Lone Enforcer: An Alpha Shifter Suspense Romance (Wolf Enforcers Book 2)
Page 8
“Someday I’m going to have you leave that on, but for now, I have to taste you.” He took charge, ripping the hotel bed-cover back and rolling her on to her back on the sheets. He dove face first into her pussy. She arched back against the sheets, lacing her fingers into his hair as he went straight for her center, licking and tasting. He held her ass up with his hands and she marveled again at how strong he was. Was it from all the ranch work he did or was it something about being a wolf shifter?
She didn’t know, but she was beginning to think she wanted to find out.
He found her clit and she nearly shot off of the bed. “Luca,” was all she could get out as he took her to the center of her own pleasure, bringing her again and again to the brink—stopping before she tumbled over the edge.
There was so much she wanted to do. Take him in her mouth and suck on his cock while he licked her pussy. Have him put her on her knees and take her from behind, feel how deep he would sink in. See just what he thought she could take and then—she wanted to push that limit past her own boundaries.
But not now. Right now, she just wanted him inside her, taking her up and over.
She urged him up and on top of her. “Luca, I want you now.”
His breath was coming in fast pants, and she saw the need in his eyes. She knew he wanted to have sex with her just as much as she did, but he stopped, pulling back and asking, “Are you sure? You’ve been through a lot today.”
Even with his need, Luca still was putting her first.
He’d put her above his pack when he’d kept her secret. He’d come to her rescue. She hung on to him secure in the knowledge that, even if she was alone in this world, he’d be there for her.
Everything that had happened rushed over Natalie like a breaking wave. All the tension and fear and not knowing what was going to happen, was too much. She clung to Luca, using him as ballast in this weird world of wolves she’d tumbled into.
“I’m sure.”
At her words something raw and wild flared in his eyes. It was dangerous and scary, and as exciting as hell. She wanted this man. Wanted the strong quiet cowboy. Wanted the safety. Wanted the danger that lurked just under his skin.
He rolled on a condom and moved back over her. She used her fingers to guide him and he entered her. She shuddered as he stilled, letting her stretch to take him in. Then he began to move. Before she even had a chance to think her orgasm rolled through her.
It was blinding and she arched and held on as he shook and shuddered into her.
The lay together. Their skin was sticky with summer’s heat and she didn’t care. She buried her face in his shoulder, taking in everything about him.
“Ah, Natalie. Next time we’ll take our time.”
All of a sudden she knew, she definitely wanted a next time.“Yes. And the next, and the next one after that.”
She traced the white scars she’d seen earlier on his body, wondering at what must have caused them. “Someday I want to hear each and every story that’s carved into your skin.” He had so much in his life and she wanted to find out about it all. “What caused all of these?”
He gave her a quick kiss, pulled off, and went to clean up. “Does that mean you’ll hang around long enough to find out.” He called from the bathroom.
“I do have a job. Sort of.” She hated her job. It was a means to an end and without Yvette in Denver, she wasn’t even sure what that end was anymore.
“I never found out, what it is you do?”
“I’m the manager at a small gift shop.”
“So, if you decide to take a month off and hang out here with us wolves, what’s your boss going to say?”
“He’ll fire me.”
“Do you care?” He went to the air conditioner and turned it on.
“No. Not anymore.” The blast of air skimmed over her heated skin and she stretched, reveling in the sweet coolness. “Without Yvette, our apartment is so empty I almost can’t stand it. That’s really why I came up here. I needed to fill the space.”
“I won’t be your best friend.”
“I don’t want you to be.”
“What do you want?” He came and stood by the side of the bed.
“I don’t know.” She reached up to him, and he took her hand. Their fingers laced together and she tugged him down next to her. “But I have decided, I’m going to take Anna up on her offer. I’m going to pack up my apartment and come up here and see where it takes me.”
He pulled her closer to him, as if he couldn’t get enough of her. “I like the sound of that.”
“So do I, cowboy. So do I.”
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DEAR READER,
Thank you for reading LONE ENFORCER. I hope you enjoyed discovering Luca and Natalie’s story as much as I enjoyed writing it. You may be able to tell from this particular book that I love, not just the mountains of Colorado, but the Western part of it too. Yes, I used to own a horse. And I rode with a Western saddle and made it up and down some steep trails. It made writing my cowboy shifter romance all the more fun, and I hope it got you thinking of horses and cowboys too!
This series has been a crazy one with the books written totally out of order. First I wrote Blood Enforcer, then Wolf Enforcer, then Lone Enforcer, and finally Pack Enforcer. But since Lone Enforcer originally came out in a box set, it’s been published before, but once again, in the wrong order. Crazy!
I want to thank you for purchasing it on its own. It means a lot to me that you care enough to buy this book, and others I write. And it means I’ll be able to keep writing new romances for you. Yay!!!
