MILITARY ROMANCE: The War Within Himself (Alpha Bad Boy Marine Army Seal) (Contemporary Military Suspense & Thriller Romance)

by Claire Branson

  "You're beautiful," Corbin said, voice a little rough in his throat.

  His hands were there, then, shaping the curves of them, thumbs stroking over her nipples. Lily's breath hitched. He caught them between thumb and forefinger, gently rolling them until she writhed in his lap. It was... God, she didn't know how to describe it. His gaze was intent, like he was focusing all of his attention on this one thing, on pleasing her. Like he was studying her reaction to his touch so he knew how to make it exactly right.

  Lily reached out and ran her hands up his chest, then stroked back down with her nails, just hard enough to leave quickly-fading red lines behind. He made a soft sound, his fingers faltering only for a moment. Then he was lifting her, settling her over him so that she straddled his lap, her dress riding high up her thighs. She could feel how hard he was already, and she rocked down against him. His hands tightened around her hips.

  He caught the hem of her dress in his hands, and pulled the whole thing up over her head, leaving her in just her underwear. She looked down at him, teeth pulling at her lower lip, a little shy, and found him looking up at her with something like reverence in his expression.

  "Can we take this to my bedroom?"

  She nodded. Yeah. They could.

  He picked her up like she weighed nothing, and Lily laughed and clutched at him, her legs wrapped around his waist and her arms around his neck. She buried her face against his shoulder as he started up the stairs, not really sure that it was a good idea for him to carry her up them, but trusting that he wouldn't drop her. They didn't seem to trouble him at all. He dropped her lightly on the mattress in his room, and then he stepped back to strip out of his own pants before he joined her on the bed.

  With them both nearly naked, he seemed a little less confident.

  Lily reached out and stroked a hand along his cheek, and he turned his head and kissed her palm.

  "Are you okay?" she asked gently.

  He nodded. "It's just been a while since I've done this," he said, not quite meeting her eyes.

  Lily smiled. "It's been a while since I've done this too. We'll relearn it together."

  She rolled over and settled herself on his hips, her knees on either side of his thighs. His hands curled around her legs, and he looked up at her with eyes that were a little wide, and an expression of obvious admiration. Lily leaned down and kissed him, rolling her hips to feel the hard length of him through their underwear. He bucked up against her with a groan, and she answered with a little sound of her own. It was nice to be appreciated.

  Abruptly, he flipped them both over so that she was laying beneath him, her hair spilled out across the pillow and her thighs still pressed against his hips. She hooked her ankles together behind him, and he leaned down onto his forearms, her hard nipples brushing against his chest as they moved. Their mouths met again, and for moments that stretched out long, it was just them, moving together, connected at every point.

  "Do you have protection?" she asked when they broke apart again, gasping.

  Corbin nodded, then reached for the drawer in the nightstand.

  "Good. Then get these off."

  Lily hooked her fingers in the waistband of his underwear, pulled them down as far as they would go with him kneeling over her. Her tongue slipped out to wet her lips. He looked good almost naked. All lean muscle and smooth, fair skin. She sat up enough to wrap her hand around him, making him gasp and rock into the touch. He stripped out of his underwear, then settled back on to his knees as she pulled her own off and tossed them over the side of the bed.

  She rolled the condom on for him, listening to the gasps and sighs her touch coaxed from his throat, then stroked him again, once, teasing. When she dropped her hand, he caught her around the thighs and pulled, dumping her onto her back in the rumpled sheets. Lily's laughter was soft and delighted, edged with a moan.

  One hand pressed her leg outward until she was spread wide under him, her cheeks flushing anew, and he reached down and stroked his fingers up her labia, the touch at first so gentle, nothing more than a whisper over her skin, making her whimper and writhe, pleading without words for more. Obliging, he slipped them between her folds, rubbing them over the entrance to her body but not pressing inside, sliding up with only slight hesitation to find her clit, rubbing over it and making her jolt and moan. He looked, she thought, entirely too pleased with himself over the matter, and his fingers kept up their circling until she clutched at the sheets and begged him to fuck her.

