by Jade Allen
"Wow!" Lizzie said in her ear. "He picked you! I just knew he would, the way he was looking at you! What's wrong?" Lucy had been quiet since the end of the show, and she wasn't smiling.
Now she looked at the rose. "What if she was right? What if he's just....planting more roses?" She hung her head in shame. "I'll probably never see him again." She looked at Lizzie helplessly, wondering if it would be too much to ask to leave, but Lizzie was gazing over Lucy's shoulder in awe. "What?" she asked. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder, and she turned and saw Sir Hugh, smiling at her with an unreadable look in his eye.
Damn, she thought. Just her luck.
****
"I do resent that," Hugh said as he led her backstage and down a short hall toward his dressing room. "I don't 'plant seeds', or anything like that. That's just a rumor jealous girls started when I didn't pick them to throw a rose at." He led her into the room, simple and plain, with a straw bed and a large, cloudy mirror. His eyes bored into hers as he closed the door softly behind him. Lucy felt like she was being examined under a microscope.
"Well, I'm sorry, I meant no offense." She looked up into his face as he walked slowly toward her. Her legs were shaking, and she searched for something to say, anything---and landed on thin air. She kept thinking about how full Hugh's lips were, and how he smelled of sweat and soap at the same time. "I really enjoyed the show," she babbled. "That barker was quite funny."
"Did you hear me?" Hugh asked quietly. He was inches away from her, and now he put one hand on the curve of her waist.
"Yes," Lucy said, and let out a nervous titter as his other hand moved her hair to one side, cupped her chin again, and led her gently forward into a kiss. She melted into it instantly, a fiery lust shooting through her body as his lips met hers. Both of his arms slipped around her waist and pulled her against his body firmly, and she felt a hardness grind between her legs. She gasped into his kiss, and he pulled back, panicked.
"I'm sorry!" his eyes were wide with fear. "God, I should have asked first! You don't even want me, you were just being nice." His face was stricken. "Damn. Lucy, please forgive me. I've wanted you since I first saw you, but I completely understand---"
She didn't give him time to finish. She leapt forward and crushed his mouth with hers, plunging her tongue between his lips to tangle with his. Hugh grunted in delighted surprise, then shocked her by reaching around and cupping her plump ass, holding her body firmly against him as he ground his erect member against her. They fell on to the bed, and Hugh kept grinding his hips against Lucy, pulling gently on her hair as his cock thrusted against her swollen clit.
"Clothes off," Lucy panted, skin burning from the kisses Hugh was planting on her face and neck. "Now."
Hugh jerked Lucy into a standing position and reached behind her to untie the strings, then pulled her dress over her head swiftly. He started to remove his clothing as Lucy stripped off her undergarments. As her huge breasts swung free of her brassiere, Hugh let out a throaty moan. He moved his palm over the rigid shaft of his cock, wrapping his fingers around it and stroking lightly. His thumb passed over his bulbous head, sending a shiver down his spine. He licked his lips, waiting for her to move.
Lucy slowly returned to the bed, taking in Hugh's chiseled body with fervent eyes. She spread her thighs invitingly, running her hand over her mound and shivering as her palm caressed her swollen clit. A fire was eating away her self-control, and she moaned as Hugh gripped her thighs to steady her, then sank swiftly into her pussy. He let out an impassioned cry, pulling slowly out of her wetness, then thrusting himself back in. The incredible sensation of his thick shaft penetrating her tight walls stole the breath from Lucy's lungs, and her hips rushed to meet the movement of his, her nerve endings singing with pleasure. His mouth found her nipple and his tongue flicked across it sharply, forcing an ardent cry of joy from Lucy's lips as he drove himself desperately between her thick thighs. Her arms wrapped around his broad shoulders, pulling him in closer so the round head of his rigid cock could reach the deepest, most sensitive spot inside her.
