Alpha Devotion: Paranormal Romance Collection

by Lola Gabriel

  “Leah—” Erik began to say, turning to Aubrey with an almost embarrassed flush on his cheeks, but Aubrey didn’t mind dancing with Leah’s friends (or roommates or classmates or acquaintances or whatever they were), as long as she could keep dancing with Erik. So she simply squeezed his hand and tugged him a little forward so that they were properly inside the dancing group.

  Realizing that she wasn’t actually upset by Leah’s intrusion, Erik chuckled and pressed himself closer to her. Even though they were alongside these other partygoers, Aubrey still felt like Erik only had eyes for her, and to her surprise, she found that she only had eyes for him.

  They continued to dance together, always holding one of the other’s hands, as though they were afraid to let go of one another and get lost among the crowd. Erik spun her around and then pulled her back to his chest, and Aubrey laughed and thought that she must be walking on clouds or feathers or on the air itself, her feet felt so light. She felt lighter than ever.

  Erik was…unbelievably handsome. Of course Aubrey had noticed it when she first saw him, but being this close to him, she could see how soft his brown hair looked, how beautiful his green eyes were, a different shade than hers and seemingly much more radiant. His jawbone was sharp and had only the slightest hint of stubble, and Aubrey suddenly wanted to touch it, to caress his cheekbones with her thumbs and run her fingertips across his mouth.

  She started leaning in at the same time Erik did. Maybe he leaned in before she did, or maybe only one of them did. Whatever the case, there was a distance of less than five inches between them, and then there was no distance at all.

  This wasn’t Aubrey’s first kiss, but good god, she wished it had been. No kiss could compare to this, to the taste of Erik’s lips, to the way he intertwined their fingers together, to the way his eyelashes fluttered against Aubrey’s cheeks, to the way his other hand pushed a strand of her hair behind her ear and then wrapped around her nape to pull her closer. Aubrey gasped and then sighed into the kiss, and Erik swallowed the sounds and pulled her lower lip between his teeth, gently biting down on it before he kissed her again, harder and deeper.

  Aubrey clutched his waist with her free hand, pushing herself on her toes to give back as good as she was getting. Not expecting it, Erik took a step back, and Aubrey smiled victoriously against his mouth. God, she never wanted to stop kissing him.

  Erik broke away from her, his gorgeous eyes blinking open to stare at her with a look of utter desire that took Aubrey’s breath away. His mouth opened to say something—revealing the tip of his tongue, which Aubrey was tempted to bite—when someone close to them yelled, “GET A ROOM!”

  It snapped them both out of their reverie. Aubrey glanced around them and remembered that they were still in the middle of Leah’s dancing group of friends. Leah herself was looking at them with her eyebrows raised, and most of the other students surrounding them were catcalling or whistling at them.

  Erik wrapped a protective arm around Aubrey.

  “Do you want to?” he asked.

  Aubrey blinked confusedly. “Want to what?”

  “Get a room,” Erik said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a smile. He gestured toward a hallway in the back of the room, and Aubrey assumed it led to the dorms of the fraternity brothers.

  She looked back at Erik and saw herself reflected in his eyes. She recalled how his lips had felt against hers, how she had wanted to touch his face, to touch him everywhere, and most importantly, she recalled how much she wanted to keep kissing him and just never stop.

  “Yeah,” she said breathlessly. “Yeah, let’s get a room.”

  Erik grinned at her, and Aubrey barely managed to hold herself back from pouncing on him right then and there. He squeezed her hand once more and strode to the hallway, with Aubrey following right behind him.

  ---

  Erik’s mouth was on hers before they had fully stepped into his room, so Aubrey stumbled on the way in and only managed to stay upright because Erik wrapped his arms around her and kept her from falling, just like he had earlier.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” he mumbled, his lips brushing hers, and Aubrey grinned into the kiss, their teeth clashing against each other’s as her purse fell to the floor. Erik’s hands moved to her hips so he could gently tug her forward until he was falling back on what Aubrey could only guess was his bed, with her falling on top of him and hearing him huff out a humph when she did.

