Barbie & The Beast (27 page)

“Don’t. . .like. . .blondes,” he whispered.

And she believed him.

Barbie’s orgasm, arriving on the heels of Darin’s three little words, made the world shimmer and all her former dreams forgettable.
She had a new dream. In it, the white picket fence gleamed, then faded into a sizzling hotbed of steam and sparks. Satin sheets
appeared, the color of strained ruby wine. She and Darin lay atop those sheets, sweaty, in a heap, legs tangled.

Sagging limply against Darin, she knew this climax had been too easy, and caused by a lifetime of orgasm-free living. She
had finally done it, though. She had experienced bliss, and with very little help from her partner. Now, she wanted more.
Much more. She wanted full participation.

She could have it, she knew. Right then. Darin and she could be together in the way that she’d never been with anyone else.
She could forget about her parents and propriety— Darin was her soul mate. Yet. . .for all the rightness of their being
together, one question remained. Until that question was answered, nothing had been solved for keeps. For her to know the
full and final truth, she still had to see him in the moonlight.

Her heart was skidding. Her skin felt broiled. Wayward body parts were akimbo, wanting more of what Darin had to offer. More
orgasms. Bigger orgasms. Orgasms caused by a true merging of flesh. Immediately. No more delay. She was teetering on the edge
of the pleasure chasm, the sensations akin to biting into an Oreo for the first time. It was like being presented with an
entire package of Oreos without having to worry about calories. An interstellar climax, that’s what waited. It was possible,
she knew.

“Is your place close by?” she asked breathlessly, her entire body a shaking, puttylike mass of nerves and need. “In case you’re
telling the truth?” The only thing that would stop her now was proof that he was a liar. She just didn’t believe that was
possible. “Step into the light,” she said. “Show me.”

“You’re not afraid of me?” he asked as Barbie looked into his eyes.

“I. . .”she began, feeling as if she were having an out-of-body experience, nervous not about his being a werewolf, but of
his not being one. Anxious to find out if they might actually have a future, even if they had to live in a zoo.

“It’s your choice to make,” he told her, his eyes bright with insinuation and promise. And then Darin moved sideways. Startled,
Barbie stumbled along.

With a hopeful expression on his devastatingly handsome face, Darin stepped into the moonlight. For some time he stood gloriously
tall and unmoving, drenched in a full flood of silver, looking like one of Forest Lawn’s marble statues come to life.

Light danced off his skin, his hair, his face. Moonlight poured over every muscle, across every square inch of him, adding
shadowy beauty to his contoured physique. His eyes, catching and reflecting this heavenly illumination, shone.

Barbie, staring, heard herself yip. She felt herself weaken. This was what lay underneath that imaginary kilt. Darin.
Naked as a jaybird. Darin in all his glory. The moment was so magical, tears fell from her eyes. Not daring to move, afraid
of losing the beauty of the moment, she let them fall.

Darin tilted her head back with one long, pointy claw, and for no more than a second looked deeply into her eyes. Then he
began to alter.

His neck widened. His biceps bulged, then his forearms. New layers of muscle piled up, mounding, rounding off into newly fashioned
shapes. It was as though the moon had poured latex goo over Darin from the neck down; his chest heaved and rippled in waves,
those waves rolling down his abs and onto his thighs. Second by second he unpeeled, skin ruffling and resettling, hair lengthening,
first to cover his shoulders, then down to his waist. After all this, his remarkable face began to blur.

There came the sound of bones cracking. Barbie winced and sucked in a breath as Darin’s cheeks expanded. His nose began to
stretch and re-form. Over his naked body a full coat of fur now covered everything. Fur. No lie. There in a blink.

Barbie felt like laughing, although tears continued to spill. This change wasn’t terrible at all—it was fascinating. She didn’t
want to run, she wanted to cry some more. Why was she crying? Because Darin had been telling the truth. Darin, it turned out,
was
a frigging werewolf!

The Darin-wolf tossed his head back, settled his massive shoulders, opened his lips and howled. As the sound echoed throughout
the alley of mausoleums, he spread his fur-covered arms outward as if to say,
Here I am
. He was awaiting her decision.

How many times had he been disappointed? Barbie wondered. He had told her she was the only person outside of his family to
know his secret. Some secret it was!

