Billionaire Romance: MAXIMILIAN (An Alpha Bad Boy Contemporary Mystery Romance) (Mysterious Billionaires Book 3, Anthologies & Collections) (65 page)

Somewhere far away

“Come and get it, big boy!” Deborah posed seductively, her plump flesh exposed for her lover to see. Nude, she lay on the side of the ship’s bed-thing shivering in anticipation, the way she always did when she waited for him to come back.

On the other side of the chamber stood Var’ghan, freshly returned from a meeting with his fellow elites. His expression made it abundantly clear just how much he enjoyed the sight of what she had to offer. His expression wasn’t the only part of him that radiated glee, as his growing crotch quickly made evident.

“Well, someone’s pleased to see me!” she exclaimed as he removed the Egyptian-like garment that was the norm for alien lords. A second later the thing was on the floor, and Varg’han was ready for what was about to follow. Like a predator he approached her, fully aroused.

“Oh, look at the big—“

He grabbed her by the breasts, burying his fingers into their pliable mass as he pushed her on her back. His touch was electric, causing the desire to swell within her abdomen. In response Deborah moaned as she parted her legs. Pleased with her reaction, he removed his right hand from her left breast, putting it to work elsewhere. Swiftly, but not in too much of a rush, it found its way to her waist, caressing her jiggling tummy as it slowly advanced down to the area between her legs.

“Yeesss…” Deborah slowly exclaimed as Var’ghan’s fingers buried themselves into her. Like a tide, waves of electricity erupted from the area, spreading pleasurable sensations over every part of her body. By the time he pulled them out they were absolutely drenched. She was ready for him.

Without hesitation, Var’ghan let go of her right breast, instead grabbing her by the thighs as he lifted them up. With the agility of a cat, he repositioned himself between her legs, letting them rest on his shoulders as he released them. He grabbed her firmly by the tummy as he touched her nether region with his throbbing manhood.

Come on, bury it in already!

She didn’t have to speak it out loud. As fast as he began his teasing Var’ghan ended it, plunging his erection into her with a force no Earth man could match. As always, Deborah gasped, but the trace amount of pain it caused her quickly gave way to an overwhelming pleasure. For a little while he let her squirm like that, his own arousal being stoked by the sight of her biting her lip. Then he repeated the motion, pulling out almost completely before he impaled her up to the base again.

“More! It’s so good!” she purred, her red-painted nails grabbing the sheets below her back.

“It’s about to get even better!” Var’ghan commented as he started thrusting repeatedly, every motion causing her to contort just the way he wanted, completely lost in the throes of passion.

Her breathing sped up, her moans intensified in both volume and frequency. Unconsciously, she crossed her ankles behind his torso, the way she did every time they made love. He knew what it meant. It was Var’ghan’s cue to step it up, and he would never disappoint.

Like a machine, he proceeded to hammer the hell out of her insides, the force of every impact causing her body to jiggle as if an earthquake was raging below the two of them. Deborah’s fingers curled up into the sheets as much as they could, threatening to rip the fabric. Her legs let go of Var’hgan’s muscled torso, rising up into the air as the currents converged within her belly. Then, like an explosion, everything disappeared. There was no room, bed, or Var’ghan. She could not even feel her own body. Her consciousness had transformed into an expanding cloud of pleasure, and every additional thrust she received felt like a bolt of feel-good lightning.

Drowned in bliss, Deborah had no idea how long she spent in that state. By the time she was about to revert back to her body another storm was coming, overpowering her senses again. Everything she could perceive and every pleasurable sensation joined together, producing something she could not describe.

But it felt
amazing
.

Epilogue

“So… how did the meeting go?” Deborah asked him as she helped herself up from her previously prone position.

“Not as good as it could have,” Var’ghan responded as he rose from the bed. Full of energy from their recent romp, he took a couple of steps away and turned around to face her. “They didn’t bite yet. But they will, and then my tribe’s—
our
tribe’s—future will be all set.”

“What makes you so certain they will not just, I don’t know, get themselves another one? For all we know, the military might be fielding the things regularly.” Deborah couldn’t help but observe each finely crafted detail of his body as she spoke. She knew why he had stepped away—he wanted her to see his magnificent body.

