The Watchers

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  NOW!

  The bellow was enough to get Claire on her feet without thinking about it. Everything went black for a few seconds once she was on her feet, but she clutched at the wall, willing the faintness to recede and when she opened her eyes again, she saw the darkness lifting. Bracing herself, she started down the corridor, keeping one hand on the wall at first to help her balance, but the fog had cleared completely in a few moments and she began moving faster, with more surety.

  She felt better the moment she’d entered the apartment and saw that it was familiar—was the one Dante had taken her to before. As soon as she was inside, she grabbed chairs and chests and shoved them in front of the door—wondering how much good it would do. After all, the bastard that had been out for her blood had beamed into the room with her!

  With that thought, Claire decided to look for a smaller, tighter space to hide in—maybe a closet?

  Bathroom facilities!

  It was a relief in many ways when she found the ‘throne’ room. After securing the door and making use of the facilities, she bathed her face and hands and then climbed inside the bathing unit and latched that door, curling into a tight, tense ball in one corner.

  She’d had just enough time to begin to relax and feel the aches from the effort she’d put in to trying to escape when she heard someone shoving at the stuff she’d piled in front of the door to Dante’s apartment. Everything in her—muscle, bone and sinew—instantly transformed to jelly.

  She struggled to her feet, mentally searching the small apartment for some avenue of escape or a better place to hide.

  “Claire! Are you hurt, my love?”

  A sob of pure relief exploded from her throat. “Dante?”

  Rushing from her refuge, she unlatched the door to the bathroom. Dante was standing just outside and she launched herself at him. He caught her tightly against his length in a bone crushing embrace that was amazingly satisfying. “I was so scared!”

  “I was terrified out of my mind! You are not hurt anywhere? He did not hurt you?” Dante demanded, pulling away from her enough to catch her face in his hands and examine her eyes for an answer.

  Her chin wobbled with the urge to burst into tears, but he forestalled her by covering her lips with his and spearing his tongue into the cavern of her mouth. Eagerness instantly swept the urge to cry away and replaced it with the warmth of affection and the heat of desire. She clutched at him, returning his kiss with fervor.

  He broke from her lips, hugging her tightly again. “I died a thousand deaths when I heard your cry and you were so far away I thought no miracle could get me to you fast enough!”

  “I was so scared!” Claire managed to get out again before he covered her lips once more.

  Instead of merely holding her tightly against his length this time, he lifted her off her feet and swept her in a dizzying circle. She clutched him more tightly when she felt him lowering her. Then she felt softness at her back, the coolness of bed coverings.

  He leaned away when he broke the second kiss, examining her length with his gaze and a sweep of his hand for any sign of injury.

  “I’m not hurt,” Claire assured him, “unless you want to count bruises from running into everything in my path and torn muscles from running faster than I’ve ever run in my life.”

  He didn’t even crack a smile. “I should have killed the crazed bastard!” he snarled, shifting down to burrow his face between her breasts briefly before he blazed a heated trail upwards with his lips in search of her mouth once more.

  Claire shivered at the reminder of the near death experience and, more pleasantly, at the currents of desire he stirred within her. Dismissing everything else from her mind, she tightened her arms around him and kissed him back feverishly in encouragement. He instantly took her up on the offer, tugging at her clothing and then pulling away to tug at his own. She shucked her T-shirt, shorts, and shoes while he was undressing, but she was still struggling with under things when he dove at her again, sprawling half on top of her. They battled briefly over the removal of her underwear and then, upon the successful completion of that mission, curled around one another, skin to skin, enjoying the heated friction they generated rubbing against each other as they surged against one another and felt the contact from breast to toes.

  He stroked her with massive hands that dwarfed her and kissed her all over, murmuring words in his own tongue that she didn’t understand but that sounded worshipful enough to inspire a fresh flood of warmth through her.

  She explored him with her own hands when the opportunity arose, marveling at the smoothness of his skin and the strength of the hard muscles beneath, pleasured as much by her appreciation of the physical beauty of his form as she was by the stimulation of his touch.

  But that wowed her, flooded her mind with pleasurable drugs that made her feel drunk with euphoria. He’d called her his love and she felt loved by his touch, felt adored by the hunger she sensed he barely held in check.

  Impatience abruptly replaced the acceptance and pleasure in the gentleness of his touch, in his restraint. She wanted to feel the blaze of his passion and she began to demand it with her hands and body, pulling at him, thrusting against him.