Lucy couldn't believe she had this beautiful man on top of her, filling and stretching her, and kissing her urgently. His eyes were gentle, affectionate, and burning with passion. He kneaded her soft breasts as he plunged into her, languidly dragging the length of himself back and rushing forward to hilt himself in her dripping wet pussy again. Hugh twisted her nipple with one hand, biting gently on her breast before sucking the areola into his mouth. Lucy whimpered, and her eyes rolled back in her head as he buried his cock in her again and again. She felt her inner walls clench around him as he moved inside her faster and faster, and he shuddered, picking up speed as desire rolled through his body. Lucy grabbed the firm cheeks of his ass, pressing him closer against her. The weight of his body ground against the sensitive nub of her clit, and she shouted her ecstasy to the ceiling.
"You feel as amazing as you look," he moaned into her ear, and Lucy felt a wave of ecstasy suffuse her body. Hugh started to pump his hips wildly, sacrificing rhythm for power and moaning deliriously as Lucy's inner walls swallowed his girth and sent his body into paroxysms of delight. "I never want to stop making love to you. Never." He said viciously. His green eyes were wild with lust.
"Don't," Lucy begged, and Hugh's hands grabbed her hips as he threw himself against her harder. "Don't stop! Yes! God, yes, Hugh!" she cried, her eyes closed in rapture. He was filling her with euphoria, his forceful thrusts pounding her closer to the delicious edge of orgasm. His strong hands tightened on her soft waist as he watched himself slide in and out of her slick pussy. His breath grew ragged and short, and Lucy rolled her hips against his, her body thrumming with joy. Her pussy tightened around his shaft as she came, moaning her ecstasy into Hugh's mouth. She pulled his hair gently as he exploded inside her, and they thrusted together, bodies drained of adrenaline. He pulled back, looking at her in wonder. He didn't say a word, but kissed her, then slid himself off of her, gazing at her face from his side.
There was a heavy silence between them, and Lucy listened to the pounding of her heart, waiting for her body to cool. She realized she could hear the roar of the crowd just outside the door, responding to something someone was doing with an appreciative cheer. Hugh was smiling at her shyly, waiting for her to speak.
"So," she said carefully, trying for a joke. "You come here often?"
Hugh gazed at her, startled, then laughed, holding his chest until the chuckles subsided. "I promise I don't," he finally said. "Those stories really aren't true. You are the first woman I've taken back here. In any fashion." He smiled slowly at the look of disbelief on Lucy's face. "I'm serious."
"Well, I hope you don't think I'm easy." Her voice was light, but she wasn't joking at all. Hugh seemed to pick up on it. He leaned in and kissed her softly, sending a jolt of happiness through her body.
"Not at all," he said earnestly. "In fact, I'm expecting you to give me quite the problem." His hand found hers, and she squeezed it.
"What do you mean?" Lucy asked, puzzled.
“Well," Hugh said gently, his eyes shining with mirth. "I doubt very much you're going to let me take you on dates at your diner and at my place of work. So, we'll have to work around that, and meet up whenever I'm close. And I expect you'll want me close often." He slipped his arm around her waist, grinning happily. "Which I don't mind at all."
Lucy shook her head, almost unable to believe what she was hearing. "Sorry...are you saying you want to keep seeing me? Like...on dates?"
He looked at her as though she'd said the most ridiculous sentence in the human language. "Are you kidding me, Gorgeous? You think I'm going to let some other cowboy snap you up?" he laughed, and the sound made her heart soar in her chest. She started laughing with him, and they laughed until their faces moved close enough to kiss again. They kissed until their bodies grew close enough to touch again. Then they touched until they warmed again enough to make love.
After, Lucy watched her cowboy sleep,
hoping the show went on a little longer out there. She pictured the look Rosie would get when she let this event slip, and especially when she informed her that it would be ongoing. And to think that all she had to thank was her special---a dish as hearty and complicated as her, but not half as irresistible.
THE END
Steamy Paranormal Romances
Rogue Wolf: Wild Forbidden Mates
Two rival shifter clans.
One relentless and forbidden love that breaks all of the rules.
