The Crocodile Virgin

by Jenny Schwartz

  The Crocodile Virgin

  Jenny Schwartz

  A cold-blooded mating frenzy can be ridiculously hot!

  Nadia Lorre has her hard-earned college degree, a mountain of student debt, and a new job as a tour guide in Africa. The Sahara Desert, even its northern fringe, is hot and harsh—and that’s before the bullets start flying! Paul Carnarvon’s dramatic entry into Nadia’s life will change it forever.

  Orphaned at five years old, the only crocodile shifter Nadia knows is herself. But Paul is a King Croc, a shifter with the ability to compel other shifters’ transformation. He will compel Nadia to embrace her wild self.

  Ancient magic, modern terror, and a heroine afraid to love.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Note From The Author

  Chapter 1

  I’m cold-blooded. Frigid, my ex-boyfriends say. They kiss me, they caress me, and I feel…nothing. Why would I pretend, why would I fake it, so that they could have sex with me? Sometimes I almost give in, I almost say, “yes”, but I don’t want to lie. I don’t want to have sex till it means something to me. Till the man means something beyond my desperate attempt to find someone to love.

  A psychologist would say that I have a fear of intimacy that goes back to the trauma of losing both parents when I was five years old. From a loving, happy family, I was suddenly adrift in the vagaries of Chicago’s child welfare system. I survived.

  I don’t fear intimacy. I crave it. But I have yet to meet “The One”.

  “Don’t forget your hat,” I reminded the seventh passenger descending the tour bus. “The Saharan sun is hot. Do you have your sunscreen?” I reached for the tube of sunscreen that I’d learned to carry with me, along with extra water bottles, hats and wet wipes. I am a tour guide for an African adventures company. I have a college degree in archaeology and a mountain of student debt to prove it and the job could be worse. For the next week, I’m responsible for twenty one seventy- and eighty-year olds, and sometimes it feels as if I’m a kindergarten teacher. “Mr. Carter, do you have your allergy medications?”

  Jerry, the bus driver, gave me a friendly and sympathetic grin before pulling out his paperback science fiction novel. For now, his job was done. He’d stay in the air-conditioned bus, keeping the air-con running in case any of my charges over-heated—or at least, that was his justification for running the cool air. Jerry had been driving tour buses for thirty years. Nothing surprised or perturbed him. He was as steady as a rock and since this was only my third tour group, I was grateful for his reassuring presence.

  I stepped out of the bus into the heat of the Saharan morning and my other self, deep within me, stirred and sniffed the air. She liked the desert, but she was lazy. She’d sleep awhile yet. In Chicago, especially with its cold winters, she’d rarely woken.

  The tour company provided a practical uniform of a loose cotton shirt and trousers in a dark sand color. My boots were my own, worn in and comfortable. I wasn’t about to risk blisters or snakebite.

  The northern strip of the Sahara wasn’t all desert, or not as people pictured a desert. The fringe had shrubs and grasses and a chain of oases. There were lions and antelopes, jackals and crocodiles. It was a wilderness, but we weren’t interested in the natural world, today. I herded my group of twenty one along the trail to the ancient tombs.

  Archaeologists—real ones, not tour guides like me—argued over who had created the tombs cut into the rock and decorated with wall paintings. Some saw an Egyptian influence. Others Nubian. Still others argued for people from the Middle East.

  I’d entered the tombs once, the first and biggest tomb, and had nearly collapsed beneath a sudden and crushing case of claustrophobia. Since I’d never experienced claustrophobia before, my whistling, hyperventilating breathing and incipient panic attack had scared me. Fortunately, my companion on that first descent into the rock-cut tomb had been a retired nurse. She’d taken charge of me and herded me back up the ladder. Once outside in the hot sunshine I’d recovered fast.

  However, I knew better than to descend into the tombs again. Luckily, no one else had to know of my problem since the tombs were too small to comfortably allow more than three people at once. Me staying outside seemed to the tourists merely a time-saving exercise.

  In fact, I’d swiftly learned how to make myself comfortable for the long wait.

