Authors: Kate Shepherd
MC BIKER ROMANCE: Bad Boy Romance: BETRAYED: (New Adult Motorcycle Club Navy SEAL Romance) (Contemporary Military Romance Thriller) (116 page)
Tamera yawned as she woke up in the morning. She could smell coffee brewing and followed her nose to the kitchen. Julius was there, and he looked good. His hair was wet from a shower and she suddenly felt like she should have asked to take one. She felt grimy and a little dirty after having sex at least five times last night. Her legs were stiff and her stomach hurt in places that showed her those muscles hadn't gotten a good workout in quite a while.
"You want some coffee?" Julius asked her as he grabbed another cup. "My housekeeper will get to the dishes later, but I made some breakfast if you are hungry."
"I would like breakfast, thank you, and coffee would be wonderful," she told him as she sat at the bar at the island counter. "I am going to need to get home to get ready for work at some point today."
"I'll take you home after you eat, but let's talk first." He had a serious expression on his face as he handed her the coffee. "I want to see you again, Tamera. I like you, a lot. We are clearly...compatible in more ways than one."
"If you mean all the sexual positions, sure," she joked and sipped her coffee. Sighing in pleasure, she closed her eyes and savored it. Now this was good coffee. Opening her eyes back up, she grinned at him.
"I mean that despite our different backgrounds, we work well together. I like you. When I'm with you, I'm just Julius. You accept me. All of me, my human and my bear side...even my job. I couldn't ask for a better woman, Tamera. You're beautiful, funny, and smart. I want to see you again. Sex for one night isn't going to be enough for me when it comes to you. I want you to be willing to give this a real chance between us," he told her as he slid a plate of toast and eggs across the island counter for her to eat. Waiting for her response, he looked a little tense.
Tamera almost felt bad for him. She wasn't sure where they'd end up, but she agreed it was worth finding out where it would go. With one exception.
"We need to be more careful in the future with how we have sex, then. No more sex without protection, not unless we end up in a committed relationship. I let myself get carried away last night. I've never done that before. Something makes me want to throw all common sense to the wind to be with you."
"If you insist," he said, shrugging. "Did you know bears mate for life?"
"Do they really?" she said, looking shocked.
"No, I dunno. I was joking, but I'm the kind that would mate for life." He gave her a pointed look and then let her finished her coffee as she absorbed what he was telling her.
"I had fun last night," Tamera said, not sure what he was getting at entirely. But she was getting the hint that he wanted more than one night with her. The question was, could she handle what he asked for. While she wasn't looking for the rich, billionaire boyfriend, she had been looking for a shifter. Most would consider his being rich a bonus, but money brought a lot of troubles.
"Tamera, whatever this chemistry is that's going on between us, I think it can last. Sex with you is amazing, and you accept my shifter side. You already know that I'm a domineering ass at times, and it seems you can get past that. You will stand up to me when needed. You bring out a part of me that I can't share with anyone else most of the time. You asked for it, eagerly," he told her and cupped her cheek as he looked down at her. "It would be easy to fall in love with you. I'm not trying to pressure you, or rush you. I just want a chance to let this go where it goes."
"I think I can handle that," Tamera said. His amber eyes were lighter than normal, a sign of his intense feelings right now. She was already starting to learn to read him. She realized that, when she looked at him, she wanted to know everything about him. "But, I have a few conditions."
"Okay, I'm listening. I won't make promises before I hear what they are," he told her and raised his brows together.
"No secrets. We have to communicate and talk. You have a high-stress job where women will throw themselves at you because of money. I'm not the jealous type. I'd be able to trust you as long as you tell me everything. Even when I don't want to hear it. I can handle the truth better than feeling like there are secrets between us." She nodded as she spoke. "Second, you have to agree to shift for me occasionally. I want to see it, to touch you when you're in your other form. I find it enthralling, and it's a part of what I find attractive about you. I suppose this falls under the ‘no secrets’ request."
Laughing, Julius leaned down and kissed her. "Fine, I can live with all of that, but I have a condition of my own."
"I'm listening," she said breathlessly after he pulled back from the kiss.
"That when you love me, you're not afraid to say it. I want you to be honest with me about your feelings, and what you're thinking. I can't make educated decisions if I don't have all the information. Simply put, information is my specialty. Unlike a computer where I can figure everything out by looking at code or running programs, human relationships are far more complex. I'm not a mind reader, which means your bluntness is one of the things I like the most about you." He rubbed his knuckles against her chin. He resisted the animal urge to put her on the counter and have his way with her until the conversation was over.
"I can do that. I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship," Tamera whispered to him as she leaned forward and put her hand against his chest.
Kissing him back, they both ended up late for work.
