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

by Claire Branson

  She closed her burning eyes. “Not, you’re not. You’re just obsessed with me now. Next week it’ll be something else. Rucked crepe skirts, or burnout velvet hats, or walking models with their eyebrows erased.”

  “Never. I hate that eyebrow erasing trend. It makes them look bald.” Thierry picked her up out of the chair and carried her back into her tiny bedroom. “Don’t I pay you better than this?”

  “Yes. No. I quit, remember?” She felt her throat tighten. “Don’t do this to me, Monsieur. Please. I’ve had enough, I really have.”

  “Me, too.” Thierry began to undress. “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep – Wren told you, yes? Big mouth for such a little girl. You know she pretends to be a boy sometimes? We should get her to do our next androgynous show.” Once he was naked he stretched out beside her. “So: I am moving in with you, into this postage stamp of an apartment with no servants and very little hot water. We will drink coffee and eat radish-buttered bread and fight and make love until you feel better about me. Which I hope will be very soon.”

  Kate turned away so he wouldn’t see her bottom lip trembling. “I’m going back to the states.” Where she would be safe, if not happy.

  “No, you’re not.” He snuggled up behind her. “You’re staying in Paris. Or Provence, if you want to see Simon’s chateau for a week or two. Please, Kate. Please don’t go. I hate America, and I would have to chase after you and drink their terrible coffee and be miserable.”

  With a sob she turned to him. Thierry soothed her with soft, sweet pecks and then deeper, hungrier kisses, until she was tearing at her own clothes with him. He couldn’t wait to get her naked, and simply tore everything preventing him from sinking into her before he slowly slid inside her tight, wet pussy.

  “Ah.” He didn’t move as he stared down at her, his eyes narrowed and his expression fierce. “Forget eating. I want to live on this.”

  Kate gripped his shoulders as he pressed in and glided out of her, drawing his head down to her puckered nipples to feel his tongue soothing them. “Thierry.”

  “Look at me, Katie. I belong to you now.” Slowly he began thrusting into her, his shaft so hard it felt like iron. “You own me. Command me. Tell me what you would have of me, and it is yours.”

  She rolled him onto his back, straddling him and impaling herself on his rampant, glistening cock. “You never lie to me again, Monsieur. Ever. I don’t care if you go to jail for it.”

  “If I do you can visit,” he assured her, cupping her buttocks and lifting and lowering her.

  “I want my old job back, too.” Kate arched her back, clenching on his shaft as she worked herself on him. “With that raise I earned. You remember. The gigantic one.”

  “Done.” He reached up to caress her breasts. “Bring these down here to me. I need them. They have missed me, too.”

  Kate lowered herself on him, rubbing one mound against his mouth and then hissing in a breath as he suckled. “I want sex. A lot of sex. Maybe every morning, noon, and night sex. Without the audience, the handcuffs or the death threats.”

  Thierry muttered something that sounded like an enthusiastic affirmative.

  “You tell the DGSE and the Brits and the U.S. and whoever else makes you spy for them that you’re done. Finished,” she added when he took his mouth away to protest. “I’m not letting the father of my children get himself killed. Or party with perverts. And I’m never doing that again, either, Thierry. Do you understand me?”

  He smiled slowly. “Very well. How many times am I getting you pregnant?”

  Now came the real moment of truth. Kate drew his hand up to her belly. “After this one? Two. Maybe three.” As his jaw dropped and then closed again she nodded.

  “I don’t believe it.” He splayed his hand over her navel. “We’re having a baby.”

  “This is what happens when you have unprotected sex with a woman who isn’t on any birth control,” Kate told him. “I was in the right moment in my cycle, and you, apparently, are fertile as hell. In about thirty weeks, we’re going to be parents. P.S., we are never telling this child how she or he was conceived, understand?”

  “Good. I want a little girl,” he told her firmly. “With your hair, please. What else? Marriage?”

  “I don’t care. I want you to love me.” Slowly she straightened, and brushed her hands along his lean cheeks. “The way I love you. Nothing held back. All the way. Forever. You’ll probably have to work at that.”

