by Amira Rain
After Jim had made a few more remarks, he thanked everyone for fighting so hard, and then gave instructions as to how the Angel carnage was to be disposed of. He was going to stay with his men to help do it, but before he got to work, he took me aside and gave me another long hug and a kiss before looking deeply into my eyes.
“I knew you’d be phenomenal, and you were. Your mom would be smiling. She’d be so proud.”
Nodding, I buried my face in Jim’s chest briefly until I could get a sudden flood of tears under control.
Over the next couple of days, all shifters, Gifteds, and poor Marbles made a complete recovery from being zapped. Jen decided that she was never again going to let him go roaming alone. With many Angels still very nearby, it was just too dangerous.
Over the next couple of months, they attacked several more times, though now, with their numbers smaller, and with Jen’s incredible help on the battlefield, most fights only lasted several minutes before the Angels would retreat. I continued to fight, too, becoming even more adept at using my levitation power each time.
Jim and I fell deeper and deeper in love with each passing day, and I began thinking that I didn’t just want to be his live-in girlfriend anymore. I wanted to be his wife. But, to my growing disappointment, he never asked me to be, and I didn’t want to pester him about the subject, or cajole him into proposing in any way. I wanted him to want to ask me to marry him. I wanted him to do it on his own. And eventually, I decided that I was just going to be patient. If we were meant to be husband and wife, I had faith that he would propose to me at some point in time, and it would happen.
That Fourth of July, we had a carnival of sorts in Timberline. It had been Jen’s idea, and she’d lobbied hard for it, eventually getting everyone in town to agree to use some of the profits from the bar for it.
The lane between the cabins was the “midway,” and it was filled with at least a dozen fair food trucks, numerous booths featuring carnival games, and even a few kiddie rides. Dozens of picnic tables and a fairly large Ferris wheel had been set up in the cleared space in front of the bar, and it was in this area that most Timberliners had seemed to congregate by late afternoon, waiting in line for the Ferris wheel or riding it, eating fair food at the tables, or just generally milling around talking and laughing.
When Jim and I approached this area, he tossed Jen a stuffed pink flamingo that he’d just won at a baseball-throwing game down on the midway. She caught the flamingo, squealing, thanked him, and then ran off, saying she was going to go show Annie.
I looked at Jim, smiling. “You know, I really think you’re going to make an incredible father someday.”
He grinned. “Yeah? Maybe. And I would love to have kids. But I think I’d like to become a husband first.”
I forced myself to smile again, wondering just when exactly he planned on doing that. “Right. Well, I think you’ll make an incredible husband, too.”
We strolled along in silence for a little while, hand-in-hand, but Jim suddenly brought us to a stop between the picnic tables and the Ferris wheel.
“Hey.”
I looked at him, thinking he was going to ask me if I wanted to take a ride on the wheel. “What is it?”
“I want to be your husband.”
Suddenly feeling as if I had cotton in my mouth, I couldn’t answer right away. “What?”
“I wasn’t going to do this right this second, I was going to wait for the fireworks display tonight, and then I was going to do this.”
“Do what?”
“I planned it out so that the last of the fireworks is going to be an infinity symbol, with BB in one side, and PB in the other. Then I was going to look at you and say, ‘Well, what do you think?’ But I guess right now, I don’t want to wait another second before finding out your answer.”
“My answer to what? What’s the question?”
I had a little clue what it was going to be, but for some reason, I just couldn’t believe it.
Stunning me, Jim suddenly got down on one knee and took my hand, looking up into my eyes. I gasped, but the sound was drowned out by a loud collective gasp from everyone else around. Then, while Jim took a gorgeous ring with a very large princess-cut diamond from his pocket with his free hand, the carnival went quiet. All sounds of conversation and laughter stopped, and even music coming from speakers somewhere nearby was suddenly shut off. When Jim spoke, still looking up into my eyes, it was in a fairly loud, clear voice, but one that held just the slightest hint of a tremor.
“Avery Clark, will you marry me?”
Someone in the crowd, someone that sounded an awful lot like Jen, let loose with some wild peal of joy. I myself couldn’t breathe. For a long moment or two, I could only nod while my eyes filled with tears. Then, after a deep breath, I was able to manage a single word.
“Yes.”
Jim grinned. “Yes?”
I nodded again. “Yes.”
Grinning even harder, he began sliding the diamond ring on my finger.
Suddenly laughing and crying at the same time, I covered my now tear-stained face with my free hand. “Yes! I want to be your wife!”
The next thing I knew, I was in Jim’s arms. He was lifting me, spinning me around, whispering near my ear how much he loved me. The crowd standing around us was clapping and cheering; a few people were wolf-whistling. I buried my face in Jim’s shoulder, laughing and sobbing all at once.