  “Sorry!” she said quickly, attempting to pull away so she wasn’t completely atop him, but he wrapped an arm around her waist to keep her where she was.

  “No, no, that’s okay,” he told her. “You’re perfect.”

  Aubrey thought he might follow that with “right there,” or something along those lines, but when he just stared at her, she blushed under the intensity of his gaze and the meaning of his words. She had no witty comeback or comment to make, so she simply leaned down to kiss Erik again.

  Her hands immediately roamed his chest, and she had the sudden urge to touch his skin. Slowly, gently, she pushed her hands beneath his shirt, asking for permission to touch more of him. Without any further prompting, Erik leaned on his elbows only long enough to take off both his varsity jacket and his shirt and throw them somewhere in the direction of the floor, and Aubrey was face to face with his gorgeously defined torso, covered by a small trail of coarse brown hair that continued down into his jeans.

  She was so distracted by his beautiful skin that his hands at her back made her jump a little in surprise.

  “Hey,” he said, his voice gentle. “If you don’t want to, we don’t have to.”

  Aubrey had never done this before, and she didn’t think of herself as someone who would do something like this: sleeping with a guy she’d met two hours ago. Except that Erik didn’t feel like a stranger, like someone she had only known for two hours. She felt like she had known him her whole life, like he was a long-lost friend who had shown up when she needed him to, like all this time, he had been waiting for her, or she had been waiting for him.

  Maybe they both had. She couldn’t imagine stopping now for anything in the world, and she surprised herself with how much she wanted to keep going.

  “I want to,” she replied, and the grin he gave her seemed to course through her insides and fill them with warmth and light.

  “Me too,” Erik said. He looked down at where Aubrey’s hands rested right above the button and zipper of his jeans, and when she stared at him for confirmation, he nodded his head and let her help him slide his pants and underwear down. Not all the way, but enough for her to reach out and wrap her hand around him, which made his hips buck up.

  “Whoops, sorry,” he huffed out with a chuckle.

  “Easy there,” she teased him, and he twisted his head up to kiss her. His own hands moved down from the top of her back to her tailbone and then lower still, to the back of her thighs and knees, until he could push the ends of her dress up to almost her waist. Then he moved one of his hands between her legs and gently pressed his fingers against the front of her panties, making her choke back a gasp.

  “Oh,” Aubrey moaned. “Oh, that’s—” Erik’s hand slipped underneath the fabric, one of his fingers pushing inside her flesh firmly yet not painfully, only the right amount for Aubrey to feel like her eyes were rolling back into her head. “Oh, my god…”

  “Yeah?” Erik added another finger, and Aubrey’s knees shook against the mattress.

  “Please,” she mumbled, resisting the urge to squeeze her legs together in order to keep Erik’s fingers inside her. “Please, Erik…”

  Erik growled low in his throat and pressed his mouth to Aubrey’s neck, softly biting her skin before soothing the sting with his tongue, pulling his hand out of her panties and pushing them down her thighs.

  “What do you want, Aubrey?” he asked her in that low, raspy, guttural voice of his, full of desire and arousal. “Tell me what you want.”

  “You,” Aubrey nearly snapped. She
ground her hips down against his, and Erik groaned and bucked his own hips upwards, and then he was slipping inside her with a pleasured hiss between gritted teeth.

  Aubrey had never felt as complete as she did in that moment. She lifted herself slightly and ground down again, and both she and Erik let out a moan in tandem that spurred the two of them on. When she rolled her hips down, Erik pushed his up, creating a cacophony of groans and sighs that reverberated throughout the room, bouncing against the walls, into their ears, out of their mouths, and back against the walls.

  Aubrey felt her release approaching much faster than she thought it would, and she sped up the rolling of her hips and held on to Erik’s shoulders, pushing her forehead against his.

