that he asked all at once. Yes, he was at her apartment. Yes, it was late. Yes, they were doing exactly what he was afraid they were doing. She waited, wondering if he would rescind his help, if he felt vindictive. She knew it was cruel, to ask him for help in locating a man who he didn’t like, who was his rival. But she needed the help of her friend, and she hoped that was what he focused on.
“I’m on my way,” he said finally. “Don’t go anywhere or mess with anything until I get there.”
“Okay. Thank you, Erik. So much.”
“Any time, Les.”
He hung up the call and she stood there waiting, feeling strange levels of both guilt and gratitude for her friend.
#
“Holy fucking hell,” Erik said when he finally got to the hole where the door once was. “Did they think it was made of fucking steel?”
He stepped in and over the wood chips and splinters that littered the first few steps of her apartment. He looked at the damage from inside the apartment and shook his head.
“You’re okay?’ he asked, turning to her.
She’d been sitting on the couch, her legs pulled up and in on herself, the sleeves of her loose flannel pulled completely over her hands which were tucked away. She looked and felt like a child but someone had invaded her home. The monsters in her closet were far worse when she was an adult and her mother wasn’t here to make it better. Erik walked over and kneeled in front of her, taking her tucked-away hands in his own. One of his hands went up to brush some stray hair from her face back behind her ear. For once, he had no agenda; he wasn’t doing this because he so desperately wanted to kiss her. He was doing it because he was her friend, he wanted to help her. That made her all the more guilty.
“First things first,” Erik said, getting up. “We need to make sure they didn’t bug this place.”
“Bug?”
She didn’t remember seeing anyone place anything. But a lot had been going on, placing a microphone or camera would have been easy, and if they were watching her the entire time and willing to break into her apartment, she didn’t doubt that they would have planted something to keep their tabs on her after they left. Why hadn’t she thought of that?
They both set to work, looking for the illusive big. Erik said it was usually found wrapped in some way around electronics, hidden where other wires would be. So he took to dismantling her lamps and the TV. She looked in the less likely places like under a table and in cabinets and all the places she saw bugs planted in movies. She just wanted to feel useful in some way and this was all she had.
“Gotcha, fucker,” Erik hissed and she turned.
From behind her DVD player, he pulled a small disk, maybe the size of a thumbnail, with a wire tail attached to it. He brought it over and set it on her kitchen table. It looked harmless, something she would easily overlook. But she saw the mesh in the metal across the surface that told her it was built to take in sounds. They would try to spy on her some more.
“Well, this is our only clue,” he said.
“It’s not really giving away much.”
“No. But it might if we take some long hard looks at it.”
He did just that, turning it over in his hands and looking it over for signs and hints. She didn’t know what he was looking for, so she stayed back, waiting. It was possible he didn’t even know what he was looking for, maybe he had just seen one too many spy movies and tried to make something work out of that.
“Well,” he said, staring closely at the device in his hands. “We’ve got a manufacturer at least. It might not lead anywhere since anyone can go into an Army surplus store, but it’s a start. This is a local brand, which means our baddies are from around here.”
That was one point for the chance that they were part of Drake’s organization. That wasn’t incredibly revelatory, Alessia was pretty sure they’d been watching her and now it was confirmed. It didn’t tell her anything concrete. The only real thing they could get from this was that Drake had been taken somewhere local, most likely.
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
“Please don’t tell me you’re pregnant.”
“Jesus, no.” She glared at him. “That day at the fall festival. That shifter group took me hostage.”
“What?”
“They didn’t hurt me. If anything, they might have saved me from getting trampled. But they took me to some underground bunker or meeting place. Drake was one of them. He got them to release me.”
A lot of things flashed across Erik’s face and the look of “I knew it” seemed to be among them. But it was replaced quickly with anger and horror. He took to pacing through the apartment.
“You were kidnapped two weeks ago and you didn’t feel the need to tell anyone?” he asked.
“It’s not like it was some g
uy on the street in a candy van I could pick out from a line up,” she said. “This was a terrorist organization. They said as long as I didn’t say anything and acted like nothing happened, then everything would be fine. I knew they were watching me.”
“So, you clearly didn’t play by their rules then,” Erik said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the wall.
“No,” she said, her face turning red. “I think that’s evidenced by them breaking into my damn apartment and taking Drake from right in front of me.”
Erik was quiet after that, maybe imagining what had gone on. She’d managed to stow away Drake’s clothes before he got there. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they’d been doing or at least the nature of their relationship. She felt her face settle on a constant state of blush and bit her lip, looking away. It was awkward, but they had a bigger task at hand; they needed to focus in on that.
“We need help from more than just us,” Erik said. “This is bigger.”
“Did you have someone in mind?”
“A few people. Meet me tomorrow behind the old engineering building if you want to play a bit of Scooby Doo,” Erik said. “These are people we can trust, I promise.”
She nodded. But there was still one thing wrong. “Can you stay here tonight?”
He looked at her with a furrowed brow, but not necessarily with surprise. His crossed his arms, relaxed, and sighed.
“I just don’t want to stay here alone,” she said. “Or if you want to go home, maybe can I stay with you?”
“Of course, I’ll stay here tonight,” he said with such conviction and seriousness that she almost felt lightheaded. He was a good man, a great man, and one day, she’d find a way to repay him as he deserved.
The Artistry of Love Page 45