Dirty Wrong: BBW & Older Alpha (Off-Limits Love Book 1)

by Q. Zayne

  My erection aching, so hard, I speared her over and over, making her flail out of control under me, growling and wild, red-eyed, gasping, her bud turgid, her hair flying. I flipped her over, grabbed her arms and pinned her so I could see her face, striving harder, pounding into her to make her let go.

  I felt more for her than I could stand. I could almost shut out the tenderness but it burned me and I ravaged her with all my power and the force of my denial. Her eyes rolled. S he gasped, creaming on my cock, milking me and making me moan with her sinuous body mating so perfectly with my raging flesh. I drooled, aching to consume her. Fighting my release, I buried my face in the soft junction of her throat and shoulder and bit her hard, mastering the urge to bite deeper and keep on biting until there was nothing left. I tasted her blood. Mine, all mine.

  I clawed her back, my human fingers poor substitutes for my paws and claws, yet marking her, claiming her, hurting her, hot and hotter as she moaned and worked her hips in rhythm with my strokes.

  It took her longer than ever before and I helped her with my thumb, finding her pleasure spot and working her in rhythm with my thrusts to make her succumb.

  She gasped and clawed at me.

  I pulled her hair, looked into her face, pressing her down with my whole body, not letting up with my thumb or my cock, pushing her over the falls. She held to me as though she were drowning, moaning her protests, then crying out, a choked, strangled orgasmic call, emitted in spite of her fighting it. I bled from her claws and ground against her hard, taking all my pleasure as her spasms milked my seed into her.

  I kissed her softly, like a lover not a ravager.

  She turned her head away. I pulled her hair and forced my mouth on hers. I’d fight her fighting me as many times as it took. She could not deny me the completion of my passion.

  “Look at me,” I demanded.

  She did, with tear-filled eyes. I wanted to hit her. I forced myself to subside.

  I was angry and hurt that she resisted me.

  All her earlier compliance led me to expect her to always give in, to yield under me with her clinging heat.

  But I found the place she didn’t want to go.

  She didn’t want to be loved.

  I was her bear and she was my mate. I’d protect her now, from everyone and everything. Even from herself. I growled low in my throat at the thought of getting my hand on whoever hurt her. I’d make him sorry. I’d make him long for the end of his abject life before I killed him.

  I shook my head. I was a responsible man, a doctor. Not a killer. She made the bear in me so strong, so growling and possessive, I wanted to right every wrong, make the clock turn back on every harm that ever came to her. I took her in my arms and rocked her against my chest, feeling the contrast between my hard muscles and her softness along the length of my body.

  She enlivened me like nothing I ever experienced before. She was like a lightening storm in the forest leaving scorched trees and a smoking path, waves taking apart the coastline, bringing down homes broken to the beach amid piled boulders like giants played a game.

  Such intensity in one small frame. I kissed her where her whiskers would be when she shifted. She batted at me with her hand. But there was a small smile at the corners of her lips. It lifted me like the sight of dawn after a long cold night. I was reaching her.

  What was I thinking? Could she be one of my kind? In some moments it seemed the most natural thing, that she was a shifter, too, and came to me. Then my medical mind asserted itself and denounced those thoughts as lunacy.

  She kept her eyes closed and pressed her face to my chest. She was all woman, but she was purring.

  Interrupted

  I must have dozed. I fought my way through a fog, roused by an urgent tug on my hand. At first I wasn’t sure where I was. I wasn’t in my bed.

  “Close your eyes. You have to come with me, right now. Please,” she added, pleading.

  It went against all my instincts to close my eyes. Her voice told me danger. But I trusted her. It hit me that I did. I closed my eyes. Her tug on my hand pulled me to a floating state. My medical mind tried to analyze and examine what was going on, because I suspected what was happening.

  We landed softer than I expected, leaves crackling under the soles of my favorite Italian shoes. Some day I’d have to get undressed before I took her, but it never seemed a priority.