  He slid in carefully, one arm bracing his weight over hers. Lily's spine arched, and her arms lifted to wrap around him, her nails digging faint marks into the skin over his shoulder blades. The expression on his face was almost startled, open and wanting, pleasure written across it. The press of him inside her was a stretch after so long, but the slide of it was easy, and there was only pleasure, building as he began to move, shifting with each thrust until he found the angle that made her sob his name and rock up to meet him. Corbin leaned down and silenced her with kisses.

  It was slow, and intimate, and Lily moved with him, wanting him deeper, closer. Wanting more.

  The pleasure built slowly, rising between them until she could feel Corbin trembling with the strain of holding back. He reached down with the hand that wasn’t holding his weight, pressed his thumb to her clit and rubbed in slow, firm circles until she sobbed and arched and came with his name on her lips. He followed her over the edge, teeth sinking into her shoulder with a shock of pain that only made the pleasure sharper.

  After, they lay side by side for long moments, remembering together how to breathe. Then Corbin drew her into his arms and they slept. Lily woke in the middle of the night to find him looking down at her, his expression contemplative and almost sad in the pale reflected glow of the streetlights beyond his window, but when she asked him what was wrong he reached out and slid his fingers through her hair, whispering for her to go back to sleep, and she sank into dreams before she could find the words.

  Chapter Six

  Days became weeks, one date became two, became five, and Lily was happy. Her father was not. She tried to avoid fighting with him when Corbin was around, but it seemed as though he always knew when she had anyway. She wasn’t sure if it was that or something else bothering him, but as the months wore on, he seemed more and more stressed. He was still gentle, still attentive and warm, but she could see the worry behind his smiles, and some nights she woke to find him sitting slumped in the chair in front of his desk, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. Trying to coax the reason out of him had been unsuccessful. Every time she tried, he turned the conversation around to her, to her father. He was insisting that she get him help.

  Lily knew, of course, that Corbin was right, that something had to be done. She struggled against the knowledge until a day in late August, and then she gave her father an ultimatum: either he went to rehab, or he found a new place to live. He’d yelled at her, accused her of not caring about him, but she’d held her ground until rage had turned to tears and he’d agreed to go.

  Two days later, she had dropped him off. After a week, he’d called to tell her that he was glad she had made him go, that he was thinking clearly for the first time in a long time. Lily had been so relieved she’d cried.

  It was September, and Lily was thinking about broaching the subject of moving in together, when Corbin told her they needed to talk. She settled onto his couch with nerves twisting in her stomach, her hands clasped together in her lap, and waited for him to speak.

  “There is something that, if this is to go any further, I have to tell you,” he said quietly, staring down at his hands. “Something very big that you don’t know.”

  He was a criminal. He’d been divorced. He had a child. The possibilities flicked through Lily’s thoughts, and she clenched her hands together tighter.

  “I’m not sure you’re going to believe it.” Corbin took a deep breath, and dragged his gaze up to meet hers. “I’m not human.”
<
br />   That was not a possibility she had considered.

  “You’re not what?”

  He looked as sick as she felt. “I’m an alien.” She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand. “Not the body-snatching kind.” If he was trying for a joke, it fell flat, and the smile he’d attempted faltered. His voice got very quiet. “The shapeshifting kind, actually.”

  “You’re a shapeshifting alien.”

  Corbin nodded.

  “Prove it,” Lily demanded.

  He looked startled, as though that wasn’t quite the reaction he’d expected, but then he nodded again. The change was subtle, at first, a shift she couldn’t quite explain, and then it was rapid, his body folding in on itself until suddenly there was a large black bird sitting in a puddle of fabric where he had been. It tilted its head, and looked at her through one dark eye.

  Lily stared at it in startled silence.