  “I’m close,” she warned him. “I’m—oh, I—”

  “Good,” he replied, tugging her lower lip between his. He also picked up the pace of his thrusts, his body tensing underneath Aubrey’s. He opened his eyes and stared straight into hers, the green of his gaze seeming to reflect hers, except his appeared to be much, much brighter, much more vivid and luminous, as if he were royalty, and Aubrey circled his neck with her arms, her fingers threading through his luscious brown locks, and kissed him.

  “God,” Erik snarled into her mouth, “you’re so perfect—”

  Aubrey didn’t hear if there was more to his sentence. Erik’s next thrust made her climax, and she screamed out in absolute pleasure and bliss, her legs quivering at his sides, her heart thumping so loudly, she feared it was going to burst out of her chest. Not a moment later, she felt Erik spend himself inside her, his arms wrapping around her so strongly that he pulled their chests together until there was not even an inch between them. Aubrey could not just feel her own heart, she could feel his, and she smiled breathlessly at how fast and hard it was beating.

  They stayed there for a few minutes, gasping for air and letting their breathing slow down.

  “Well,” Erik panted. “That was… something.”

  Aubrey laughed, her chest rumbling against his.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “That was something, all right.”

  His fingers started caressing her hair, beneath the braid crown that was surely disheveled by now, but she appreciated that he didn’t want to ruin it more than it already was.

  “I wouldn’t mind doing it again, you know?”

  “Is that so?” Aubrey leaned her chin on his chest so that she could look at him. His gaze had softened, and the smile on his face was kind and gentle, almost a little dazed, like the air had been knocked out of him and he hadn’t realized it. “I can’t say I’m against that idea.” She started to slowly lift herself up from him, and he helped her by sitting up, even though that made him slip out of her and made her hiss from the overstimulation.

  “Th-though maybe not right now,” she said, and Erik laughed and kissed her jaw.

  “Sorry,” he apologized into the skin of her neck. “Didn’t mean to be so rough.”

  “No, no,” Aubrey said hurriedly, tilting her head up so he’d be able to reach more of her skin to keep kissing. “I—I liked it. If, you know, you couldn’t tell.”

  Erik chuckled, his breath tickling her neck. “I liked it, too.”

  She smiled and pressed a kiss into his hair before she pulled up her panties and pushed her dress down, climbing out of Erik’s bed to grab her purse. While he got dressed, Aubrey noticed his varsity jacket on the floor next to the bed, and she leaned down to grab it. It had the name CARTER and the number 04 embroidered on the back of it.

  Erik Carter, Aubrey thought. The name suited him somehow. On a whim, she turned the jacket around and slipped it on, immediately noticing that the sleeves were too long for her arms. It felt like a sweater that was a size too big but still perfect, because it made you feel warm and cozy and safe, and Aubrey found, to her utter surprise and sadness, that she didn’t want to take it off, despite the fact that she would most likely have to.

  But then Erik wrapped his arms around her from behind and rested his head on the back of hers.

  “That looks better on you than it does on me,” he said, and he sounded like he was bragging, as though he’d had the jacket made for her and had only worn it as a pretense.

  Now that she apparently had his permission to keep it, at least for the time being, Aubrey snuggled into it and wrapped the open ends around her, breathing it in. It smelled so much like Erik, and with him also resting against her, she felt almost overwhelmed.

  She didn’t know how she had found her way into this fantasy-esque situation. A mysterious campus, a stranger she felt such a big, important connection to, someone she didn’t want to walk away from just yet… it was too much like a fairytale, or maybe like a dream. She would have to eventually leave and go back to her usual life, with her apartment and her work and her friends.

  Well, if she was living a dream, she might as well try to make it last as long as she could. She would not end her twenty-first birthday on a sour note.

  “Want to head back out?” Aubrey asked, turning in Erik’s arms. “The night’s still young.”

  Erik snorted in amusement. “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  He pulled away from her, but he held out his hand for her to take. Aubrey grabbed it and followed him outside of his room, back to the party, where, among the partygoers, a group of young men, most of whom were wearing jackets like the one Aubrey had on, were surrounding two other jocks shoving each other.

