Stag: A Masquerade Ball Romance

by Angela Blake

  “Uuuh,” she said head thrown back, eyes closed. She’d explored herself before but it felt different when it was someone else’s hand against her flesh. She could feel liquid dripping slowly from between her legs and squirmed in a mixture of desire and embarrassment. He tipped her backwards, murmuring nonsense words of reassurance in her ear even as he settled between her legs. She hardly knew what to do with them so she wrapped her legs around his waist and he pressed down against her with a relieved groan. His erection brushed against her thigh and she jerked a bit in fear. It was so big.

  She shivered, torn between fear and desire even as she reached for him, rubbing tentatively against his crotch. She had no idea how all this was supposed to work. There had to be some secret she didn’t know because she couldn’t see how…

  Brendan’s fingers tickled against her clitoris, making her jerk and spurt in surprise. His other hand worked deeper, opening her up slowly.

  “I’m gonna make it so good for you.” He murmured before biting her earlobe. The sensation was toe curling and she wrapped herself even more firmly around him.

  Brendan shimmied downward, burying his head between her legs.

  “What are you…?” Rachel began raising her head to look at him, “Oh my God,” she squirmed, not sure if she was embarrassed or aroused by his tongue on her privates.

  “Ugh, I haven’t even cleaned down there,” she protested.

  Brendan’s only response was to press closer and Rachel closed her eyes and gave herself over to the sensations assailing her body. There was a bubble of feeling growing inside of her, getting bigger and more intense, making her want to scream, or run or moan with pleasure. She arched her hips, abandoning all shyness in the wake of extreme emotion.

  “Brendan please!” she begged, not even sure what she was pleading for.

  “Okay yes, I’m gonna give you what you need,” he murmured reaching for his wallet and extracting a condom. He pulled it on, never breaking eye contact with her.

  “You sure?” he whispered even as he loomed over her.

  Her only response was to pull him down, knotting her legs around his waist. His hand went between them, guiding his erection toward her heat, breath held, mouth open, eyes closed. He groaned long and deep as he entered her and she shivered, unable to believe that he was actually inside her. It was an invasion unlike anything she’d ever experience. Her body expanding more than she ever imagined it could to accommodate him. She could feel every hard inch of him and she had no idea how to feel about the immediacy of it.

  “Oh God,” she whispered, her whole body tensing and relaxing in a way that seemed out of her control.

  “Is that a good ‘oh God’ or a bad ‘oh God’?” Brendan asked as he bottomed out inside her.

  “Is there a bad ‘oh God’?” she asked, feeling her thighs quiver.

  Brendan laughed and she felt the vibration of his mirth inside of her. She closed her eyes, not wanting to miss a thing.

  “Rachel?” Brendan whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you…can I move now?”

  “Umm, yeah,” Rachel squeaked, not really sure what he meant. Then he withdrew from her almost completely and then thrust back into her, and she understood perfectly.

  “Oh God,” she said again voice hoarse.

  Brendan laughed as he repeated the action, over and over, his moans assaulting her ears. He began to move faster and faster, sounding more and more animalistic with each thrust. The hair on his arms seemed to increase where Rachel was clutching at him and Rachel opened her eyes to look.

  The sight before her eyes made her freeze.

  Brendan had stag horns on his forehead. His hazel eyes had taken on a golden hue and his body was covered with red gold…fur. Rachel wanted to scream but the sound was frozen in her throat. Brendan continued to thrust into her, increasingly frantic and uncoordinated.

  “So good,” he murmured, or at least that’s what Rachel figured he was saying. His dentures seemed a lot bigger than they’d looked a few minutes ago.

  Suddenly Brendan arched, throwing his head back and letting out a loud bellow. Finally, Rachel was able to scream and scream and scream.

  Chapter Nine: We Need to Talk

  Rachel was curled in on herself in the furthest corner of the room possible, her eyes wide and terrified.

  “You don’t need to be scared of me,” Brendan -once again fully human- tried again, standing up and taking a step toward her. She jerked back, tucking her legs in even closer to her body and Brendan froze arms out placatingly.

  “I’m a shape shifter. It’s part of why I brought you here.”

  Rachel just stared at him.

  Brendan sighed, “I…it’s a family curse. I mean to break it at some point. Hopefully.”

  “W-what d-do y-you want from me?” Rachel whispered, lip quivering, face pale with fear.

  “I…okay, honestly?” Brendan said blushing with embarrassment as Rachel watched him with wide eyes, “I-I’ve been watching you since you were a baby. I watched you grow up. Seeing you at that ball…I just had to-”

  “Wait. What do you mean you watched me grow up?” Rachel had actually straightened out of her fetal position in surprise.

  Brendan sighed eyes downcast, “You lived in a small cottage at the back of our property. In the early days, I was not allowed to see anyone except my parents a few trusted staff and my tutors. It got…lonely. So sometimes I would scale the wall at the back of the property and go exploring. Your house was just a few yards away from ours and one day, I heard you crying…” Brendan was eyeing her keenly, noting every twitch of muscle, every change of expression.

  “Go on,” Rachel said.