  I brushed back my hair and eyed our surroundings. The woods of course, swathed in mists like the entrancing skirts of dancing women. An old, primal dance where all the gods came out of hiding. Where were we? When were we? The place felt ancient.

  She tugged my hand again, her fingers small and cold. She hadn’t dressed, of course. She was as naked as when I mounted her. No wonder she felt chilled. But her urge to run seemed to be about something other than a desire to get warm. Everything from her alert head to her racing heart said danger.

  I sensed she knew this place and what to do, so I followed. It seemed the only sensible thing to do. I felt calm despite the strangeness of everything. It was like dreams I had long ago when a spirit guide in his magnificent finery of feathers and beads came to me. Reverence and acceptance filled me. His presence was a gift.

  Lida was my guide to a place I hadn’t known existed, and yet which seemed necessary. The essential place my kind came from. Dreams and myths, the deep truths that made me what I was, existed here and continued always. I needed to be here.

  It was the place I escaped all the restrictions of the rest of my life. It was the place I could be with her without guilt.

  Blake said to me in med school, at the fork when I could have fallen deeper into the drugs and alcohol that were coloring so much of my life, “Physician, heal thyself.” That painful talk until dawn while the lights of the city winked on below us triggered the start of my long journey back to health, where jogging and wholesome foods and an unexpected, deep friendship took the place of mind and body dulling substances. It was the first and only time I cried in a man’s arms. I’d lost my father too far back for memory to reach.

  It must have been Blake at the office who alarmed Lida. He must have come back from the beach when I didn’t expect him, and Lida sensed he was about to catch us. I swallowed. How would I have coped if he caught me with Lida on my exam table?

  Lida’s skin shone luminous in the shadows. She seemed to have a slight teal glow that made her easier to follow. Fairy light. She turned and held her finger to her lips. I hadn’t felt any need to talk, but I understood her gesture as a beast broke through the trees.

  A buffalo. All alone in this strange place. I wondered where his herd was. Images of masses of buffalo moving through the land until humans slaughtered them to the last survivors filled me with sadness.

  I watched him walk away, my heart saluting him. I hoped he had a mate.

  Lida flattened herself behind a tree, gesturing to me and I did the same. Unusual hooded people on horses emerged through the brush, the animals neighing at the cruel pace, the riders yelling in blood lust.

  The buffalo had appeared unconcerned. Whether out of acceptance or being far above the puny hunters, I wasn’t sure.

  They raced after him, going the wrong way. I hoped he lived out his years. But if he was truly alone here, that wouldn’t be fun.

  She led me deeper into the woods over crackling leaves. Like her accent, the shapes and sounds of the leaves stirred old memories inside me with their pungent familiarity.

  At a pillared temple open to the moon, she touched a panel under the dais. It clicked at her touch. She withdrew a woolen cloak for each of us from the revealed compartment. Enveloped in its lush folds with the hood pulled over my forehead, the chill began to leave me. She clapped her hands delightedly, breaking at last the sense of danger.

  “It’s wonderful. You look like a sage or mage of old!”

  Of old. Of when, when were we? This place filled me with a sense of ancient vastness. The stars seemed closer, the sky free of light pollution in
every direction. The air smelled pristine, the primeval forest before factories and vehicle exhaust.

  The sounds of the hunters had retreated far enough that I could share her sense of safety.

  “Where are we? You’re from here, aren’t you?” I went right to my main concern. If she were from some other place, not my world, then my life as a doctor wasn’t at risk. She had no more reality in my world than her squiggled intake form had any meaning in my office’s computer system. I’d shredded it, of course. Whatever else she was, Lida could not be my patient.

  Heat suffused my groin at the thought of her first visit to my exam room.

  Her smile slipped away.

  “You’ve been here with me before. You must understand.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  She frowned and swung around, gesturing at the woods. “This is no more real than your place is real.”

