Phoenix Ablaze (BBW / Phoenix Shifter Romance) (Alpha Phoenix Book 1)

by Isadora Montrose

  She sighed. She knew final when she heard it. “But when it’s over,” she pleaded.

  “I guess,” he said. “We can discuss it when I get back.”

  Alarm seized her. “When are you going?” she cried.

  He shook his head. “No idea,” he said. “Next week or next month. They haven’t said, and if they had, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Why so hush-hush?” she asked, alarmed all over again.

  He shrugged. “It’s just the way things are in this line. It’ll be fine.” He rocked her against his erection and Hannah forgot her concerns in the hot tide of longing and excitement that making love with Jack released.

  * * *

  “You’re leaving tonight?” wailed Hannah. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I only got my orders today,” her lover told her, taking her nude body in his arms and silencing her objections with a passionate, openmouthed kiss. She forgot her unhappiness as his tongue slid along hers and played with the most tender recesses of her mouth.

  Jack’s big hands held Hannah’s head still as he suckled her tongue before turning to the sensitive spot at the base of her throat. He moved one hand to the nape of her neck and played with the soft curls that grew from that sensitive spot. Hannah’s womb clenched and her own hands began to move down her lover’s body towards his jutting erection.

  Even though they had just made love and should have been satiated, they fell together on Hannah’s bed and twined their bodies into one with as much enthusiasm as if they had been months apart. Jack explored Hannah’s lavish curves with his long, muscular fingers, tracing the delicate mauve veins that lay under the creamy skin of her large breasts. He plucked at her sensitive coral nipples until they furled into distended red points that he took into his mouth.

  As he suckled first one nipple and then the other, Hannah squirmed beneath him. She ran her eager hands down the black trail that bisected his bulging six pack until she reached the stiff cock jutting from his black thatch. Both were still damp from their first bout of passion. But Jack removed her hands from his hard shaft, and held her arms apart, looking at her as if to imprint her image on his eyes.

  “You are so beautiful, sweetheart,” he rumbled. “I want a taste of your honey pot.” He moved down the swell of her alabaster stomach fondling her generous hips and kissing her tidy black bush. He reached behind her to squeeze the luscious globes which spilled over his big hands. He raised her hips and nuzzled her exposed pussy and inhaled deeply.

  “Mmm, you were made for me,” he announced smugly. His shoulders forced her thighs wide so her secrets were revealed to his eyes and mouth. “Your scent makes me wild,” he told her before beginning to lick the pink folds he had spread open.

  He lapped until her writhing hips signaled her renewed pleasure. His tongue swirled around the tight red bud before he dipped into her still swollen passage and thrust at the pink flesh. Hannah began to spasm in his arms but he did not stop his tender ministrations. He moved back to her straining clitoris and sucked lightly while pressing up firmly with two thick fingers inside her. She bucked and came again. And again.

  Jack set her bottom back on the sheets. He kissed her with his mouth still damp with her sweetness, before positioning his cock at her entrance. Slowly he pressed inward, kissing her mouth, her cheeks, her closed eyes. He began to thrust slowly, leisurely, as if they had all the time in the world. Hannah lay almost passive beneath his bulk playing lightly with his curling chest hair and flat brown nipples as he roused her all over again.

  She felt powerful, secure at last in her womanhood as she matched Jack’s gentle thrusts with delicate squeezes of her vagina. Jack was the first lover she had ever had who matched her appetite in bed and found her abundant flesh endlessly enticing. He had only been in her life for a month, but she had known from their first night that he was the one. The intimate soul deep bond she felt intensified with each day. He filled all the empty places in her heart.

  Jack deepened his thrusts as his breath grew thick and his murmured encouragement and endearments became an indistinct rumble she felt rather than heard. She gripped his hips with her strong thighs and set her heels on his muscular buttocks as she increased her rhythm to match his faster pace. Together they pounded to orgasm. She felt her womb contract as he flooded her again.

  She lay snuggled in his arms her head pillowed on his chest, until he felt her tears. “Aw, honey, don’t cry,” he said. “I’ll be back before you know it,” he promised, hugging her tightly.

