Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here

by Christine Warren

  Anthropologist Cassidy Poe is a world-renowned authority on social interaction, but the overpowering desire she feels around Quinn defies every ounce of her expertise. Working by his side to uncover The Others’ enemies poses risks she never expected—to her own safety, to those she loves, and to her heart, as every encounter with Quinn proves more blissfully erotic than the last…

  Now, with no one to trust but each other, Quinn and Cassidy face a foe that’s edging closer every day, threatening to destroy the lives they’ve always known, and the passion they’ve just discovered…

  Cassidy crouched beneath the potting bench and trembled. Not with fear, but with the hot rush of adrenaline pumping through her.

  She didn’t know who the wolf was. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him before—in either form—and he wasn’t the sort she would have forgotten. She sure as hell couldn’t picture forgetting him now. A girl never forgot a werewolf who attacked her in a deserted greenhouse. Or so she assumed.

  To be honest, “attacked” was a pretty strong word. While the Lupine had reached for her, she hadn’t detected any sort of threat from him, and she usually had pretty reliable instincts about those types of things.

  She usually had pretty reliable instincts, period.

  Peeking out from among the foliage, Cassidy sniffed the air and tried to pinpoint the wolf’s location. He’d been right on her heels from the moment she shifted, not missing a beat even when she changed from woman to fox right in front of him. Of course, when one attended a party at the oldest and most exclusive private club for Others in Manhattan, one had to expect to see some things beyond the ordinary.

  Like this Lupine.

  She sensed something extraordinary about him, something beyond the average and not-so-average pack members she had met through the years. Oh, he smelled like wolf, that dark, earthy, evergreen smell they all had in common. And he certainly looked like one. She’d caught a glimpse of him over her shoulder when she took a corner at top speed, so she’d seen the huge white teeth, the rich charcoal-colored fur, and the deep black pigment of his skin. The eyes she’d noticed the moment she’d turned after hearing his growl. You couldn’t miss those eyes—a dark, rich color something like ancient gold that seemed to glow in the dim moonlight.

  They had fixed on her with an intensity that set her pulse racing. Along with her feet.

  She’d read his intent to touch her in those eyes and instinct had kicked in, sending her darting out of the way a split second before skin made contact with skin.

  Skin against skin, flesh against flesh, mouth against mouth—

  Down, girl.

  She shook her head again. Where had that come from? Clearly, the adrenaline was messing with her head. She pricked her ears forward, listening for the sounds of his movement. He was still out there somewhere; she just couldn’t pinpoint where.

  “Arrroooooooooooooooo!”

  She bolted, sprung like a pheasant by a spaniel, at the sound of the howl so close behind her. He’d managed to sneak up on her somehow, but she sure as hell didn’t intend to stand around and ask about his technique. She ran as if the hounds of hell were on her heels. Some might argue they were.

  She felt her sides heaving as she ran, air billowing in and out of her lungs, her paws searching for purchase on the slick slate tiling the floor. When she hit a corner, her hind legs skittered out from under her, and she lost a valuable nanosecond righting herself. The slip let him get so close she could feel his breath ruffling her fur. Desperately, she poured on another burst of speed and dove frantically for the greenhouse door.

  She never made it.

  She managed to get herself airborne only to collide mid-flight with a much larger and more vigorously propelled body. He knocked her off course and sent her hurtling back to the floor before she could so much as wriggle away.

  Cassidy lay there, dazed, the wind temporarily hammered out of her, while he stood above her, tongue hanging out, one massive forepaw planted against her chest, pinning her in place. She had about as much chance to get away as she did to become the next Mr. Universe. Faced with that harsh wall of reality, she gave one disgruntled yip and shifted.

  If she had counted on the element of surprise to give her an opportunity to escape, she needed a recount. She stretched and shivered, fur replaced with smooth skin, newly broadened palms planting themselves on the slate to help her slither away.

  They didn’t.

