by Brianna Hale
“What for, mi niñita?”
The lapping sound stopped several minutes ago. There was nothing I could do to save her. I take a deep breath and step aside, showing them what’s lying on the floor, dead and still. Blanca, my mother’s toy poodle.
A blood-curdling scream pierces the air. Mama throws herself to her knees before the little dog.
“I saw her adding something to your glass before you came downstairs,” I tell Zacarias. He stares between the wine splattered on the ground and the dead dog. The poison would have finished him in an instant.
“Your husband tricked me into having sex with him, Mama.” I say the words dispassionately, watching her rock the poodle in her arms and sob into her fur. “He took my virginity the night of the ball in Madrid. He comes into my room, straps me with his belt and makes me call him daddy.”
Predictably, Mama doesn’t show one ounce of shock at the news, or sympathy for me.
“He’s not been fucking you. He loves you.” Mama screams like love is disgusting. Like I’m disgusting. “I can smell it all over you. You’re carrying his bastard child.”
Zacarias leaps to his feet.
Valeria turns to him, still rocking and sobbing. “I cursed you. I cursed you. Why aren’t you dead?”
Her eyes flash with preternatural greenish light and her face is transformed by a suffusion of black veins. She’s something terrifying. Something unearthly. Then, a split second later, she’s Valeria again, sobbing over her dog. Zacarias takes a step toward her, but she leaps up and runs from the room, Blanca in her arms. We hear her pitiful cries all the way down the corridor.
Zacarias and I stare at each other. The sword drops from my nerveless fingers and clatters to the ground.
I’m pregnant?
My hand goes to my belly and presses against my flesh. I seek inwardly for the truth. We had sex twice without protection. I wasn’t thinking about it in the moment or afterward because it was impossible that I was even with my Black Fox, let alone becoming pregnant by him.
Our eyes meet, and Zacarias is staring with naked longing at me. He was supposed to die, but I discovered the truth before the evil queen could kill him. I was supposed to hate him, but instead I’m carrying his child.
It’s all gone horribly wrong.
But not for us. For the queen.
Tears spill down my cheeks as I walk toward him. I wrap my arms around his neck and press my lips to his. My Black Fox. My Zacarias. Two halves of the same man.
He stares down at me, his brown eyes bewildered. “Mi niñita? What’s happening? The curse…”
“Is broken,” I whisper through my tears. “The queen tricked you into becoming two men. I think she was the fortune teller, or possessed her like she seems to have possessed my mother. No woman can love a man who is not whole. I found out, though, and I fell in love with both of you. Do you love me, too, Zacarias?”
Zacarias caresses my cheek, his face filled with pain. “But how can you love me after the things I’ve done?”
I smile up at him, remembering how he fled my room when I asked to be punished, but came back and gave me what I wanted. He ran as the Black Fox, but returned as Zacarias. “Because even blindfolded, I can see the man behind the mask.”
My lips touch his. For a moment he resists, still lost in confusion and doubt. Then his arms wrap around me and he crushes me to him as he realizes the curse really has broken, and the queen has fled.
“My Lolita. I love you, too.”
He lifts me up in his arms and carries me from the room, and then upstairs to my bedroom. He throws me on the bed and takes handfuls of my breasts through the see-through fabric, and then pinches my nipples. I can see the lust in his eyes, but there’s a spark of fear, too, and he hesitates, as if afraid that I don’t want this.
Wrapping my legs around his hips, I draw him closer to me. “Daddy, will you punish me?” I whisper, looking up at him through my lashes. “Will you take your belt to me and tell me I’m your filthy little girl? Will you cherish me in your arms and call me your angel?”
“Lolita, I can’t—”
I take a fistful of his shirt and pull him down on top of me. “I want all of you. I want the Black Fox. And I want Zacarias, too.”
