Horns for the Harem Girl (12 page)

What seemed like an eternity later, Helena felt a familiar pulse deep in her walls. Her nerves all flickered and flared, and without thinking about it, she dug her nails hard into Arad’s back.

“Yes!” he whispered viciously. “Yes, scratch me, harder. Make it sting.”

With his hair hanging in his face, her king thrust deep, hard and strong. The instant of pain she felt melted a moment later into a feeling of sweet warmth flooding her senses. She dug in, painting eight hot, red streaks down Arad’s back. He threw his hair back out of his face, and as he drove in again, and the cords in Helena’s neck went taut, she saw his eyes glimmer with a hint of gold.

She moved her hands to his arms, clawing there, and loving the way he threw his head around with each deeper, faster, hungrier thrust. Suddenly, the hair on his arms thickened and grew harder, more wiry.

He saw the look on her face, and paused. “It happens,” he gasped in between harried breaths, “when we’re with the one we’re destined for. Our animal selves escape their normal bounds and... and...”

With his breath quickening, Helena realized that hers, too, was coming in hotter, shallower bursts.

The tension in her hips and her stomach stretched longing fingers between her legs. The muscles of Helena’s sweetly aching sex constricted around her lover, gripping her tight, milking at his length. It was as if her body was trying its best to keep him as deep as he could go.

Their lips found one another, his stubble scratching deliciously at her chin. She drank him in, he pushed as hard as he could go, and with one more shudder, Helena felt Arad thicken and swell.

“I’m... I’m so close,” she whisper-groaned, and dug her nails in again. She tried, once again, to kiss him, but the spasms wracking her body wouldn’t allow that kind of control.

In one more breath, she felt the tension strumming her core release in a massive wave of lightness trickled out of her lips in a long-held breath.

“Arad,” she groaned, though the word stretched to many more syllables than it had.

“Helena,” he whispered, her name dripping from his lips like the finest honey she’d ever tasted.

Inside her, he pulsed, he exploded, and she trembled and gave up control.

Gripping, pulsing, pulling and breathing was the only world the two of them knew. The universe narrowed to a pin-prick that was nothing except for the two enthralled, enraptured in one another.

When her breathing finally receded, and Arad fell from her, she was finally able to push herself up on her arms and kiss him again.

The taste on his lips, his desire, and the scent of their sex, their sweat, and the luscious lavender and lilac swirled through her head.

Gently, slowly, the mighty king stood with his queen’s legs still around his waist. Effortlessly, he lifted her from the bath and stepped out before lying her down in a blanket of the thickest, fluffiest towels she’d ever experienced.

“These are like blankets,” she said, her eyes half open, and her body still reeling from the aftershocks of her orgasm. Every few moments, another thrum of desire plucked her heart.

“We might not spend the rest of our lives in a lavish, almost ridiculous palace,” he said with a grin, “but these towels are coming with us.”

She giggled softly as he soothed her prickled skin with patient strokes of the towel, drying the water, drying the sweat, and dabbing the remains of their love from her sex. “Somehow,” she said, “having you here with me, just touching my body and looking at me, somehow it almost feels better than what we just did.”

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Almost,” she said with another soft laugh. “Very important word.”

“I’d hope so,” he said. “After all, that was a whole lot of effort if I could have just toweled you off.”

The two of them laughed, and he lifted her from the bed of towels, cradling her against the warmth of his naked body. The hair on his chest and his arms shrank back to its normal, close-cropped state. She curled against him, letting her head rest in the hollow of Arad’s neck.

At distance, she heard a knock at the door. It was a gentle, almost timid sound. “Hello?”

Helena looked up at Arad, who had a slight air of confusion on his face. “One second,” he called out, turning toward the door to his bedchamber. He slipped on a long, soft robe and wrapped Helena in another. “I guess we should see who that is?”

Nodding, Helena followed him. Her feet patted gently across the floor. Again, the knock came. “This is heavy.”

“Alara?” she cried out, trotting across the floor and flinging the door open, not caring one bit whether or not she showed off more than she meant to with her robe billowing around her. “What are you doing here?”