  He smiled up at her. “Not anymore, Katie. Not ever again.”

  THE END

  The Architect’s Passion

  Bound to the Alpha Billionaire

  Book 5

  (Can be read as a standalone book)

  By: Lucy Wynand

  The Architect’s Passion

  Chapter One

  From the outside, La Maison Noire looked like just another decaying remnant of the eighteenth century. Badly constructed during the Rococo movement in Paris, its asymmetrical plasterwork mildewed silently over rotting wood. The vampire of time had also drained away the rest of its dubious, overly ornate charms. Only the chateau’s blackened windows hinted at an exterior possibly less disappointing.

  Once he stepped inside, Eliot Tashiro felt no disappointment, only disgust. The infamous “blackest” of Paris’s underground BDSM club had been outfitted like a brothel for Goths. Wall displays of whips and chains did nothing to perk up the funerary furnishings. Industrial burgundy carpet stretched out like a pool of congealed blood under the bruised or bruising clientele. Other imminent victims crowded a chrome and black-leather bar forming a moat around the performance stage. Flickering faux wall torches made Eliot imagine bad wiring more than the dungeon. Nothing could dispel the unlovely, sour aroma of countless lager spills.

  “Monsieur.” At the bar a handsome, bare-chested boy with pierced nipples lifted his eyebrows in an invitation for Eliot to order.

  He placed the black-edged card he’d bought from a very grateful vice detective atop a black cocktail napkin. “I will speak to your manager now.”

  “Oui, Monsieur.” The boy collected the card before he waved over a blunt-faced bouncer. The big man eyed Eliot and then gestured for him to follow.

  Back in a large office that could have been at home in any corporate headquarters, the club’s stocky, weasel-faced manager carefully examined the card and then Eliot.

  “This is your first visit to La Maison Noire, Monsieur?” He sounded politely suspicious.

  “You know it is, and I am not a policeman.” He felt so tired of these inspections he didn’t have to feign his boredom anymore. “I am here to seek a particular entertainment. Very young. Fresh.”

  The manager’s gaze grew shuttered. “You can find many such young, fresh things out in the night club, Monsieur.”

  “Not as fresh as I’d like.” Eliot lowered his voice before he added, “My dear friend, Jin Chen Ba, assured me that you could provide exactly what I desire. If this is not the case, I will seek my pleasures elsewhere.”

  The club manager stood up, all smiles now. “Mr. Ba is one of our most treasured patrons, Mr. Tashiro. Please, let me show you to our private level.”

  Eliot hated using Ba’s name to gain access to these clubs, as just thinking of the sexual predator made his skin crawl. But Eliot needed a guaranteed in, and few people outside Tokyo knew that Ba had just been murdered by a young victim’s outraged father.

  Once the manager escorted Eliot to a far more sumptuous and tasteful lounge on the third floor, he personally served him a glass of overrated champagne and seated him among a small group of other affluent-looking men.

  “Tonight we are holding an auction, Monsieur,” the manager said. “Some very fine submissive young men willing to attend to all your needs.”

  “Only boys?” Eliot asked, setting aside the bubbling flute.

  “For tonight, yes,” the manager said, sounding apologetic now. “I can of course arrange to have some girls brought in for you to inspect, if they
are more to your taste.”

  Before Eliot could reply, adolescents began shuffling into the room. The guards escorting them guided them over to the back wall and lined them up under a bright light. Nearly all of them blinked in confusion, or shaded their dilated eyes with a hand. One small, slender boy with long silver hair and large blue eyes hesitated for a fraction of a second before doing the same.

  “I believe I’ll stay,” Eliot told the manager. “I see something I like after all.”

  #

  Wren Calhoun hated being sold as a sex slave.

  She could fake being drugged with the best of intelligence operatives, of course, and not only because of her MI-6 training. Most of her childhood had been spent in a sedated stupor. Because they wanted her to look good, the slavers usually didn’t knock her around much. The abduction phase usually went fast. She knew how to project exactly the right amount of dazed fear, too. Really all she had to do was take her cues from the terrified victims she was trying to save.