  “You… That was you,” she said finally.

  Corbin squawked something that was maybe bird for yes, and then the change was reversing itself, and he was sitting in front of her as a human again, though his clothes hadn’t made the transition as gracefully as he had. He didn’t seem bothered by his nudity.

  “It was me,” he said, in the tone of a confession. “I know that it was an invasion of privacy, though I didn’t at first.” He looked down. “I only wanted to be sure you were okay.”

  For a moment, Lily was angry. He had no right. She didn’t need him spying on her to make sure she was okay. Then she remembered the way he had stopped the fight with her father the day he’d been angry enough to scare her. She remembered the little black cat she had seen only once.

  “The cat?”

  He nodded without looking up.

  Lily rubbed her fingers against her abruptly aching temples and let out her breath in a slow sigh.

  “So what happens now?”

  He finally raised his head to look at her.

  “I have to leave.”

  “What?” The word was ripped from her. “Why?”

  “Because there were rules. And I’ve broken them. I wasn’t supposed to date you. I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this. And I certainly wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you.” A laugh, soft and bitter, escaped him. “Love is not something we’re supposed to even be capable of.” He ran a hand through his hair, his eyes still locked on hers. “I was sent as a spy, and I’ve failed utterly in my duty. They know where I am. As long as I’m here, I’m in danger, and so are you. And I won’t allow that.”

  I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with you.

  It was the first time either of them had said it.

  She should wish him goodbye and good riddance. She should walk out and let him leave and not care. He was an alien. A shapeshifting alien spy, for heaven’s sake. She should do a lot of things. It was absolutely crazy to do what she was contemplating.

  “So take me with you.”

  “What?”

  Lily almost laughed at the shocked echo of her own earlier demand.

  “Take me with you,” she said again. “We’ll go somewhere far away. We’ll see the world together.”

  “I’ve just told you,” he said slowly, “that I am a shapeshifting alien spy, running for my life, and you want me to take you with me?”

  “Yes.”

  Corbin threw up his hands, an edge of hysteria in his laughter.

  “Well why not then? I’ll just… I’ll just take you with me.” His voice softened. “We’ll see the world together.”

  And it was crazy. It was absolutely insane. But somehow, Lily was okay with that. She stood, then held out a hand to him, and he took it with a grasp so tight it almost hurt. She helped him to his feet. His arms wrapped tightly around her. She held him in return, his face pressed to her shoulder, buried in her hair.

  “I love you too,” she said.

  It was insane, but at least it wouldn’t be boring.

  THE END

  Space Tigers 1

  Book 1: Conflict

  Book 1: Conflict

  Prologue

  There was a knock on the door. It rang through the small room, cutting into Bruce’s thoughts. Part of him was annoyed that someone would deign to disturb him so close to his naming ceremony, and the other couldn’t help but be grateful for this very fact. With a sigh, he stood up and crossed his small room to the door, swinging it open to find none other than his best friend’s ex-mate, Lexus. She stood on the other side of his threshold, clad in her warrior dress: a black armored corset, fishnet tights, and a holster that housed two different daggers, a stun gun, and her intergalactic cell phone. She lifted her gaze from his boots to his face, making sure to linger around his bulge as she did so. A smile stretched across her face as she pressed past him into his bedroom. “Well, I guess this will be one of your last moments as yourself,” she declared in a seductive voice. Everything she said sounded impossibly seductive.

  Bruce shrugged, hesitantly shutting the door behind him. “Boris wouldn’t want you in here after what happened.”

  Lexus scoffed. “Oh please. We’ve been broken up for, like, almost a year now.” She groaned, sitting on his bed. She leaned back onto her palms, an action that opened her chest to him. “I know that a grace period of a month, maybe two, is customary for these things. But it’s been ten. He can’t tell me who I can and can’t have sex with.”