He knows me so well.

“They won’t, my love. Trust me. The two of us are the first to get a hold on that new neural stasis countermeasure that seems to be popular among the Earth’s military these days. It is an enormous asset, the way it wakes human soldiers like that, though I can’t for the life of me imagine how they’ve invented it with their level of technological mastery. Anyway, we’ve got it from your escort team, and trust me when I say it: it’s worth its weight in gold. Those still in charge of this mission will need to learn how the thing works so they can develop a way to beat it. And I will not give it to them for analysis until they agree to my terms.”

“I understand that, Var’ghan, but that still doesn’t answer my question. What makes you think another one of yours won’t grab one by themselves?”

“The way I did with you?” He smiled, displaying a dazzling array of white teeth. “Not everyone is
me
, love.”

The ego on him is staggering.
She smiled back.
Then again, he is right.

“But jokes aside, the answer is simple: manpower. There aren’t a whole lot of us left, my love. We
used
to be capable of a full-on invasion by means of synthetic soldiers, but that is no longer the case. Mankind is advancing at a rapid pace, and those new toys they have that fry our inorganics make every territory we could potentially take not worth the effort. If we want to fight, we now must do so by ourselves.”

If the general knew this, he’d probably have creamed his panties. Good that he doesn’t, the jerk.

“Add to this the fact that most of those who were originally engaged in this initiative have already gotten their mates and left for home, and the picture isn’t pretty. The force we still have stationed here is basically a reserve. No one will try to hunt for this technology. I hope that this answers your question.”

I love it when he’s being all-knowing like that.

“It sure does, sugar.” She put her hands on her knees, forcing her breasts together as she sat.

In response, Var’ghan’s manhood started rising again, despite the fact that he’d just had sex. Giving her a knowing gaze, he started getting closer again.

“As I’ve said, in exchange for sharing my discovery with the reserve, I will demand primacy in eligible females for my tribe. My sons will get to have their brides. The bloodline will not die out. And none of my subordinates will miss a woman’s touch anymore. Not under my rule.”

“That’s great, love.” She caressed his abs with her hands now that he was near. It made her want more. “But your woman is missing
your
touch right now. Are you ready for another round?”

“Always,” Var’ghan replied, the desire evident in his alien eyes.

Prologue

Inez Guzman dreamed of being a nurse since she was a little girl. When she was 5-years-old, a mobile medical clinic came to her neighborhood in Mexico City to vaccinated the children and old people against the flu. She remembered swarms of women in blues scrubs walking from family-to-family down the long line of people waiting for their shot, gathering their names and medical information, asking all of them if they needed to see a doctor for another reason other than receiving their vaccination. Almost all of them did. Inez’ neighborhood was a poor one and most of the children had not seen doctors since they were born, the same could be said of a good number of the adults as well.

When the nurse came to her family, she smiled at Inez with a brilliant perfect smile. Her voice was so cheerful and happy as she asked her about how she was feeling. But then a rough man came and interrupted the nurse, shoving her by the shoulder, telling her to hurry up, that people were waiting. The nurse apologized to the man for the wait and politely asked him to wait his turn and then tried to start talking to Inez again. But the man was very angry and he shoved the nurse again, harder this time causing her to stumble backward.

And then the nurse hit the man.

Inez remembers it so clearly. The man’s large, beefy hand shoving the nurse in the chest and her feet tangling briefly, but then finding solid footing. The nurse’s face was so full of rage, the corners of her mouth turned downward, her jaw set, and then she reared back and seemed to punch the man with her entire body right in the man’s nose. She remembered the sound of her fist against the soft bones of the man’s face, a hard packing sound followed by a spray of blood from his broken nose. The man fell straight back into the dirt, unconscious. The nurse then returned her attention to Inez with the same broad and friendly smile.

She decided to become a nurse on that very day. She had never seen a woman so powerful, so strong. Her father was a gentleman who never laid his hands on his wife or children. But Inez knew many men who did. Men who used their wives as punching bags when they were drunk, or just whenever they became angry. Men like her uncles, her grandfather. But the nurse, Inez knew no man would ever touch her. She was to be treated with respect or you would face her wrath.

