by Dante King
Empire Builder 1
Breed, Populate, Conquer
Dante King
Copyright © 2021 by Dante King
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
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About the Author
Chapter One
Melody’s soft voice moaned urgently in Ben’s ear as his tension released inside of her. His vision exploded with light, and his body prickled with the heat of her skin pressed against his own. His muscles tensed, seizing up as he teetered over the edge.
Melody’s legs wrapped around his waist and squeezed as Ben froze then released. He took in one deep breath after another as each pump filled her before he collapsed on the bed, laying on his side. Melody gazed at him with warm, sensual eyes as she gently dragged her fingertips over his chest. A soft noise that sounded almost like purring flowed from her mouth.
Ben rolled off to the other side of the stiff hotel bed and stared at the cream-colored ceiling, lit by early morning sun. The light reflected off beige walls as it filtered through the thin curtains of the eastward facing room. The furnishing was sparse—a couple of bedside tables topped with lamps, a coffee table with a pair of chairs, and a low cabinet with a TV. The only other things in the room were their clothes, which were strewn haphazardly all the way from the door to the bed.
The room was sound-proofed, which was good, as the cheapish hotel was downtown where lots of ears were around. The only noise in the otherwise still air was the quiet hum of the AC, cranked up to the max in the late summer heat.
As Ben caught his breath, the events of the last few days rushed through his head. Just a few weeks ago, he’d been frantically cramming for the last of his CS exams. He couldn’t have imagined then that, just a few days away from starting his new position in one of the most prestigious tech firms on the West Coast, he’d be lying next to this hot as hell woman in some random hotel.
It was his last weekend of freedom before entering the working world, so he’d decided to make the most of it. He’d met some of the guys in the new firm already, guys who liked to party. Opportunities for getting wild would be hard to come by during the seventy-hour work weeks to come, so they’d decided to have some fun while they could.
The club last night with the guys from work had been fun, but he hadn’t at all expected the night to end this well. He’d met this beautiful foreign girl, whom he’d figured to be an exchange student, out on the dance floor. Her dance moves had caught his eye from a mile off, like there was no one on the dance floor but her. She was graceful, and could keep a good rhythm, sure, but the way she was dancing was totally different than everyone else, like she was using ballet moves to a beat. And she had this…grace that none of the other girls on the dance floor, all of them half-wasted on vodka cranberries, could hope to match. She’d met his eyes from across the club, narrowing them in a seductive, come-hither way that’d struck him as almost feline.
They danced, they drank, they made out under the stairs. And when she’d grabbed his cock through his jeans with that same seductive look in her eyes, he’d known it was time to get her to the nearest hotel.
“Benjamin of Davies,” Melody half-whispered, drawing his name out to sound like “Benzhameen,” her accent peculiar and hard to place. “You really have a way with women.”
He’d given up on explaining to her that it was just Benjamin Davies. She’d kept insisting that Davies was the name of his realm. Why she was talking about “realms,” he had no idea. Best not to ask too many questions when you’re minutes away from getting a total dime into bed with you.
Her accent had struck him as Russian-ish. But it still seemed odd how fascinated she was with his mobile phone, as if she’d never seen one before. Civilization wasn’t that far behind in Eastern Europe, was it?
Not only that, but last night she’d been fascinated with the switches on the bedside lamps. He figured she had to be pulling his leg when she asked if they were powered by magic, but the wide-eyed stare on her face was cute, so he didn’t complain.
Now, Ben’s breath started to steady a bit more. He’d never been with a woman who could knock him on his ass quite like Melody could. He liked to lift weights, and he’d taken part in some martial arts training on and off too. But the night of athleticism they’d just had still pushed him to his limits.
Ben shifted his weight, rolling over to put his arm around Melody’s curvy waist. Where he’d expected to feel smooth, soft skin, the taut but supple muscular flesh of the lovely woman’s torso, his left forearm touched a hard and slippery surface. It was lukewarm like skin, but not as nice to the touch.
His half-closed eyes opened wide.
Melody’s half of the bed was empty, except for a round … egg.
That’s what it looked like. It was a creamy-colored round egg, around football-sized, lying in the bed next to him. The surface was discolored by reddish-brown streaks, three in a row, dotted around the circumference, almost resembling the kinds of scratches an animal’s claws might make.
Ben shook his head. Why was he pondering the pattern of the egg’s surface? There was a fucking egg on the hotel bed beside him! He reached over and poked the thing, the egg wobbling on its side. What the hell was going on?
“Benzhameen,” Melody’s accented voice lilted from behind him. “It…it worked.”