Arad began chuckling. “I guess someone else got the message you were hungry.”

The tray her sister was carrying, and which she quickly deposited on the center of the huge four-poster bed, was mounded with dates, olives, piles of roasted meat, and grapes. In a bucket she plunked down on the floor was a bottle of champagne, frigid and ready.

“I’m just glad to see you smiling like that,” her elder sister said. “I thought the days of you being happy were long gone. Oh,” she said, bowing to Arad, who quickly took her shoulder.

“That’s enough of that,” he said. “I’m just Arad. We’re family now. And besides, all those titles and things... I wasn’t ever comfortable with that sort of business.”

“Oh,” her sister smiled. “Well then, I’m happy to see you beaming as widely as my sister is, Arad. Should I open the bottle for you?”

Arad smiled, thanked her and nodded. After she wrestled with the cage for a moment, he quirked an eyebrow. “Not too familiar with those things?”

With a faint blush, she said, “Yeah, not so much. I can crack open beer kegs, but this is a little beyond me.”

He smiled and took the bottle. “The idea is to point it, er, away from everyone.” He dug his thumbs in, and shot out the cork with a loud report, followed by a small jet of liquid. “That’s not really the best way to do it, but... oh well, what can you do?”

“I’ll leave you two to, uh, well, to celebrate,” her sister said. “I just wanted to come by. The food was a flimsy excuse to see the two of you and to thank
you
,” she said, looking at Arad. “For everything.”

He shook his head. “I’m not the one who needs to be thanked. Helena,” he said, “she’s the one who opened my eyes.”

“You two are pathetic.”

With a giggle, a smile, and a quick squeeze of Helena’s hand, her sister vanished down the long hallway.

“I guess we are,” Arad said. “Nothing wrong with that.”

Helena shook her head. “But why are you thanking me? You’re the one who did all... all of this.”

“Without you, I never would have found the courage. Some people fall in love for beauty. Some for money. Some because the person they find makes them want to be better.”

“I do that? I make you want to be better?”

He took her hand and led her slowly to the massive window overlooking the sprawling city. “For a long time, I knew what needed to be done to save this place. I think my father knew, too. But until I saw you, until I knew that I
had
to have a girl who by tradition I couldn’t?” He shook his head. “I never would have done this without falling in love with you.”

For a long moment, the two stood, looking out over the city, hand in hand. “That’s really what this is all about, isn’t it?” Helena asked.

He turned in her direction, and she turned to stare into his eyes. “Meaning?” he asked.

“Love. Your love for these people. My love for you.”

He nodded. “Love,” he said with a smile dancing across his lips. “Love does funny things to a man.”

She kissed him again, softly. “What else could be a better reason for the things we do?”

“There isn’t one,” Arad said. “Not in this world, or any other.”

As the sun sank on the horizon, streaming red, orange, and deep purples across the desert, and the city, Helena tilted her head, resting it on Arad’s shoulder. “I don’t need any other worlds if I have you.”

His only reply was a soft chuckle, as he smoothed her hair with a gentle hand. “Neither do I, my love. Neither do I.”

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“H
is voice, Dilly, it was... growly. Like real growly. It got me tingling.”

Life for curvy, witty, just-fine-by-herself-thank-you-very-much Delilah Coltrane has fallen into a slightly boring, but comfortable routine. She runs stadium stairs, she drinks a little too much and is a karaoke master. But for Dilly, a reluctant ice sculptor, the routine is starting to turn into a rut.

Jake Somerset is a man caught between two worlds. When his father died, he inherited both his spot as head of a massively successful tech company... and as the alpha of a pack of rowdy, half-crazed werewolves. Jake figures the best way to say “I’m The Boss” is to get a giant statue made of himself. He walks into Delilah’s studio, and straight into her heart.

The big, growly, adorably cocky billionaire is exactly what Dilly never knew she wanted, until he walked through her door with his dark curls, steely silver eyes, and shoulders broad enough to stop her dead in her tracks. And yeah, his voice is growly enough to get her tingling in all the right places.