  “Are you kidding me?!” yelled one of them. Aubrey recognized him from earlier: he was Daxton, the guy who had told her about the campus. “You can’t even get to twelve inches, don’t even try that on me!”

  “You’re blind if you think you can get further than me, bro,” argued the other one.

  “This doesn’t work as a collective effort, you ass!” said Daxton. “Just because Abdul can doesn’t mean you can, too!”

  “Oh, good grief,” Erik sighed. “Here they go again.” He leaned close to Aubrey to whisper in her ear. “Bet you they start competing in ten seconds.”

  “Wait, seriously?” Aubrey didn’t believe that for a second. Surely these two fraternity guys weren’t going to engage in a pissing contest inside the fraternity, of all places? And in the middle of a party!

  Then, without any warning whatsoever, Daxton’s head began to morph until it was the head of a blue dragon with shimmering scales where his neck had been only a second ago, and in the blink of an eye, the dragon head opened its mouth and spewed a burst of flames into the air that, instead of being met with panic, was met with oohs and whoops.

  “Oh, like that’s impressive,” said the second jock before his head, too, transformed into the head of an orange dragon, its mouth opening to spew another burst of fire.

  Aubrey felt like her heart had dropped to her feet. What the hell? she thought. What the actual hell? Am I hallucinating? Have I completely lost my mind?

  Around her, no one seemed to find this occurrence as anything out of the ordinary, and Aubrey wondered if maybe she had crossed into some sort of parallel dimension where there were dragons and people were just fine with this. Had she passed out somewhere between her birthday picnic and walking out of Erik’s room? Had she breathed in something poisonous or with drug-like properties that made her imagine human heads turning into dragon heads?

  “Come on, Dax!” shouted someone in the crowd. “Show him what you’re made of!”

  When Aubrey turned toward the source of the voice, she saw a werewolf wearing a different varsity jacket, his giant, hairy paws clenched into fists, as if he were a regular, human jock instead of a giant, two-legged wolf. She turned her head to Erik, to confirm that he was still Erik and not some sort of monster, but what she saw were the three students standing next to Erik, growling and snarling as fangs sprouted from the corners of their mouths, their eyes glowing red and standing out against their incredibly pale complexions.

  Dragons, werewolves, vampires? Aubrey noticed her heart had started beating faster, and her breathing
was growing more ragged and uneven. Where am I? What is this place?

  Now, to her credit, she considered herself to be quite an open-minded person. She knew that changing a little bit every day was part of a healthy mindset, because it meant that you were growing and becoming better than you were the day before. Of course, having your own beliefs and opinions was completely valid, as long as those beliefs and opinions weren’t hurting you or anyone around you, but when you were presented with something that was undeniably a fact, no matter how difficult it was to believe, you had to accept that it was a fact, and therefore, you couldn’t simply close your eyes, turn your head, and say that no, actually, you didn’t think that was true.

  Aubrey desperately wished that she could. Oh, that was what she wished for more than anything right now.

  As it was, she was currently staring at a young man who had the head of a dragon, as though it were the head of a costume, except it was his own head, and he was an actual dragon who was breathing and spewing fire without a care in the world. There was another young man in front of him who also had the head of a dragon, and they were taking turns spewing fire out of their dragon mouths to the cheers and excited screaming of the people around them, some of whom were apparently werewolves and vampires.

  Aubrey’s legs were shaking. Her entire body was trembling, quivering in absolute terror at being surrounded by an army of creatures that were supposed to be mythological, yet there they were, as real as herself, as real as Erik next to her.

  “What?” Erik bumped her shoulder with his, and Aubrey could hear the smirk on his voice, even if she could not see it. “Never seen a bunch of dragons in a fire-breathing competition?”

  No, Aubrey thought, but the words would not come out of her mouth. No, I can’t say I have.

  5

  “Okay, guys,” Erik said, raising his voice so Michael and Daxton would hear him. “That’s enough, let’s cut it out.”