by Jenna Kernan
“That was wonderful,” she whispered, her body settling languid and replete.
He tucked her close beside him, her body half sprawled over his. Johnny flicked the sheet over their glistening bodies and she shut her eyes.
“When you first arrived,” he said. “I tried everything I could think of to get you to quit.”
“I almost did,” she murmured.
“Now, each day for the rest of my life I’m going to do everything I can think of to make you stay.”
“Everything?”
He nodded, his face suddenly serious. She stilled at his solemn expression losing her playful grin.
“What is it, John?”
“I love you. And I want to wake up beside you every damn day.”
She managed a smile as her eyes welled up. “I want that, too.”
John drew her down for another long, languid kiss. When she came up for air, his eyes were blazing with heat and her body hummed with need. She draped a leg over his waist and then straddled him.
Thirty minutes later she lay panting at his side and he lay motionless with one hand draped over his eyes. “I didn’t know you could ride like that,” he whispered.
“Save a horse, ride a marine,” she muttered, her words slurring as she drifted toward slumber.
“We need to get you a ring.”
“We need to get me some sleep.”
Johnny chuckled and closed his eyes.
* * *
Johnny did, indeed, heal quickly. The following day, Mac and Sonia watched as the bandages were changed. Sonia saw the wound had already closed and the scar tissue was raised and pink. The ghastly horseshoe shaped marks marred the otherwise perfect skin of his thigh on both the front and back of his leg.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
Johnny grinned and she couldn’t help smiling back, he seemed so happy.
“Never felt better.”
Sonia left him so she could shower. When she returned it was to find he had shifted into his wolf form. Her initial panic was quickly allayed by his hurried signs. He’d changed intentionally, his first time and after reassuring her, he lifted her off the ground to spin her in a circle.
Mac insisted she leave the room while he shifted back which she did with reluctance. Ten minutes later she was readmitted to find John sweating and pale, but still in high spirits.
“You did it!” she said, elated.
Sonia rushed to his side arms open wide. She didn’t know who was more pleased that he now had control of his transformation, her, her captain or Johnny.
“He’ll get better at it,” said Captain MacConnelly, the relief evident on his tired face. “Just takes practice.”
She flanked Johnny’s bed and he scooped her up beside him for a celebratory kiss. The captain cleared his throat and Sonia tried to scramble off the bed, but Johnny refused to let her go.
“Touma, my office in thirty to discuss your reassignment.”
She went cold and then hot as she recalled her transfer orders. Suddenly the room did not seem to have enough air. Was he shipping her back to the mainland? Johnny lifted her chin so she looked back at him instead of at her captain’s retreating back.
He was signing, reassuring her. Still she wouldn’t be at ease until she heard what the captain had to say.
He told her that Johnny needed a translator once more and he needed to learn sign so that the two of them could better communicate in the field. The discovery by the vampires made it imperative that he quickly get his wife out of the Pacific. He and Johnny were shipping out to Germany in just one day and her orders were to accompany them.
The captain and Johnny would train for combat assignments while she acted as translator and taught them sign. When they were in the field she would accompany them as far as possible and in some circumstances she would watch by remote camera, translating their words to headquarters.
Sonia liked the assignment. The work was important. She would be near Johnny and she would be useful. The only concern she had was teaching Captain Travis MacConnelly because he still made her nervous.
What didn’t make her nervous was leaving the country and all that was familiar to her. She didn’t care where she was as long as Johnny was there, too. There would be separations, of course, but she would bear them because it was important to Johnny to “get back in the game” as he called it. She no longer wanted to serve out her time in a quiet backwater. She wanted to be with John Loc Lam.
The rest of the day was a hectic frenzy of preparations for departure. Her second ever flight was much more relaxing than her first as she no longer feared her future. Instead she anticipated it. She began speaking to the captain both verbally and with sign, just as she had done with Johnny.
Her quarters in Panzer Kaserne unfortunately looked nearly identical to her old ones. And Johnny no longer had his pretty little cottage on the mountain. He didn’t need one. But they both missed the privacy. Johnny missed it so much that he proposed after only a week in Germany. Sonia accepted both the proposal and the lovely white-gold engagement ring set with a single half-carat diamond.
* * *
Three months later, Johnny and Mac, as she now called him, had finished their training and received orders to return to the Sandbox. Sonia would be joining them as far as Kabul, Afghanistan. But before deployment there was one final bit of business to finish. And to accomplish it, Sonia left her uniform behind in favor of a lovely mermaid style lace wedding gown. Paperwork had been signed, exemptions made and approval received in triplicate. Sonia was cleared to marry Sergeant John Loc Lam.