In the small town of Spring Lake, the long-standing rivalry between a pack of werewolves and a clan of were-panthers erupts into full-scale battle. Raul, an ex-Navy enforcer of the Wolf pack, is forced to take sides in the conflict when a group of panthers—who have been raiding werewolf businesses for weeks—is finally captured, and the order given by the Pack's Alpha male is to execute them without trial.
He can only save one: Keira, a voluptuous panther female who only consents to let him rescue her after she nearly beats him in personal combat.
But the war between the two groups is more complicated than either of them know. As they begin to unravel the two Alphas' motivations in attacking each other, Raul and Keira's rivalry develops into a hot, heavy, and forbidden romance, sparking further reprisals and deeper battles between their people.
With threats of death—or discovery—hanging over their heads, Raul and Keira must find a way to bring their communities together, or risk losing each other in the chaotic war.
“Raul, we’ve got another one,” the voice on the other end of the line began as soon as the call connected. Raul groaned, scrubbing at his face. It was still dark outside—but it was nearly four in the morning, and he had been looking forward to finally going to sleep.
“Bastards keep slinking off before one of our guys can catch them in the act,” Raul said bitterly. He could feel the frustration of his pack-mate on the other end of the line, sense it as an extension of his own irritation.
For weeks, he, Gary, Cameron, and Adeline had been tracking a group of vandals; their scent marks at the scenes of the crimes were easy enough to read, but all traces of the assholes responsible for the graffiti and broken windows—not to mention a few petty thefts—disappeared within a half mile of the site. It was just like a bunch of sneaky panthers, Raul thought bitterly. The town of Spring Lake had fewer than five thousand residents; and yet, Raul and the other enforcers for the Pack hadn’t been able to track down what they’d counted as five panthers. The other members of the Pack had started looking at him doubtfully, and the Alpha—Reginald—had put more and more pressure on Raul as the Pack’s number one enforcer to get the job done.
“Someone was asleep at the wheel,” Cameron said, his voice full of brittle irritation. Raul growled low in his throat; he had asked for the Pack’s participation in staking out the various businesses that might come under attack. He, Cam, Gary, and Adeline simply couldn’t watch over all of the businesses that the members of the Pack owned in the town. They needed people to be vigilant, and they had needed to have a way to track the shifty, good-for-nothing panthers to their den, wherever it was.
There were just enough people in the town for it to be impossible for any of the members of even the large wolf pack to know everyone, to know all of the addresses. Spring Lake was home to a thriving supernatural community—and even Raul, in his position of relative authority within the Pack, didn’t know all of the shifters in the area. There were even some, he was fairly certain, who lived outside of the town proper—in the woods that surrounded the town, closing it off superficially at least from the rest of the country. He had done what he could, asked who he could, about the whereabouts of a group of panthers and had come up empty.
“Which business was it?” Raul put his phone on speaker and set it down, standing up from his seated position on the couch to get ready to leave the house. If another one of the Pack-owned businesses had been vandalized, the Pack would expect him to be there before daybreak, working the scene, trying to find a clue that might not have been at the other raids. Eventually those fucking panthers are going to get sloppy, he thought. And when they do, we’ll track them down and put the bastards on trial.
Even with scent marks at the scene, there wasn’t a whole lot of information to be gleaned about the vandals. Raul knew that one of the panthers involved in the crimes was a fertile female—he could smell it in the rich honey-moss smell of her scent mark, buried in the deeper, sharper musk of big cat that the males left behind. He knew that there were five of them. He knew what they were. But until I know who they are, I am going to have this goddamned albatross around my neck, pulling me down.
He had been a natural successor to the Pack’s previous lead enforcer; Reginald had groomed Raul for the position for years, even mentoring him through the Navy when Raul had enlisted. Reginald had told Raul more than once that the best thing he could cultivate beyond ruthlessness was the ability to lead, and Raul had taken that seriously. If Reginald retired—or if he fell in a challenge, or met with an accident that cut short his time as Alpha of the Pack—then Raul would be the first in contention for the Alpha position within the Pack. He would need to have the skills that it required, whether or not he ever took on the job.
