Paranormal Erotic Romance Box Set

Paranormal Erotic Romance Box Set

By Lola Swain and Ava Ayers

Copyright 2013 Lola Swain, Ava Ayers and Pulp Friction
Publishing, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons
living or dead is purely coincidence.

Snuggle up and get ready for a ride of fantasy filled with
lust, adventure and yes, even love. Best-selling authors Lola Swain and Ava
Ayers bring you some of the most exciting paranormal fantasy erotic romance
novels published in this four novel box set. Your journey begins with a
first-class stay at an ancient hotel filled with sexy apparitions with shocking
secrets in
Immoral Beloved
, then you are a voyeur into the lives of the
rich, entitled and psychotic in the dark, erotic
Parawhormal Activity
,
next, you spend the evening with a hot, Alpha inquisitor well-versed in the art
of passionate punishment in
The Inquisitor’s Song
and finally, frolic
with the Devil’s brood during their twisted exploits in
The Master Captive
Chronicles
. Your voyage is bursting with a delicious, tense yearning that
fills you with an insatiable desire for your own hot expedition that will end
in your release. Onward, friends. But, a caveat: this book is meant for mature
audiences and all characters are eighteen and over. Now, climb on.

Table of Contents

Immoral Beloved
, Ava Ayers

Parawhormal Activity
, Lola Swain

The Inquisitor’s Song
, Ava Ayers

The Master Captive Chronicles
, Lola Swain

Immoral Beloved

By Ava
Ayers

For She who knows the prize she thinks she won
is a curse.

PART I

“I try to reach into your page and breathe it back,
but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.”

Anne Sexton

My life ended on June 23, 1967. It was also the day it
began.

My name is Sophia Pearson-Therrault and on that day, I was
a bride. Today, I am a ghost. An apparition existing between worlds on a strand
like gum that stretches from the bottom of a shoe and hot asphalt. I am that
which is between. The am that I am.

And there is no more pain or panic or twisting in the
wind. Gone are the days of trying to please, begging for acceptance and hoping
to be loved. No longer do I strive to find completion because I am complete. In
a way that was both dumbly simple and mind-bogglingly complex, in a turn of the
screw, I transformed.

It was the union of three that forced my elevation: the
love of a man, a passionate billionaire playboy, whose need to possess overcame
his reluctance to love, a night when the Gods entered and fucked the childish
out of me and my friendship with Anthony Porcco, a boy who died in 1948 after
eating twenty-four poisoned baked potatoes.

I reside at the Battleroy Hotel, a grand hotel on Cape
Cod. It was here that my husband Brandt Therrault and I honeymooned. And on
that day, June 23, 1967, he left, but I remain. But before I was this
supernatural thing, I was just Sophia Pearson...innocent, naive, neurotic and
certainly no candidate for what I became.

I was the youngest of three children, born to a wealthy
family from Marblehead. My brother and sister were quite a bit older than me
and my parents referred to me privately as the accident.

Very much in the public eye, my parents stressed the
importance of applying a heavy-handed veneer of perfection to everything we did
or said. As you can imagine, the Pearsons were a total sham.

My father was as much a ghost then as I am now. My mother
believed she would never be seen unless she damn-well made sure she was heard.

I was defined and confined by my mother through a series
of metaphors and idioms. I could not take the ballet lessons I so desperately
wanted because I had two left feet, I was constantly admonished for having my
head in the clouds and that I must save myself for marriage as no man will buy
the whole cow when he can get the milk for free.

I spent much time alone in my room reading, which was
ridiculed by my parents as frivolous and self-serving.

“Where’s Sophia now?” My father said on occasion.

“Reading, again.” My mother said as if she had a mouthful
of rotten teeth.

I longed more than anything to escape and the means to do
it presented itself to me when I was fifteen-years-old and I was spotted by an
agent from the Ford Modeling Agency. After this, my mother seemed to be
enthusiastic toward me for the first time in my life. It pleased me so much
when I finally won my mother’s endorsement, gaining her approval became my
second job.

My parents were so tightly enmeshed in their own
dysfunctions they had little time to encourage me to do anything other than
what would be the easiest thing for them to support. And because I was told I
could do no other thing, I resigned myself to the myth that my calling was to
be a model and soon after, a wife. And, of course, a model wife.

“The secret to your career,” my mother said, “is to work
as much as possible. Then, you need to find a man. Your looks are the first
thing to go. Is that a wrinkle?”