When she nodded, the movement felt awkward after so much stillness. Possibly she was in shock, but Darin was in
that body across from her, wrapped in all that fur. His eyes gave a familiar flash of green fire, softened by a whitish glaze
of moonlight, as they gazed at her from the beast’s altered face. No change there. Hunger still burned in those eyes. Hunger
for her.

Zing!

She reached to pull up her Saturday pan ties, settling them on her goose bump–covered hips that were so cold now, without
Darin’s nearness. She cocked her head to better see the Darin-wolf in his entirety, thinking she would have to buy a new hairbrush
to accommodate all that fur. Then Barbie threw her own head back and howled.

“Ah-oooooooo!”

Weak. She tried again.

“Ah-oooooooooooo!”

Grinning, she said to Darin, “Better?”

Darin, trembling all over, held out an expectant paw, palm up. Without hesitation, Barbie placed her hand in his.

“It is you inside there?” she asked.

The wolf nodded, and shrugged his massive shoulders.

“Will you make me a werewolf?” Barbie asked.

Headshake from the wolf.
No, from
Darin
. This was him in there, the man who would never hurt her, he’d once promised. The man who had mentioned the E-word in passing,
early on.

Light cascaded over Barbie as she joined Darin in the moonlight. The light shimmered on her tanned skin. But she remained
Barbie.

Experiencing a burst of emotion she could barely contain, different from an orgasm yet infinitely close, Barbie smiled and
took a firmer hold of Darin’s paw, claws and all. Darin had entrusted this gargantuan secret to her. He trusted her. This
was something they would share for a lifetime, three days each month.

Only one more question sprang out of Barbie’s mouth, a question requiring immediate attention. “If I’m not one, how can we
. . .Because I. . .”

She reconsidered what she had been about to say and revised. “Good grief. I’ve waited this many years. I think I can manage
to wait out a couple more nights.” After a pause, she let out a moan and added, “Maybe.”

Darin’s laughter was a hushed and husky “Grrrr.”

“Forever?” Barbie whispered back to him. “No joke? No game? The real thing, Darin? You and I and. . .Dog?”

Definitely they would have to get bigger space if Dog was part of the picture, and blankets to cover the furniture for all
the animals in this family, because her dreamed-of Cape Cod house would soon have its occupants. Perhaps eventually it might
be populated by a small wolf pack.

Those pictures skittered away, drifting on the currents of Barbie’s exhaled breath. Her heart continued to thrum expectantly,
as if there might be more to come and this was only the beginning.

“Grrr,”
her wolf said. Barbie knew the word he’d just confirmed was
forever
. She knew he meant it. He’d chosen her. He hadn’t lied. They had a deal.

Angie’s client had sent them to a singles party that just happened to be in a graveyard. Fate’s intervention—the cemetery,
the singles party, the moon? Fate stepping in to join two people for a lifelong adventure? Maybe four people? (That last term—
people
—she used loosely, depending on what Angie’s Walter turned out to be.) Yes, that client had likely meant it as a joke. But
who would have the last laugh now?

“Is there more, Darin?” Barbie waved up at the moon. “Show me
everything
.”

She grasped even tighter to his hairy paw as he turned away from Walter’s lair. She trembled as his ultrasoft fur brushed
her skin, realizing that she couldn’t walk anywhere.
Her nerves were on fire. Her body’s switch had been left in the “on” position. She was one big mass of need, and although
this wolf man was truly terrific, what she had to have real soon was Darin the man back with her, in the flesh. Instead of
pushing him into the moonlight, she’d have to pull him away from it.

She had her hands back on Wolfy before he knew what was happening, her fingers wrapped in his minklike chest fur. It would
take a lot of effort to move a werewolf. She leaned back and tugged.

“Oooohhhhhh!” Darin barked, with what Barbie assumed might be the surprised equivalent of
Ouch!
He stumbled forward a step. One giant leap for womankind, she silently crowed.

Barbie tugged again, nearly losing her footing, but she had made it back beneath the mausoleum’s overhang with the Darin-wolf
in tow. Now, she only had to find that very close, relatively unoccupied crypt they’d discovered earlier. Get Darin back in
the dark and out of that fur. Again.

