The orgasm took her, and it was glorious.
“What I'm saying,” she said, after a moment to calm down, “is that I love how you're a good guy. But sometimes a girl wants a bad boy.”
Max took the hint. With a low growl he took over, stroking her deeply and tugging at her clit and stroking her until she was screaming his name without a care for who heard them. On her back, she spread her legs wide and let him play with her however he wanted. When he added his tongue she screamed all over again. Her finger tangled into his hair and pulled him in tighter and made him, made him, made him, lick and suck and kiss her into a frenzy.
It was the most strenuous sex she'd ever had. They wrestled back and forth, Max pinning her to the bed, then rolling them over so she could sit on top of him. There was a moment when he bit her ass that she orgasmed and she didn't think she would ever stop. She put her mouth everywhere on him. His knees, his cock, his back, his toes, his cock again and again and again.
She bit his neck, hard, and he moaned heavily and pushed her down, mounting her between her legs this time, and pushing into her.
There was no way to know how long it was before they ended, exhausted and spent, tangled up into each other. Nikki just knew that for this one moment in time, everything was all right. Whatever would happen next, whatever would become of them, for right now everything was how it should be.
Then Max had to open his big mouth.
“We can't stay here long. It's just a place to rest before we go back.”
She sighed through her nose. “You sure know how to spoil a mood.”
When her hand slapped his white ass, he jumped, and growled, and for one glorious moment he started in on her again, his hands all over her, his lips tasting the sweat on her skin and his teeth nipping at her neck.
Da-amn.
He was there, and then gone. He'd pushed away from her so quickly that she was left grasping at empty air.
“Seriously, Nikki,” he said to her. “We have to go. You don't understand what's going on.”
She sat up, cross legged, her crotch pulsing and aching for more. “Whatever. That was the most amazing, mind-blowing sex ever. If you don't want to do it again until later that's fine with me. Gives me something to look forward to.”
His smile was genuine. She'd touched something inside his heart, apparently, either with the physically intimate acts they had just done to each other or by what she had said. Either way, this white boy was hers, if she wanted him.
She had chosen to be with Max instead of Arcan. Did she want to be with Max long term? Was that what she had decided here?
Her core fluttered and her pussy pulsed, hard. Yes. Yes, she did want to be with him. Well. That was a new experience for her, too.
“So, uh,” she said, trying to distract her mind from serious thoughts, “tell me where we are and what's going on.”
“What's the last thing you remember?” he asked.
“You mean besides you reaching that little spot inside of me?”
He actually licked his lip. “Um, yeah. Besides that.”
“Well, we went to meet your friends. One of them wasn't your friend. He was a Shift, and we killed his ass before he brought his bigger brothers down on us.”
He nodded. “Right. I'm not sure I would have put it that colorfully, but yes that's about it. Which means Bulka hasn't been himself for a long time. We checked when we got back here. Bulka hasn't been to our world for as long as anyone can remember. Years, apparently. We all thought it was because of his assignments. Turns out, he couldn't come here. Because the Shifts can't make the portals.”
"And that Bulka was a Shift hiding behind his face," she guessed.
"Right."
"Wait, that means we're back in Gallanadon?" She never had been able to say the name correctly. Max had told her it was cute the first few times.
He didn't think it was so cute now. "Gallandrian," he corrected her. "Yes. We're here and we're worried now that Bulka shared our secrets with the Shifts before he was killed and replaced. He was one of the closest friends the Council had."
“But that doesn't mean he didn't learn too much,” she guessed. “How much do you suppose he passed on to the other Shifts?”
“Too much, like you said.” He held his hand out to her, helping her up off the bed. "That's exactly what we're worrying about. Obviously, he learned enough for the Shifts to start their plans to exterminate us.”
The Ursa Initiative. The thing her law firm had been working on that got her fired and nearly raped and killed by Shifts she had thought were people. The Ursa Initiative was a plan to exterminate every werebear in existence. In this world and in every other one. That one little file had started all of this. She wished she'd never heard of the damned Ursa Initiative.
Of course, if she hadn't accidentally opened that file, she never would have met Max.
They were fighting for their very lives. Fine time for her to make one of them her boyfriend.
Well. At least the sex was worth it.
Chapter 11
Nikki really hated the werebear council.
It was bad enough that she had to sit naked this time outside the meeting hall without even a dress made of leaves. It was worse that she knew they were talking about her. At least in part.
Max had told her how special she was. The Council had spelled it out for her, finally. She was the product of a Shift and an Ursallin. Something that had never happened in the history of every world that had ever existed. She was a first. She didn't feel special, so much. What she felt was left out. She wasn't human. She wasn't a Shift, that was for damned sure. Of course, she wasn't a werebear, either.
So what in the hell was she?
She felt along her side where she'd been injured in that fight, wondering again about how quick it had healed. All the little cuts that damned Shift had given her while ripping off her clothes were gone, too. The Ursallin could heal almost immediately. Did she have that power? Was that one more thing she had never known about before, that marked her as something more than human?
Or something less?
Even though the weather here was warm and pleasant, with hot breezes that caressed her skin, Nikki shivered. Pulling her knees up to her chest she wrapped her arms tightly around her legs. They all expected something from her that she couldn't understand, let alone give. What was she supposed to do?
Arcan came over to where she sat, his knees at her eye level. She kept her attention there, knowing that if she looked up just a little she could see the part of him that she had held in her hands just a few hours ago. This was why she knew she could never make it in a nudist colony. How could a girl be expected to be around all these fine looking men with their cocks out for display and not look at them? Or touch them, for that matter. Or do the occasional taste test...
Hmm. Well, that took her mind off what the Council was doing for sure.
Instead of sitting with her, he squatted on his heels, his elbows resting on his knees, his body lithe and ready to spring even in that casual pose. He kept his gaze on the meeting hall when he spoke to her.
“I'm not surprised you chose him.”
She knew this would be awkward. Arcan had carefully avoided her and Max both after they had stepped out of the hut where she woke up. She was afraid he would hold it against her. Choosing Max felt like the right thing to do and she wouldn't change it now for all the money in the bank accounts of her former law firm, but that wasn't going to make it any less weird between her and Arcan. Guys got attached to girls who stroked them off. This she knew from experience.
“Look,” she said to him, “it's just one of those things. The heart wants what the heart wants, you know?”
He shook his head, frowning. “No. I don't know. You humans and your sentimental emotions. Max is already infected by them, losing the hard logic that has kept our kind alive for so long. The facts seemed simple to me. I'm older. I'm trusted more by the Council. I'm better looking.”
“I don't know about that last one,” she muttered, then realized she had said it out loud and tried to backtrack from it. “Um, I mean you're both good looking in your own way, I mean. Er, I mean to say that you are good looking, but not like Max is good looking.”
He made a dismissive wave with his hand and she gratefully stopped stuttering through her apology.
“I might grant you that,” he said with a wry smile, “but I'm better in bed.”
She doubted that, but since she'd never let Arcan screw her she really didn't have a frame of reference.
Anyway...
“Just don't go all crazy bearman on me, okay?” she said to him, making sure to keep her legs closed and her tits covered behind her crossed arms. “Jealousy is bad enough in a man when he doesn't have the strength of a bear to back it up.”
“I'm not like that,” he said, all serious like. “I tend to plow into things straight on. If you know what I mean.”
His double entendre was not lost on her. He might not like to show when he was angry, but it was written all over his body language, and in the things he was not saying, and how he was not saying them.
“Bigger issues,” she said to him. “There must be plenty of bear-girls out there who would let you do lots of things to them. Don't obsess over little old me. Especially when there are icky black pudding monsters out there trying to kill you.”
Now he did turn to face her, one eyebrow arching. “Pudding monsters?”
Nikki rolled her eyes. “What do you want me to call them? I can hardly take them seriously the way they melt and ooze and spread themselves out like an evil Mister Fantastic." She shivered again, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms looking to put some heat into her stippled flesh.
“You take them seriously enough when you're fighting them,” Arcan pointed out.
“Yeah.” She didn't know what to add to that. One day, she had been just another girl in a world of overpriced coffee and bad television reruns. Now she was this ninja assassin who had moves she had never been trained to have. It was like the first Shift she ran into at her apartment had flipped a switch in her. Like some part of her brain that had lain dormant all these years had suddenly come to life just because the Shifts had shown up on her doorstep. To kill her.
And worse.
“Max hasn't told you where the Shifts come from?” Arcan asked her.
She shook her head. “Must not have come up.”
“Too busy burying himself in you,” Arcan said indelicately. “Let me tell you the origin story of the Shifts. It is our story as well. Our two races are so intricately linked that we can't have one of us without the other.”
“But the Shifts are trying to kill you guys. Obviously, they want to live without you.”
He nodded, sitting down with one foot tucked under him, and damn if her eyes didn't go right where she didn't want them to. “The Shifts don't share our view of things,” he said to her. “They believe they can extricate themselves from us and not suffer for it. They're wrong, but there isn't any arguing with a homicidal...pudding monster.”
Nikki snickered as he repeated the term she had made up, and he laughed with her, much to her surprise. “So tell me the story already,” she insisted.
Running both hands over the top of his head, stretching the already tight muscles of his arms and chest and making Nikki wish that Max was here right now to distract her, Arcan's voice took on a faraway tone. “In the beginning, there was only one world. It was dark, and evil, and devoid of anything good. Into this world, the Primus was born. He was the first Ursallin. The first of us. He saw that the world was without any scrap of goodness and wanted to change that.”
“Wait,” she interrupted, shifting to a more comfortable position on the ground. “Are you telling me the very first man was a werebear?”
He hesitated, rolling his head on his shoulders. “Hard to say. The histories are a little fuzzy on that. Were there other people created at the same time as our ancestor? I don't know. It's possible that my first ever ancestor walked the same Earth as yours. All I know is that he was the first of us to decide the world needed to change. He could have spent years trying to change things little by little where he was but he had the unbridled impatience that comes from strength. So instead of fixing the world he lived in, he stepped from his world to the next.”