While the two indulge in a whirlwind romance, a threat brews on the fringes. Jake’s brother – the exiled alpha-wannabe Dane – wants to take back the pack. Once he finds out about Delilah, Dane won’t stop with controlling the pack... he’s gunning for his brother’s mate.

Will the unlikely pair survive a war with the brutal and murderous rogue wolf? Or will their match made in heaven turn into a match made in hell?

––––––––

I
took a deep breath that burned in my chest. My nostrils flared as I gazed up from the field, all the way to the top of the stadium.

One more time.

Just one more hellish, awful, painful, terrible trip up the stairs and I could rest.

The walls of the Jackson Community College stadium loomed over my head like a boogeyman with hunched shoulders waiting to suck the soul out of me as soon as I closed my – wait, wait, that’s not right at all. They were just walls and I am
not
a ridiculous drama queen when I’m making myself run the stadium stairs.

Not at all.

One more breath, Dilly
, I willed myself.
Stop saying one more breath and just go
.

I don’t remember taking the first step, but then I never do because I take so many of them. What I do remember is my ponytail flopping, heavy and wet, against the bare skin at the top of my back that my bunched-up shirt didn’t cover. I remember that halfway up the stadium stairs, somewhere around seating section D, my legs started to burn.

Blood pumped into the muscles, tightening them, squeezing them into wonderfully painful knots of potential, and then kinetic, energy. They were pistons, I was a V-8 engine that couldn’t be stopped.

That is, until my toe caught the loose bit of step just above seating section KK and made a loose bit into a missing bit.

Those V-8 pistons didn’t stop for a second, but physics meant that the rest of the car did. I fell into a heap, although luckily I caught myself with an outstretched hand and didn’t suffer anything worse than a skinned knee, a scraped palm, and a bruised ego.

Briefly, I had a fantasy of some big, shaggy-haired man catching my flailing ass and hauling me back to my feet before laying me down on the cold metal benches of section KK and kissing me so hard that the back of my head left a dent in the aluminum. I imagined that after he kissed me, he ripped my shirt a little on the collar, sucked at my neck and put his hands places that would usually make me reach for the pepper spray.

But the guy in my fantasy wasn’t just a guy – no, no, no – he was something different, some unchained id that couldn’t be contained. He had fierce eyes, of some indeterminate color; but the color hardly mattered because after mauling me with his hands, he had my shorts around my ankles and was pulling my hair while he—

And then I remembered the stinging in my left knee.

There was no mysterious alpha male with a cocky grin and an improbably large, er, pair of hands to catch me. There was no head-forcing kiss, or libido-throbbing caress. There was just me, Delilah Coltrane, Dilly to all my friends and my single enemy, alone in a stadium with a bleeding knee and a slightly embarrassing flush on my neck and chest.

“It could be worse,” I told the fitness tracking shackle strapped to my wrist, which didn’t reply except to beep and tell me that I’d stopped moving and that I needed to go faster. “I could have broken my leg and fallen off the side of the stadium.”

It beeped again, the humorless son of a bitch. This time it beeped to tell me that I had been motionless too long. It was going to switch off, and then seconds later, it made good on the threat as I poured water onto my knee. The bleeding mostly stopped. The wound on my palm was more of an impact scrape – the kind that throbs and hurts like hell, but just kinda gives the skin an agitated gray color instead of breaking it.

Thank goodness for small miracles. The last thing in the world I needed was to feel guilty about getting blood all over a stadium step that some janitor would either have to clean up, or more likely, would choose to ignore.

By the time I’d gotten back down to the field and to my duffel bag, my knee had mostly stopped throbbing, and I wasn’t limping anymore. Any more than I normally did, at least – the souvenir of an old car wreck that hadn’t gone away in the four years since I got it, so I had sort of placidly assumed it’d be with me forever.

Of all the things that a person can carry around – guilt, regret, anxiety – a limp wasn’t the worst. Although I had pretty good helpings of those other things too, come to think of it. But somehow I kept on. Maybe it was the fact that without me, my dog would have no one to feed him, or maybe it was my constant fantasizing about being caught every time I fell by some hunk of man who would ravish me in all the right ways.