A few days later, for an engagement present even on top of my ring, Jim gave me a gorgeous pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings to match my necklace from him. For his present, I gave him the finished painting of the two of us walking up to the bar, holding hands, the night of our first date. He said it was the most beautiful painting he’d ever seen, and just a very slight pinking of his eyes while he looked at it told me he was being completely sincere.
I soon asked him to kiss me, and he did, lifting me off my feet while he did so. I wrapped my arms around his neck, silently giving thanks for the night that government agents had showed up on my doorstep to take me away.
THE END
BOOK TWO
GIFTED
TO THE DRAGON
A PARANORMAL SHIFTER ROMANCE
AMIRA RAIN
Copyright ©2016 by Amira Rain
All rights reserved.
About This Book
After a passionate one night stand with a dragon shifter named Desmond, Madison Bennett is stunned to discover she is pregnant.
She is stunned even further when she discovers that being pregnant gives her strange supernatural powers and she soon realizes that she is one of the GIFTED. One of a small amount of humans who are born with supernatural powers and it was the pregnancy that activated her gift.
Now Madison must tell Desmond about the pregnancy but she is shocked when he tells her he wants nothing to do with her or the baby and there is a very good reason why....
CHAPTER ONE
When the government agents knocked on my apartment door, I wondered what had taken them so long. It had been a full three days since I'd discovered that I was one of the Gifted, women who possessed supernatural powers of various kinds. Usually, the agents showed up in less than twenty-four hours, from what I'd heard. I'd even begun to wonder if they were ever going to show up to take me to my assigned "post."
I'd begun to wonder if I should have gone ahead and called them myself right away, instead of just figuring that probably several of the dozen or so people who'd witnessed the display of my power had already done so. But, being that private citizens were rewarded with lump sums of cash for reporting Gifteds, I'd assumed that at least one of them had called it in, especially since at least half of the people present that day knew my name; and now it seemed I'd been right. For whatever reason, it had just taken the agents a little while to come to me.
My building didn't have an intercom buzzer system or a doorman or anything, so the three agents came right up to my second-floor apartment. I peered at them through the
peephole, wanting to make sure they were who I thought they were, but it was pretty obvious. With all of them dressed in black and wearing nearly identical serious expressions, they were the perfect picture of G-men, or G-men and G-women, as the case was. Joining one tall, slim man with wire-framed glasses, there were two women, one with platinum blonde hair and the other with short dark hair and bright red lipstick.
It was this dark-haired woman who seemed to have been the one that had knocked, because she was standing closest to the door. After a few seconds of peering out the peephole, I opened the door just as she was about to knock again.
Trying to keep my voice even and not overly enthusiastic, I said hello. "Can I help you, folks?"
Standing in a shaft of sunlight slanting in through one of the tall windows lining the hallway, the dark-haired woman gave me the hint of a polite smile.
"We're from Washington, D.C. Are you Madison Bennett?"
I nodded. "Yes. I am."
After the dark-haired woman and her two fellow agents had flashed badges of some sort at me, she continued. "We're hoping we might be able to come in and talk to you. We've received word that you're a Gifted, and we'd like to invite you to come with us to your posted assignment, in Chicago. May we come in and discuss this invitation with you?"
Invitation. Calling it that struck me as just a bit funny, because I knew that a Gifted declining an "invitation" to travel to her assigned post was actually now a federal offense that resulted in prison time.
So, really, unless a person liked forced confinement and loss of liberty, an "invitation" from the government was more like a "forced relocation to assigned post." I had to hand it to the dark-haired agent for at least trying to be pleasant and polite about it all. I was sure that in her line of work, she often encountered Gifteds who had to be coaxed and finessed, to say the least, into agreeing to be taken to their posts.
I, however, wasn't going to need to be coaxed in the least. I was pretty much raring to go, in fact. I needed a fresh start, and I needed money, desperately. And, being that I'd heard that Gifteds were paid extremely well by the government for their services, I knew that my relocation could provide both these things. Not to mention that after living in a smaller-to-midsized city my whole life, the idea of living in Chicago was exciting in and of itself.
Trying to conceal just how excited I was, thereby concealing just how miserable my life had become, I told the agents that we didn't even need to talk about my "invitation," because I'd already decided to accept it.
"If you'd all like to have some coffee while I finish packing, though, please come on in."
I'd actually been almost completely packed since the day my supernatural power had appeared.
Appeared completely out of the blue, stunning me, might have been a better way of putting it than just appeared. Three days earlier, I'd been just standing in line at the coffee shop next door to my apartment building when a silvery beam of light had just shot from one of my palms, burning a dime-sized hole in the flooring.
Customers sitting at tables nearby had gasped, and I had gasped. An older woman standing behind me had whipped her phone out and taken a picture of the hole in the floor, saying that her husband was never going to believe what she'd just seen.
Apparently, I was what was called a "latent Gifted," which was to say, a Gifted whose powers hadn't manifested fairly soon after the Angel Coven's failed takeover of the world, which was when most other Gifteds had developed their powers. My power had been latent because I was one of the Gifteds whose powers seemed to be activated only by pregnancy.
