Kiss of the Goddess (Grecian Goddess Trilogy Book 1)
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Kiss of the Goddess
Grecian Goddess Trilogy: Book 1
Tessa Cole
Clara Wils
Contents
Kiss Of The Goddess
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
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Kiss Of The Goddess
Tessa Cole & Clara Wils
One spunky heroine, four magical lovers... how could this dream possibly go wrong?
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Winter in Chicago is the perfect time for a mini pity party. Annie Chambers hates snow, her job sucks, and getting laid? Ha! In her dreams. When she slips on a patch of ice, opens her eyes on a tropical beach, and meets the blue-green eyes of a beautiful… merman?... she’s positive she’s dreaming. Or suffering the world’s best concussion.
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As long as she’s hallucinating, she figures she might as well enjoy it while she can. And this dream lays it on… thick. What woman wouldn’t feel sexy under the heated gazes of not one, but four men who worship her body like a goddess? What woman wouldn’t feel inspired to be as bold as she’s always wanted to be?
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Delphon, Rion, Aethan, and Keph are as magical as the world they live in. Yet this world isn’t perfect. A strange sickness is sweeping through the people, and when Annie discovers a magical ability of her own that can help, it attracts the wrong kind of attention.
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Suddenly Annie’s dream isn’t just reality, it’s a nightmare — and the four men who love her will sacrifice everything to save her from an ancient evil that wants her dead.
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Kiss of the Goddess is the first book in the Grecian Goddess trilogy, an action-packed full-length paranormal romance with four irresistible guys and a spunky heroine who doesn’t have to choose.
Kiss of the Goddess
by Tessa Cole & Clara Wils
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Copyright © 2021 Tessa Cole & Clara Wils
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Cover Design by CReya-tive
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ISBN: 978-1-988115-90-0
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written consent, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are entirely the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual locals, events, or organizations is coincidental.
Chapter 1
Annie
My phone rang. With hands numb from the cold, I pulled it from my purse, fumbled, and dropped it onto the icy sidewalk.
“Fuck!”
Several of those around me on the early morning crowded Chicago street turned my way with expressions varying from shock to annoyance at my outburst, and I flashed them my winningest grin, which I hoped said “sorry, go about your business” before turning my attention back to my phone.
Except before I could kneel to get it, another pedestrian unknowingly kicked it across the sidewalk.
“Fuck!” I snapped again and this time didn’t care who heard it or what they thought.
My life was on that phone.
More importantly, my job was on that phone.
The start-up I worked for didn’t have work phones, so everything went on our personal ones. And I had a lot on there.
As the Operations Coordinator for Siren’s Call Software, I was the “everything else” person at the company. With only seven of us in the office and five of those being developers, that left myself and my cohort Diane, to take care of the rest of the business. We were HR, office managers, finance, shipping-receiving, and most importantly internal sales. We reached out to all the police in the area to set up demos of the software, so they’d hopefully buy it.
And that meant I had the contact information for every police service in all of the Chicago area on my phone.
Something I couldn’t afford to lose.
Siren’s Call wasn’t that big yet, but we were growing and I needed that information — not to mention I was sure some of my police contacts wouldn’t have wanted their phone numbers available to just anyone.
I huffed out a breath, misting a cloud of cold air around my head, and scrambled after it.
But moving through the thick crowd of people who were all hurrying to their jobs to start their day wasn’t easy. I may have been tall for a woman, but I wasn’t particularly forceful. So, by the time I reached where my phone had been, it had been kicked again, skittering away… into a dark alley.
Wonderful.
This was the icing on top of a very foul cake, which had been the last month for me.
To start, I’d only just managed to save my job after messing up the paychecks at the beginning of the month. I’d been working overtime during the holidays at the end of December, and it had been on my list of things to do, but that list had been far too long for one person. The rest of the company was off. The checks were usually Diane’s thing, but she’d been in Mexico, and with everything else and my family commitments, I’d been so frazzled that I’d simply forgotten.
My boss, the boss, had been furious, but I’d managed to resolve that quick enough to avoid getting fired. Except the late check meant I hadn’t had enough in my account and my rent check had bounced. Then my landlord was furious. I had only just gotten that sorted out when my heater had died and the sadistic landlord — perhaps as payback for the late payment — had taken a week to fix it. Which meant my place had been freezing, so I’d stayed at my brother’s place.
Except he was getting ready for his wedding, and that meant my ex — one of his friends and a groomsman — had been there a lot, so of course I was interrogated and harassed about my pipe dream of living and working quietly in the tropics, which reminded me why we’d broken up in the first place. Not to mention that the aforementioned wedding was in two days, and I still didn’t have anything to wear.