  “Well, I heard you crying and…it was like your voice was calling to me. So I followed the sound, climbed up to your window and came in.”

  Rachel laughed and Brendan raised his eyebrows at her in surprised inquiry.

  “It sounds like Rapunzel or something.”

  Brendan smiled in answer, “Yeah except without all the long golden hair.”

  Rachel couldn’t help returning the smile, if only for a moment. Then her face became serious again, “Continue,” she said.

  “Well your mother caught me staring down at you in your crib and chased me away. But…I worried about you because…well…I’m sorry but there’s no nice way of saying this.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Well your mother didn’t exactly give the impression that she cared about you a whole lot. I just felt like I had to keep an eye out for you.”

  Rachel just continued to stare at him and Brendan could not hold her gaze for long before dropping his.

  “And I was bored and lonely and watching you made me feel connected to someone.”

  “How long did you…?”

  “Watch you? Pretty much until I went away to school. I took it pretty seriously, had files on you and everything. Thought about calling CPS once or twice, but you seemed pretty attached to her, however badly she treated you so…I didn’t.”

  “Huh,” Rachel said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Sooo, were you planning on ever doing anything other than watch or…?”

  “I didn’t like, have a plan. I was just, playing it by the ear, y’know?”

  “No I do not know since I don’t normally stalk people.”

  Brendan inclined his head in concession, biting his lips as he blushed, “Yeah okay well, I’ve also been busy doing other stuff recently and I wasn’t even planning on going to the Governor’s ball this year but my mother couldn’t make it and she really wanted to be represented so, there I was. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw you.”

  “That’s…”

  “Crazy, I know.”

  “So now what is this? Have you kidnapped me? Is this some sort of culmination of-”

  “Of course not,” Brendan said cutting her off, “this isn’t some secret evil plan. But…
”

  “But?”

  “But if we’re gonna be in each other’s lives I wanted you to know the truth about me.”

  Rachel raised an eyebrow, quite forgetting to be afraid, “You do that with all your er, investees?”

  Brendan grinned, “Just the ones I’ve been stalking since childhood.”

  Rachel nodded, “I see. Well, now I know. So now what?”

  “I was just about to ask you that very same question.”

  There was a silence in the room as they stared at each other.

  “Who did you bring me here to meet?” Rachel asked eventually.

  “There’s a woman. She was the fortune teller who told my parents I was cursed. I thought if you heard it from her, you wouldn’t think I was totally crazy.”

  “As opposed to what?” Rachel asked with a snort.

  Brendan shrugged, “Maybe I wasn’t thinking too clearly.”

  “Ya think?” Rachel replied softly.

  “Well forgive me for not knowing what the etiquette would be for telling someone you’re a shapeshifter.”

  Rachel laughed, “This is crazy,” she said shaking her head.

  Brendan held up his finger and thumb, holding them a little way apart, “Maybe just a little,” he agreed, “So how about I take you to lunch and you can ask me all the questions you’d like.”

  Rachel stared at him, “Just like that?” she asked.

  Brendan shrugged giving her a look that told her that it was all in her hands what happened next. Rachel’s shoulders came down from the unconscious hunch they’d been in as she relaxed and Brendan’s face lightened to see it.

  “Fine. I could eat.”

  Brendan’s smile was blinding.

  “Don’t go assuming nothin’ though,” Rachel warned.

  Brendan put his hands up in surrender but his grin did not dim, “I just want to feed you,” he said.

  Rachel stood up, picking up her purse, “Is that a stag thing then? Feeding your mate?”

  It was only when Brendan turned to her with a look of delight that Rachel realized what she’d said, “Not that I’m saying I’m your mate,” she hastened to add.

  “Ha! Too late to take it back,” Brendan replied smugly as he held the door open for her. Rachel stepped through with a sigh, letting him guide her down to the French restaurant and ply her with food.

  ***

  Rachel did not know what to do. She wanted to call Barry and Sergio and discuss the bizarre turn of events she found herself in, but it wasn’t the sort of madness she could explain over the phone. She had been expecting that something was up when Brendan asked her to go to Ireland with him. She just hadn’t been expecting this level of crazy.

  Brendan was a shapeshifter.

  His stage ‘costume’ had actually not been a costume.

  What was she supposed to do with that?

  And on top of that, he’d been stalking her since she was a child.

  Talk about red flags.

  She should be running. Running and not looking back. But here she was doing her makeup as she got ready to meet this fortune teller that Brendan had finally tracked down. She didn’t know why he still insisted on this meeting since she already knew who or what he was. But she wasn’t just humoring him by going. On the one hand, perhaps this whole situation was balls to the wall crazy but it was also very intriguing and Rachel wanted to know more.

  She left the room, heading to the ground floor in the lift, where Brendan was booking hotel transport for them. Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she walked quickly to join him. If she was honest with herself, she was just a little bit excited about the new developments in her life. If someone had asked her what she expected from life before all this, she would have said that she figured she’d work her fingers to the bone at the coffee shop and if she was lucky maybe she’d get a higher learning certificate of some kind. She would spend most of her life looking after her mother and by the time her mother passed away she would be too emotionally exhausted to find someone to love.