Johnny stood beside her in his dress blues looking so handsome he took her breath away. She was even getting used to his new haircut, though she did miss all that thick long hair. Johnny had promised to grow it back when he was discharged. Sonia suspected she would have a long wait.
Behind them, their guests filled the first three rows of the nondenominational chapel on Marine base as the chaplin, Father Tejada preformed the ceremony. Beside him, a female translator kept up with his words. To John’s left, Captain MacConnelly stood, ramrod stiff, clutching their two rings in his fist as if their protection was vital to national security. Marianna, Sonia’s sister stood to Sonia’s left. As maid of honor, she held both bouquets in a gentle hand, rendering her momentarily speechless. Her sister shifted her attention between the translator and the chaplin, reading the signs and his lips as she waited for the moment when she would return her sister’s cascading arrangement of white orchids and rosebuds. Beside Marianna stood Johnny’s sister, Joon, as her only bridesmaid.
The chaplin called for the rings. Her captain dropped them from his hand onto the open bible as one might release dice and stepped back, his duty done. The rings came to rest and where exchanged.
Sonia stared down at the twinkling diamonds that studded the white-gold band and felt herself well up. It was real and really happening. Johnny’s mom and sister had flown all the way from San Francisco to Germany to see them wed. And somewhere back a few rows, as far from the others as possible was Brianna, Mac’s wife, intentionally leaving space between her and the humans she so affected.
Father Tejada raised a hand to God as he spoke about the power vested in him and gave his permission for John to kiss his bride. Johnny turned to her and lifted the short, modest veil.
Sonia beamed up at her new husband who looked proud enough to bust a polished brass button. He held her lightly by each shoulder and leaned forward from the waist to kiss her lips, sealing his promise. The cheers reached her and Johnny drew back to present his bride to the assemblage, raising their joined hands as if they had just completed a race.
Sonia looked out at the happy faces, some cheering, some whistling and others dabbing their eyes. Marianna kissed her sister and returned her bouquet. Johnny drew Sonia’s hand into the warm crook of his arm and covered it with his opposite hand. Then they marched in unison down the aisle and toward the new life they would make together.
In that moment she felt the promise of a future bright with love and hope. He said she had given him a reason to live again but he’d given her much more than that. Johnny had made her a part of his family, his brotherhood and his life. He had given her his love and her first real home, right there in his heart.
* * * * *
Can a werewolf with deadly secrets reclaim a future with the witch he never stopped loving?
Read on for a sneak peek at the next installment of Rhyannon Byrd’s Bloodrunners series,
BLOOD WOLF DAWNING
Only from Harlequin® Nocturne
“Cian, please,” she said as carefully as she could manage, praying her voice wouldn’t tremble. “Say whatever you came to say and then leave. I honestly don’t want you here. It isn’t...it isn’t good for me.”
She watched his throat work as he swallowed, his voice low and rough in a way that had never failed to make her shiver from the inside out. “There’s a lot I need to explain. I know that, Sayre. But we don’t have the time. We need to leave this place.”
“Not a chance,” she tossed back, wondering if he’d been hit over his gorgeous head with a crazy stick. “We don’t need to do anything. I live here; you don’t. Whatever you want from me is nothing but a waste of your time. I don’t give second chances.”
Frustration shot through his narrowed eyes, making them as dark as smoke. “You never even really gave me a first chance, much less a second one.”
Amazed by those quiet, almost bitter words, she slowly shook her head, then pulled her shoulders back and glared. “Don’t make it sound like you even wanted one. You made my life hell!”
He came another step closer. “Right back at you, Sayre.”
“Then why are you even here?” she shouted, watching his eyes get wider as he slowly looked her over again. Oh...hell. Her power had just slipped free of her hold with the galvanic rise of her temper, skittering around her body in a fine spray of tiny golden sparks.
Instead of commenting, he cleared his throat and looked her right in the eye as he said, “There isn’t time to explain, but you can’t stay here, Sayre. I’m taking you back to the Alley, where you belong.”
She blinked back at him, unable to believe his arrogance.
All the pain she’d tried so hard to bury these past years came rushing back in a surge of emotion. “Cian, just stop,” she said with a derisive snort.
“Sayre.” He said her name on a long, drawn-out sigh, and she felt her fury tip from emotion...right into action. Bathed in a fiery shower of sparks, she reached behind her back and whipped out the gun she always kept tucked against her lower back when she was outside on her own. It felt unbelievably sweet to point the gleaming barrel directly at Cian Hennessey’s no-good heart.
“You know that bullets won’t kill me, Sayre.”
“They might not kill you, but they’ll hurt like a bitch.”