So Inez worked hard in school, was always at the top of her class, but her family was poor, and she was sent to work at one of the cell phone factories when she turn thirteen. She hated it, but her family needed her. She saved her money, though. Every extra peso she made, she stashed it away, keeping it buried in a coffee can in the weed backyard of an abandoned house two streets down from her. Every week, the amount grew larger and larger, and she knew that God was looking out over her because no one ever discovered her can. God wanted her to become a nurse as much as she did. He wanted her to go to America, find a better job, and then go to school to become a nurse.

And on her 24th birthday, Inez counted up her money—her pounds of coins and wads of dirty bills—and she had saved up $5000, which was enough to pay the coyotes to take her across the border into the deserts of Arizona. She had to admit that it wasn’t the way she wanted to come to America. But it seemed like America only let the wealthy into their country legally, and not even her $5000 was enough to convince the American government that she would be a productive citizen. So her only way across the border was to give her money to the coyotes and pray to God that when they dropped her off in Arizona, the sun would not be too hot, or her walk to civilization too long.

But the coyotes were not good men. In fact, they were not even coyotes, but killers. Dirty white men who smelled of sweat and cigarettes who did bring her group to America, but they only brought them here to execute them and leave their bodies to rot under the boiling sun.

Inez ran, though. The minute they stopped, she felt that something was wrong, and when the men rolled up the door of the box truck her group was riding in and she saw the semi-automatic rifles over their shoulders, she knew she was about to die, so she ran. She ran out into the hot desert with bullets chasing her, slamming into the dirt around her feet, whizzing through the air over her head. She had never been so scared in her entire life, but she didn’t lie down and cower in the hot dirt, she ran. She ran for hours under the scorching sun, her body dripping with sweat until she found an asphalt road and a sweet retired couple picked her up just as she was about to collapse.

She told them her car had broken down and for some reason they believed her and told her they would take her as far they were headed, to a town called Apache Junction.

Inez felt so lucky. She was safe, she still had a few hundred dollars hidden in her shoe, and she believed she would never see the dirty white men again.

But she was wrong, they were coming for her.

Chapter 1

Most people think that Arizona is nothing but a bunch of gun crazed hillbillies running around in the desert, and the fact is, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong in that assumption. Arizona has more than its fair share of yahoos and peckerwoods running around shooting their mouths off, carrying around some big guns they don’t need, and driving around in gas guzzling pickup trucks that they don’t have much use for, either, other than proving that they have a lot of money, or at least pretending they do. But for the most part, Arizona has a lot more good, hard working people than we do crazies, and the only reason you hear about them more is because the whacko’s have bigger mouths and make for more interesting television footage.

Arizona is in my blood. My family—the Collins—have lived in the state for 100 years longer than it's been a state. My family were a group of madmen who traveled across the country from Pennsylvania and Ohio in covered wagons, fought off bandits, fought off Apaches looking to collect their scalps, and decided for one reason or another that a nearly uninhabitable stretch of copper orange desert was a fine and dandy place to set up a homestead and raise a family. And I’m sure if I knew my ancestors from way back when, I would have laughed at them and told them to hustles their asses back home because one-half of them were going to die of heat stroke, and the other half burn up with fever caused by small pocks. But a couple of them, well, they would make it out of those harsh early times alive and prospered.

The first of our wealth came entirely from gold. Back in the mid-19th century, southern Arizona was absolutely teeming with the stuff, but the thing was there weren’t enough people around to pick up off the ground and turn it into folding money. But the Collins’ were here and we scooped up by the ton. And when that all disappeared, we became a bit more sensible and went into copper. Needless to say, but precious metals were good to my family … At least until it all ran out. Well, the family at least with the family claims. Then for some reason or another, my father—the senior Henry to my junior—thought it was a fine idea to go into horse and cattle ranching. Which would have been incredibly profitable if we didn’t live in a sun-blasted desert?

