by Vivi Andrews
The words should have been ridiculous. She was emotional, in shock. They’d only met a few hours ago.
But in that time they had saved one another so many times he had lost count. The way she felt, the way they both felt, couldn’t possibly be real, but he couldn’t make himself deny her words. Instead, he leaned forward over their joined hands, holding her gaze until the last minute when her lashes swept down and his lips brushed over hers.
For a moment it was soft and gentle. Then the world fell away and he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began.
In that perfect blend, the future laid out in front of him like a feast of possibilities.
She sat across from him in a cheesy pizza joint he knew, looking so damn adorable with a dab of tomato sauce on the corner of her mouth that he had to kiss it away. “…my Tomato.” Pressing her against the door to an apartment—hers, he knew in some impossible recess of his mind—wanting her so badly he would go mad if he couldn’t get inside her this instant. Standing close behind her in a furniture store so he could breathe in the tangy citrus scent of her soap, teasing her about the expense of furniture they both knew he wanted as much as she did, just to feel her go all mock prickly in his arms. “Real men have real furniture, Matthew.” Nibbling that spot beneath her clavicle that belonged to him and him alone as they lay soft and warm together in the lazy afternoon sunlight that splashed across their big new bed. The damn rented tuxedo choking him, then lifting his gaze and seeing his reason for living walking toward him, looking soft and hopeful and so happy she was glowing from the inside out. “I now pronounce you…” Her small hand, held so tight in his, feeling so fragile and yet so perfect as they looked together at the future on that screen. So proud and excited and so damn scared he was practically shaking with it. “Jesus. Twins?” A pair of freckled, toffee faces topped by untamable red curls, just like their mother’s. Laughing and demanding and making him feel like a king. “Now me, Daddy! Fly me!” His beautiful Ronna, tucked so perfectly into the circle of his arms, trying to steal a few more minutes of her perfection before the rest of the world crawled into bed with them. “I love you, Matthew Holloway.”
Matt pulled back, the vision in his head falling away as soon as her lips fell away from his. He blinked at her, startled and bemused, and Ronna, his beautiful Ronna, smiled.
What the hell just happened?
Her smile grew wider, knowing and open. He could trust this. He could trust her. Always.
“Don’t worry, Matt. There are great things ahead for us. We’re going to live happily ever after.”
He felt a matching smile tugging at his own mouth. “You know, I have a hunch you might be right.”
He kissed her again, letting the heaven of the pull and slide of her mouth erase all of his doubts. When he lifted his head, he tucked her under his arm, knowing even before he did that she would fit perfectly there.
“Come on. Let’s go get cleaned up. I know this great pizza place you’ve gotta try.”
About the Author
Vivi Andrews lives in Alaska when she isn’t indulging her travel addiction. She’s currently hard at work on her next paranormal romance. For more about her books or the exploits of a nomadic author, please visit her website at www.viviandrews.com or stop by her blog at viviandrews.blogspot.com. Vivi also loves to hear from readers and invites you to email her at [email protected].
Look for these titles by Vivi Andrews
Now Available:
Karmic Consultants
The Ghost Shrink, the Accidental Gigolo & the Poltergeist Accountant
The Ghost Exterminator: A Love Story
The Sexorcist
The Naked Detective
A Cop and a Feel
Serengeti Shifters
Serengeti Heat
Serengeti Storm
Serengeti Lightning
Serengeti Sunrise
Coming Soon:
Ghosts of Boyfriends Past
No strings? Try hopelessly tangled.
Serengeti Sunrise
© 2011 Vivi Andrews
Serengeti Shifters, Book 4
Zoe King is itching to get out of Three Rocks. Sure, the pride is more progressive with her brother in charge. She’s just got a bad case of wanderlust…and an even worse case of the hots for Tyler Minor.
The pride’s mechanic sets her senses on fire one second, then shuts down and walks away the next. Before she hits the road for good, this lioness decides it’s time to bring their cat-and-mouse game to a satisfying end.
Twenty years ago, Tyler’s father walked out and left him with a mountain of responsibility. Now that his younger siblings are settled, the last thing he wants or needs is another obligation. Which is exactly what he’ll get if he screws around with the Alpha’s sister.
When Zoe offers—more like demands—a no-strings affair, temptation wins and he finds his hands in places they shouldn’t be, and his thoughts straying to words like his. But Zoe’s got her own ideas about possessive, chest-banging males. And they don’t include white picket fences…or letting Tyler keep her out of the danger zone when an outside threat to the pride’s secrecy becomes all too real.
Warning: This story contains sexual relations, manipulations, ultimatums and two strong-willed shifters determined to be on top.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Serengeti Sunrise:
Zoe launched herself out of the truck. “Tyler!” His only response was the clang of the heavy metal door to the garage slamming behind him after he ducked inside. “Dammit.” She stalked after him. Cutting through the garage was the fastest way to the main part of the compound, but they weren’t finished here yet and she was going to make sure he knew it.
She ran to the door, jerked it open and surged through, carried on a tide of indignant frustration.
“Tyler!” Her shout echoed in the garage bay along with the ringing clang of the heavy door banging shut behind her. “Stop running and face me, you coward!”