  Hannah brushed her tears away with a hand that shook. “How soon?” she demanded.

  Jack hesitated. “I don’t really know, but I’m guessing six weeks, tops.” He stroked her long hair comfortingly.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  Jack shrugged one massive shoulder. “We get our info on a need to know basis. Security is tight on this project and I haven’t been told much.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated firmly. “And if I did, I couldn’t tell you anyway.”

  “But it’s dangerous? Right?”

  “Possibly,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “You might be killed?”

  “I can take care of myself.” His voice was a confident rumble vibrating her whole body. The bastard sounded happy.

  Hannah thumped his heavily muscled chest. “Have you ever thought that being a mercenary is not such a red hot career choice? Can’t you refuse?”

  Jack looked up at her, his black curls rumpled and chaotic, his blue eyes sincere. “I have to go,” he said steadily. “Refusing this tour is not an option.”

  Hannah’s heart sank. “Can you make it your last?”

  “I will,” he swore. He kissed her tenderly and rolled out of bed. He vanished into the bathroom and she heard the shower come on.

  He kissed her again, just as tenderly, when dressed in his uniform of black tee shirt and jeans and black leather jacket, he stood by her front door saying good-bye. “Lock up,” he said sternly as he did whenever he left. “Keep safe.”

  On her condo’s CCTV, Hannah watched Jack stride out the elevators through the entry doors. He vanished into the darkness beyond the camera’s eye. She went into her bedroom, and lay down clutching his pillow and breathing his virile scent. She wept as if he were already dead.

  Read the rest of Bear Necessities on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

  Bear Skin

  A Billionaire Oil Bearons Romance

  Bear Fursuits Book 5

  Red-hot love story with lusty military bear Zeke and his curvy fated mate midwife Jenna. How will this luscious BBW help Zeke overcome PTSD and survivor guilt? This brawny Army Ranger must prove he is the right mate for sexy, playful virgin she-bear, Jenna.

  Available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Does Uncle Jeremy know you’re heading out?” Laura asked her cousin Zeke Bascom as he loaded his camping gear into the bed of his big red pickup.

  Zeke grunted. The harsh planes of his face were grim. Under the fatigues he was wearing, his huge, hard-muscled body was stiff with suppressed fury . He concentrated on arranging his stuff efficiently and didn’t answer.

  “And,” Laura probed, handing him a duffel that bulged with canned goods.

  “He knows. And he isn’t happy.” Zeke admitted without looking up. He stuffed his bedroll against the box of tools he had moved to accommodate the duffel, and made some space for a second duffel.

  Zeke’s beat up old Ford was parked in the circular forecourt of his father’s palatial house, a blemish on its perfect landscaping. Laura’s Quarter Horse Dakota was tied to the cast iron hitching post that Zeke’s latest stepmother, Diana, had left by the porch steps as a nod to the family’s ranching history.

  Laura and Zeke’s great-grandfather Clive Bascom had bought the Double B Ranch back in 1946 when he got out of the army. Clive had added to his land until he owned pretty much all t
he land surrounding Success, Colorado. Finding oil on their ranch had catapulted the Bascoms into the oil business in the fifties. Clive had turned B and B Oil into the largest privately held oil company in the U.S..

  Jeremy Bascom’s house was the only one visible in the undulating, snow covered prairie that surrounded the two cousins. But the Double B Ranch was big enough to conceal the several others which had been built by the different branches of the extended clan. Laura had ridden over from the original ranch house which she had shared with her great-grandfather until his death two months ago. Now she, her father and her older brother had made it their home base.

  “Will you be back for Christmas Day?” Laura pressed Zeke.

  Her cousin’s hard face got harder. “Nope.”

  Laura’s cheerfulness vanished. “I was kind of looking forward to having you to buffer me from Calvin’s latest arm candy.” Calvin was her brother.

  Zeke turned to Laura and gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t take it any longer. I’m sick of the squabbling and the nagging. Since I came home, it’s been endless. Clive’s death has just made it worse.” His voice tapered off. “I told you the day the will was read that it would set us all at each other’s throats. Was I right? Or was I right?”