  The tombs were cut into a sandstone ridge. A thorn tree grew a short distance from the entrance, its roots forcing their way into crevices and deep into the ground to survive. As long as I avoided the thorns on its trunk and branches, I could be relatively comfortable. My secret self huffed at my softness. If I wore her skin, the thorns wouldn’t trouble me.

  But if I wore her skin, I’d scare all the tourists.

  I thought of their shock if I suddenly wandered among them as a crocodile. I was seven feet long in my other body. I’d measured myself once by marking the sand before rolling away to shift back to human.

  The second set of tourists climbed out of the tomb and the third prepared to descend, carefully looping bag and camera straps over their shoulders.

  Crack!

  Gunfire has a particular sound. Despite what people say, you don’t mistake it for a car backfiring or anything else. There’s an edge to the sound, a whine that is the promise of death. And when it erupted at the tombs, it wasn’t just me who recognized it.

  People screamed. There were three other tour parties here with us. One was smaller, a boutique tour. The other two were standard like mine. The younger tourists fled like chickens, flapping in the direction of the buses and away from the gunfire.

  I squinted against the glare of the sun.

  There seemed to be two men with guns. They weren’t firing randomly. They stood in the slight protection of outcrops in the limestone ridge and the straggly shrubs and shot towards a third man who ran in a zig-zagging but determined line—right for me and the largest tomb.

  “To the bus!” I shouted at my group of twenty one, and counted heads.

  …nineteen, twenty. Where was Mr. Carter? Damn. Had he gone down into the tomb? He was a bit deaf, but even so, could he really not have heard the gunfire? Or was he just stubborn enough to ignore it? Mr. Carter was very determined to get his “money’s worth”, as he called it, from his African vacation.

  I watched the rest of my flock, but they were all scurrying with surprising speed back toward the car park. Once there, Jerry would do his best for them. Better than I could manage, at any rate.

  Just to be clear, I’m not a hero, but I couldn’t leave Mr. Carter in the tomb.

  Crouching low like they did in movies, I ran from the shade of the thorn tree to the entrance of the tomb. “Mr. Carter—oh!”

  He was climbing back up the ladder and was face-to-face with me. I smelled his licorice candy-scented breath and a tinge of sweat. And no fake coconut scent of sunscreen! But now was not the time to worry about sunburn and heat stroke. I could nag him later.

  “I dropped my camera. I had to go get it.” Mr. Carter climbed out of the tomb. “It was in its case so it should have survived.”

  That camera was his pride and joy. However, as a fragment of rock skidded across the ground ten feet from us, evidently the result of a bullet striking, I hoped his camera wouldn’t be the death of us. “Run!” I gave him a firm push and he staggered off toward the bus.

  I had every intention of following him. I truly did. But a strong hand grasped my arm and swung me around.

  Holy heck! I slammed up against a six foot wall of muscle. The man who’d been running for the tomb, zig-zagging from bullets, held me against him. With his other hand
, he tipped my chin up. I looked into hazel eyes that flickered from green to yellow.

  Crocodile eyes.

  Inside me, my secret self lashed her tail.

  “Of all times and places.” The guy had an American accent. Southern. Louisiana, perhaps. His voice, and even more, his breath, skated over my skin.

  I growled. I didn’t meant to. It wasn’t as if I wanted him to release me. Far from it. I pressed into him.

  A bullet hit the rock of the tomb.

  “Inside.” The stranger pushed me into the tomb.

  I’d have argued—claustrophobia—but his big body hurried me on and I had the sudden, painful realization that he was using his body as a shield, blocking the tomb’s entrance till I was down the ladder. He was shielding me from gunfire.

  I practically slid down the ladder, I descended that fast.

  The stranger hurried after me, jumping the last few feet.

  But we wouldn’t be safe long. There was a definite flaw in his thinking. I turned to him, my hands instinctively clutching his shirt and feeling the heat of his skin and steady heartbeat beneath. “There’s no other way out. We’ll be trapped here.”

  He gripped my wrists. “Mate, don’t you understand where we are?” He pulled me with him to the wall behind where the ladder descended. This was the wall the tourists never photographed to show me later on their camera screens. Nor did the tomb’s carefully placed, battery-powered electric lanterns favor it. The wall was almost shadowed, but still not a hiding place.