  He responded almost before she’d announced her demand. Levering himself downward, he caught her wrists and pinned them to the bed on either side of her shoulders and then leaned down to pluck at first one breast and then the other with his lips. When her nipples stood erect in response, he began to suck at them and pull at them more and more feverishly, nipping with the edge of his teeth. Molten fire seemed to pour forth from his lips and pool in her lower belly.

  She lay still to enjoy it for a few moments, but the fire rose so rapidly to fever pitch that she quickly discovered she couldn’t be still anymore.

  And still he tormented her, plucking at her breasts and then blazing kisses along her throat to her ear and back to her breasts and downward across her belly, so close to her mound that her kegels fluttered madly with hopefulness. Releasing his hold on her wrists abruptly, he grasped her thighs and ‘made a wish’, diving toward her sex. She bolted half upright, but he tipped her off balance and then sucked a love bite on the tender juncture of inner thigh to hip.

  She tangled her fingers in his long hair, mindless with the electric jolts that went through her, torn between the desire to feel his mouth on her sex and the equal opposing need to feel his cock inside of her.

  He seemed torn, as well, teasing her by sucking a love bite on either thigh and briefly teasing her clit with the tip of his tongue—just enough to make her completely lose her mind—and then surging over her and spearing his cock into the mouth of her sex. She lost her breath when she felt the connection, but she knew instantly that that was what she wanted most in the world at that moment. She wanted to feel herself impaled on his huge shaft, struggling to engulf him.

  He gave her that, curling an arm around her shoulders as he thrust in short sorties that gained ground by fractions of an inch while her flesh spread for him, reluctantly engulfing his turgid flesh until it began to burn with the strain and she was gulping air as if drowning.

  He ceased pushing momentarily, shifted his hold on her and thrust again. That time the combination of moisture and force overcame the resistance of her flesh and he sank fully inside of her. She felt the bumping of the spiraling ridge along his cock as he fully claimed her channel, felt an almost electric jolt go through her with each bump along her passage until she was teetering on the brink of climax almost the moment he fully claimed her.

  He sought her lips with his own once he’d plumbed her depths, kissing her as he had that first time—infusing her with an elixir that was like the most potent alcohol she’d ever drank, the most powerful drug. She was floating dizzily with it, drifting without mooring when he broke the kiss and withdrew his shaft from her almost completely at the same moment.

  The first quake hit her as he thrust again. Almost gentle, it barely shook her with pleasurable waves unti
l he withdrew and those waves intensified. When he thrust again a second quake struck, harder than the first. She wasn’t even aware that she’d begun to groan and that had built into a scream with the ever increasing intensity of her climax until Dante abruptly jolted with his own release and then began to pound into her more fiercely.

  The relief as her euphoria softened to repletion was almost as lovely as the climax itself had been. She nuzzled her face against Dante’s throat gratefully when he’d collapsed on top of her in the aftermath of his release. “I don’t know how you found me, baby, but I am very, very glad you did,” she murmured lazily.

  His arms tightened around her. It is the bond, my love. I will always know when you are hurt or frightened or in need. It will lead me to you.

  Discomfort wafted through Claire.

  He coasted a kiss along her brow. “It is alright, love. I know that you are not the same as I and I have no expectations, but I do hope that you will feel for me some of what I feel for you one day.”

  Claire shifted to look at his face.

  He smiled a little crookedly. “I am growing old,” he said with a faint chuckle. “My hot headedness put me where I am, but I cannot entirely regret that as I once did when it lead me to you. I have just finally realized that I must learn more self control or I will lose anything that I gain, everything in this life that matters to me. I do not want to lose you. I do not know what I would have done if anything had happened to you.”

  Claire studied his face, realizing abruptly that she did care about him, that he mattered to her. Somehow, against all odds, against reason, she had fallen for him. “We aren’t the same,” she said finally and shook her head. “I don’t … know what we could ever have.”

  He pulled her close, stroking one hand soothingly along her back. “I will find a way. First I must make you safe, though, and I confess I am not sure of how to go about that. I had thought you would be completely safe here ….”

  A shudder tracked its way down Claire’s spine. “Not if angels like that one can beam in here. I don’t even understand that at all. I hadn’t done anything. I mean, he looked furious the very second he appeared and I knew he wanted to kill me!”

  Dante’s arms tightened around her almost painfully. “I knew him.” He shook his head. “I do not understand what has happened to him, but that was a mindless thing that attacked you. That was not the man I once knew.”