I was exactly one month along. And, before discovering that I was a Gifted, I'd been an anxious, absolute wreck. I was twenty-six, unmarried, and newly unemployed. My parents had both been killed by Angel sorcerers during The Takeover, two years earlier. I only had one relative left, my eighty-one-year-old maternal grandmother, who lived in a nearby group care home for people with various stages of Alzheimer's disease.
I loved her dearly, and she was the main reason I'd stayed in the city of Quincy when nearly all my friends had fled to different parts of Illinois and the Midwest in the chaos that had followed The Takeover. Now that I was a Gifted, she was also the only reason I was still just slightly hesitant to leave.
Before discovering that I was a Gifted, I'd had no clue how I was going to support a child and make it all work. But, I'd known that I would make it all work, one way or the other.
Feeling that becoming a mother was the right thing for me, even if it was happening at the wrong time, I'd resolved to keep my child and make a good life for him or her, even if that meant taking a job I didn't necessarily want to do, which was pretty much all the available jobs in Quincy.
I had no desire to do anything other than what I'd been doing for the past seven years, which was being a gymnastics coach.
I started in the sport at age five, competed at club level, and then had gone on to become high school state champion in floor exercise and balance beam. That led to a college scholarship, but after only a year, various injuries forced me to quit, and I came back home to Quincy and the gymnastics center that had basically been my childhood home.
Right away, I filled the vacant position of head team coach, and the pay had been pretty decent. More importantly, I loved what I was doing, and I'd been happy and secure. Even in the chaotic two years post-Takeover, the gym felt like a welcome haven of routine and normalcy.
But then, only a few weeks ago, I'd found out I was pregnant. With the city of Quincy still bleeding out residents, the gymnastics center had to close its doors. With enrollment at an all-time low, I wasn’t exactly surprised, just sad, as well as more than a bit panic-stricken.
I hadn't wanted to follow my boss, who was also a good friend, to Texas, a state supposedly fairly free of Angels, because I hadn't wanted to uproot my grandma, considering her poor health.
I considered being a Gifted one of the best things that had ever happened to me in my life. Now I'd have money for my baby, and a lot of it, and I'd also get a fresh start, though all the while still being in close visiting distance of my grandma. Chicago was only about an hour from Quincy, and I'd had a hunch I'd be "stationed" there, just because I heard that most Gifteds from Illinois wound up there. Really, I couldn't believe my good luck.
While the government agents sipped coffee and ate apple cinnamon muffins that I'd made for breakfast earlier that morning, I finished packing a few last items in the large suitcase I was bringing. As I'd suspected, based on things I'd heard, the agents told me that movers would soon come and pack up the rest of my things, and then have everything delivered to me in Chicago.
Within ten minutes or so, I was ready to leave, and this coincided perfectly with the agents finishing their coffee and muffins.
The lone male agent stood, pushed in his chair, and asked if I was all set. "Anything else you may want before the movers deliver your things? It may not be until tomorrow."
I shook my head, thinking. "No...I think I've got everything I need. I do have one question, though. Would it be possible for me to stop by my grandma's care home before we leave town? I'd like to say goodbye."
Pretty much echoing each other, the three agents said things along the lines of of course, and certainly.
They drove me to my grandma's in a shiny black sedan. I sat in the back with the blonde agent, who told me her name was Cynthia, but other than that, she didn't say much.
The group home where my grandma lived was owned by a smiling, fifty-something woman named Eloise, who was a registered geriatric nurse. She ushered me into the house, saying that she hadn't been very surprised when she'd heard around town that I was a Gifted and that I'd probably be leaving soon. "But I knew you'd never leave without saying goodbye to your grandma."
She was right about that. I may have been happy about being a Gifted, thrilled even, but if the agents hadn't allowed me to say goodbye to my grandma before leaving Quincy, they would have had to take me literally kickin
g and screaming.
Leading me down a long hallway that bisected the vast house, Eloise told me that most of the residents were with two caretakers in the kitchen, making May Day baskets and spring-themed simple crafts, since it was May first. "Your grandma, however, went out to the living room to watch TV a short while ago, after making a very pretty flower with pastel tissue paper. I think one craft was enough for her."
After saying a quick hello to the residents and caretakers, I went out to the living room, where my grandma was sitting on the couch watching a game show. Dressed in pale pink sweatpants and sweatshirt, and with her mouth curved in a happy, day-dreamy little smile, she looked almost unbearably sweet, so sweet that it made my heart ache. The feeling intensified when I saw a flower made from green pipe cleaners and pastel tissue paper clutched in one of her small, wrinkled hands.
When I approached the couch after a few moments just spent looking at her, fighting tears, she turned her focus from the TV to me, and her little smile got a bit bigger.