  I blinked. Maybe she’d come to see the wrong kind of doctor. Maybe she needed a shrink. But I was here, too, so what did that say about me? I tried to put all my objections aside and listen. Her features looked pinched. She resembled a teacher at the end of her patience.

  “It’s all thought forms, Ian. We think it, so it’s so.”

  I balked at that. We thought wars and atrocities and babies dying? Well, it made no more or less sense than God or gods doing such things. Damn it.

  “Wait a minute, Lida—.”

  “There isn’t time for arguing. I had to pull you out—your colleague arrived at your office.”

  Yes, Blake. He would have caught us. Caught me, hot handed with my pants around my knees. The moment flooded back, the small sound of the doorknob turning. I hadn’t thought to lock it. Good-hearted Blake would have seen me balls-deep in a patient if I hesitated an instant when Lida tugged me to leave my world.

  She lowered her eyes. Gratitude surged through me. She understood, after all. She kept me from being caught. There was no possible excuse I could have given. Blake was a good guy, an amazing friend, but he’d sworn the same oath as I did. He was a devoted Catholic with a wife and four kids. He wouldn’t go down in my dirty boat. He’d have reported me.

  “Thank you.” Words couldn’t express my appreciation of her goodness and my relief at my near escape. I put my hand on her cheek, loving her, but barely admitting it.

  “Tell me, what have we arrived in? Where are we?” I wasn’t sure how to phrase what I meant.

  “The hunt. These strangers come after creatures like us to kill us.”

  Oh, hell. We’d leaped through impossibility, space and maybe time, too. We’d jumped from one danger to another. Strangers. The aliens with the crashed ship. I’d put that out of my mind as too impossible to contemplate. And creatures like us. Shifters, she must mean. Those cat eyes, her stripes and elongation as she disappeared into the trees. All of it right in my face and I’d denied it. I still didn’t want to believe it. Why was it easier to think she was a mental case than that she was a shifter, too? I flinched inside from a wound so old and deep I didn’t want to go near it.

  I stared at her, waiting for a sign that she was yanking me. Her earnest face with its moon-arched brows made me trust her more than ever. She meant it literally. That meant, yes. I imagined that meant the buffalo was a shifter, too. I wondered if she found him attractive in his man form. Silly, petty thought in the circumstances.

  “Come on!” She beckoned me deeper into the woods.

  We ran. I wanted to get a better look at the riders on the horses as they doubled back, but there was no time.

  Lida headed for a grove of young trees. I saw the wisdom of her strategy. The close-growing trees would impede the horses, give us a chance to get away. Her ample body displayed her feline grace and strength.

  “Will they shoot us?” I cursed myself for not keeping up my daily runs. I panted at her heels.

  Wind whipped her tawny hair across her face. I pulled off my jacket and gave it to her. She pulled it on.

  “No. There aren’t any guns here.”

  Point in favor of this realm.

  “What do they hunt with?”

  Something hit the tree next to me with a sound so loud and violent it made me jump. A spear with wicked-looking barbs went right through the slender trunk. It looked like a cruel harpoon. If you lived through being speared, you’d probably bleed to death trying to get it out.

  “Those.”

  I shut up and ran faster, weaving through the trees to be a more difficult target. I angled away from Lida in hopes of drawing their fire, keeping her in sight.

  The chill air rasped in my lungs. Lida’s composure impressed me. Her movements remained graceful and sure despite the lethal danger. She was no doubt smarter than the men, a long-time predator in this terrain in her feline form. Tiger shifter. No time to wrap my mind around that. The hunters were gaining on us.

  But what were they, and why did they want to kill us?

  She leaped a creek and I followed, less gracefully. Her lovely, strong legs took her straight up a hill.

  I was relieved to see her pulling brush away from the opening of a cave. I followed her into the sanctuary, my natural refuge. She rearranged the brush behind us to cover our hiding place.