1 a.m. was not an unfamiliar time for Scarlet, as much as she wished that it were. Working at a law firm was supposed to be a job people killed for, but all the glamour surrounding the profession usually comes from the six digit paycheck, without much thought going towards how many late nights are spent getting reports in to an asshole boss. Scarlet could just throw her computer across the room and go to sleep, but that wouldn't help her when tomorrow came. Especially considering that the report was already late.
Another hour and a half of excruciating writing went by before Scarlet could send the email off, then she got up, went over to the empty bed and flopped down. "Fuck this job," she muttered. Sure, it had gotten her a nice house on San Clemente beach in California, and she had enough smart investments to retire around fifty thanks to her connections, but nights like these made her wonder if the money was really worth it.
She tried to just relax, take a deep breath, and close her eyes. If she was ticked off before she laid down, she was livid now. Her body was so tired that it couldn't even get off to sleep.
"I can't believe it," Scarlet muttered to herself, then got out of bed, sluggishly shuffled down to the kitchen, made herself some tea, and groaned. Nights like these were the worst. All she could do was try to relax and get her mind off of things, or she would never be able to find the sweet land of sleep. So, she took her chamomile tea outside to her beach chair and just lounged, looking up at the night's sky.
It was a beautiful night. If she had a fancy camera, it would be one of those nights that a stunning photo of the sky could be caught. There wasn't a single cloud in the sky, and the city was enacting new energy conservation measures, so light pollution was at a minimum. It was just beautiful.
Though Scarlet was never too interested in astronomy, it wasn't hard to appreciate a night like this. There was even a comet with a faint greenish glow streaking along the clear night sky at a steady clip.
Funny, she mused to herself. Usually if comets were going to come by, then they would be all over the news. Yet, nothing of the sort had been on the local station she listened to in the morning. Yet that thing in the sky, that little greenish ball with the brilliant tail -- that had to be a comet, didn't it? Scarlet never really cared for astronomy, so she didn't know a comet from a meteor from any other extraterrestrial body that might come zipping along, but she was fairly sure that was what a comet looked like.
The beautiful and faint glow as the rock whizzed by in the sky soothed Scarlet, and she just sipped her tea as her eyes followed the comet. She started to feel at ease, until it became apparent to her that the comet's direction had changed, or at the very least it seemed for a moment to stop moving. The tail disappeared. Then the comet started getting larger.
The serenity that Scarlet felt not too long ago went up in smoke. Was what she was seeing even possible? The comet--if that's what she saw-- didn't stop moving. It was coming towards the Earth? Scarlet didn't even realize that comets could suddenly, and so clearly change directions like that, but she wasn't going to question it either. She dropped her cup into the sand and started running. She couldn't tell where the comet was going to land just yet, so she could be running right into the eventual impact zone. Regardless of that, her instincts just kicked in and told her to run.
She didn't get far. Maybe twenty feet, which barely got her to the fence around her estate, when the comet landed in the ocean, and the shock waves completely knocked her off her feet and made her legs feel like jelly.
Unable to do much else, Scarlet turned back towards the site of the comet, and she saw a huge wave forming from the impact. She tried to get back to her feet to run, but her legs wouldn't move, so she just held on tightly to her fence. Maybe it was sturdy enough to survive the torrent heading towards her?
Scarlet's eyes fluttered open to an entirely new, vibrant scene. Immediately above her, she could see a pink canopy draped around the bed she was lying on, and pulled over her a soft and warm purple blanket of sorts. She shot upright in her seat, and in front of her saw nothing but a cold, blue, metallic floor leading up to a wall of the same material. There was something analogous to veins, glowing with a faint blue glow, running through the metal.
Immediately, Scarlet felt her heart beat quicken, and she tried to rub her temples to jog her memory of what had caused her to wake up to this place. She remembered back to being on the beach. A big wave came. It pulled the pickets right from the ground as she was clinging on to them. Then she was washed away. Before she got far, though, something cold and hard, like metal, seemed to wrap around her like a tentacle and pull her out towards the sea, against the current of the wave which were still going inland. After that, she couldn't remember anything. She probably had passed out from lack of air.
Scarlet, though she felt a pain in her chest from taking in too much water, jumped to her feet from the bed, only to realize she wasn't wearing anything at all. Her little red silk nightie that she'd been wearing when she went outside to sit, which wasn't much to begin with, and her slippers, had completely disappeared.
It was hard to decide whether the embarrassment or the fact that she was freezing without these garments on was worse. She felt goosebumps on every single square centimeter of her body when her feet touched the cold metal floor, and she instinctively jumped back onto the bed she'd been on and pulled the warm and inviting blankets around her.
"I see that you're finally up," a low but powerful voice said. Scarlet looked around frantically for the originator of the voice. The canopy around the bed was made of a very thin muslin, or at least something like it, so she could see a silhouette of a figure off to the right side of the bed.