I crammed more work into four years than most people do in
a lifetime. And I hated every second of it. Even though I travelled quite a bit
and fancied myself a cosmopolitan girl, I was scared to move to Manhattan by
myself. The compromise was for my father to purchase a beautiful penthouse
apartment for me in the heart of Boston. I met my roommate Katt Lawson during a
visit to Ford and through her, I thought I had a shot to be the confident,
successful girl I wanted to be.

Katt was a fellow agency girl and originally from London.
A true bohemian, Katt was sophisticated, free loving and always up for a party.
I marveled at the way she never backed down or away from anything. When anyone
asked me what I did, I apologetically mumbled that I was a model whereas Katt
shouted it from the roof.

Man, did she ever try like hell to make me shed my awkward
skin.

She dragged me to every party she was invited to and used
to coach me while she made me stare at my reflection in the mirror.

“Look at yourself,” Katt said as she held her mirror to my
face. “You are fucking beautiful, but your attitude conveys ugly duckling.”

“I’m not like you,” I said and sighed.

Despite my attributes, I was hopeless when it came to men.
Every function I went to started out the same: four or five handsome men
gathered around me, I interviewed each man to see if they would please my
mother and one by one, they drifted away, never to be seen again. I was to men
what the Titanic was to its unfortunate passengers.

The only men who stuck through my clumsiness were the
predators. I had the men who were only interested in my body, but when I made
it clear that this cow’s milk was not free, they disappeared. And then there
were the men who gleaned they could set themselves up financially through me,
but Katt scared those guys away.

In April of 1967, Katt booked a series of jobs that kept
her in Europe for five weeks.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” I said to Katt as she
sat on her suitcase and tried to close the over-stuffed box.

“Five weeks, Sophia,” Katt said.

“But what will I do without you?”

“Oh, you will pine and eat bad food and mope around with
your nose shoved in a book. You will probably not venture outside these walls
except to work or visit with your destructive parental figures,” she said. “But
that will be done when I come back, right?”

“Perhaps I’ll prove you wrong,” I said.

But as she usually was, Katt’s prophecy proved spot on.
But by the second week, I decided to shove my nose in a book in a place other
than our apartment.

It was in Boston, down Newbury Street, I met Nellie
Daniels.

“We are all born marked for evil.”

Charles Baudelaire

On the day I met Nellie Daniels, I sat at the counter in
the coffee shop where she worked reading a suspenseful and juicy romance novel.

“I’ve read that too,” she said as she refilled my coffee
mug.

I looked up from my book, gave her a half-smile and went
back to my reading.

“Didn’t you just want to die when Officer Carlson revealed
that Jamie was Mike’s killer?” she said.

I slammed the book shut and stared at her. She looked down
at the countertop and picked at a dried blob of ketchup on the Formica.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I always manage to stick my foot
in it.”

From her reaction, I realized I shot her one of my
mother’s looks.

“It’s okay, it was boring me anyway,” I said and smiled.

Her complexion had the rough look of one of the wharf
women who worked the docks icing the fish the men hauled in from the sea, but
she couldn’t have been much older than me. She had a horsey smile that looked
forced and her eyes were so pale blue, I imagined that she had to squint to
look at anything. Her blond hair hung lifelessly on either side of her round
face like a wet newspaper.

I stared at her crooked nametag. It was pinned to her blue
polyester diner uniform that was stained and pilled and much too tight for her
short, stocky frame. She flopped a piece of her hair over her shoulder and
twisted toward me.

“Nellie,” she said as she jutted her bulbous breast toward
my face. “Nellie Daniels.”

“I see that,” I said.

I studied the cover of my book and hoped that she would go
away. I was in no mood to keep company with the unfortunate-looking girl who
ruined the end of my book.

“And...” she said as she shoved her chubby hand in my
face.

“And?” I said and leaned back a bit.

“Your name? I mean, you know my name. What’s yours?”

“Oh, Sophia. Sophia Pearson,” I said as she grabbed my
hand.

She had a grip like a man, but it wasn’t confident. It was
suffocating.

The skin on her hand was so rough it felt like an emery
board. Her ragged nails were bitten to the quick and surrounded by dried,
splintered cuticles. It was the most unpleasant handshake of my life. But
because her hand was damp, I was able to slip mine from hers. Nellie caught me
blotting my hand on my napkin and she ran her hands down the sides of her
uniform.

“Sorry, they sweat,” she said.