Two yards from the front exit, Tyler’s feet took root on the concrete floor. She could hear a growl rumbling in his chest. His lion must not have liked being called a coward. Well, hers didn’t much like him running away from her.
Her lioness was ready for this fight, had been itching for it for months.
He turned to face her, his eyes narrowed and hands loose around his hips like a gunslinger. As they faced one another across the length of the garage, she felt that high-noon feeling herself. Tension snapped in the air, the unavoidable sense that something was coming. Something that had been bearing down on them for a while now.
Love or war. Whichever it was, there wasn’t any middle ground. They’d burned it all away with the friction of the last year.
“Coward?” he asked, his voice a soft, dark rumble.
“You have another word you’d prefer?” She strolled across the concrete floor, adding an extra sway to her hips as she came to stand directly in front of him. “Chicken? Pussy, perhaps?”
“Don’t push me, Zoe.” He rumbled the warning.
“Or what? You gonna show me who’s boss? Or are you just gonna run away like you always do? Like a coward.”
His lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl and he loomed over her. She could practically feel his lion pushing against his skin, burning with the need to prove to her, once and for all, which one of them would end up on top if it ever came down to a battle for dominance. He might play at being civilized, but Tyler wanted to make her submit. She could see it in the luminous feline gold of his eyes.
“Are you going to kiss me or throttle me?” Zoe tipped her chin back, meeting his eyes with a blatant challenge. “Whichever you’re going to do, do it now. Because I’m sick of waiting for you to make up your mind.”
“What makes you think I didn’t make up my mind months ago and you just can’t take a hint?”
“What hint was that? The way you stare at me when you think I’m not looking? How you take the longest possible path between your bung
alow and the garage each evening just so you can go past my house? Or maybe the fact that you can’t tell when I’m in heat because you always want me?”
He turned away, striding toward the door. “That’s quite a healthy ego you have there.”
“It’s all in my head, is that it?” He put his hand on the door and Zoe felt her composure fracture. “Dammit, Tyler! What the fuck is your deal?” He didn’t turn back to her, but he didn’t open the door either. She shouted at his back. “You want me. I’ve made it embarrassingly obvious I want you too. So what is the big problem?”
“Your brother…”
“I’m twenty-seven years old. I don’t have to ask his permission to fuck whoever the hell I want.”
He turned, leaning his shoulders against the door, one hand still resting on the knob. “He’s the Alpha—”
“So what? This has nothing to do with him. He doesn’t even have to know.”
“He’ll know.”
“Who the fuck cares? Because I’m the Alpha’s sister, I’m not allowed to get any?”
“I don’t want any more commitments in my life. I’m sick of being responsible for everyone.”
“Who’s talking about a commitment? I’m talking about sex. Fucking. Screwing. Banging our brains out. No strings attached. I never asked you for a fucking commitment, dumbass.”
“It’s never going to be no strings. Not with the Alpha’s sister.”
“God, I am so sick of being the Alpha’s sister. I’m Zoe. Can we just have one conversation that doesn’t include Landon?”
Tyler thunked his head back against the door. “Look, Zoe, if I wanted to stay here at the pride for the rest of my life and mate with a little lioness who’d give me lots of fat babies, you’d be the first person I’d—”
She cut him off with a solid punch to his shoulder that made him wince. “You asshole. Would you listen to me for five seconds? I don’t want to marry you. I’m not Mara the fucking baby-making machine. If you tried to give me a picket fence, I would rip up the posts and shove them up your ass. So stop trying to put me in that box.” She slapped her palms flat on his chest, baring her teeth up at him. “I want sex. And I want it from you. So do you want me or not? Because I’m done waiting. We’re deciding this, once and for all. Are you a man or what? Because for someone with the teeth of an alpha lion, you’re awfully fucking scared of me.”
He grabbed her so fast her back was slamming against the door before she even realized his hands were on her waist. Her hat went flying, landing somewhere on the dirty floor. “Scared, am I?” He gripped her jaw and forced her face up to his. “Does this look like fear to you?”
His expression was harsh and unforgiving, the animal running close to the surface. There was nothing contained or distant about the heat in his eyes. Who is this man and what has he done with Tyler Minor? Zoe’s breathing quickened.
His claws flexed against her side. Zoe wet her lips. She’d goaded him to this.
A little flicker of misgiving flared in her chest.
“Hasn’t anyone told you not to bait lions?” he growled, palming her nape.
Zoe’s heart stopped then restarted and accelerated. The nervous sensation got lost in a flood of heat as he took command. Finally. This was it. After a year of foreplay, it was finally happening. Quick, rough, one and done. At last, she’d get over this stupid obsession.
Tyler Minor had her pinned between hard and harder, leaving no doubt in her mind exactly how much he wanted her. Then he leaned in and sealed his mouth over hers, and Zoe forgot everything but the taste of him. This wasn’t just a quickie to get him out of her system. This was everything.
Some secrets are dangerous. This Secret is deadly.