  Claire pulled away and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  He shook his head again. “I do not know. I do not understand it. The shell, I am completely familiar with. He came when I came. The mind was not there, though. He was more like … a machine. I saw no recognition in his eyes.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He was silent for a while, obviously thinking. After a brief hesitation, Claire settled again with her head on his shoulder, enjoying cuddling against him and the soothing, absent stroke of his hand.

  He chuckled. “It is not absent. I am very consciously stroking you because I like the way you feel.”

  Claire bit him lightly on the nearest patch of flesh—a pec. “Stay out of my head!”

  He speared his fingers through the hair at her temple and tipped her head back, straining slightly to touch his lips to hers. “It is a beautiful head. This is the mind that I fell instantly in love with.”

  Claire was pleased. “Not the body?”

  “I am in love with that, as well. It is a very nice body.”

  End Part One.

  Read an excerpt from Watchers II.

  Watchers II:

  Exiles

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  Chapter One

  Dominick ‘Nick’ DiCarlo rolled out of the dingy and onto the beach, ignoring the water that splashed in his face as he belly crawled out of the surf, across the short beach, and then scrambled up the first dune to scan the terrain through his night vision goggles. Surrounding him was his own S.E.A.L. team and three others that had been pulled in for this ‘special emergency’ mission.

  He wasn’t in the habit of questioning his orders—and he hadn’t this time despite the fact that he’d been thoroughly pissed off about having his leave canceled—but he had a bad feeling about the latest mission and his brain wouldn’t stop turning it over and over in an attempt to figure out what just didn’t freaking fit.

  Truthfully, he’d been stunned but more than a little excited when he’d discovered the general area where things would go down—the Persian Gulf—because it would put him in pretty damned good shape to take care of his own personal mission once he’d done Uncle Sam’s job, eliminating the cost of transportation in one direction anyway.

  The tale they’d cooked up didn’t fit, though, he decided, and that was why he felt distinctly uneasy, not just wound tight with nerves because of the possibility of a firefight, which was so typical of his job that he hardly paid that any attention anymore.

  The Middle East was a hot bed of terrorists, though. Not the sort of place one would expect to find spies or stolen technology. If they’d been told they were raiding a terrorist stronghold for stolen weapons, he would’ve bought it. Or if they’d dropped them in Russia or China to look for stolen technology—or to steal technology ….

  The story just didn’t fit the circumstances in his book.

  In the foreground, he saw what looked like a vast basin of crumbling ruins that seemed to fit the satellite images they’d been shown. And on the far side a jumble of tents that was the secondary target for this part of the mission that might house trouble with a capitol T. They’d been told there might be armed guards stationed there and they should be ready for trouble, but that resistance wasn’t expected.

  What?

  That had really thrown everybody and was the main reason Nick felt so uneasy, he decided. Of all the things that just didn’t seem to fit, the (believed) lack of firepower protecting their ill-gotten gains was the most out-of-place of all.

  These terrorists, or whatever, had stolen technology and yet they didn’t have a small army guarding ‘their’ treasure?

  That was a problem for ‘Delta’ team, though. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma teams were to recapture the technology and destroy everything they couldn’t take with them. While they were taking care of retrieving their property at the land base, a second group of four S.E.A.L. teams would proceed to the underwater base just off the coast, wipe out any resistance they encountered there, and collect anything else that they found in the way of ‘stolen’ technology.

  It took them almost an hour to get into position. Once they had, they had to wait for a go from the Delta team since they didn’t want to spring the trap before Delta had secured the insurgents and make their job harder.

  The minute Delta swarmed the tents, Nick and his team shot for the edge of the basin, went over it on ropes and raced toward the pyramid shaped structure in the center. Nick’s uneasiness grew as they made their way through the land based ‘camp’. It looked awfully fucking old for a government facility of any kind.

  He closed his mind to the doubts, focusing.

  He felt a wave of dizziness sweep over him, though, when he and the others swarmed inside and got their first look at the map room. For a handful of minutes, all any of them could do was stand and gape at the ceiling, the map of the universe—not the known universe, the ‘unknown-till-now’ universe!

  It sure as hell wasn’t stolen technology—at least Nick wasn’t buying that it had been stolen from Uncle Sam anymore.

  He could believe they were about to steal it, though.

  “Hump it! We only have about an hour and we need to get this recorded and everything we can carry moved to the ship!” the CO bellowed.

  Actually, Nick wasn’t certain of whether he’d bellowed the order or if it had just echoed through the room, but he jumped to obey like everyone else. He didn’t know about the rest of them, but the sooner they collected the stuff and got the hell out the better he would feel.

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nbsp; Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter One