“Hey!” he yelled. “Who keeps extra pillows under the couch?” He threw two of them back at her.
“Former Pillow Fight Champions, obviously,” Bethany said, ducking. “You never know when you’re going to need extra ammunition.”
The next few minutes were a blur of laughter and pillows, until somehow they both ended up on the floor, with Bethany kneeling over Alexei’s prone body as he pretended to cower away from the dangerous paisley bolster she held in one hand.
Their eyes met and something shifted. Suddenly the air was heavy with potential. Alexei felt as though he couldn’t catch his breath. In the dim light from the lamp on the wall, Bethany seemed like some ethereal creature, her red hair floating around her fair-skinned pixie face, flannel shirt riding up to reveal a smooth midriff.
“I think you win,” he said. “I should have known better than to take on the champion.”
“Yes, you should have,” she said, putting down the bolster. But she sounded a little breathless too, and her eyes darkened. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to pay the penalty now.”
“And what would that be?” he asked, wondering if he should end this now, and knowing he really didn’t want to.
“A kiss, of course,” she said, as if it was nothing. But when he rose up to meet her and their lips touched, it was something. It was everything. It was as if the past year just dropped away, leaving him weightless, his heart near to bursting with some emotion he didn’t want to put a label on.
“Bethany,” he said, whispering her name as if it were some magical word that could unlock the mysteries of the universe. He ran one hand up under her shirt in the back, reveling in the feel of her smooth soft skin, pulling her closer to him. “This probably isn’t a good idea.”
“Probably not,” she whispered back. “We’re doing it anyway though, right?”
He kissed her again, harder. Hell yes.
Suddenly he wanted, no, needed to have next to him. All of her. Next to all of him.
“Are you sure?” he asked. He didn’t want to risk regrets later. Not on his part, because he couldn’t imagine any universe in which he could regret being intimate with Bethany. But he wanted to give her the chance to change her mind.
“Oh, hell yes,” she said, unconsciously mimicking his thoughts. She pulled her shirt off over her head without unbuttoning it, revealing a silky camisole, which quickly followed.
Alexei cupped her breasts in his large hands, losing what little rational thought he’d managed to hang on to. Her creamy flesh felt like silk, the pink tips inviting him to nibble and suck and lick until Bethany gasped and collapsed on top of him.
He rolled her over and quickly pulled off his own shirt and jeans before sliding hers off too. Now, their positions reversed, he reveled in the feel of skin on skin, while carefully holding the mass of his body up so he wouldn’t crush her smaller form.
She writhed underneath him as he teased her with lips and hands until she bit his shoulder and said, “I want to feel you, Alexei. All of you. Now.” And grasped him with greedy fingers, in case he had any doubt of her meaning, guiding him to her center.
Then there was only heat and pleasure, low moans that turned to cries of ecstasy, and a rush of joy so heady he thought that everything that had come before was merely a faint shadow of the reality of this moment.
* * *
Alexei woke in the morning feeling more cheerful than he had in a long time, and it took him a minute to remember why. He stretched out in the too-small bed, peering over the edge to check on Lulu and her babies. Bethany was gone, but there was a stack of pillows where she had ended up, and a piece of paper with a note on it that said, “Still the champion.” So apparently she was okay about what had happened between them the night before.
That was good, since they had to spend a lot of time together. On the other hand, he hoped she wasn’t thinking it meant something it didn’t. He was still leaving as soon as they’d found and vanquished the kraken. He wasn’t the settling down type, and he wasn’t going to risk letting someone else important to him down the way he had his brothers. Not that Bethany was all that important. Nope. They’d practically just met. Just because he could actually breathe when she was around, that didn’t mean she was important. Just really, really amazing.
“Outside,” Lulu whined, bringing him back to reality. He let her out, then moved her and the babies into the box (lined with old towels, as promised) that Bethany must have put in the living room at some point after she left his bed. Then he wandered over to the house, his need for coffee overwhelming his desire to put off seeing Bethany.
The dazzling smile that greeted him almost made him forget his resolve, his wanderlust, and everything else that wasn’t her.
“Morning,” she said, handing him a mug. “How are Lulu and the puppies doing?”
“Great,” he said, gulping the coffee too fast and burning his tongue. “I put them all in the box you brought over.”
“Great,” Bethany repeated. “Can you get my dad up on your own? I want to peek in on the babies, then run a few errands and then get to the bar early so I can catch up with some paperwork.”
“Uh, sure,” Alexei said. “Um, are we okay? I mean, you’re not upset with me, are you?” He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but this calm, normal, cheerful attitude wasn’t it. Not that he was disappointed. He was happy not to have to deal with a fuss or clear up a misunderstanding. But Bethany was acting like nothing had happened at all. He hadn’t actually dreamt the whole thing, had he?
“Why would I be?” she asked, grabbing some folders off the table and sticking them in a tote bag, not even looking at him. “We were both emotional after the puppies were born and got a little carried away. It was fun, but it’s not like it changed anything, right?”
“Right,” Alexei said as she walked out the door. He wasn’t sure which one of them was lying. Or if they both were.
Chapter 14
Hayreddin hated to admit it, but that damned Len had been right.
Being a pirate in this new world was just no fun.
So much had changed during the time Red had been away, and his kind of piracy just didn’t work anymore. Len had been right about the lack of ships to attack. Wealthy men still sailed the seas in expensive boats, but during the month of April, they were all someplace warmer, like the Caribbean, and no one sent their fortunes by ship anymore. Except drug dealers, apparently, and Red saw nothing worth stealing in piles of white powder.
To be sure, they occasionally attacked a yacht or a tanker just for fun, but Len was surprisingly squeamish about all the killing, and the supposedly tough men they’d hired to be their pirate crew were a disappointment, one and all. Half of them, panicked after one glimpse of the kraken, took off as soon as they came back to port, swearing this wasn’t what they’d signed on for. The rest had to be paid extra to keep them from blabbing to everyone they knew.
Without booty to amass, the larger ship Len had procured was mostly just wasted space, and not nearly as maneuverable as one of Red’s old sloops. There were no cannons mounted on it, and just as Len had said, today’s weapons were smaller and more portable. In the end, he had grudgingly allowed Len to return it, and get rid of most of the extra men, retaining the three most bloodthirsty to work on Len’s battered fishing boat.
Hayreddin told himself it was a better disguise anyway, since no one would suspect a mundane fishing boat of piracy, but really, it was all so disappointing. He longed for the day when the kraken found his long-lost treasure and he could return to the Otherworld. This was all taking much longer than he had expected it to, and sooner or later word would get back to the queen, and she would summon him home.
Even though dragons were given a bit more leeway than other Paranormals due to their extreme power and longevity, not even they could disobey a direct command from high queen of the Otherworld. The trick was to stay on this side of the portal until he had accomplished his task. If she forbade him fro
m returning after that, he did not much care. He hated this new world, with its technology and its lack of swashbucking adventuring. He would be happy never to come back here again.
So he had been having Len send the kraken out more and more often, searching for where his ship had gone down on its final voyage. The beast had found a few other wrecks, even some with riches and gold aboard, although nothing to compare with what he’d lost. They had a nice little stash of booty for Len to drool over, but it was not what Hayreddin had come here seeking.
And then there was the added complication of the attention the kraken’s presence was drawing. In the old days, anyone sensible would have run in the opposite direction. Now, they sent out scientists.
“I have an idea,” he told Len over a breakfast of rum and sandwiches.
“Oh, god,” Len said, putting his head in his hands. “Not another one.”
Red missed the days when people who irritated him could simply be made to walk the plank. This stupid little vessel did not even have a plank. But no, he still needed the Human, both to control the kraken without violating the technicalities of the queen’s rules and to help Red navigate this confusing and uncomfortable modern world. But later, oh yes, later, there would be a reckoning.
“We need to scare people away from the area we are searching,” Hayreddin explained in what he believed was a calm and even tone. One of the hired men turned white and helped himself to more rum in a hurry.
“Yeah, okay,” Len agreed cautiously. “I mean, it makes sense that we don’t want anyone to figure out that the kraken is under our control, or stumble across us when we find my, I mean your, treasure.”
Red puffed on his pipe furiously to mask the smoke coming out of his nostrils. He closed his eyes and counted to ten dead bodies until he could be sure he had himself back under control. “Yes, exactly. So I have come up with a cunning plan.”
“Uh, huh.” Len rolled his eyes. “You mean like all the other cunning plans you’ve come up with so far?”
The youngest and stupidest of the men guffawed, and Red casually took out the knife he kept tucked into his boot and stuck it into the annoying Human’s chest, then picked him up in one smooth motion and heaved him over the side of the boat.
Silence settled over the remaining crew and Len opened and closed his mouth like a fish on the end of a spear.
“Would anyone else care to make a comment about my leadership skills?” Red asked mildly, wiping his knife off on the leg of his trousers. “No? Excellent. Then I assume you are ready to hear my idea?”
Three heads nodded up and down in unison, Len’s bobbing the hardest of all.
Good. It was about time the little twit remembered who was in charge here. The kraken was only the second most dangerous thing on this ocean.
“People are still afraid of ghosts, are they not?”
Len’s usual blank look became even blanker. “Uh, sure. Most people. Why?”
“I will start appearing as the ghost of Blackbeard, the fearsome pirate,” Hayreddin declared, quite pleased with the cleverness of his idea. (After all, he had been the man known as Blackbeard, along with many other famous pirates, so it was not as though he would have any difficulty taking his semblance.) “These scientists will be so frightened, they will stop chasing the kraken and leave us in peace to pursue the treasure.” He waved his tattooed knuckles in the air to reinforce his point.
“Uh, I’m not sure that will work,” Len said, albeit in a more cautious manner than before. “People probably won’t believe you are really a ghost, his ghost especially. I mean, he wasn’t known for operating in this area, was he? I thought he ended up mostly in North Carolina.”
Red waved away his protestations. “I can take on the guise of Blackbeard as easily as you can pull on your boots,” he said. “Just you wait and see. And it matters not where he sailed in life, since all is different now anyway. It is only important that I am fearsome and strike terror into the hearts of those who see me, so they run away and stay away.”
“You sure as hell strike terror into my fricking heart,” one of the men muttered.
Red beamed at him. “Exactly. So we will await the next passing vessel and I shall appear to them as if out of nowhere. They will spread the word and before long, we shall have peace to continue our search.”
“Or end up on the Internet,” Len said. But he said it quietly, and so Red was happy to ignore him.
* * *
“Oh, come on,” Bethany said. “You saw what?” The last couple of days had been difficult enough without her having to deal with idiots. And this particular idiot wasn’t even drunk yet, unless he’d started in another bar.
“Blackbeard’s ghost,” a fisherman named Clyde said, with complete seriousness. His face was ashen and he’d tossed back his first whiskey like it was water. “I swear to god. Scariest thing I ever saw in my life. And you’ve met my mother in-law.”
The two men who crewed for him nodded their heads in unison, looking equally unsettled.
Bethany had met his mother in-law. It was hard to believe there was something out there that scared him more. (Her Christmas fruitcakes had been known to make grown men cry.)
“How did you know it was Blackbeard?” she asked, her skepticism clear in her voice. Alexei, who was sitting at the bar with the three sailors, took a sip of his beer and perked up, like a man whose favorite reality TV show had just come on. A group of regulars gathered around.
Bethany often thought sailors gossiped more than any dozen women in a hair salon. Her father said it was because of the long, boring hours out on a boat with nothing to do but talk. He was going to be really cranky that he missed this particular conversation.