Now I won’t say that the Collins Ranch of Gold Canyon, AZ went belly up—it’s alive and well, obviously, because it's running takes up the bulk of my time and money—but it’s really just more of an expensive hobby as opposed to an actual business. Don’t get wrong, it brings in an income, and I’m damn proud of the horses—we dropped the cattle back in the mid-80’s due to the overall cost—that come out of here. But the fact is, year-after-year, more money goes out than comes in, and on certain days it feels like a thousand pound weight dragging off my shoulders. But on days like today, when the sun comes up and turns the sky into a riot of brilliants oranges and reds, and I’m riding on top of my favorite horse watching it happen, I love it more than life itself. Just like Arizona, ranching is in my blood, and even if it was completely bankrupting me—which it’s not even close to doing—I would still soldier on and work two or three jobs just to keep it afloat.

“Henry!” But, yeah, there are some days, though, where all I want to do is hide away out in the desert, and when I hear Juan calling for me, I know today is going to be one of those days where I wish I could disappear. Not that he’s coming up here to tell me anything bad’s happening, but some days, all I want to do is ride and pretend the land around me is the land of my ancestors and that the only people out here are me, Myself, and I. But the illusion is completely broken when Juan rides right up on me on one of the ATV’s.

“Boss, it’s time to get the Sanderson geldings loaded up. I know you wanted to be there to make sure out goes smooth.” He says as he spits into the rocks. Juan has been the ranch foreman going on 25 years. The man is as much a father to me as my old man ever was and I largely blame him for my love of ranch life, I couldn’t love him more even if I wanted to. I’m still not quite to him calling me boss, though, even if it’s been 10 years since he’s been doing it.

“Yup, let’s get on down there and get it done while it’s still cool out.”

                        ***

We get the Sanderson geldings—all 24 of them—loaded and secured onto the trailers in just a little over 4 hours. Roy Sanderson is one of the ranch’s oldest clients, and back in the day when my father was running the place, Roy was just about the only person keeping the ranch afloat. As much as the old man loved horses and the desert, he wasn’t much of a rancher. In fact, he wasn’t all that much of a businessman even though he came from such a long line of them. The old man craved action, and the thing with ranch life is, there ain’t all that much action to be found in it. Forget about anything you’ve read, or seen in the movies and whatnot where you see ranch hands moving around all day roping stray steers or horses. All that working from sun up-to-sun down stuff is nothing but pure nonsense. For the most part, ranching is really more about waiting to work and then waiting for more work to come. More than a few of my boys will get so bored sometimes that they’ll invent chores for themselves to do.

Because of this, and my father’s nervous nature, he had to go outside of the ranch to seek his thrills and he went into law enforcement. At first, he joined up with the Phoenix police department, but after a few years of doing nothing but being parked out on the I-10 pulling over speeders—which, I imagine, was an even bigger torture than ranching for the old man—he ended up running for sheriff of Apache Junction. Which, because of his name and the family’s reputation, he won by a landslide.

Apache Junction—or AJ as it’s affectionately called by the locals—used to be a small retirement village planted against the foothills of the Superstition Mountains. When the old man was sheriff, it was little more than a loose collection of mobile home parks, RV dealerships, and antique stores. It was quiet and peaceful. But then the Baby Boomers started retiring, and they brought in a load of their crappy, dependent adult children who brought along all of their crappy, dependent adult problems.

Mostly drugs, specifically, methamphetamines, and lots of it.

The old man basically went from having a sleepy little town of docile, white-haired grandmas and grandpas, where usually the worst thing that happened was that one of them would drop dead in the middle of the night, to having a town where break-ins and drug-related homicides became a daily occurrence. The old man got his thrills with his new job and then some. So much so that it eventually ended up getting him killed. He walked in on a couple of speed freaks tossing a trailer house, and both of them had shotguns. They let loose on him the second he stuck his head in the door. I was 25 when it happened and rounding out my second tour in Iraq. The army let me go a couple of months early to take care of things at home along with my brother Samuel and Paul.

I thought when I came back, the three of us would re-bond over the old man’s death, and we’d end up running the ranch together side-by-side. But no such thing happened, it was nothing but a misty-eyed fantasy of a man who’d been gone from home for too long. Sam had his own thing going on down in Tucson—he was and still is a commander with the U.S. border patrol—and Paul was bent on revenge. Not so much revenge against the fellas who shot the old man—Dad’s deputies had taken care of that a couple of days after the shooting—but in a general angry young man kind of way. He joined up with the Phoenix PD with his eyes set on becoming part of their drug task force.