  Bruce flexed his jaw, wondering how he was going to resist her this time. They were holed up in complete privacy in his room, much different than the last time she tried to seduce him, during a bathroom break in the middle of a political speech. “Yeah, well, common decency can,” he countered as he crouched down to re-lace his boots.

  “Look, I don’t have a lot of time. I’m supposed to be en route to earth in less than thirty minutes.”

  “Oh please, you’ll be fine.”

  Bruce rolled his eyes. “Hugo’s men have been working on this for almost ten Earth years now. They’ve hacked databases and created a whole life for me…”

  Lexus groaned. “Yes, yes. I know, and it would be flaky as hell for you to skip on your own field job.”

  “Look, the emperor is waiting.”

  Lexus stepped off of the bed and crossed the room to him, placing her palm on his shoulder. He could feel his body almost melt into her touch.

  That was not a good sign.

  With a sigh, he stood up and wrapped his fingers around hers, if only to move her hand away from his tough, tanned skin.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Instead of giving him the personal space he so wished she would, she squeezed his fingers, pressing her chest into his. The hard cuts where her corset covered her breasts were almost as arousing as the real thing. Suddenly, all he could think about was the sound of her moans and the sensation of himself inside of her as he rammed into her over and over again, her nails digging into his skin and drawing blood, the knowledge that anyone could catch them at any moment only drawing them closer and closer to orgasm. He could already feel his bulge hardening at the mere thought of all of this, and it was a bad look, because she picked up on it almost immediately.

  With a dark chuckle, she pressed her lips against the little space on the back of his ear, knowing good and well that he had a weakness there. Her tongue lingered on the skin, driving him into a frenzy of desire.

  She laughed yet again. “Look, no has to know… Not that it’s anyone’s business to care.”

  He tried to craft some sort of tertiary denial, but all he could think about was her sweet breath caressing his skin. “I don’t—” he started, but she just smiled and drew his face toward hers. She pressed her lips against his, her thick lipstick sliding all around his mouth. He grabbed her arms, holding on as tight as he could, the trembling in her muscles only arousing him more as he pressed his tongue into her small, hot mouth. She wrapped her lips around it and sucked, just as her hands slid down his torso and settled on his bulge.

  Then, there was another
knock on the door. It was a small sound, but just enough to wrench Bruce out of this potential mistake and remind him that the emperor was waiting for him, along with a pod to send him to Earth. He gulped, sucking in deep breaths to try and slow his pounding heart as he made his way to the door, assuming that it was a messenger coming to summon him for his mission.

  But when he swung the door open, none other than Boris stood on the other side of it. His half-smile faded as soon as he looked past him and saw Lexus sitting on his bed, looking far too comfortable.

  He looked back at Bruce, a hardened look darkening his almost purple eyes. “You’re out of time.” With that, he stormed off.

  Bruce sighed, his heart dropping into the pit of his stomach. This was nowhere near the goodbye he had hoped for. He double checked his small pack of fake ID’s and credit cards, stowed away the one weapon he was allowed, and then finally left his room for the last time in who knows how long. As he left Lexus, who sat suggestively on his bed as if she simply awaited his return, he tried not to think about the fact that he would not have his best friend’s support on this mission.

  He rushed down the long corridor until he reached what would be the equivalent of a landing deck, on the other side of which stood the entire warrior population of their race… minus Boris. Emperor Hugo stood next to Bruce's pod, his black and red cape oddly matching the metallic hue of his vehicle. He smiled at him as Bruce quickly closed the distance between them. “Are you ready for your mission?” he asked, his voice barely carrying over the sound of cheers and excited conversation.

  Bruce nodded.

  Hugo pressed a button on the side of a pod and the door swung up, an otherworldly grace to it. He then placed a hand on his forehead. “Safe journey,” he muttered.

  Bruce nodded, the voice in the back of his head telling him to at least be happy that he was getting a personal send-off from the most powerful creature in the universe. Once he had stepped inside of the craft and buckled himself in, he looked back to the Emperor for his parting words.