Zacarias smiles, and then grasps my hip and flips me over onto my belly. He draws the gossamer fabric of my dressing gown up to reveal my behind. “I can’t strap the woman who is carrying my child, but I can spank her till her ass glows red.”
He squeezes my ass, first one cheek, and then the other; hungry, greedy squeezes. “I get to have mi niñita every night like this?” He lifts his hand and spanks my flesh, and I squeal. “I can love her and punish her and do all the sweet and nasty things I want to her?”
I wriggle my legs open on his lap and feel myself smile against the blankets. “Yes, daddy. All yours.”
He spanks me again and again, making my flesh glow hot and sensitive. When he pulls my underwear off and plunges his fingers into me I arch my back and moan. The man I love, and I’m going to have his baby. The castillo is filled with so much love at last, and I cry out loudly as he makes me come over and over again on his fingers.
Zacarias turns me onto my back and sheaths his cock deep inside me. I look up for the first time into my beloved’s face as he thrusts into me. My beloved’s handsome face. Smiling, I reach up and twine my arms around him as he climaxes deep inside me.
Zacarias groans and wraps his arms and legs tight around me. “My Little Lo. Te quiero. Te amo con todo mi corazón.”
“I love you with all my heart, too, Zacarias. All of you, with all of me.”
A while later I get up and wrap my robe around my body once more and head out onto the balcony. I gaze around at the moonlit night. The vines are still. The sloping hill down to the village is silent. Not a creature stirs in the silver light. Zacarias joins me.
“Do you think Mama was possessed by the evil queen all these years, or just recently?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. Your mother wasn’t an evil person, though she could be cold and jealous, and so perhaps she was susceptible to be used for the queen’s purposes.”
I remember all the times she was cruel to me over the years and my heart feels wretched. The way she convinced others I would lie about anything. I think maybe he’s right. “But why was she jealous?”
My love smooths my hair back and kisses my forehead. “Because you are clever and beautiful, two things that she should have been proud you inherited from her. But instead of being proud, she resented you.”
I take a deep breath. “Did you…ever love her?”
He shakes his head. “No, mi niñita. I never loved her. I’m ashamed to say I thought of her as an opportunity. If I didn’t love the woman I married, I couldn’t fall prey to the curse. I didn’t realize that the curse was steering me toward you all along.”
What a cruel curse it is. I wonder how many other good men have spent their lives in torment because of it. I think about how my mother’s eyes flashed green and her face became terrible and mottled for a moment. I think that will haunt my dreams forever.
“What should we do now?” I ask him, gnawing worriedly at my nail. “Where shall we go?”
Zacarias wraps his arms around me and turns me toward him. “We shall stay here.”
“But are we safe here?”
He smiles, and the fear in my heart finally melts as I gaze into his warm brown eyes. “The curse is broken, and we have nothing to fear from her. We shall make this place our home.”
“Just you and me?”
Zacarias kisses me. “Yes. You and me. The Black Fox, his woman, and all our little foxes.”
Epilogue
Zacarias
A cool rain has freshened the vines, and the scent of clean earth wafts through the open windows. Lolita is sitting in a rocking chair by the open terrace doors, smiling down at the baby in her arms. Little Izabella’s chubby hands wave in the air.
I come forward and ho
ld out my hands for the child, and Lolita places her into my arms. She’s so small, just two days old. My Lolita looks tired, but happy, as she gazes up at us.
“Papa loves his beautiful girls,” I tell her, kissing the baby and then Lolita.
“And we love daddy,” she tells me with a smile. It fades slowly as she studies my face. “You’ve had news. I know you have.”
I can’t hide anything from Lolita. Sometimes I wish I could still wear a mask, to protect her. “Yes, I’ve had news.”
“About Mama?”
I nod, and sit down on the sofa with the baby in my arms. I look down at this perfect little rosebud, and know that I would fight to the death to protect her and Lolita from all the evil in the world. “The private investigator sent me a report last night. He hasn’t found Valeria, but he did dig up some information about her marriage.”