A special thank you to my daughter, D2: for creating the cover. I found myself without a cover artist and she jumped into the fray, and into the business! I think she’s found something she loves to do and can earn a little money from. It’s super nice to be able to hire her and to recommend her to other authors. Thanks so much, sweetie!
I also want to thank you, the reader, for reviewing my books and giving other readers the opportunity to discover new stories. If you enjoyed LONE ENFORCER, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Your reviews help readers like you to discover new authors, and new books to love—so keep spreading the word of what you like to read.
Cheers!
-Jessica
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Discover all Jessica Aspen’s paranormal romance today!
TALES OF THE BLACK COURT
THE DARK HUNTSMAN
PRINCE BY BLOOD AND BONE
BROKEN MIRROR
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MIRROR
BEFORE THE WINTER QUEEN
THE WINTER QUEEN’S DRAGON
QUEEN OF THORNS
SEXY SHIFTER FAIRYTALE ROMANCES
RED
SNOW
&nbs
p; GOLDI
SCARLETT
SILVER
CINDER
WOLF ENFORCERS
WOLF ENFORCER
LONE ENFORCER
BLOOD ENFORCER
PACK ENFORCER
ROGUE ENFORCER
(Rogue Enforcer is only available to newsletter subscribers in the Jessica Aspen Starter Library)
Your free preview of Blood Enforcer is next.
BLOOD ENFORCER
By Jessica Aspen
Chapter One
THERE WAS NO GOOD WAY to find out you had the disease, but Glenna thought this had to be the worst.
She’d been attacked, almost died from something so horrible her brain shied away from remembering. Now, she lay alone in her curtained alcove of the ER, blinking at the bright lights and struggling not to bleed out. She focused on sorting out the smells—antiseptic, bleach, blood—anything to avoid the memory of her own skin being torn by someone’s teeth, the hits to her stomach, the taste of her attacker’s blood in her own frenzied defense of bites and punches and torn fingernails.
From around the curtain, two orderlies came at her, looking like prize fighters under their strained-tight white coats and masks. Their latex-covered hands locked her wrists into soft padded restraints, clamping them onto the steel bed frame with cold, hard clicks.
Then, and only then, did her ER doc approach. Dr. Wong’s formerly friendly features now hid behind a white cotton mask over which she’d laid a large plastic one, leaving only enough room to reveal eyes tight with fear. She hesitated several feet away, just close enough for Glenna to hear her loud whisper.
“I’m sorry to tell you that you have lycanthroism.” The doctor’s glance darted away from Glenna’s. “The CDC is on their way.”
Shock rolled through Glenna’s pain-racked body, setting her damaged nerves on fire. Her mouth fished open and shut. Open and shut.
Lycanthroism. It couldn’t be.
She peered at Dr. Wong through swollen eyelids and tried to make out the rest of the words whispered from behind the sterile mask.
Isolation.
Highly contagious.
Fatal.
Impossible. She couldn’t have lycanthroism—she was getting married. Things like this didn’t happen to people like her. Was the disease even real?
She’d always thought it was a hoax. All the recent media hoopla about the brand-new disease went through her head. Accounts were mixed—so mixed she’d thought they’d made it all up to fill a slow news week.
They said—first you went crazy, hallucinating things that weren’t real. And then, as the disease ravaged your body, you totally lost who and what you were, and started attacking people close to you—anyone close to you. Biting and clawing…as if you’d turned into a beast.
They said—victims tore out family members’ throats then ran naked through their neighborhoods, blood streaming down their faces and necks, howling—before dropping dead.
They said—it was as if the victims thought they were werewolves, hence the name.
But there were no real pictures, and she couldn’t remember one confirmed case. Not one. Was she the first? This couldn’t be happening.
Her bed rolled away from the ER, pushed by the beefy men dragging her IV behind them. There was a flash, and then another, as the nurses took pictures of her with their phones. Glenna struggled to make a sound, to get something, anything, out through her bruised windpipe.
“Wait,” she croaked.
But no one paid any attention to her desperation.
Overhead lights flashed in and out of her vision as her orderly jailers whisked her down a dark corridor and into a small back elevator, where gravity’s pull made her stomach lurch. The movement tore through her injuries, stole her breath, and kept her quiet for the rest of the ride. It was when they wheeled her towards a set of locked steel doors—and she heard the buzzer—that she was finally able to scream.
GLENNA SWAM UP THROUGH the burning in her gut and fought her way to consciousness. Two nurses stood next to her bed in a darkened bare-bones hospital room.
“Poor thing. I would have gone crazy too.”
She tried to see the nurse standing next to her, but the only things she could make out were the plastic mask of the woman’s protective head-gear leering in and out of her blurred vision.
She couldn’t even make out that much of the man who responded, he and his scrubs were just a smudge of light blue standing in the shadows. “You can feel sorry for her now, but soon she’ll be as crazy as one of the monsters who did this to her. They need to be stopped.”