  Laura nodded sadly. “I still hoped you’d be here for Christmas.”

  “Is Calvin’s girl that bad?” he asked.

  “Haven’t you met her?”

  Zeke shook his head. “Nope. I’ve stayed away from Cal. He and Pat just want to hash over that blasted will — as if talking about it could fix it.”

  Laura grimaced. “Tiffany is another one of Cal’s anorexic models. You know the type. This one is supposed to be an investment banker.” Her voice was dubious. “So far she has given me a couple of books worth of advice on losing weight, and another of fashion advice.”

  Zeke looked, really looked, at his cousin. She was four or five years younger than him, and the closest thing he had to a sister. Her Junoesque frame was thick with solid muscle, and her opulent curves fit her six foot body. She had been running the Double B Ranch for the better part of a decade, and she was the strongest woman he knew, which was saying something, since the army was full of fit females.

  Today she was dressed for work in heavy flannel-lined jeans and chaps. Her torso was kept warm by a puffy blue parka and a windproof vest. Her ancient cream colored Stetson probably sat over a woolen watch cap. She looked pretty rectangular in her get-up, but it was December in Colorado.

  There was two feet of snow on the ground and a brisk wind, and the prospect of more snow. Laura was dressed to get through a hard day of locating stray cattle on horseback and bringing them to shelter. To Zeke’s eye she looked exactly the way a hard working rancher should look. And she always looked beautiful to him.

  But his cousin Calvin, Laura’s brother, liked his woman city bred. Cal pretty much ran B & B Oil, even though his Uncle Gilbert was still the CEO. Calvin and Zeke’s twin brother Patrick were the smoothest bears he had ever set eyes on. And he didn’t mean that as a compliment. They shared a baffling taste for stick insects with his father Jeremy. At least it baffled Zeke.

  Zeke preferred his women with hips and breasts and a whole lot of love handles for a bear to grab hold of. Women who looked just like Laura. What his father saw in his last three wives, Zeke would never know. Susan, Zara and Diana all looked like clones to him. And he was willing to bet that Jeremy was well on the way to replacing his present wife, Diana, with yet another identical sack of bone and gristle.

  And he was also willing to bet Cal’s investment banker was yet another skinny bitch. “Ignore Tiffany,” he advised Laura. “You look the way a woman ought to look. And I know you can sit in the saddle all day and all night if you need to. If you lost weight, you’d just lose muscle.”

  Laura snorted. “You know that, and I know that, but the constant little digs and helpful suggestions get to me. And examining my dinner plate! Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t be out looking for stock in this weather on salad and a slice of poached chicken.”

  “Is that what Tiffany eats?” Zeke was amused. “I bet Rosa isn’t impressed.” Rosa was the ranch house cook.

  Laura laughed. “She’s not. But she brings Tiffany what she asks for, and feeds Cal and me proper meals. It’s really Calvin that’s the problem. He’s brought her home for one thing, and one thing only. Outside of that he doesn’t even want to talk to her. Come supper time he leaves her for me to deal with. And all he and Daddy talk about is the will. I’m dreading Christmas Day.”

  “I can’t stay, Laura.” Zeke said apologetically. “I just can’t. If I have to have one more conversation about how to get my fair share of Great-granddaddy Clive’s billions, I will kill someone. I really will.” His big, broad face was lined and drawn.

  Laura put her hand on his arm. “Not yourself?” she asked softly.

  “Hope not.”

  Laura’s pretty face grew grave. “I need you too much,” she said. “You stay in one piece.”

  Zeke nodded at her once. Commitment made.

  “When’s your leave up?” she asked.

  “It’s not. Col. Rivera called me to inform me that my papers are in the mail. Doctors have suggested that I be given a medical discharge. I’m on terminal leave as of last Wednesday.”

  “Oh, Zeke, I’m so sorry,” Laura said. “Does your daddy know?”

  Zeke shook his dark head. His hair was still cut military short, but the snowflakes drifting slowly down from the grey sky had started it curling anyway. “And I’d prefer if he didn’t know it.”

