Barbie felt like laughing, although tears continued to spill. This change wasn’t terrible at all—it was fascinating. She didn’t want to run, she wanted to cry some more. Why was she crying? Because Darin had been telling the truth. Darin, it turned out, was a frigging werewolf!
The Darin-wolf tossed his head back, settled his massive shoulders, opened his lips and howled. As the sound echoed throughout the alley of mausoleums, he spread his fur-covered arms outward as if to say, Here I am. He was awaiting her decision.
How many times had he been disappointed? Barbie wondered. He had told her she was the only person outside of his family to know his secret. Some secret it was!
When she nodded, the movement felt awkward after so much stillness. Possibly she was in shock, but Darin was in that body across from her, wrapped in all that fur. His eyes gave a familiar flash of green fire, softened by a whitish glaze of moonlight, as they gazed at her from the beast’s altered face. No change there. Hunger still burned in those eyes. Hunger for her.
Zing!
She reached to pull up her Saturday pan ties, settling them on her goose bump–covered hips that were so cold now, without Darin’s nearness. She cocked her head to better see the Darin-wolf in his entirety, thinking she would have to buy a new hairbrush to accommodate all that fur. Then Barbie threw her own head back and howled.
“Ah-oooooooo!”
Weak. She tried again.
“Ah-oooooooooooo!”
Grinning, she said to Darin, “Better?”
Darin, trembling all over, held out an expectant paw, palm up. Without hesitation, Barbie placed her hand in his.
“It is you inside there?” she asked.
The wolf nodded, and shrugged his massive shoulders.
“Will you make me a werewolf?” Barbie asked.
Headshake from the wolf. No, from Darin. This was him in there, the man who would never hurt her, he’d once promised. The man who had mentioned the E-word in passing, early on.
Light cascaded over Barbie as she joined Darin in the moonlight. The light shimmered on her tanned skin. But she remained Barbie.
Experiencing a burst of emotion she could barely contain, different from an orgasm yet infinitely close, Barbie smiled and took a firmer hold of Darin’s paw, claws and all. Darin had entrusted this gargantuan secret to her. He trusted her. This was something they would share for a lifetime, three days each month.
Only one more question sprang out of Barbie’s mouth, a question requiring immediate attention. “If I’m not one, how can we . . .Because I. . .”
She reconsidered what she had been about to say and revised. “Good grief. I’ve waited this many years. I think I can manage to wait out a couple more nights.” After a pause, she let out a moan and added, “Maybe.”
Darin’s laughter was a hushed and husky “Grrrr.”
“Forever?” Barbie whispered back to him. “No joke? No game? The real thing, Darin? You and I and. . .Dog?”
Definitely they would have to get bigger space if Dog was part of the picture, and blankets to cover the furniture for all the animals in this family, because her dreamed-of Cape Cod house would soon have its occupants. Perhaps eventually it might be populated by a small wolf pack.
Those pictures skittered away, drifting on the currents of Barbie’s exhaled breath. Her heart continued to thrum expectantly, as if there might be more to come and this was only the beginning.
“Grrr,” her wolf said. Barbie knew the word he’d just confirmed was forever. She knew he meant it. He’d chosen her. He hadn’t lied. They had a deal.
Angie’s client had sent them to a singles party that just happened to be in a graveyard. Fate’s intervention—the cemetery, the singles party, the moon? Fate stepping in to join two people for a lifelong adventure? Maybe four people? (That last term—people—she used loosely, depending on what Angie’s Walter turned out to be.) Yes, that client had likely meant it as a joke. But who would have the last laugh now?
“Is there more, Darin?” Barbie waved up at the moon. “Show me everything.”
She grasped even tighter to his hairy paw as he turned away from Walter’s lair. She trembled as his ultrasoft fur brushed her skin, realizing that she couldn’t walk anywhere. Her nerves were on fire. Her body’s switch had been left in the “on” position. She was one big mass of need, and although this wolf man was truly terrific, what she had to have real soon was Darin the man back with her, in the flesh. Instead of pushing him into the moonlight, she’d have to pull him away from it.
She had her hands back on Wolfy before he knew what was happening, her fingers wrapped in his minklike chest fur. It would take a lot of effort to move a werewolf. She leaned back and tugged.
“Oooohhhhhh!” Darin barked, with what Barbie assumed might be the surprised equivalent of Ouch! He stumbled forward a step. One giant leap for womankind, she silently crowed.
Barbie tugged again, nearly losing her footing, but she had made it back beneath the mausoleum’s overhang with the Darin-wolf in tow. Now, she only had to find that very close, relatively unoccupied crypt they’d discovered earlier. Get Darin back in the dark and out of that fur. Again.
A crypt would be a strange place to explore her sexuality for pretty much the first time, she admitted to herself fleetingly. Yet she was virtually wagging all over at the thought of forever with Darin, and she wanted it to start now. She couldn’t wait one more minute. She wanted to seal the deal no matter how strange any of it was. This was love.
Darin howled his happiness over being closer to her. Barbie howled right back at him.
They laughed together—his, a bark, and hers, a trill that kept right on coming.
“Get a room!” The shout came from inside the building at their back. Angie was never too busy to eavesdrop.