“What worked?” he asked, still staring at this weird egg-shaped object. If there was one thing you never expected to see after knocking boots with a beautiful woman, it was. . . whatever the hell this was.
Ben pushed his hands under him and lifted his body back against the headboard.
Melody stood to the left, leaning over the bed to study the surface of the egg. She was totally naked, as if it were no big deal at all.
All thoughts about the egg vanished as his attention was completely absorbed by a couple of other round objects, even closer to his vision.
He’d slept with some hot girls before, some sevens, even an eight every now and them. He’d even dated this girl Amy who was a hard nine. CS majors tended not to have the best of luck pulling the ladies, but as the top student in his class, he’d managed to land a high-paying internship at a good firm. And the promise of a fat paycheck in the very near future allowed him to splurge a bit on dates. Or, at least give a girl a better time than simply Fridays at Dunkin’ Donuts like the rest of his broke classmates.
S
o, he had some experience with girls he’d only dreamed of dating in high school.
But Melody blew all of them out of the water. The lithe muscles of her long legs drew his eyes up toward the full but firm curve of her mouth-watering ass, which had so perfectly filled his hands last night.
Her stomach was looking a little more rounded than he remembered from the previous evening, but the skin was taut, and he recalled the soft warmth of her body against his.
But it was her breasts that really drew his attention. He’d always been a boob man, much as he appreciated a nice round ass. This girl’s breasts were among the largest he’d ever seen, and definitely natural. They were firm and pert, even without a bra to hold them up. Just staring at her bold pink nipples brought the memory of how they’d tasted.
Melody turned to face him, and her cheeks flushed as she saw him staring. But if she was embarrassed, she made no move to cover herself. Foreign women could be much less inhibited than American women, and way more comfortable with nakedness.
And her face had that exotic allure that he’d always had a weakness for. Her cheeks were round, her lips full, her purple eyes piercing, framed by long eyelashes.
Wait. . . Purple eyes? Am I seeing things?
Her hair was purple too, he realized. He hadn’t noticed any of the details in the dark club the night before, or in the low light of the hotel bedroom, but he supposed she must have been wearing contacts, and hadn’t had time to take them out. Those eyes and the purple hair suited her.
But her hair was strange. He’d known girls who’d dyed their hair weird colors like red and blue and orange, and the dye jobs always seemed to have a fakeness to them—and you could usually see their natural color at the roots. But her hair was solid purple, from root to tip. As much as he wanted to believe the color was fake, it seemed so real.
Melody stared into his eyes curiously, her head cocked to the side. Ben ran his fingers through his close-cropped hair, trying to focus, to figure out what the hell was going on. Then she murmured his name once again.
“Benzhameen?”
“It worked, you said?” He could hear his own voice almost whispering in a daze. “What worked?”
Melody laughed, a lilting, sweet-sounding laugh, her purple hair shaking as it cascaded over her cheeks.
Melody pointed at the egg-shaped object on the bed beside him. “That worked, Benjamin. What else would I be talking about?”
She was talking about this egg thing as if it were the most normal happening in the world, like the typical result of what they’d gotten up to last night.
Her eyes stayed locked onto his, the purple irises almost eclipsed by her big, Disney-like pupils. This girl was a strange one—who wears colored contacts and then doesn’t take them out before going to bed? Maybe it was nothing, but he needed some answers.
“Alright, Melody—any chance you can tell me what the hell’s going on?” Ben’s tone was sharp, and Melody stiffened with wide-eyed attention as if she’d received a command from a general.
“I mean, I’ve got nothing against, uh, experimenting in the bedroom.” Ben swept his hand toward the pale egg beside him, the thing still radiating warmth. “But this doesn’t look like any toy I’ve ever seen before. What is it, a Japanese sex egg or something?”
Melody laughed again. “Benjamin, this is no toy. This is our child.” She seized his left hand in both of hers then stared lovingly at the egg beside him as if it were a newborn baby.
Ben tried to wrap his head around what she was saying. The egg was their child? She’d been acting weird ever since he’d met her last night, but this was downright bonkers.
“What are you saying?” Ben placed his hand on the surface of the egg.
As soon as his fingers touched the warm round shell, his stomach jumped. The room seemed to darken, and the image of something like a lynx prowling through the snow on unsteady legs appeared in his mind, clear as a picture. But this lynx-like creature was unlike any big cat Ben had seen on the Discovery Channel. It was already the size of a large tiger, but its blue fur made it look even bigger. And the sharp horns curling out of its forehead increased its stature still further. The lynx’s eyes gleamed in a way that was menacing and mysterious and otherworldly.
Ben snatched his hand away from the egg, the vision vanishing from his head as quickly as it had appeared.