  “I won’t betray your confidence,” she said hurt.

  “I know, Lauralee.” Zeke used her childhood name.

  Laura looked at her big, tough cousin. If the Rangers were forcing him to retire, he was going to be lost. Since high school when he had gone away to West Point, the army had pretty much replaced Zeke’s dysfunctional family. To her anxious eyes, Zeke looked perfectly fine — big, strong, muscular. But something terrible had happened on his last mission. Not that he had said word one to her — or anyone else — about it.

  “Uncle Jeremy has never understood that you’re not like Patrick or Calvin,” Laura told him softly. “You can’t be cooped up in an office all day looking at stock reports. You’d go nuts. Granddaddy Clive had no business trying to manipulate you into working for B & B.” Her face was hurt and angry. “He should never have written all those conditions into his will.”

  “Look at what he did to you?” responded Zeke with equal bitterness. “Leaving you only a life interest in the ranch — with a reversion to Nolan and Petal. After sucking up your life to run the Double B. He literally promised the ranch to you — you know he did. And neither Nolan or Petal is a Bascom nor a bear! And neither one has the bittiest idea of how to run it.”

  “Nolan and Petal may be Belingtons, but they are Clive’s great-grandchildren the same as the rest of us,” Laura reminded him. “And they only get the ranch if I don’t marry and have a child.”

  Zeke swore. “Before you’re thirty-five! As if any marriage or kid you had after that wouldn’t be real. And if Aunt Babs was Edward Bascom’s daughter, I’ll eat my hat.” He lowered the lid of his truck bed secured it and turned to look hard at his cousin. “You know what really pisses me off?”

  “What?”

  “The Belingtons acting like it’s a done deal that they inherit the Double D. Asking questions — as if they know a Holstein from a Longhorn. Don’t you let that clause or those ninnies stampede you into marrying some two-bit loser. You wait for the right man.”

  “I’ll try.” Laura sighed. “You know I’m contesting the will. We’re hoping the judge will remove that provision. Our lawyers say it’s too restrictive and a judge might agree. The worst part is all this wrangling. It’s going to be some weird Christmas, with nobody speaking to anybody.”

  “I know, Lauralee. We’re all squealing like feral hogs fighting over
a carcass. It’s as bad or worse here. Jeremy hasn’t been any too pleased with me since I refused to join the court challenge. And Pat’s almost as mad.

  “But you know how I feel, honey. If Granddaddy Clive wants to try to bribe me from the grave, he can go right ahead. It was his money. But I didn’t dance to his tune while he was alive, and I have no reason to start now.”

  Zeke walked toward the driver’s side door and opened it. “I’m with Uncle Gil on this,” he reminded his cousin. “Clive’s money was his to do with as he pleased. And that wicked old reprobate pleased to set us all against each other.”

  He turned back to Laura as if he had just thought of something. “You aren’t mad at me, because I wouldn’t join the rest of you?” he asked a little anxiously. “I agree that the way the ranch was left was totally unfair to you.”

  Laura shook her head. “I understand. You took a stand on principle. And you have lots of those. Don’t you care if you don’t get your inheritance?” she asked.

  “Laura, honey, I got news for you,” Zeke told her with amusement in his deep voice. For just a moment his brown eyes sparkled as they had used to. “Living on the interest from a half billion dollar trust fund isn’t any kind of a hardship. My trust fund is plenty. Millions of Americans would bless themselves to get one percent of that every year, free and clear, without lifting a finger.”

  “I want mine,” she said emphatically.

  “Breeding Quarter Horses is an expensive hobby. I know you spend your money on the stud. And that you want to expand.” Zeke chuckled at her sheepish expression. He bent and kissed her cheek. “Good-bye, and Merry Christmas. I’ll be seeing you in the new year.”

  “Have you got your cell with you?” Suddenly she was worried. “There’s a blizzard predicted.”

  Zeke shook his head and grinned for the first time. “Not where I’m going.”

  “I thought you were going into the foothills, to camp by the river,” Laura said in surprise.