“To my father? He died a long time ago.”
I shake my head. “Not to your father. Another man, five years ago. Did she never mention him?” The expression of shock on her face tells me everything I need to know.
“But why would she get married and not tell me? I suppose I was at school, but even when she married you she wrote and told me about it.”
“I don’t know, mi niñita. It seems like it was impulsive wedding, and the two of them separated almost immediately. The investigator couldn’t find any record of the divorce, and that man is still very much alive, so…”
Lolita’s eyes open wide as she realizes what this means. “So you were never legally married to my mother.”
“No. I never was.” I stand up and go to her, crouching down beside her chair with our baby in my arms. “Is it too soon?”
Her beautiful eyes search my face. “Too soon for what?”
“To ask you to marry me. I’ve never loved anyone but you, Lolita, and I never will. Except our little fox, and all the little foxes who will come after her.”
A slow, delighted smile spreads over her face. “Well, you won’t know until you ask me, will you?”
I reach up and tweak her nose. “Cheeky girl. All right. Will you marry me, mi niñita, and make me the happiest man whoever lived?”
Lolita smiles wider and wraps her arms around my neck. She gazes at me with love. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We both want a simple ceremony, and we’re married in the local church the following week. We delay our honeymoon for the time being. Even though we don’t go away, it feels like a honeymoon. The housekeeper helps Lolita with the baby, and my wife studies in snatches. She didn’t, of course, get terrible grades in school. That was one of Valeria’s lies. Lolita is doing brilliantly in her coursework and I have no doubt that she will continue to do brilliant things.
When I’m not looking after Izabella I’m down among the vines. The first harvest is a success, and the Rioja is put into oak barrels to age. It’s a slow business, wine-making, but I’m in no hurry. This time next year we’ll taste our first vintage. Meanwhile, I learn to prune the vines and how to put them to bed for the coming winter.
I hear from the investigator one more time. Valeria has changed her name and remarried yet again. When he asks me if he should report her to the police for bigamy, I tell him to let sleeping dogs lie. I don’t hate my ex-wife. She wasn’t the woman I wish she had been, but she’s been ill-used by the curse, as well. Now that it’s broken, I hope she can find peace.
Lolita and I take our honeymoon when Izabella is ten months old, and of course our daughter comes with us. We hire a sailboat and sail it all the way to Greece on the calm, warm Mediterranean Sea, and island hop all summer.
On Mykonos we eat at a tiny taverna, gazing upon the old stone windmills with their huge sails. Izabella sits in my lap and babbles away as I eat marinated octopus with one hand. Lolita takes a photograph of us with her phone, and then smiles down at the screen.
“You both just look so happy,” she murmurs. When she looks up, she smiles even wider. “Look at you both. It barely feels real that I’m this happy.”
I take her fingers and kiss them, and then nip at them playfully. The setting sun and her white cotton dress make her look radiant. “How could I not be happy when I’m the luckiest man who ever lived?”
Her face clouds for a moment. “You can say that, even after being cursed?”
“I can say that because the curse was broken. Because my beloved broke it for me. How lucky I was the day you walked across the square toward me, and the bell tolled and time nearly stopped.” I can remember it at clearly as if it were yesterday, the day I fell for Lolita. I didn’t feel lucky at the time. I felt like the world was ending. But I know better now. It was only just beginning.
Back on the boat later that evening, we put a sleeping Izabellainto her cot below decks and close the door to her tiny bedroom. The master bedroom isn’t large, either, but there’s room for two.
Lolita undresses, smiling at me, and then kneels on the bed, her long hair tumbling over her shoulders. “Am I a good girl, daddy?”
“The best girl,” I tell her with a purr, shrugging out of my shirt. I push her back onto the bed and pin her arms above her head. “But how about you be a bad girl for daddy right now?”
She kisses me and sinks her teeth into my lower lip, growling like a kitten. “As long as he’s bad for me. I love it when my daddy’s good, but I love it when he’s very, very bad, too.”