  Then something moved on the wall. In the shadows, the outline of an immense crocodile painted in red ochre shifted from profile view to face us and opened its terrifying mouth.

  “Blood to blood.” The stranger’s hold on my wrists tightened, just before he stepped backwards into the wall, through the painted crocodile’s open mouth, and pulled me with him.

  I screamed.

  Gunfire erupted in the tomb.

  Chapter 2

  “I’m dead.” Surprisingly, I was okay with death. It actually looked quite nice…not quite what preachers had led me to expect from heaven…but maybe this was a crocodile shifter’s heaven?

  The shallow river was wide and slow-moving. Rushes edged most of it, but there were gaps along the sandbank where the mud was churned up and showed the prints of many animals. I could imagine shifting to crocodile and sliding over the mud and into the water. It would be warm. The sun was midway across the sky, signaling late afternoon, and it was hotter even than the Saharan sun. It was a good thing I was wearing sunscreen.

  Did you need sunscreen in heaven?

  I looked at the man still holding my wrists. “I’m sorry you died, too.” He must have. He was here in heaven with me. Not that I minded a gorgeous man being with me in this piece of paradise.

  “We’re not dead.” His gaze lowered from whatever he’d been studying on the far bank and he frowned at me. “This is Eden.”

  I nodded. “Paradise. Heaven. Whatever you want to call it.”

  “No, Eden.” He gave my wrists a little shake. “This is the place of raw magic, where shifters began. We’ve been looking to enter it, but Richelieu has guards everywhere. The old king’s tomb was almost forgotten, but Richelieu even had guards there.”

  “The men with guns?”

  A faint smile relaxed the tense line of the stranger’s face. He wasn’t handsome, but he was compelling. “Yes, the men with guns. You really don’t know what is happening, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay. We’ve got time. I don’t see any of the others yet. We’ll give them a few minutes, then if they don’t turn up, it’ll be up to us.”

  “What will?” I tugged my wrists free of his grip. I was beginning to believe this wasn’t heaven. But I wasn’t sure if I was dead or not.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “Nadia Lorre.”

  “Paul Carnarvon. Let’s sit up here in the shade.” He urged me up the shallow sandbank and into the shade of a date palm.

  Moving out of the sun instantly dropped the temperature. We sat on the ground and Paul rested his forearms on his knees. He was a big guy, wide through the shoulders and chest, but not bulky. Think of a world class sprinter. Yeah, he was seriously sexy. His black hair was cut short, his mouth was generous, his face square. Even frowning, he didn’t give off a dangerous vibe.

  I felt safe with him.

  No, let’s be honest.

  I felt attracted to him. Despite everything, I sat closer to him than I ever would with a stranger.

  Inside me, my secret self growled, displeased. She wanted to be closer yet.

  An answering growl, low and exciting, rolled from Paul. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Our mating will have to wait.”

  “What? I think I misheard you. You. Me.” I gestured between us. No matter the attraction I felt to him, we were strangers. “We’re not hooking up.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  He agreed with me, so why did I feel disappointed? I should have felt relieved, safe. Sex wasn’t recreational for me…and I was frigid: remember, all my dates had said so. With him sitting close, I didn’t feel frigid, though. I felt hot.

  “We’re going to be together forever,” Paul said. “But we’ll discuss that later. For now, how much do you know about shifters?”

  I felt uncomfortable. “My parents died when I was five. I know I’m a shifter, and I’ve met a couple of others, but mostly I keep to myself. I know how to shift and I enjoy being a crocodile, but I don’t let her out much.”

  “You’re in touch with your beast?” Paul asked intently. He’d clasped my hand when I told him of my parents’ deaths. Now he ran his thumb over my knuckles.

  I shrugged, struggling to suppress the temptation to move close enough to lean against his shoulder. Just the innocent handclasp had my hormones surging. The hint that he cared about me, his sympathy for my childhood loss, appealed, too. “I talk to her, my secret self. She doesn’t talk back, not with words. But I know how she feels. Mostly she’s lazy and sleeps. But…that growl you heard. That was her.”