“That thing you do with your claws,” she said to him, paraphrasing what he had said. “The way you rip a hole in the fabric of time and space or whatever to travel between worlds.”
She had come to grips with that already. It didn't even faze her anymore, even if it was an incredible thing to see. When something happened right before your eyes, more than once, only crazy people would argue it wasn't real. Nikki had seen the portal made half a dozen times now. She'd traveled through it herself. She knew it was real. She was in an alternate world, sitting naked on the ground with a hot, visceral black man who could change shape into a bear.
See? Perfectly sane.
“When our ancestor walked from the old world to the new one," Arcan continued, "his shadow had trouble making the journey. It followed him, but because it had come from a dark world it couldn't take the light of the bright sun here."
He looked up at the sky, his wide nostrils flaring as he inhaled a deep and satisfying breath. Then he sighed it out and told her more. "His shadow tore itself away from the Primus and hid among the shadows. As time passed, it became stronger and more aware of itself. At the same time, it began to mimic the creatures around it. Birds, lizards, bigger things that had no name and have since passed into extinction. Everything it could see, it imitated. It learned to shift into anything it wanted to be in order to hide in plain sight. It learned to kill and to hurt things. At the same time its hatred toward the Primus grew. My ancestor had trapped it here in this bright new world with its sun and its green grass and its loving creatures. The Shift became a creature of dark, foul thoughts and evil purpose.”
They sat in silence after that, for a long time, until Nikki cleared her throat. “That's, uh, pretty incredible.”
“I know. Not the history you're taught in school, is it? Your people have forgotten all about the evils that lurk in the shadows around them. That's why they are such easy prey for the Shifts.”
“Hey, buddy, don't forget that one of your own people got themselves killed and replaced by a Shift too. A Shift that damned near killed us.”
As soon as she said it, she regretted it. Bulka and Vallith were both dead. The pain of that was fresh on Arcan's face. There was just no taking her words back. The tragedy of Bulka being dead all this time was much too fresh a wound for her to be poking at it. “Arcan, I'm sorry...”
“Forget it,” he said, his tone cold like ice.
Nikki turned into him just a little bit more and suddenly her knee was touching his. When had they gotten so close? Worse, when had she stopped caring that she was naked in front of him, or that his thigh was resting comfortably against hers? Sparks leapt along her nerves and into her core, threatening to make her need something really, really badly.
"So how did your Primus boot the Shift out of this world?"
"That remains a fact lost to history," he said, his eyes holding her gaze, his body coming closer to hers.
In the doorway to the meeting hall, Max cleared his throat.
Jumping away from Arcan and up to her feet like she'd been burned, Nikki kept her eyes carefully away from Max's. Her breasts jiggled tightly, her nipples stiff, and she swore under her breath at how her body had betrayed her. “Max,” she said, “uh, Arcan was just giving me a quick rundown on where Shifts come from. The history of your people, I mean.”
“Same thing.”
He shrugged, but the expression on his face told Nikki that he was very aware of what had been going on out here, and he knew it was more than just talk. She felt her cheeks heat and she had to remind herself that she was a grown woman and her private thoughts were none of Max's business.
“
Um,” she said, pushing her hair back from her face. “What, uh, did the Council say?”
“Some things I'd rather not repeat,” was his first answer. Then with a huge breath that swelled his chest, he added, “We're going back. To your world.”
Arcan snorted. Max positively glared at him, and she could see more of their private communication pass between them before Arcan simply turned and walked away. Nikki's eyes slid to his tight ass and the way it flexed with each step.
Max cleared his throat again.
“What?” she snapped, a little more harshly than she had meant to.
“Look, Nikki,” he said, shifting his weight, his penis swinging to the side as he did.
Damn it all to Hell, she thought. She had to get back to a world where men wore clothes!
“I know,” Max went on, unaware of her heating thoughts, “that Arcan is attractive by most every standard that counts. I know that you are a very sexual woman. I don't mind that you look at him. I don't mind that you get turned on by him. Really, I don't.”
“That's very open minded of you,” she quipped.
“No, it's not. I'm just recognizing what's right in front of me. Plus, I didn't finish. I know how he might make you feel. But if you ever go to him or any other man for release, we're done.”
She stared at him. Those words hit her harder than she would have ever expected them to. Was she into him that much? “I'm not looking to spread myself around, if that's what you mean.”
“Good,” he told her, with a thin smile. “Because we Ursallin mate for life.”
Words caught in her throat with a little strangled sound. “Life? As in, you only take one lover in your whole entire freaking life?”
“No. That's not what I mean. We have sex often. In our younger years. But when we find the woman we're going to stay with, the one we love, we mate for life. For me, you're that woman.”
Nikki put a hand to her forehead. “That's a lot to take in, Max. You maybe should have told me that before I let you fuck me.”
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 37