I turn her over and wrap my belt around her throat, forcing her to look up at me. Her eyes grow dark and liquid with desire. “And tonight you want him bad?”
Lolita smiles sleekly, and wriggles her legs open. “Oh, yes. Tonight I want him very bad indeed.”
I slide two fingers along her wet slit, and then plunge them into her pussy, tightening the belt so she can’t cry out. “Anything for my sweet Lolita.”
Finding His Strength - Sneak Peek
Blurb
Captured and forced to marry Henrik, Megara vows never to forget his monstrous behavior... but her hatred for her husband doesn't weaken her attraction to him.
Henrik chases his legacy with the ferocity and strength worthy of a God. He will not be deterred, and he will not fail. Nothing will stand in his way. Not even a wife.
But Henrik's strength can not keep Megara's beautiful soul from seeping into his heart. A choice is coming, between everything he ever wanted and the one thing he didn't know he needed.
Chapter One
Her neck snapped as he thrust once more; the last ripples of his orgasm fading in time with the life draining from her body.
Henrik pulled out of her warm body and, using the crumpled-up bedding, wiped himself clean of her remnant. Tossing the blood-stained linen onto her lifeless body, he went in search of his pants.
He twisted his torso to stretch the tight muscles of his back. It had been a long fucking day, and he still had unfinished business that would keep him away from his bed for hours.
After buckling his belt, he gave the woman on the bed another glance. Smooth skin kissed sweetly by the summer sun, round ass, and legs that could probably wrap around him twice. Such a waste.
He went about gathering his phone and his gun, tucking it at his waist before shoving himself into his jacket.
Oliver stood outside the door waiting for him in the hallway.
“Shit.” Henrik glared at him. “You didn’t need to stay right at the fucking door.” He pulled the door to the bedroom closed and began walking down the long corridor to the winding staircase.
“He’s already downstairs,” Oliver said.
“Good.” Henrik tugged the sleeve of his shirt beneath his jacket. He jogged down the staircase easily, the same as he’d done his entire life. “My father?” he asked.
“On his way. The plane took off half an hour ago.” Oliver hesitated. “Your mother is with him.”
Henrik stopped several feet from his office door, where two of his men stood. “My step-mother,” he clarified as he turned around to face Oliver, his first in command. “Wh
y is she coming with him? I thought she was spending the summer overseas.”
“I don’t know, and I wasn’t about to ask. Your step-mother goes where she wants.” Oliver spoke plainly. Henrik had known him since they were both two young boys taking peeks into the girls’ locker room after gym class. Not a practice either of them needed to continue as they grew older. Woman needed no coaxing to enter his bed.
“If they took off half an hour ago, we have maybe another hour and a half before they storm through my front doors. Best to have this situation finished with before he gets here.” His father disliked dealings with the Creon family and left the matter at Henrik’s door.
Henrik entered his office.
“Gentleman.” Henrik’s voice boomed into the room. Christian Creon may be the head of his family, and several decades older than him, but Henrik was still man of this house. He would not cower to their supposed power.
A firm handshake handed out to Christian and a curt nod to his two men standing in the background. Henrik waved Christian into his chair as he rounded the large mahogany desk to his own seat. As a child he used the hulking piece of furniture in his games of hide and seek. His father would always keep his silence as Henrik, hid at his feet while the other children searched the house for him. None of them would dare enter Jackson Olympus’ office without being granted permission.
But this wasn’t childhood. This was no longer his father’s desk. This was Henrik’s office, his home, his business.
“Matthew McKinley will no longer be a problem for you,” Henrik says confidently.
Christian’s tense expression softens. “You are sure?”
“Saw to it myself.” Henrik confirmed. “His body has been delivered to his wife this afternoon with instructions on what she should do. My men tell me, she’s already packed herself and the children up and left the city.”
“The men loyal to him-”