When Barbie looked back up at Darin, there he was, in man form, his luminous eyes flashing with desire. Next thing she knew, she had jumped up into his arms with her legs wrapped around his waist and her hands on his oh-so-dreamy human shoulders. He felt glorious, hard, manly, and all hers. And she could see in his eyes that he wanted to get somewhere safe to prove it to her.
She silently pleaded with him for mercy and lots of rule breaking, just this once. In her mind, Barbie visualized that big book of rules snapping closed.
“Walter?” Darin called out in his sexy, throaty voice. “I know you’re busy, but could you maybe help us out here?”
Wind whipped through the branches beside them. The crickets again stopped chirping. A low rumbling noise, starting in the distance, quickly rolled in toward the graveyard and passed right over their heads. Lightning, dazzlingly white, outlined in purple, sizzled over the tree tops. And as if the lightning were a giant needle weaving the darkness together, the sky tumbled over itself and clouded over.
All moonlight disappeared.
Darin, holding Barbie close, backpedaled away from Walter’s crypt. He hit the nearest gravestone and waited out a breath. It was so dark now, all the other crypts were hidden. When Darin smiled, Barbie knew it only because her lips were a mere breath from his.
“I won’t even ask about that,” she said, “because my friend is in there, and I refuse to believe her date could have had anything to do with a rising storm.”
“Good,” Darin said. “Because your mouth is going to be too busy for speech.”
He proved this with a kiss so lush and deep that it needed no help from any other body parts to send Barbie over the moon. And then she was falling, locked in Darin’s embrace, to the grass, where Darin proved some other things, too. Like the fact that his scratch-and-sniff theory had real merit in the dark, no visuals necessary. That internal fireworks accompanying a slow sexual coupling could easily beat out those of the Fourth of July. That grass stains on the knees can actually enhance a sexual experience, and virginity is worth keeping until the right man comes along. Oh, and she also decided that it would be a good idea for Mattel to give Adventure Barbie a hefty production run.
She had never even come close to imagining what a true sexual experience could be like. Couldn’t have guessed. When the big moment came, with Darin’s lips locked to hers and his body pressed in close, the ground rippled and the sky closed in. She forgot to breathe. No clanging sounds could have matched the intensity of her own whispered cry of happiness. The entire graveyard, marble and all, might have fallen, for all Barbie knew, as the rush of heat and vibration kept on quaking through her with no sign of letting up. Indeed, after sex with Darin Russell, life would never be the same again. Ever.
Incredibly, just as Darin separated his marvelous mouth from hers and her body finally rocketed to a stop, its quakes quite possibly prolonged by all those nice people underground providing an ectoplasmic things-that-go-hump-in-the-night cheering section, the three words he uttered far outdistanced everything else: the coupling, the interstellar gratification, and even the other three important words he’d used earlier.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” she said right back, faintly, going dizzily interstellar again with what just might prove to be a very addictive habit. Satiated, if only for the moment, and completely out of breath, Barbie rolled out from under Darin and stretched out on her back. Eyeing the clouds beginning to move away from the moon, she felt giddily happy.
“We managed that quite well, I thought,” she said breathlessly. “Considering.”
“Yep. Quite proud of myself,” Darin agreed in a gruff, teasing tone.
Tossing her hair out of her face, blinking at the sudden return of the silvery illumination that once again lit the area, Barbie continued, “Darin, do you know that the Barbie doll’s first horse’s name was Dancer? For other pets, she’s had twenty-one dogs, several ponies and cats, a parrot, a chimp, a panda, a lion cub, a giraffe, and a zebra.” She hesitated before finishing: “But Barbie, in all her Mattel incarnations, has never had a werewolf.”
A giggle filled her body with warmth, and caused Darin to tilt his head quizzically. Well, it was the Darin-wolf’s head, actually, since Darin was once again in the process of shifting his shape.
“It seems,” Barbie told him, grinning widely, smiling brightly, “that Barbie Bradley has finally one-upped Mattel.”
Darin nodded, growled, slurped her neck once (very sexily), and then pulled her to her feet. For a minute more they gazed into each other’s eyes. Then, legs and minds in sync, they took off at a run. Together.
Was this a match made in heaven? Maybe. Perhaps even definitely. It sure looked that way to Barbie after such a promising second date. So maybe the third date wouldn’t be to a movie. Maybe it wouldn’t be to Home Depot for a start on that white picket fence, or even an entire evening spent in bed, undisturbed. Nope. She had a feeling the third date might be at the altar.
For surely Barbie Bradley, named after the doll, and Darin Russell, named after the singer, were the flesh-and-bone equivalent of Oreos and milk, only better.
Much better, Barbie decided as she ran with her true love. . .
Through the cemetery. . .
Totally naked. . .
Laughing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A whole lot of thanks for getting this book into the hands of readers are due to the following people, to whom I will be eternally grateful. My wonderful editor, Chris Keeslar, for making this particular dream come true. My super agent, Jennifer Schober, for helping to see that he did. The Mattel toy company, for creating the Barbie doll in the first place. And my family, those here and those gone, who have always supported my creative endeavors. There just couldn’t have been a better group of people on the planet.
Copyright
LOVE SPELL®
April 2009
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2009 by Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-0658-9
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