“Alicia’s bakery,” Cameron confirmed on the other end of the line. “And get this: they’re escalating, the fucking cats.” Raul felt Cameron’s barely-controlled rage and reveled in it, breathing in and out slowly. The low-level telepathy that members of the same Pack shared was sometimes a joy—but more often a pain. He didn’t want to feel heartbroken just because one of the younger members of the Pack had been rebuffed in his romantic advances to some girl or guy. But when it came to hunting down prey—or even fellow predators—it came in handy.
“Escalating how?” Raul pulled a shirt over his head and glanced at himself in the mirror, smoothing his hair down against his skull. As soon as he had left the military, he’d let it grow out into a full, dark-brown mane, in defiance of the strict military grooming standards he’d subjected himself to for years. No one in the Pack thought that a man with long hair was anything to be laughed at, and members of the town who weren’t of the supernatural persuasion learned quickly that to laugh at his long hair was to court almost certain disaster.
“There was a fire,” Cam said. “We managed to put it out with minimal damage, but someone still called 9-1-1, so there’s going to be an official investigation if we don’t sort this out quickly.”
Raul groaned, throwing his head back and cursing long and fluently. “The last fucking thing we need is the cops on this,” he said. He took a quick breath. “Who’s coming to the scene?”
“We’re trying to get ahold of Tanya and Jeremy, see if we can’t get them to take the case, keep it quiet.” Tanya and Jeremy weren’t Pack, but they were shifters—were-foxes. They could be trusted to a certain extent to slow up the investigation if they could get themselves on it, give the Pack a chance to handle it.
Everyone in Spring Lake knew and didn’t know that there were supernatural humans living in the area; there was plenty of local lore about not going into the woods and scrublands surrounding the town during the week of the full moon, with vague implications of what happened to people who did. But nobody directly said that there were shifters, even elementals living amongst perfectly normal humans.
Whenever possible, the two-natured community tried to police themselves, along with the other supernatural elements of the town. The elementals intervened only when they had to; otherwise they kept to themselves, and Raul preferred it that way. “Text me the address, and I’ll be there in fifteen,” he told Cam after a moment’s thought. “Maybe they’re getting sloppy. Maybe we’ll luck out this time.” Raul checked his pockets to make sure he had his wallet, and when Cam said goodbye, he slipped his phone into another pocket, checked for his keys. He could feel the animal nature—the part of his brain that was always the wolf—shifting, fidgeting inside of him. He wanted to be on the hu
nt. He wanted to track down the assholes who thought it was a good idea to harass the wolves. He growled low in his throat and headed for the door, picturing the panthers in their animal forms, slinking away from a burning building. Raul stepped out of his house and strode towards his car, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. I am going to catch them this time, even if it kills me.
****
Keira’s heart pounded as she, Lachlan, William, Blake, and Floyd sped away from the scene of their most recent raid in the scent-blocked car that Noelle had contrived. She smiled to herself, worried and exhilarated, terrified and proud of what she and her clan-mates had done. “The fire was a stupid fucking idea,” Blake told Will as they put distance between themselves and the scene of their crime.
“It wasn’t exactly an idea,” Will said defensively, shifting in his seat. “It just kind of happened.”
“We can’t have things ‘just kind of happen,’” Lachlan told the others, glancing at them each in turn. His gaze lingered on Keira’s face and she looked back blandly, keeping her expression neutral until he looked away. There was an uneasy power dynamic going on between the members of their clan, and while Keira was not by any stretch interested in going for the Alpha, she wasn’t about to let Lachlan—or any of her clan-mates—push her to submit when she had no reason to. “We have to be more careful,” Lachlan added, turning his attention back onto the others.
“How can something like that be an accident, anyway?” Keira looked at Will. “I mean, you don’t accidentally light a match. You don’t accidentally drop it on the ground.” She crossed her arms over her chest as Floyd navigated the darkness. Keira could feel the tendrils of almost-thoughts from the rest of the members of her clan in the car with her; she could feel their excitement, the adrenaline pumping in their veins.