“You really think I could believe that you’d pull the trigger? You’re a healer, not a—”
“Seriously?” she laughed, cutting him off as she unlocked the safety with a practiced flick of her thumb. “You might have watched me grow up, Cian, but don’t for an instant think that you know what I’m capable of as a woman. People change. I’ve changed. So when I pull a gun out, you can bet your ass that I plan to use it.”
His sexy mouth pressed into a hard, irritated, challenging line. “Then do it.”
She aimed for less than an inch from the toe of his right boot and fired a perfect shot.
He worked his jaw for a few seconds, no doubt cursing her to hell and back. Then he calmly turned on his heel and headed back to his. And that made her nervous.
When she called his name out, he looked back at her over his broad shoulder, and she gave him a sharp, icy smile. “If you like your body without any extra holes in it, don’t bother coming back.”
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BLOOD WOLF DAWNING
by Rhyannon Byrd
Available January 2015
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Chapter 1
The candlelight illuminating the small chamber flickered when the heavy wooden door opened. Daeva looked up from the backgammon board to see who had entered her private room. She smiled as the little green creature, carrying a bronze tea tray, hobbled in on his spindly and knobby legs.
He set the tray on the small round table next to her, then slid onto the velvet-covered chair on the opposite side of the backgammon board.
She reached over and poured tea into two porcelain cups then handed one to him. “Prompt as usual, Klix.”
The creature accepted the offered cup and took a sip, his beady black eyes staring at her over the rim. “I wouldn’t miss our daily game, Mistress.”
She drank the hot, spiced tea and watched the goblin set up the game. It was her one small pleasure in the day, to play the ordinary game with him in her private chamber away from the others. Away from the reality of her situation.
Here she couldn’t smell the rancid odor of brimstone and sulfur or the stench of burning flesh. Here she could block out the woeful screams and pitiful mewls of those being tortured in the fire pits below. She didn’t have to make polite conversation with the other demons she wholly despised. As long as she had to stay in hell, she could at least pretend she was elsewhere when she was here in her room playing her games with her friend Klix.
Hell was the place of Daeva’s birth, but she’d done everything possible for thousands of years to get out and stay out. And she’d done pretty well. Staying topside most of her life, possessing bodies, living their lives, until some clever exorcist or demon hunter would exorcise her back to hell. Then the process would start all over again. It wasn’t perfect but she’d accepted the fact that she’d never be able to walk the mortal realm in her true form, so she’d stolen identities and pretended to be those people. It wasn’t quite like being a real mortal. But it was the best she could do in her circumstances.
At least when she took over a body, she kept her host in a dream state. They didn’t know they were being possessed. They just thought they were having one heck of an amazing dream. Daeva always gave them good, happy dreams.
Despite what a lot of lore said, not all demons were wicked. In fact, most lived, just as other beings did, somewhere between good and evil. Here, in hell, demons were split into seven types. Daeva was of the second, which consisted of lust demons. She wasn’t a full-blooded lust demon though; there had been some mixing of types over millennia, but she had one in the family tree somewhere. She didn’t possess people to just suck the sexual energy from them or those that they seduced. She wasn’t what some people would call a succubus.
But she did derive some energy from sex. Which was one of the reasons she preferred to possess the bodies of women. She liked sex with men. She supposed her affinity to them was one of her weaknesses. She’d been told as much by every other demon in her family tree. Which was one of the many reasons she hated it so much in hell.
She’d been doing okay as a mortal for years, surviving, forging a pretty good new life with a job, a home, friends, family and a man she loved. The woman whom she’d possessed had been near death in a coma when Daeva had come along. Her brain had little function so it would’ve been like being in a dream for her
when Daeva had taken over. The girl was mercifully unaware of Daeva’s presence. But that all had come to a halt about three years ago when she’d been exorcised out of her most favorite body, her most favorite life, and sent back to this...hell. She’d been looking for a way back ever since.
She’d been looking for payback on the man who’d sent her back, who just happened to be the same man she’d loved.
Klix had the game set up—he always played the black—then picked up the dice and rolled. She watched him move the pieces with his crooked fingers and smiled. He was her only comfort in a place that offered nothing but misery and suffering.
“So, my friend, what is the word out in the world?” she asked as she took her turn.
“Loir is going topside,” he said as he rolled again.
“Really?” This surprised Daeva. Loir was Klix’s twin sister. Goblins usually didn’t go to the mortal realm. They weren’t very good at assimilating into the human world. Seeing a four-foot, bald, green-skinned creature with bulbous eyes, razor-sharp talons and four sets of teeth would send anyone into a panic or an asylum. “What is her purpose?”
Klix shrugged. “I am not sure. She would not tell me much.”
“She must be accompanying someone on a task.”
He nodded. “Yes, that would be logical.” He moved some of his black pieces into the winning box. “She did say something about a key.”