  If a pimp or trafficker tried to strip her or take her for a test drive before auctioning her off, she could handle that as well. Wren always drank two big glasses of warm milk before an op. The milk settled her stomach, but even more importantly, gave her some extra ammunition. She could puke on demand, and no one wanted to touch or screw a kid who had sour milk vomit all over her front.

  So it was all good, except the gender she had to play. Becoming a boy being sold as a sex slave was never fun. For one thing, the prosthetic penis she had to wear itched like crazy. Then there was the body makeup she had to use to camouflage the prosthesis, which also irritated her skin. Her handler also always insisted she dye her hair some ridiculous color to distract attention from her somewhat too-feminine features. For some reason T.J. thought the Lady Gaga hair made her look more convincing as a young gay guy, something Wren would never understand.

  As for the pervs, who were generally heavy-handed brutes who couldn’t wait to maul her, they could be troublesome as well. Sometimes Wren had to deal with them in their car as they whisked her off to their sex slave love-nest. She really hated fighting in a confined space, too. Inevitably she ended up with a black eye or swollen nose after she smashed out a window with the perv’s face.

  As soon as she nailed tonight’s pond scum-sucking pedophile asshole, Wren intended to go on a nice, long vacation. Somewhere hot where no one cared what gender she was, why she had silver hair or who she slept with. She’d drink and dance and find a nice, big, strapping guy or pretty girl willing to serve as her sex slave for a few nights.

  Anything to help her forget that beautiful man in Tokyo she’d kissed.

  Once her eyes adjusted, Wren peered through the glaring light. A good dozen pervs stared back, their faces shiny and their eyes hot. Only one guy sitting in the shadows seemed less than interested. She couldn’t make out his features, not that it mattered. Whoever paid for her would be going directly to jail for the rest of his scum-sucking life. If not, he’d be forced to play informant, which was even better. The real deviants rarely lasted more than a month before they botched things and ended up floating in some sewer.

  To keep herself from smirking, Wren mentally reviewed her last op. Pretending to be a cosplay geek at an anime convention had been fun. Her sting play there had successfully trapped a pair of dangerous Chinese snakeheads, too. Since the two smugglers had killed or enslaved hundreds of desperate immigrants, she’d been overjoyed to hand them off to the Japanese authorities. During the op she hadn’t made a single misstep.

  Afterward? She’d couldn’t have staggered into trouble more if she’d walked naked and drunk into a Siberian labor camp. Instead of going to her room to pack, she’d idiotically decided to visit the hotel’s rooftop bar to have a celebratory drink. Where she had stupidly talked to the outrageously handsome Asian-American guy standing out on the observation deck. Of course he’d turned out to be Eliot Tashiro, the billionaire architect who designed for the world skyscrapers, opera houses, and art museums.

  Just her luck, he had to be hot and interesting and elegant, too. Wren never could run into some dull, shovel-faced Joe Schmoe from Buffalo.

  Of course she knew better than to engage a high-profile man like Tashiro. If only the bar band had played that slow, sexy ballad she loved. If only Eliot hadn’t asked her to dance. Just like a moron, she’d stepped into his arms.

  Dancing with Tashiro under the stars had made her feel amazing – as if she were floating on air – but not even that snapped her senses back to full alert. No, it had taken the thank-you peck he’d given her. That little polite peck that had somehow turned into a sweet, hot, delicious open-mouthed full-on French kiss. That had finally blasted through her like a firehose of ice-cold water.

  But, oh, that kiss. Even as she discreetly fled and grabbed her stuff and got out of the hotel, Wren had already labelled it in her memory for future reference: Best kiss ever.

  One of the guards grabbed her arm and jerked her forward. Wren faked a stumble and ducked to get a better look at the bored guy. She looked directly into a Caucasian face with Asian eyes the color of gold-speckled black marble. As the blood went icy in her veins, she slowly straightened.

  “Gentlemen, we will begin the bidding at five thousand Euros,” the ring leader announced in his oily French. “Do I have five?”

  “Ten,” Eliot Tashiro said.