  She blinked, and he shifted with her. Though she had spent her entire life moving between forms, between worlds, and watching other shifters do it, too, she’d never been this close to anyone during the transformation. She’d never gotten to watch skin expand to envelop fur, bones shifting from animal to human, features shifting from muzzle to nose, jowls to lips. She’d never felt someone shift against her skin, tickling in ways she would have tickled him. It fascinated her, and put her just far enough off balance that her movements slowed to give him an advantage. Before she could scoot away, he dropped, his weight pinning her to the cold slate, legs between hers, hands darting to capture her wrists and pin them to the floor above her head.

  He smiled down at her then, and somehow the expression looked as feral on the human face as it had on the wolf. Her eyes widened, and she became acutely conscious of her nakedness as this man pressed intimately against her. She kept her gaze fastened on him as the grin widened and he dipped his head toward her throat. She braced herself for the pain of teeth in her flesh or the intimate lash of an exploring tongue, but instead he pressed his face to her skin and inhaled deeply.

  “God,” he growled, in a low, smoke-and-whiskey voice, “you smell so damned good. It’s been driving me crazy all night. I have to know if you taste half as delicious.”

  She felt his mouth open against her skin…

  She’s No Faerie Princess

  “Warren has fast become one of the premier authors of rich paranormal thrillers elaborately laced with scorching passion.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  Queen Mab’s niece, Fiona, has long been bored to tears by the intrigues of Court life. She’d prefer to cut loose at a punk club, knock back a few Thai beers, and hook up with a likely lad of similar interests. But when Fiona goes AWOL, she only gets as far as Manhattan’s Inwood Park before a nasty demon nearly puts a permanent crimp in her plans—and a dark stranger sparks her desire…

  All work and no play make Tobias Walker one cranky werewolf. After six months of doing his part to keep the peace during the delicate negotiations between The Others and humankind, he’d like nothing more than a good night’s sleep—preceded by an enthusiastic mating session. The alluring woman he rescues in the park might be the answer to his most lustful prayers, but only if they can both stay alive long enough to find out who wants her dead and why.

  Now, Fiona and Tobias must unravel a tangled web of treachery that spans branches of the Fae, Other, and mortal worlds, all the while falling into a dangerous attraction that could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship—or the end for them both…

  Walker wanted to grab the woman and shake her for being so stupid as to rush up to the demon like that. Then he wanted to thank her for distracting the demon with that spell of hers. And finally, he wanted to get a better look at what he remembered as being a truly fine backside, this time without the distraction of a rampaging demon to dull his pleasure. But at the moment, he had other things to do. Like getting them both the hell out of Dodge before the demon learned how to run with severed Achilles tendons.

  Walker scooped her unconscious figure up in his arms and sprinted for home. The demon reacted about as positively to that as Walker had expected, but thankfully, the injuries slowed it to a point where the combination of werewolf speed and the thick tree cover foiled its pursuit. That didn’t mean Walker slowed down any. He ran a good two miles before he felt safe in slowing to a brisk, ground-eating trot.

  Through it all, the woman in his arms remained limp and still. His long strides a
te up the ground between the park and his neighborhood. At a dead run, a werewolf could move faster than a sprinting racehorse and might even give a cheetah a thing or two to think about. Luckily, Walker could maintain his speed for distances closer to those of the equine than the feline, because it was a good couple of miles to his apartment.

  He made it without incident, ducking into the alley behind his street and breaking his speed, slowing to a walk for the last hundred yards to his building. It took him a second to catch his breath, but both he and the woman had made it in one piece. And, he hoped, without being seen.

  Hitching the unconscious woman higher against his chest, Walker let them inside and kicked the door shut behind them. Though the entrance to his apartment looked like it led to a basement, he actually occupied two floors of the narrow old building, and he used the bottom floor as a workroom and Spartan home gym. His living space was upstairs. He carried his guest up and directly to the sofa, depositing her on the soft cushions before he straightened and shifted back to his human form.