Something Secret This Way Comes
© 2011 Sierra Dean
Secret McQueen, Book 1
For Secret McQueen, her life feels like the punch line for a terrible joke. Abandoned at birth by her werewolf mother, hired as a teen by the vampire council of New York City to kill rogues, Secret is a part of both worlds, but belongs to neither. At twenty-two, she has carved out as close to a normal life as a bounty hunter can.
When an enemy from her past returns with her death on his mind, she is forced to call on every ounce of her mixed heritage to save herself—and everyone else in the city she calls home. As if the fate of the world wasn’t enough to deal with, there’s Lucas Rain, King of the East Coast werewolves, who seems to believe he and Secret are fated to be together. Too bad Secret also feels a connection with Desmond, Lucas’s second-in-command…
Warning: This book contains a sarcastic, kick-ass bounty hunter; a metaphysical love triangle with two sexy werewolves; a demanding vampire council; and a spicy seasoning of sex and violence.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Something Secret This Way Comes:
I recapped the events of the evening as best I could over the limitations of voicemail. “Hey, Holden, it’s Secret. I killed an unsanctioned rogue in the park tonight. He had it coming. Send the Tribunal my love.”
I was in an all-night café near Keaty’s, waiting for my nonfat no-foam latte while I left the message. The barista behind the counter, who appeared to be about fourteen, gave me a concerned look.
I flashed him my well-practiced innocent smile and said, “My dungeon master.” A spark of revelation lit upon his zitty face. “I just needed him to know the outcome of a campaign he missed.” I winked and took my drink out of his hand while he muttered something about rolling twenties.
It was late spring, and there was still a chill in the air, but the café had seen fit to set up its sidewalk patio a week or so after the snow melted. I pulled my jacket around me, though the cold didn’t really bother me, and sat on one of the wrought-iron chairs. My cell phone was securely in my pocket in case Holden called, but I expected I wouldn’t hear from him right away. I was also in no hurry to go back to the office and talk to Keaty about the state of affairs I now found myself in. I’d told him I was getting a coffee and then calling it a night.
Dawn was only an hour or two away, and there was nothing I could do to change what I’d done tonight. I would have to face the consequences when they came.
I tried to enjoy the hot, bitter sweetness of the latte, in sharp contrast to the coolness of the night, but my mind was reeling from what had happened. It took a lot to scare me, mostly because almost anything that went bump in the night I had killed at some point, but my encounter with Henry Davies had really shaken me.
The unshakeable, calm and centered Secret McQueen had been knocked on her proverbial ass by the impression of a bite mark. Maybe I had been mistaken. There was a chance part of the bite had healed faster or maybe I had been anticipating it so much I had imagined the missing tooth mark.
I prayed that I was wrong. In the six years I had been doing this, the closest anyone had ever come to truly killing me was Alexandre Peyton, and he had promised me that next time we met he wouldn’t fail. If I was right about it being his mark, I was going to need to be on my guard more than usual until things either came to a head or blew over.
As I sipped my coffee I was overcome by an unexpected warmth which had nothing to do with the drink. It was like a humid summer breeze was blowing down 81st Street, only it crawled over my body and into my pores. My mouth felt thick with musky, dense flavor. The sensation was invasive and overwhelming, and what scared me the most was how comfortable I felt with it. I licked my lips and tasted cinnamon.
My latte was vanilla.
It was then, with a ripple of electric pinpricks up my spine, I felt a man pass. He approached from behind me and seemed to be wholly unaware of my presence until he turned towards the café door. He paused before entering, his close-cropped ash-colored hair tousled by the cool night air, and fixed his radiant azure eyes on me. There were two men with him, one on either side—a brunet who was the same height, just over six feet, and another who was my height and blond. The one who was watching me looked as puzzled as I felt, but he snapped
out of it after a brief period of stunned silence and took a step in my direction.
“Hello?” he said, the way people do when they believe they already know you and simply cannot place the who and how.
If I’d been on my game, I’d have a snappy shoot-down or roll my eyes and tell him to get lost. I might have ignored him under any normal circumstances, because as a general rule I try to avoid men who might try to flirt with me. I did not date, although I had tried once or twice in the past. I had no time or patience for it, not to mention there were certain aspects of my life I could never explain to a human boyfriend.
But I could not look away, and nothing about this felt normal.
Not only could I not tear my eyes from him, something inside me pulled closer, dragging me nearer like a leash being tugged. There was a piece of me that wanted nothing more than to go to him. He was beautiful, I couldn’t deny that, but he was a stranger, and this reaction was strange to say the least. This was more than magnetism; it was practically a law of attraction. The pull knotted inside me, fluttering in my stomach with the feeling of a thousand desperate moths crowding together to seek the light of a single bare bulb. My body demanded I go to him, and I realized I was now standing. My chair was several inches behind me, and I held my drink in trembling hands. When had I stood?
His friends were watching me too, like they knew what was happening between us. They were both interested and unconcerned by my reaction. I bet none of them had to make much of an effort to attract the ladies, considering all three were picture-perfect male specimens. The man in the middle smiled, a flash of white canines, and it dawned on me what I was smelling below the cinnamon and electricity. It stopped me dead in my tracks.