A crypt would be a strange place to explore her sexuality for pretty much the first time, she admitted to herself fleetingly.
Yet she was virtually wagging all over at the thought of forever with Darin, and she wanted it to start now. She couldn’t
wait one more minute. She wanted to seal the deal no matter how strange any of it was. This was love.

Darin howled his happiness over being closer to her. Barbie howled right back at him.

They laughed together—his, a bark, and hers, a trill that kept right on coming.

“Get a room!” The shout came from inside the building at their back. Angie was never too busy to eavesdrop.

When Barbie looked back up at Darin, there he was, in man form, his luminous eyes flashing with desire. Next thing she knew,
she had jumped up into his arms with her legs
wrapped around his waist and her hands on his oh-so-dreamy human shoulders. He felt glorious, hard, manly, and all hers. And
she could see in his eyes that he wanted to get somewhere safe to prove it to her.

She silently pleaded with him for mercy and lots of rule breaking, just this once. In her mind, Barbie visualized that big
book of rules snapping closed.

“Walter?” Darin called out in his sexy, throaty voice. “I know you’re busy, but could you maybe help us out here?”

Wind whipped through the branches beside them. The crickets again stopped chirping. A low rumbling noise, starting in the
distance, quickly rolled in toward the graveyard and passed right over their heads. Lightning, dazzlingly white, outlined
in purple, sizzled over the tree tops. And as if the lightning were a giant needle weaving the darkness together, the sky
tumbled over itself and clouded over.

All moonlight disappeared.

Darin, holding Barbie close, backpedaled away from Walter’s crypt. He hit the nearest gravestone and waited out a breath.
It was so dark now, all the other crypts were hidden. When Darin smiled, Barbie knew it only because her lips were a mere
breath from his.

“I won’t even ask about that,” she said, “because my friend is in there, and I refuse to believe her date could have had anything
to do with a rising storm.”

“Good,” Darin said. “Because your mouth is going to be too busy for speech.”

He proved this with a kiss so lush and deep that it needed no help from any other body parts to send Barbie over the moon.
And then she was falling, locked in Darin’s embrace, to the grass, where Darin proved some other things, too. Like the fact
that his scratch-and-sniff theory had real merit in the dark, no visuals necessary. That internal fireworks accompanying a
slow sexual coupling could easily beat out
those of the Fourth of July. That grass stains on the knees can actually enhance a sexual experience, and virginity is worth
keeping until the right man comes along. Oh, and she also decided that it would be a good idea for Mattel to give Adventure
Barbie a hefty production run.

She had never even come close to imagining what a true sexual experience could be like. Couldn’t have guessed. When the big
moment came, with Darin’s lips locked to hers and his body pressed in close, the ground rippled and the sky closed in. She
forgot to breathe. No clanging sounds could have matched the intensity of her own whispered cry of happiness. The entire graveyard,
marble and all, might have fallen, for all Barbie knew, as the rush of heat and vibration kept on quaking through her with
no sign of letting up. Indeed, after sex with Darin Russell, life would never be the same again. Ever.

Incredibly, just as Darin separated his marvelous mouth from hers and her body finally rocketed to a stop, its quakes quite
possibly prolonged by all those nice people underground providing an ectoplasmic things-that-go-hump-in-the-night cheering
section, the three words he uttered far outdistanced everything else: the coupling, the interstellar gratification, and even
the other three important words he’d used earlier.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too,” she said right back, faintly, going dizzily interstellar again with what just might prove to be a very
addictive habit. Satiated, if only for the moment, and completely out of breath, Barbie rolled out from under Darin and stretched
out on her back. Eyeing the clouds beginning to move away from the moon, she felt giddily happy.

“We managed that quite well, I thought,” she said breathlessly. “Considering.”

“Yep. Quite proud of myself,” Darin agreed in a gruff, teasing tone.

Tossing her hair out of her face, blinking at the sudden return of the silvery illumination that once again lit the area,
Barbie continued, “Darin, do you know that the Barbie doll’s first horse’s name was Dancer? For other pets, she’s had twenty-one
dogs, several ponies and cats, a parrot, a chimp, a panda, a lion cub, a giraffe, and a zebra.” She hesitated before finishing:
“But Barbie, in all her Mattel incarnations, has never had a werewolf.”