  The woman never moved, and he frowned down at her, crouching beside the sofa to examine her limp form. He’d felt the steady beat of her heart and the rhythmic rise and fall of her breathing as he’d carried her home, so he knew perfectly well she wasn’t dead. And that was what had him frowning. No human woman or witch should have survived the demon attack, which meant she must not be human. He knew from her scent that she wasn’t Lupine or any other sort of shifter, for that matter. There was nothing earthy about her, nothing animal. She smelled too pure for that, and the fact that he could smell her at all meant she wasn’t a vampire. Her skin felt too warm and smooth and elastic to belong to any other nonliving life-form, and she looked too much like a human for him to identify her origins by sight.

  He didn’t like that his sense of smell had failed him here. One good sniff ought to give him all the information he needed to place her species, but instead it only gave him a raging erection. He didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. Sure, just like any other male in existence, a good brush with death tended to bring out the horny in him, but this felt like more than that. He didn’t just want sex; he wanted sex with her, with this woman—or whatever she was—and he wanted it now. In fact, he seemed to want it more with every breath full of her scent that he inadvertently inhaled. He struggled to block the tantalizing aroma from his mind and pushed to his feet. If he didn’t get control of himself, she would end up getting a hell of an awakening. Maybe from the inside out.

  Gritting his teeth and taking slow, shallow breaths through his mouth, Walker braced himself against his uncontrollable arousal and forced himself to take stock of her wounds. Starting at her feet seemed safest, and the ragged puncture marks in the leather of her high boots looked pretty nasty. He dealt efficiently with her laces and tugged the boots off, setting them aside under the coffee table. Without the heavy covering, her feet looked tiny and fragile beneath their veil of sheer black stockings, which were dotted with blood around her left ankle. The demon’s claws hadn’t bitten deeply, thanks to the leather, but the punctures would need a thorough cleaning.

  His gaze moved up the length of her slim, graceful legs, which did totally inappropriate things to his libido, but they appeared to be free of further injury. The only other wound he could see was a slash across her stomach, and that was the injury that worried him. Carefully, he reached out to lift aside the hems of her skimpy tank tops, one eye on her face to be sure she hadn’t woken up. Her eyelashes didn’t even flutter, and her expression remained tranquil. Walker wished he could say the same for himself, but one good look at the ragged gash in her pale, freckled skin had him cursing a blue streak and gritting his teeth against the urge to howl in anger.

  The cut bled sluggishly, much less than he would have expected, but it looked nasty all the same, with jagged edges darkened to black by the poison on the demon’s claws. Jaw clenching, he dropped her hem and headed straight for the first-aid supplies in his bathroom. On the way back, he paused in the bedroom to grab a pair of jeans and ease himself into them. No reason to scare her to death by having her wake up eye to eye with the part of him most anxious to make her acquaintance.

  He stepped back into the living room with his hands full of disinfectant and bandages, and he froze. The blue-haired punk he’d left on his sofa had been replaced by a dark-haired goddess with skin like whipped cream and a torn and tattered gown of a fabric so light, if it hadn’t been for the pale lilac color, he couldn’t have sworn it even existed. The clothes she had been wearing had disappeared, and she slept on as if nothing had happened. Now he had proof she wasn’t quite human. A witch, maybe? That would explain her human appearance, since technically witches were humans who just happened to have evolved the ability to use magic, and a spell fading would explain the change in her appearance. At least, he thought it would. He wasn’t all that up on the rules of magic.

  And none of the rules he had heard before explained why the very scent of her made him want to strip her naked and introduce himself to her womb, up close and personal.

  Forcing his mind off his crotch, he returned to the sofa and knelt on the floor at her side. Her wounds took precedence over his curiosity at the moment. Until he did find out who and what she was, he’d be better off treating her injuries than speculating about the effect she had on him. When she woke up, he’d get his answers.