"Who the hell are you?" Scarlet demanded, trying to sound tough. She was scared beyond belief, of course, but she wouldn't let him know that.
"I am called Nerol," the low voice answered. She could trace the shadow beyond the canopy as he began to walk around to its opening at the front of the bed. Then he just stood there.
Though the silence seemed to want Scarlet to contribute something, her jaw just dropped, and she was dumbfounded for a moment as she saw Nerol. His body was definitely humanoid. There was no questioning the fact that he was a bipedal creature with a rather human face. However, these similarities to humans were equally outweighed with the differences. Insofar as his face went, the only difference between his and a normal human would be the eyes. They were large and dark, with no white to speak of. From what she could see of his ears, they seemed to be long and pointed, though she could only see the tips of them through his longish purple hair.
Besides his face, though, most of his body was humanesque--and chiseled like a bodybuilder at that. However, his human shape was where the cross species similarities ended yet again. Nerol's skin was a light lavender hue, with bluish spots, somewhat like very thick stripes, going down the the sides of his arms and legs. Looking at him, she saw he wore no shoes, but did have something akin to a loincloth around his waist, though it seemed to be made of a very fine metallic set of plates, rather than cloth. This, along with a thin black collar, which looked rather like jewelry, were the only items of clothing that he wore.
"Who . . . I mean, what are you?" Scarlet asked, just recoiling at the sight of Nerol, and backing up to the head of her bed to put some distance between herself and the creature before her.
"What? I do not understand the question, human," Nerol answered, frowning a bit. His ears even seemed to droop, and he leaned forward slightly when he spoke. Scarlet didn't understand the change of demeanor, but she was very disquieted nonetheless.
"I mean what the hell are you! I've never seen anything like you!" Scarlet replied, leaning as far back as she possibly could, and pulling the blankets up so far that nothing beneath the bridge of her nose could be seen.
"I am one of the chiefs of the Narut tribe," Nerol responded. "We are known as Uyubyards, from the Alpha Centuri system." As he spoke, Nerol's cold, black eyes seemed to never falter once from looking into Scarlet's eyes. For someone who had presumably kidnapped her and taken her clothes from her, he was a gentleman of sorts. At the very least, wandering eyes was not his problem.
"Okay, Nerol. Why am I here?" Scarlet demanded. That was really the thing she should have been most concerned with, as this whole situation was just inexplicable to her, and her involvement in it really should have been the first priority to clear up. Too many other things crossed her mind to ask before that question could be addressed, though.
"For breeding," Nerol replied rather robotically. His response was much the same as Scarlet might expect hearing that stamps had gone up in price, or that the weather would be cloudy. There was no emotion in his voice, at least not any that Scarlet could discern
"What?!" she demanded, her voice sounding rather shrill. She couldn't believe that she just heard those words come out of Nerol's lips. Or rather, she didn't want to believe them.
"Our species has recently lost our last female, and we have to breed to maintain the species," Nerol replied in the same sterile tone as before.
"If you're a different species, then how exactly do you think that would even work?" Scarlet asked, hoping that somehow there would just be a magical resolution to this whole thing, where Nerol conceded that she was right, that there could be no inter-species breeding, and she could just be returned to her crappy job and her California beachfront property, without being victim to any weird population growth initiative forced by a being from another planet.
"Because, my people initiated panspermia as soon as we had the technology for it, because we realized that our planet would at some point become inhospitable for my species' life. However, the change wasn't as incremental as we may have hoped. A disease that only affected the females of our species soon decimated them, and those that remain are infertile. But because we sent life to Earth, we are able to interbreed with the species which took root from the genetic material that we sent there."
Scarlet certainly didn't follow most of that. But, following the information that Nerol put before her clearly wasn't required of her. She was just staring blankly as she tried to process and make sense of what had just been said to her. However, she certainly wasn't given adequate time for that, as she felt the bed shift and then saw that Nerol was crawling on the bed, coming towards her.
As Nerol advanced, his shoulders rolled as he crawled towards her like a jungle cat on the prowl, and Scarlet could see that thick blue stripes ran down his back just like on the sides of his arms and legs. He was like a wild animal, and Scarlet just totally tensed up and froze as she realized that she had nowhere to go, and nowhere to run.
When Nerol was finally upon her, Scarlet closed her eyes and held her breath, expecting the worst. Instead, she just felt a weight on her pelvis and slowly opened her eyes to see Nerol putting his delicate, elf-like ears to her lower body, like an Indian might stereotypically do in the movies to a tree, to try to trace any movement in the forest.
"You seem to be fertile," Nerol said in his trademark emotionless voice after the inspection. He then started to take the blanket away to reveal Scartlet, but she held fast to the fabric, having no intention on letting go of it without a fight.