“How did I know?” Clyde said. “He freaking told me, didn’t he? Said, “I am the ghost of Blackbeard the pirate. Fear me, puny mortal!’ Plus, you know, it was tattooed on his knuckles, one letter on each finger.”
“Puny mortal?” Alexei choked back a laugh. “He actually said ‘puny mortal’?”
Clyde glared at him. “Oh yeah, it sounds silly now, sitting in a brightly lit,” he glanced around, “well, a reasonably well lit bar. But out on the ocean, miles from land, with the sun going down, it sent a chill right down my bones.”
His shipmates nodded mutely, and pushed their empty glasses across the bar for a refill.
Bethany poured them each some more whiskey and set the bottle down within reach. She could tell it was going to be that kind of night.
“Okay, so how do you know he was really a ghost?” she asked. “Not to mention, how did he appear to you if you were in the middle of the ocean?”
“And why were you out so late?” One of the other fishermen asked from a nearby table. “You’re usually in by afternoon at this time of the year.”
Clyde held up a hand for them to wait and slugged down the rest of his whiskey. “Let me just tell the whole story from the beginning, will ya? It will be a lot faster.”
He swiveled on his stool so he was partially facing Bethany at the bar, but could still address the others gathered around to listen.
“As for why we were out so late, well, we were trying to make a buck, weren’t we? There’s hardly any fish out there - ” this got nods of agreement from everyone else - “so we took out a boatload of those damned thrill seekers who wanted to try and catch a picture of the sea monster.”
“Giant squid, not a sea monster,” one of the scientists from Wood Hole said from a table off to the side. “Much more interesting, really, given the rarity of giant squid sightings.”
“Like sea monster sightings are common,” Alexei muttered, but for a change, he kept his voice down so only Bethany heard him.
She was grateful for that, since the last thing she needed was for him to create another riot. But he’d been strangely quiet since their night together a few days before, and she wasn’t sure what to make of it.
She knew she was faking pretending she didn’t care about their crazy (wonderful/amazing/holy
crap that was the best ever) sexual encounter, but she had no idea how he felt. And she wasn’t going to ask him, either. They both knew he was leaving soon, and not the type to settle down. What would be the point? Other than to have more wildly satisfying sex. But she wasn’t going to think about that either. More than twenty or thirty times a day.
“Sea monster, giant squid, Moby Dick’s second cousin twice removed, I don’t care what it is,” an old-timer named Mike said glumly. “It’s either eating the fish or scaring them away, and we’re all going to go broke and starve to death if someone doesn’t find the damn thing and kill it.”
“Exactly,” Clyde said. “So with no fish to catch, I figured, why not rent out my boat and my services for the day to people with more money than sense. Right? So we picked up this bunch at noon and spent hours hanging around the waters where this creature has supposedly been seen. Or where boats have disappeared, or whatever.”
“Weren’t you afraid your boat would be next?” Bethany asked.
Clyde shrugged. “My family has to eat. I mostly figured it was a fool’s errand, but even if it wasn’t, and there is some giant creature out there, I’m not going to sit at home while my kids go hungry.”
There were lots of nods around the room. Bethany’s heart ached for these men, who worked so hard in conditions that were already difficult enough without having to contend with a kraken. She bit her lip and glanced at Alexei. He narrowed his eyes and nodded, a silent promise that he would deal with it. His friend Beka had left a couple of days ago for the place they called the Otherworld to try and find some answers. Alexei said time worked differently there, so there was no telling exactly when she’d be back.
This all just got weirder and weirder.
“So what happened?” one of the guys asked. “Did you see the monster?”
“No,” Clyde said. “Not a glimpse. The folks who hired me kept insisting on going a little further, but I finally told them we had to head back when it was starting to get dark. Then, out of nowhere, this other ship appears.”
Dangerously Fierce (The Broken Riders Book 3) Page 15