  Still, he was frowning as he poured disinfectant liberally onto a sterile pad. He parted the cut in her dress, ripping it slightly wider to get at the injury. When he pressed the cotton to her skin, the muscles in her stomach clenched reflexively, and he heard a soft gasp whisper between her lips. His gaze shot immediately to her face, but her expression remained relaxed and tempting in sleep. Reluctantly, he looked back at his task, only to see that the wound in her abdomen appeared to be a lot less serious than he’d thought, now that he’d cleared the dried blood and dirt away. In fact, it almost looked as if it had begun healing even before he’d washed it.

  Oh, this wasn’t good.

  Swallowing a curse, Walker leaned back from his unconscious guest and took a really good look at her. One that had his stomach sinking into his toenails. He took in the moonlight-pale, velvet-smooth skin, the miraculously healing wounds, the magically transformed appearance, and saw that his bad day had just gotten a hell of a lot worse.

  “Aw, shit.”

  Muttering to himself and whatever god currently watched and laughed at his predicament, Walker took a deep, bracing breath, eased his hands into the tumbled mass of the unconscious woman’s raven black hair, and lifted it gently away from the delicate shell of her ear. An ear that swept gracefully up from small, unadorned lobes to a distinct and elegant point.

  Fae.

  The woman currently passed out on his sofa, bleeding from an unexpected and determined demon attack, was Fae. As in full-blooded, non-changeling, born-and-bred-beyond-the-gates-in-Faerie Fae. And high sidhe from the look of her. This wasn’t a sprite but one of the aristocratic race. So what the hell was she doing in his living room?

  Pushing to his feet, Walker shoved a hand through his already-rumpled hair and began to pace across the quiet room. He didn’t need a Lupine sense of smell to know this whole thing reeked of trouble, and he wasn’t just talking about the demon stench. He already had enough on his plate trying to keep The Others in the area from inadvertently starting a war with the humans. The last thing he needed was the Fae and demons putting in an appearance and throwing everything into chaos.

  Walker bit back a curse and looked over at the sofa, directly into a pair of sleepy, darkly lashed eyes the color of African violets. It felt like taking a stone giant’s fist straight to his gut. Even the demon hadn’t packed this kind of punch. Asleep, the Fae woman had been beautiful. Awake, she stole the breath from his lungs and the brains from his head. All he had left was the blood in his veins, and that was sure as hell easy enough to prove, considering it had all rushed right to his groin the minute sh
e opened her eyes.

  While he stood there, blinking like an idiot and probably drooling like one, his guest raised her arms over her head and arched her body in a lazy, feline stretch that left him cross-eyed and half-delirious. Then she collapsed back into the cushions and her full lips curved in a sensual smile.

  “Hi.” Her sleep-husky voice had the same effect on his dick as the average Lupine female in heat waving her tail in his face, only magnified exponentially. He probably had zipper marks running up and down his shaft. “My name is Fiona. Who are you?”

  Walker groaned and rubbed his hand over his eyes, quickly discovering that the image of Fiona stretching had been burned indelibly into his retinas.

  “Shit. I’m screwed.”

  The Demon You Know

  “Explodes with sexy, devilish fun.”

  —Romantic Times BOOKreviews

  As a research grunt at a local television station, Abby Baker tends to blend into the background, which is where she’s most comfortable. But when she ends up being the last resort to cover a hot story, Abby discovers a whole new side to her personality when she is possessed by a fiend—a type of rogue demon. Suddenly everyone wants a piece of her. And now the demon Rule—also a hunter of his own kind who have gone astray—is Abby’s only hope…

  Meanwhile, The Others—vampires, werewolves, and witches, oh my!—have come out of the supernatural closet and the rest of the humans are all aflutter. Mischief is afoot in the demon realm, and Rule knows that Abby is the key to figuring it all out before the fiends tip the fragile balance between the newly discovered Others and the humans into an epic battle. Now it’s up to two lost souls to make love, not war….