And now, to top it all off, my phone was in some creepy alleyway, probably already broken and beyond repair.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!
I finally reached the mouth of the alley and stood there for a long moment. I wasn’t in the worst part of town, but I also wasn’t in the best. And smart girls didn’t walk into dark alleys — even a pre-dawn dark alley — alone.
Behind me, the barely risen sun sent long shadows stretching through the Chicago streets.
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly pre-dawn, and my phone was only about a dozen feet in, but still. Dark alley. At least my phone looked to be undamaged. Though perhaps some snow had gotten into it. God, I hoped not.
I pulled my thick coat tighter around me and slipped beyond the bustling sidewalk just one step into the alley. No mugging so far.
A warm wind blew out from the depths of the narrow lane… smelling of garbage. The warmth was welcome, as much as the
smell was off-putting. I didn’t know why it was warm either. Perhaps there was a sewer grate back there somewhere?
“You can do this,” I muttered to myself. But I wasn’t about to do it unprepared. My father would say, ‘this is how good women get taken by predators.’ And he might be right. Admittedly he was talking about dark alleys at one in the morning, but I’d rather be over prepared than under.
I slipped my hand into my purse and felt around for a moment, before I recalled that I’d left my taser at home.
“Well, double fuck.” If anyone had been seriously listening to me for the last minute, they’d probably be wondering about my limited vocabulary.
Finding my small umbrella, I latched onto that and pulled it out. I kept the umbrella in my purse because you never knew what a Chicago winter would bring. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was something, and I felt a little better about holding it as I shuffled a couple feet into the alley.
I inched forward, searching for danger, my nerves on high alert even though this situation didn’t demand high alert.
Had that garbage bag shifted? Was there movement in the shadows farther in?
This was ridiculous. I had no idea why I was suddenly panicking. My heart raced, my fear a lot stronger than it should have been, and I was sweating through my many layers of wool. I was going to be a right royal mess by the time I got to work.
I reached my phone, glanced down quickly, making sure I knew where it was, then snapped my gaze back up. No one was going to get the drop on me today.
Kneeling slowly, I patted the ground, hoping to feel the phone. Nothing yet, and I wasn’t going to risk looking down again and be caught unawares.
I shifted to the side, causing my coat and heavy skirt to bunch uncomfortably around my left leg, forcing me to adjust slightly. But my foot hit a patch of ice and slipped out from under me, throwing me head first toward a brick wall.
With a yelp, I lurched forward, sending my wool hat sliding down over my eyes. I flailed my arms out, trying to catch myself before I smashed my skull, and instead thumped face first onto soft ground, my breath knocked out of me—
Wait a minute.
Soft?
Where was that wall?
Sure, I was thrilled I hadn’t crashed into a solid wall, and yet what the hell had happened?
I sat up, reaching to adjust the hat, and got a face full of sand.
Sand?
Now I was blind for a different reason. Also, some had gotten into my mouth.
“Gah.”
I tried to spit it out and blink my eyes clear — I wasn’t going to use my hands again, since that was what I’d done the first time. Yet as my stinging, watery vision slowly cleared, I felt around me and grew even more confused.
The sand was hot.
Had I fallen through an unseen door into someone’s secret Zen garden?
It was the only thing that made sense, and yet it didn’t make any kind of sense at all, and not knowing what was going on was the last straw in a long line of frustrating, exhausting, stressful straws.
I’d almost lost my job. I’d almost lost my apartment. I’d had to spend time with my ex and my family who didn’t really understand me. And if I had now lost my phone, there was still a chance I’d lose my job.
Tears, not just from the sand, welled in my eyes. I sat enveloped in heat, getting far too warm in all my winter clothes and having — I’m ashamed to say — a mini pity party. This was the topper, the perfect end to a month from hell. I could only hope February would be better.
After a moment, I sucked in a breath and carefully wiped the grit and tears from my eyes.
There wasn’t anything I could do about what had already happened. The only thing I could do was keep moving forward. And to do that, I had to take stock and find my phone.
Except when I looked around everything had changed.
The alley was gone. The darkness was gone. Hell, all of Chicago was gone!
Sand stretched ahead of me as far as I could see, green-brown hills sat to my left and…was that the wash of waves I heard?
I looked to my right and indeed, a vast span of water with distant islands stretched away beyond the light-brown sandy beach.
Beach?
I was on a beach?
What… the… fuuuuck?