“It’s okay, mine do too,” I said.

“Come on,” she said and shook her head, “you’re fibbing.
You don’t look like you sweat at all.”

“Sure, I do. Everyone does.”

“Hey look, I feel really bad about blurting out the end of
the book. Let me get you a piece of pie. It’s fresh and it’s on me,” Nellie
said and grabbed a white plate from a stack on the counter.

“I don’t even care about that and you’ve freed me up to
start the next book on my list so, thank you,” I said.

“I am glad you feel that way,” Nellie said and put her
damp hand on top of mine. “But you still get the pie. I already offered it, so
you get it.”

“No, really,” I said and slid my hand out from under hers,
“I don’t want the pie. Let’s just leave it at that.”

But Nellie smiled and walked to the pie rack and pulled a
tin out of the case.

“Oh, this smells so good,” Nellie said as she held the pie
under her nose and took a deep breath. “Man, I wish I could have a piece, but I
gain weight just looking at food, honestly. That one whiff just put five pounds
on my ass!”

Nellie cut a big wedge of pie and plopped it on the plate
as she prattled on about her propensity to gain weight when she smelled food.

“Nellie, I know I told you that I do not want any pie.”

She looked up at the plate and cocked her head to the side
as she stared at me.

“I’ve already sliced it. I can’t put it back now.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I told you I don’t want any pie.”

“But, who says no to pie?” she said as if she expected me
to know the official census figures of Boston’s pie-eating citizenry.

“I do, Nellie,” I said and took my napkin off my lap and
folded it on the counter. “I have a job tomorrow modeling swimsuits. Nothing
passes these lips but water, coffee and lettuce until after my shoot.”

Nellie placed the plate containing the huge slice of pie
on the counter in front of me. My mouth watered as I inhaled the aroma of the
apples, coated thickly in a glossy glaze of vanilla and cinnamon and brown
sugar.

“I told you, I don’t want that,” I said and pushed the
plate toward her with the tip of my finger.

“I know,” she said as she bent forward, heaving her
pendulous breasts on the counter, “I’m gonna eat the pie. So, I figured you
were a model, I mean, look at you.”

“Thank you,” I said barely able to look at her as she
shoveled forkfuls of pie into her mouth.

“Oh, fuck me,” Nellie said through her overstuffed mouth.
“This is almost as good as sex!”

Flakes of piecrust fell from her mouth and dotted her
uniform-covered breasts like dandruff.

“So,” she said as she licked her dry lips, “where do you
live?”

“Uh, here,” I said and moved my napkin back and forth on
the counter.

“I think I would have noticed if you lived in the diner,
silly,” Nellie said as she reached over the counter and nudged me.

“Boston,” I said.

“Well yeah, I figured. But it’s a big city. Where in
Boston do you live?”

“Back Bay.”

“Ah, now we’re talking. Must be nice to be rich,” she said.

“Money is really not all that important,” I said and sat
up in my chair.

“You know who says money is not all that important? People
with money,” Nellie said and snorted.

“I should really be going,” I said as I looked at my
wrist. “It’s getting pretty late.”

“How do you know?” Nellie said as she swirled her finger
around the remaining remnants of pie on her plate and popped her finger in her
mouth. “You looked at your wrist, but you’re not wearing a watch.”

“I...yes, habit. My watch is being repaired. I just need
to go.”

But she never stopped talking. For the next six hours, I
learned all about Nellie Daniels and was fascinated.

She grew up in Rockport and her father was a fisherman.
When he died in a bar fight three years before, her mother moved her and her
brother to Lynn where they lived in an old row house. Nellie stressed the
importance of getting out of there, how her mother was an abusive drunk and her
brother did things to her.

“Things?” I said.

“Yes, things,” she said and bowed her head. “The worst
kind of things.”

“You mean, he rapes you?”

“Often.”

“Nellie, you have to tell someone.”

She looked up at me and smiled. There was something in her
ice-blue eyes that told me she had the same reluctance toward life that I did.

“Tell who, Sophia...my mother? She knows what he does to
me. No, I just need to get out,” she said as she wiped her hands on the front
of her uniform.

“But get out, where?” I said.

“Somewhere far away from them.”

Nellie looked out the glass window at the people walking
by dressed in clothes that probably cost more than she made in a year.

“Sophia, do you ever have those days where making a bowl
of cereal seems like too much work? Did you ever just want to escape from your
entire life?”

She looked at me and closed her eyes.