  “Croc soul to croc soul. My growl came from my beast. So our beasts both recognize their mates.” He gazed into my eyes. His hazel eyes were the dusty green of the riverbank. “Most shifters don’t commune with their beasts. They simply feel their shifter self as another skin that they wear. My ability to communicate with my other self is part of what makes me a King Croc.”

  “You called yourself that before,” I interrupted. “What is a King Croc?”

  “It means I’m closer to the raw magic of our ancestors. Stronger in it. All shifter breeds have a few who are like me. We’ve banded together against Richelieu. It’s not that we like or trust each other, but we can all see the danger of what he’s attempting. We all know he has to be stopped.”

  “Who is Richelieu and what does he intend to do?” My questions sounded sensible, practical even, but my voice absolutely didn’t. I’d never imagined that I could sound so seductive. My words asked for specifics about the situation we were in, but the tone of my voice invited sex.

  A growl so sub-vocal that only my shifter hearing let me catch it rumbled in Paul’s chest. Without thinking, I put my hand on his chest to feel the vibration.

  He froze. “If you haven’t had much contact with shifters, I’m guessing you haven’t been warned about the mating frenzy?”

  “Noooo.” His face was so close. Since he hadn’t moved, I must have. I realized that I was on my knees, leaning into him. I tried to withdraw. This wasn’t me. I wasn’t sexually aggressive.

  My muscles locked as my secret self growled again.

  Paul’s hazel-green eyes were yellow, his shifter self peeking out.

  Hot, so hot.

  “The mating frenzy is part of recognizing and accepting our mate. We can resist it, but only if we intend to refuse our mate-bond.”

  “Do you intend to refuse me?” I asked.

  “We need to wait.” He’
d locked his arms, hands gripping his forearms as they rested on his drawn-up knees.

  I bent my head and rubbed my cheek against his arms.

  “Nadia.” His voice vibrated with warning and need. “This is not the time. We could be interrupted at any moment. We have to act against Richelieu, and act fast.”

  “I don’t mind fast,” I whispered.

  His body jerked. He swore.

  Then I felt a push. Not a physical one. Not even a violent one. But power called to my secret self and she punched through me. I shifted form.

  As a seven foot crocodile I lay at Paul’s feet. The world was vivid with scents and most of all with him.

  He lent over me. “You are beautiful. Your coloring is stunning, like old bronze.” He ran his hands over me. “I’m sorry I forced your shift, but I couldn’t have resisted you much longer. Soon we can learn one another. I want us to choose each other, not just surrender to hormones. Actually, I’ve chosen. The instant I saw you standing outside the tomb, helping that old guy, I knew you were mine. But I need to know that you choose me.”

  So he’d forced my shift into crocodile form to give us both time. I wasn’t sure whether to thank him or sulk.

  I turned fast, my tail slapping his boots, and raced down the sandbank and into the river. The water was silty on the button from mud, but clean and pure near the surface. I floated, blowing bubbles.

  Paul walked down to the water’s edge. “Richelieu is an internet billionaire. He’s invested in so many start-ups and other things, hidden things, and they’ve all turned platinum. Now, he’s interested—obsessed—with artificial intelligence and robotics, and he wants to get a head start on the competition. He intends to use the raw magic that created shifters to give life to robots.”

  Would that be so bad?

  I didn’t think Paul could read my mind. My question was, perhaps, the obvious one. At any rate, he answered it.

  “The raw magic of Eden is the antithesis of artificial intelligence and robots. We, shifters, are instinct and life force. Robots are calculation, rules and precision. There are scientists and philosophers among shifters. They are afraid, and it is their fears that brought us all to take action. They fear that raw magic fused with robotics will cause an explosion. Raw magic could tear free of its millennia-old patterns. As shifters, we could lose our ability to shift form, or perhaps, to control our shifts. But worse, the Earth itself, could shake into cataclysm. Raw magic flows through the ground, in volcanoes and earthquakes. It is in floods and ocean tides.”