  Chapter Two

  A heavyset Slav with a scarred face glowered at Eliot before he bid twice against him for the silver-haired boy. He then demanded in broken French that the manager let him take a closer look.

  Eliot clamped down on his temper as he watched the brute grab the boy and fondle him between the legs. As the manager hovered anxiously, he told him, “I don’t want the boy damaged if he is to be mine. Tell that dolt to sit down.”

  The manager went over to persuade the Slav back to his seat. Eliot watched the boy’s seemingly dazed expression, and saw another, faint glimmer of awareness before the blue eyes shifted to stare at the floor.

  “So you do remember,” he murmured, and then briskly took up the bidding war with the Slav again.

  In the end it cost Eliot sixty thousand Euros to prevail, but the money didn’t matter. Getting his prize out of the club before the brute or anyone else challenged his claim did. He paid the manager, put an arm around the boy’s narrow waist, and guided him downstairs while he called his driver.

  “Don’t worry,” he said as they walked out to the private car that had just pulled up to the curb. “You’re safe now, little bird.”

  “My name is Justin,” he said, slurring the words as he climbed in. “What’s yours?”

  “Please.” Eliot ordered his driver to take them back to his hotel, raised the privacy screen and then tipped up the boy’s chin. “I know you’re not drugged. How did you get involved with these bastards? Did they abduct you? Did they hurt you?”

  The submissive shrugged and inched away, huddling in the corner. He lowered the window and reached out as if to feel the night air rushing through his fingers – or to gauge how fast they were moving.

  Eliot engaged the locks. “You’re not jumping out of the car, little bird.”

  “I told you, my name is Justin.” The submissive yawned and closed his eyes. “You got a thing for birds, man, then you don’t want me.”

  Eliot contented himself with watching the boy until they reached his hotel. He kept a firm grip on the thin arm as they got out and walked to a side entrance. Once inside Eliot took his guest directly into the elevator and up to his suite, where he led him to an armchair by the fireplace.

  The submissive dropped onto the seat but still wouldn’t look at him. “So what do you want me to do, man?”

  “Sit there while I contact the authorities.” He walked over to pick up the phone, but then felt arms winding around his waist from behind. “It will only take a few minutes, little bird.”

  “It can wait.” The boy unzipped Eliot’s trousers and reached inside to curl long, c
ool fingers around his thick, hard shaft. “This can’t.”

  Eliot watched as the submissive came around and dropped to his knees in front of him. “What are you doing?”

  “Please,” the boy said, and rubbed a lean cheek against him.

  Before he could use his mouth on him, Eliot hauled him to his feet and gave him a firm shake. “Stop this.”

  The boy finally met his gaze, his eyes narrow and glittering like sapphires. “This is why you bought me, man. Don’t you want it?”

  “I’ve wanted you since you kissed me at the Tokyo Hilton’s rooftop bar.” He watched Wren’s eyes widen. “Very well, I kissed you. I couldn’t resist, not after dancing with you. You were so light on your feet, I thought we might float off into the clouds. You can stop pretending you’re a boy now. I know you’re a woman.”

  #

  Wren knew she had to leave, now. “You don’t know anything about me. Let me go.” When Eliot released her, she headed straight for the door, but he beat her to it. “You really don’t know what you’re doing, Mister.”

  “I’ve done many things this last month,” Eliot told her. “I’ve bribed hotel managers, and traced credit cards, and followed a hundred false leads until I finally tracked you to Paris.”

  She turned to stare at him. “You did what?”

  Eliot nodded. “I’ve spent the last two weeks here going to sex clubs, talking with deviants, and seeing things that belong in nightmares. I do need to get away from these people, and have a long soak in a tub of disinfectant. I should probably have my head examined as well. What I will not do is leave without an explanation.”

  Wren opened her mouth, shut it, and then banged her head back against the door.

  “Stop that.” Eliot pulled her away before she could do it again. “You will give yourself a headache.”

  His move plastered her against his chest, and as much as she wanted to stay there, she had some serious business to attend to. “Of course I remember you, Tashiro.” She wriggled out of his arms and put some distance between them. “I was just having some fun with you.”