What was going on? He didn’t like to mess around with drugs—his brain was how he made his living, after all. So some kind of side-effect was no explanation. Had Melody roofied him? He couldn’t think of any other reason for this crazy hallucination.
Ben caught her gaze again. She was staring at him with the kind of affectionate frown you might reserve for a small child in the process of telling you about some make-believe animal he’d come up with.
I’m dreaming—that has to be it. Nightmares had been something he'd dealt with for years, sometimes seeing scenes straight out of a Hellraiser movie, complete with torture and hideous monsters.
Ben’s dreams tended to be worse after drinking, so his brain conjuring up this beautiful purple-haired and purple-eyed woman was a surprising change—one that he wasn’t going to complain about. Maybe this all was the booze trying to work its way out of his system, his body coming up with a new way to tell him he’d had one too many.
As pleasant as this little fantasy might’ve been, however, it was time for him to wake up.
Ben pinched his left arm, just above the elbow. He winced at the sudden jolt of pain, then looked around. Nope, no change. Then he slapped his right cheek, hard. The sharp crack of skin on skin was loud in the relative quiet of the hotel room, unbroken by anything but the rhythmic blowing of the AC.
“Goodness!” Melody cried out. “For what reason are you hitting yourself?” She rushed over to him and began caressing his cheek with the back of her hand.
“I need to wake myself up,” he said, his cheek still throbbing.
Melody looked perplexed. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Well, this is obviously some crazy dream. Don’t get me wrong. It’s fun, and you’re a hell of a lot easier on the eyes than what my brain usually comes up with when I’m sleeping. But I’ve got to get ready for my new job. So…”
Melody nodded. “I completely understand what you are feeling.” She leaned forward and abruptly kissed him on the lips. The sensation of her lips on his was so sudden, so intense, that he very nearly grabbed her by the arms and pulled her into bed for another round.
But she stood up, and he got the impression the kiss was more about comforting him than sex. “I too thought this was a dream when it happened to me. I couldn’t believe I was hearing the truth when Archmage Kamila announced that I, a lowly Elemental Acolyte, would be the one sent on a quest to find the Forgotten Ruler.”
There was wonder in her voice, and she spoke through a broad, dreamy smile. It was like she was recounting something amazing that she still couldn’t believe had happened.
And the weirdest part was that as she said the name “Forgotten Ruler,” she pointed at Ben.
“But it was no dream,” she continued. “I could not have dreamt up a man that would fuck me like you did.”
Hearing a word like that out of a sweet, doe-eyed woman like her was a hell of a shock. But she somehow made it sound sexy all the same. Melody enunciated it with passion and expression, clasping her hands to her chest as if she were an actor on a stage performing for a crowd.
Melody turned her attention back to the egg, the smile still on her lips. “And look, Benjamin of Davies, our union has brought us a child. No dream could account for such a thing.”
“Okay, lady,” Ben swung his legs to the side of the bed. “First of all, nothing but a dream could account for me waking up next to a freaking dinosaur egg in my bed. But since I don’t seem to be waking up, I think maybe what’s going on is that we both need some professional help. If it’s all the same to you, I’m going to call my cousin James. He’s a shrink, so maybe he
can tell me why I’m imagining egg babies, or whatever the hell this thing is.”
Ben reached for his cellphone on the bedside table. But before he could even get close, Melody gasped and snatched the phone. Then, with a feminine grunt, she hurled it against the wall. It collided against the wall with a sickening thud-crack, the phone falling onto the carpet.
“What the hell?” he asked, his eyes on the phone. “Why did you do that?”
“Benjamin! You must not use the Summoning Stone! No one can know of what has taken place here today.” Her eyes stayed on the surely-ruined phone as if she expected it to come to life.
Still in a state of shock, Ben rushed over the phone and snatched it up to survey the damage. Sure enough, the screen had shattered into a thousand hair-thin fissures. Bits of glass lay scattered on the carpet. He pressed the power button and found, much to his chagrin, that it wouldn’t even turn on. The wall was indented where Melody had thrown it. She’d whipped the thing like a major-league pitcher—Ben would have been impressed if he weren’t so mad.
Well, shit.
Ben was broke as hell at the moment, so he couldn’t afford to replace the screen or the device itself. He’d get a paycheck in a couple of weeks, but for the time being, he was phone-less. He’d been fantasizing about all the cool stuff he could buy with his first paycheck, and a replacement cellphone wasn’t exactly one of them.
More importantly, not having a phone meant he wouldn’t be able to call his cousin—or anyone else. He was stuck in the middle of whatever the hell was going on.