This had to be a dream. There was nowhere else on this world I’d rather be than on a sunny beach. It was my deepest desire, my pipe dream, and had been as long as I’d been an adult.
I hated winter, hated the cold. I had family in Chicago, a home, a life, but it wasn’t where I wanted to live.
And that was a major source of division between me and my family. I loved them and they me, but they didn’t understand. My skin burned at the drop of a hat. My ex had taken me to Barbados on vacation. I’d loved every minute of it, up until I’d gotten a sunburn so bad, I’d had to go to the hospital. He’d thought that had taught me a lesson, and changed my mind. It hadn’t. I didn’t know how I’d make it work, but there was nothing I wanted more than to be a virtual assistant on some beach somewhere.
And here I was.
But… how?
A dream, yes, it had to be a dream.
“Pardon, stranger, are you in need of aid?”
I yelped and spun at the sound of the voice behind me. It took a long moment for my brain to actually hear what had been said. The voice hadn’t sounded threatening, but it had been a burly baritone, and I didn’t want any man from some dark alley — or some mystery beach — too close to me right now, since I had no idea what the hell was going on.
But when I did see the guy who’d spoken — or so I assumed since he was the only one around — I blurted, “Holy-what-the-fuck?”
The man was stunning.
He lay on a long flat slab of black rock at the water’s edge that was part of a collection of jagged rocks, jutting up from the sand, some over a dozen feet tall. With his torso levered up on his arms so he could look at me, it was clear he wasn’t wearing anything above the waist, and I could see his broad chest and heavily muscled shoulders and arms. His face was clean-shaven, with a curious smile below startling blue-green eyes and framed by thick, blue-black hair that fell in waves past his shoulders.
In short, he was one of the most gorgeous men I’d ever seen.
But my exclamation had been more from seeing his legs, or more precisely his lack of legs. Where his legs should have been was a massive fish tail.
“I… ah…” I flashed him my hopefully-winning smile again, flustered.
He’d said something a second ago and I couldn’t recall it, and everything was just a little… too much for me right now. The sun, the sand, the handsome fish-man. I should be in a dark alley, in Chicago, in winter… not here, wherever here was.
“Do you need help?” the man asked.
“Yes?” I said, just a little too defensively. Instantly the image of me in his arms, lost in bliss, screaming that same word, came to mind and the heat of a flush rose to my face, making me far too warm in this sunny paradise with all my winter clothes on.
The man levered himself up farther and swung his not-legs over the side of the rock. Yep, that was a long fish’s tail… I wasn’t delusional.
Or at least I wasn’t delusional in my delusion?
“A mermaid?” I asked, the question slipping out.
No that wasn’t the right word.
“Mer… man?”
“We prefer merfolk, or tritons,” he said with a grin. “And from your voice, I think you’re a woman of some sort? It’s hard to tell with all those strange clothes. You must be quite hot.”
He thought I was sexy? No, he meant…
Hot. Yes. Burning up.
I’d hit my head.
I’d fallen into that wall after all, and hit my head and now I was lying unconscious — probably bleeding out and feverish — in that alley, fantasizing about… merfolk.
Would anyone find me? Would I wake up? At the very least, I was going to be
very late for work.
“It’s a dream,” I said softly. But hearing the words out loud didn’t seem to change anything. “It’s all just a dream.” Repeating it didn’t help.
And if it was a dream, why was I still in my winter woolies? Why — if I’d chosen to dream of sexy fish-guy here — wasn’t I in his arms? Hell, he didn’t even have a cock! Some dream-man he was.
Perhaps that was some comment on my psyche. I couldn’t even get laid in my dreams.
“How do… merfolk have sex?” I blurted out, and my cheeks burned, even though this was a dream and I had no reason to be embarrassed by my own subconscious.
But that was the frustrating illogic of dreams.
He chuckled and flashed me a mischievous grin. “That’s a little forward, don’t you think? But I’d be happy to show you if you wanted to shed some of those heavy things you’re wearing.”
My blush turned searing at his proposition… or had that been in response to my proposition?
And ah, hell, it was a dream after all.
If I was unconscious and freezing to death in an alley somewhere, I’d be an idiot to deny my dream.
I began stripping off my things, but I was wearing a lot — and not a lot in the dream sense where the dream just kept adding clothes and I never got past the undressing stage. Winter in the Windy City wasn’t great for sexy clothes. Not that I cared much for such things anyway. I just wanted to be warm. So, there were a lot of layers: heavy down coat, boots, wool socks, long woolen skirt, thick knitted sweater. Now I was just down to a long-sleeved shirt, woolen leggings and my underthings.