  Yet here she was, her virginity taken by a man who could turn into a stag. About to meet a fortune teller who would educate them on how curses worked…it was so far out of her field of experience that she could hardly fathom it. Every little thing about it was exciting. From her awakened body, newly educated in the joys of sex – one of the reasons she wanted to know more about Brendan and his curse was that she definitely wanted to do that again.

  And he was still interested in funding her café, which was great on its own because she had big ideas on how to take the business forward. Also if she could help him solve his issue with this so called curse, well, that would be one for the books. She almost skipped in excitement as she caught sight of Brendan in conversation with the concierge. The only hair that was currently on display on his body was that on his head where no stag horns stuck out. Sometimes she felt like she had imagined the whole thing, but here they were, going to luncheon because of those stag horns and the beautiful red gold fur and the golden glinting eyes…so she could not have imagined it.

  Brendan caught sight of her and smiled and she smiled back without even thinking about it. Her stomach lurched with butterflies and she almost stumbled, her cheeks flushing in reaction.

  “Ready to go?” he asked hand reaching out for her.

  “Yes, I am,” she replied letting him take it. He led her out to the front of the hotel where the valet handed some keys over to Brendan. He opened the passenger door for her and then closed it gently, skipping over to the other side to get in the driver’s side.

  “Ready?” he asked, hands on the wheel.

  “Yes.”

  ***

  Rathnait Moyra Mooney was a British national, who had toured the world with a traveling circus but was now settled in her birthplace of County Down, Northern Ireland. She had started her career in the IRA, fighting for what she thought was freedom.

  “Wait. The IRA? I’ve heard of them. That’s the Irish Republican Army right? Wasn’t that a pretty long time ago?” Rachel interrupted.

  Rathnait simply glared without saying a word and Rachel shrunk back in her seat, cowed. Brendan covered her hand and looked earnestly back at the witch.

  “Please continue,” he said in a soft gentle voice.

  Rathnait left the IRA when she had a vision one night of how it would all end in innocent blood and politics. That was when she decided to get as far away from Ireland as she could; both because of her potentially criminal activities and because she was freaked out about the visions.

  “Was it your first time to get a vision?” Rachel couldn’t help but interrupt.

  It had been the first of many, each one more detailed than the next. While they were traveling in the US she began to have persistent…dreams about a woman and a baby. The woman was sad because she could not conceive. And the baby was crying…crying out for his mother.

  “The baby was me?” it was Brendan’s turn to interrupt.

  At the time she had had no clue what it all meant. She knew of the legend of the curse because her mother had been interested in such stories. She knew when she was having a vision because her nose tended to bleed and she would suffer a mild headache for hours. But this was different. This was a persistent dream with no context and no meaning that she could decipher. Then a girl came into her life, pregnant she said, even though she had no memory of having sex. The dreams of the baby crying intensified and now she could decipher the occasional word, ‘Mama’ being the most clear.

  She didn’t know what it all meant but she was sure the universe would let her know in time.

  Chapter Ten: Deciphering the Indecipherable

  “Okay so your witch-”

  “Fortune teller.”

  “Fortune teller, whatever…she figured out that your mother was the woman in her dreams and that somehow this random girl had given birth to her baby? Is it just me or is that completely bonkers?”

>   “It’s a crazy theory but then again, I’m a shapeshifter so…I don’t really have a leg to stand on when it comes to labeling crazy things.”

  “Okay so…umm, she figures out that this girl is carrying your mother’s baby, the girl is perfectly fine with handing it over…”

  “She didn’t exactly set out to be pregnant.”

  “Right. So. She handed over the baby and the fortune teller just thought to say, ‘yo, that baby is cursed’ and scram. I mean, is your head spinning or is it just me.”

  “She was young in the craft. She didn’t know what to do. She knew my parents were powerful. If they found out about her past, they could get her locked up. We’re lucky she told them anything.”

  “Okay okay, I dig it. But now what?”

  Brendan shrugged, “Well…I think we’ve done all we could here. Do you wanna like do some sightseeing or do you wanna go home?”

  Rachel stared at him, eyes wide. She couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. They’d just been told a lot of stuff that was mind boggling. Hell, they’d decided to stop at the very same Irish bar as before to get some Dutch courage in order to confront it all. And now, he wanted to go sightseeing?

  “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “Very. I promised I’d show you the sights.”

  “Yeah, that was before you told me that you were half stag.”

  Brendan’s face fell, “So you’re saying you don’t want to? You want to go home and forget you ever knew me right?”

  Rachel laughed staring at him in disbelief, “Even if I wanted to do that, I have no idea how anyone forgets they met a half man half stag.”

  Brendan looked increasingly miserable, “I get it. I’m sorry. I’ll change your flight details so you can leave in the morning.”

  “Hold up. Who said anything about leaving?” Rachel asked placing a hand on his arm, “I’m gonna need some time to wrap my head around this. You’ve had thirty years. So there’s no need to be hasty.”

  Brendan’s face brightened, “Really? Umm, okay so do you want to do that sightseeing or..?”

  Rachel shrugged, “Sure, why not?”