"What are you talking about, you creep?" Scarlet demanded, trying to swat at Nerol so he would get off of her. When her hand connected with his cheek, she just gasped and closed her eyes again, partly because Nerol was colder than she had expected, and also because she was afraid of what his reaction to being struck would be. Despite the fear she had, nothing happened for a few seconds after she hit Nerol, and so she tentatively opened her eyes, just to see Nerol looking up at her.
"Why did you do that?" Nerol asked flatly.
"Why? Because you're . . . You're on me!" Scarlet replied. She could just see Nerol's eyes stare at her with something that looked akin to total confusion, as if he didn't understand what the point of her bringing that up could have been. To Scarlet, it seemed like the most obvious thing in the world, and that he was mocking her, but her mind quickly started to kick in to remind her that perhaps there was a major cultural difference here that she would have to explain. After all, Nerol wasn't being violent with her, so perhaps calm reasoning would work to her advantage.
"Look," Scarlet began. "In my culture back at home, it's not permissible for a man to just crawl on a woman without her permission," she explained, just naive enough to think that a little simple reason might be able to sway Nerol, and make him take a step back. Of course, it wasn't so easy.
"How else would we mate if I wasn't on top of you?" Nerol asked, honestly engaging with what Scarlet was saying. He didn't just brush away her comments, but his goal was still the primary focus in his mind.
"We're not mating!" Scarlet screeched, trying once again to slap Nerol away. However, if any damage was done, it was to her hand, considering Nerol was as cold and hard as a marble statue.
Nerol this time took her hand, which made Scarlet gasp and try to take her hand back from him, but she couldn't break out of his cold grasp however hard she tried. "Stop doing that," he ordered flatly.
"Let me go!" she screeched, and tried harder to get away from Nerol. Still, it was to no avail, and he just stared at her flatly.
"Stop," he repeated again, in a more authoritative and forceful tone. This stopped Scarlet's struggling, because in all honesty, she was very afraid of what Nerol would do to her. The only thing that gave Scarlet pause was thinking of which fate would be worse. To be raped by this alien, or brutalized by him. The choice was clear to her, as the scenario was as black and white as it could be. So, slowly, and by degrees, her mind worked through the minefield of possibilities before she calmed down, and decided to just accept her fate.
Nerol seemed pleased that she stopped her struggling and her screaming, and so he just proceeded, peeling away the purple blanket to reveal Scarlet's body. He only got as far as exposing the two peaks of her breasts before she couldn't contain herself and snatched at the blanket to stop him, holding the blanket as if she were holding onto something for dear life.
"It's so cold," Scarlet said softly, feeling much safer with the blanket around her. She could tell by Nerol's initial expression that he was annoyed, but that didn't last. He slipped under the blanket instead, and ran his fingers over her curves. The blanket was warm enough that it mitigated how cold Nerol was, but regardless Scarlet still shivered as she felt the unwanted touch on her body. She would have shivered if Nerol was warm or cold, honestly. This was an odd experience for her, and she still didn't know exactly how she even should react to it.
Nerol proceeded to carefully explore her body, taking his time and mapping out all of her curves with his hands, considering his eyes weren't able to see them as much. She was quite the fine specimen, without much excess fat, and very bodacious. Of course, Nerol didn't appreciate her form too much, but his biological urges knew what he did and did not like. And he liked this.
As Nerol continued to explore Scarlet's body, he got progressively more adventurous with his advances, going from tracing her sides gently with his hands to kneading her breasts, then tweaking her nipples. Despite her fear of this, Scarlet found herself letting out moans of pleasure. She couldn't call Nerol particularly skilled with what he was doing, but regardless, his instincts and passion certainly came across in his actions, and she started to feel herself getting into it. At least a part of her was trying to. After all, she realized that there was no way out here. She would have to do this, probably again and again if this was part of some population growth initiative.
As Scarlet made this resolution to let herself enjoy what Nerol was doing, small moans were trickling out of her mouth while Nerol had his way with her body, which in turn encouraged him to keep going. His fingers tweaked and pinched her erect nipples gently, just to give her the sensations that she seemed to respond to best, while his other hand began to go on a downwards creep towards her crotch. At first, Scarlet kept her legs firmly clenched together, but even then Nerol had no problems squeezing his fingers inside.
When his fingers touched her clitoris, Scarlet sharply inhaled and recoiled from his touch. Even though he wasn't as cold under the warm blankets, he was still certainly colder than Scarlet was--especially when he touched one of the warmest parts of her body. The sensation wasn't exactly something that she was prepared for or used to.
"Did that . . . Did it hurt?" Nerol asked, seemingly confused. He was taught how to go about having sex along with his natural biological urges, so he didn't think that stroking that sensitive part of Scarlet would be at all painful. If anything, it should have been pleasurable for her, but her reaction did give Nerol pause.