  “There’s a back way out.” She gestured where the cavern continued, branching off into what appeared to be a large cave system.

  “They’re Scurimun,” she made a series of sounds I couldn’t follow so I shortened it to three syllables. “They don’t know about this cave system. There aren’t such features in their world, so it doesn’t occur to them to look for them here. As long as we take care that they never see us go underground, these places will remain safe.”

  It was the first time I felt comfortable since I arrived. I treasured the lair, the chance to be alone with her, the break from evading hunters who were after our lives.

  “Their world?”

  “They arrived here from another realm, the same way we did.”

  I didn’t know, didn’t want to know. Had rejected the idea completely and she’d just hit my credibility threshold. It had been a stretch to accept that she pulled me into a different realm where shifters lived openly, but there was another realm?

  “From another realm.” My words came out flat. I didn’t want to have this conversation. I was halfway back to hoping she was crazy. That would be easier, because she made me feel too much. I didn’t like it about myself, but I almost wanted a way out. There must be someone here I could take her to where she could get some help. Then I could get back to my life. But I didn’t fool myself. I didn’t want to leave her. And she’d asked for my help—I’d managed to not think about that, either.

  “They can’t get back, the passage closed. I can’t make much of their language, but it seems they think shapeshifters are unnatural and must die to restore order. Why they think it’s their business to restore order in a realm where they aren’t welcome guests is a mystery. Not that their drive to kill beings they know nothing about made any sense in the first place. But men do that everywhere, don’t they?”

  Her luminous cat eyes leveled me. Nothing waif-like about her now. I could imagine having a daughter in college confronting me the same way for generations of wrongdoing by all males, as though I were personally responsible due to the equipment between my legs.

  I used the time-honored defense of men everywhere. Apologize, it doesn’t matter for what. It might be the only worthwhile thing my father taught me. Unlike my Uncle Joe, the old man never had to spend the night on the couch. It was one of the few things I remembered from the short time he was alive.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She turned her back on me, sniffing. It didn’t work with her.

  “I see your point, okay.” I rested my hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. “Please explain to this lowly male why these guys from another planet want to kill us and what I can do about it. Believe me, I’m not on board with killing people.” Except for whoever hurt you so bad and these guys if I need to, to s
ave our lives. Already I never wanted to lie to her, but I had to reserve the right to defense.

  “I told you. I don’t know. I think it might be a spiritual thing.”

  “A rite of manhood?” I tried not to sound annoyed at being lumped in with the bad guys.

  “Stop it. This is serious.” She pursed her lips. I didn’t think I was a big old sexist, but I couldn’t resist noticing she was gorgeous when she was angry.

  “How long has this been going on?” I had to keep my mind on the problem of survival and override my urge to spread my genes.

  “More than your lifetime.”

  I raised my brows. She made it sound as though she’d been fighting them the whole time, but she was half my age.

  “About 50 years,” she clarified as though I wasn’t calculating our age difference for the uncounted time.

  Okay, something wasn’t right. Those were men in their prime, no one decrepit or fuzz-faced among them. Too young to be the original invading party and too old to be their descendants. Unless—

  “Yes.” She gave me an approving look as though she heard my thought and wanted me to know I was a good student. I bet she’d be a wonderful mother. “Time is different here. We have to evade them and get you back, or you’ll miss the rest of your life.”

  Miss the rest of my life? Hell. This just kept getting more fun.

  Strange Realm

  During a few too-short days of peace, Lida took me hiking through unspoiled, physically-challenging terrain to meet the widely-spread shifter inhabitants. The experience involved a lot of rock-climbing, desert slogging, and water gulping. The raw-food diet of unfamiliar plants and results of Lida’s hunting didn’t always agree with me. We didn’t dare give our position away with fire. My body grew more fit and my mind clearer. I knew a peace I’d rarely experienced, something that used to come over me when I’d take off on camping trips with Blake, a rare thing since his marriage.