“But it’s not her fault. They attacked her. She never asked to get sick. Wow, I never even believed it was real. She still looks so normal.” There was some quiet movement and the woman added, “Maybe she’ll volunteer to be studied and they can figure out how to fight this.”
“Maybe she’ll get lucky and die before the insanity sets in and she starts hallucinating she’s a wolf.” He howled quietly.
The other nurse giggled, but then got serious. Her voice dropped lower. “You’d better shut up or you’ll get suspended.” They moved away from the bed. “What’s taking the CDC so long? I’ll feel better when she’s out of our ward, whatever the truth is.”
There were some beeps of a combination lock and the door clicked open. They were leaving.
Glenna tried to lift her hand and reach out—to clutch some sense of humanity from the nurses—but her will drained away under the effects of the drug sweeping her system.
“Too bad,” blue scrubs said. “She’s probably pretty when her face isn’t so swollen. I like redheads.” The door closed and the bolt shot home with a clang, cutting off the rest of their conversation. She fought the demanding wave of black trying to suck her back under. Until, finally surrendering, she lapsed into unconsciousness.
Chapter Two
Sam hung his head low, letting his long, bleached-blonde hair swing forward to hide his face, avoiding the all-seeing eye of the hospital security camera. He pushed the oversized maintenance cart into the stairway where it took up most of the landing and hefted the mop and bucket up the one flight of stairs to the hospital’s secure wing on the fifth floor, where Ian was already positioned on the landing. Marcus came down from the stairs above. In the artificial light, his pale blue scrubs glowed blue, making his dark skin look even darker than normal. They met in front of the locked fifth-floor door.
“How long until the CDC comes?” Sam placed the mop and bucket in a corner, ready to grab for cover in case anyone came. He rubbed his sweaty palms on his thighs. “The target is vulnerable here. We need to move soon. Once the CDC grabs her, we’re done.”
“We just got the call.” Marcus’s face was grim. “They were delayed by the collision. But they’re sending a back-up transport.”
“Damn it! They were supposed to be delayed for an hour or more.” Sam ran a frustrated hand through his hair.
“We’re out of time.” Marcus’s lips twisted. “Look, my break is over in ten minutes. I’ll go back into the security wing, disable the system and distract Darla. You’ll have three minutes, tops, before I turn the system back on.”
“Can’t you give us more time?” Ian asked.
“No. The system has a fail-safe. After three minutes you need to have a second key card input or it turns on an alarm. We’re lucky. It has the three minutes delay only because the alarm going off drives Dr. Smythe crazy.”
“Is the target ready to go?” Sam wanted to move, needed to move. Once they were in action he’d settle down, but right now, doing nothing was killing him. Just being inside the hospital for the last hour, with its pungent scents and artificial light was almost enough to drive his wolf into a frenzy. Good thing Marcus was a dormant, with no wolf inside, or he’d never have been able to handle the nurse’s job.
“Yeah. Darla gave her a sedative just before I took my break. Just disconnect the IV and take her out. She should be completely unconscious when y
ou take her. One thing, she’s really hurt. She’s stabilized, but just barely.”
Sam shook his head. “Is it even worth it? Is she going to live?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know.” Marcus shook his head. He gave a nervous glance up the stairs. “Look, I need to go. Give me ten minutes, and then call my cell. If it’s clear I’ll tell you we’re on. If not, then get out. We won’t be taking her.”
“Marcus—” Ian shifted his weight from foot to foot “—we’ve got to take her. If the CDC gets her we’ll be up shit creek.”
“Can’t see you two in jail.” Marcus grinned, flashing his trademark white teeth. He always said the ladies loved a man with white teeth, and Marcus loved the ladies. “I’d be okay, but you two? No way. Your wolves would eat their way out of your bellies before the first day.” He gave a short laugh, turned, and headed up the stairs to the sixth floor where he would blend in, as if he’d been hanging out on his break before heading back to the fifth floor and the locked wing.
Sam and Ian waited in the empty stairwell.
“Shit, you know it really screwed things up for us that they tested her for lyco,” Ian said. “How in the hell did she get it?”
“I don’t know, but she did.” Sam checked the time on his phone. Five minutes left. “And with the CDC having complete control of anyone who tests positive, she’ll be in their experimental labs before we know it. Then we’re really fucked.”
Ian and he gave each other that look that said they were fucked anyway. They’d known each other since high school, worked together as enforcers for Sam’s old pack for almost as long and when he’d moved packs and joined up with the Ram’s Haven enforcers, Ian had been right behind him. Sam knew going into this op there was no one he’d rather have at his back. Whether Ian felt the same after Sam’s recent walk on the crazy side? He had no clue. But there was no time to ask.
“Better call.” Ian pulled on his ball cap and reached for his latex gloves as Sam punched the number into the throw-away phone.
Marcus picked up on the third ring. “Hey, babe, you aren’t supposed to call me at work.”