Sassy Ever After: Bonnie Sass (Kindle Worlds Novella) (7 page)

T
homas Davenport eyed
the rude vampire called Simon and demanded, “Why have you followed me here? This is none of your business.”

The burly, shaven-headed figure who should have been running some sort of small-time crime ring in a shabby part of London sauntered arrogantly into the room to stand between Thomas and Angie and look back and forth between them. He emanated a menace that actually made Angie wish she was closer to Davenport, saving not being in the room with them at all.

“My business that you can’t get over the idea of shagging this bird when you should just be feeding on her?” Simon asked. Then he shrugged and nodded. “Yeah, I’d say that’s none of my business. By that ain’t the only matter here, Davenport. There are bigger issues at hand.”

“Bigger issues?” Thomas glared appraisingly at his fellow vampire.

“There are, shall we say, bigger plays to be made.”

A split-second too late, Davenport seemed to catch the meaning that this was Simon’s bigger play—against him.

Fangs and talons instantly bared, the two vampires clashed and swiped and struggled. Seeing her chance during the distraction, even though it made her blood run cold, Angie started toward them in hopes of skirting around the struggling vampires and reaching the door. She could scream now, too, without worry that one of them is going to stop her. The pack guards would hear….

But before Angie could scream for help, Simon threw off Thomas and lunged for her. His hand gripped her throat to draw her back up tight against him, to act as a shield between himself and the other snarling vampire. Both vampires were panting and bleeding.

His beauty turned feral and wrathful, Thomas Davenport hissed at Simon.

“What are you playing at?” the obviously older vampire demanded.

“You could say I’ve got a bit of rogue in me, too, Thomas. The wolves have their doubts you’ll fulfill their agreement to try to make them vampires.”

“And you will?”

Angie couldn’t tell if Davenport was disbelieving or disapproving.

But Simon laughed. “They’re even more gullible than Evelyn and that Highlands pack I had her feeding false information. She was a handy one before she caught on and I had to kill her and her wolf boyfriend.”

The scenario Simon was describing sounded far to close to what Angie knew of the trouble with the rogue vampire, only it looked like Thomas and the coven had misidentified their loose cannon when it had been Simon all along just manipulating her.

Simon hissed when Thomas tensed and bared his fangs. “I’ll feed on as many of the stupid wolf bastards as bow down and present themselves for slaughter. Make a vampire from a werewolf?” Simon shook his head no. “But if they want to die trying I’m more than happy to help and throw all the packs in this fucking city into a frenzy. Let them kill each other off, and then we’ll sweep up the stragglers, those among us who still have the balls.”

Then to Angie, struggling in his grip, Simon said, “And you, I want you to know that right about now Ballard and his rogues are closing in on your wolf lord. By morning, they’ll just find pieces of him strewn through the Steamworks rubble.”

For a second, Angie told herself Simon was lying. But fear gripped her stomach.

“No,” she shouted and began struggling as hard as she could.

Simon asserted his control by jerking the collar of her robe aside and sinking his fangs into her shoulder. Then all Angie could think was,
I’ve been bitten, fuck, I’ve been bitten
. What did that mean? What was going to happen?

The vampire threw Angie stunned to the floor as Davenport leapt for him. The woman was unable to focus, her head swimming. Was it the sudden blood loss? Was the shock? Or was there something injected into her blood by the vampire’s bite to make her less able to struggle while he fed?

She heard shattering furniture under the weight of the struggling vampires. She heard sharp tones of pain as they tore at one another. And she smelled blood. But whose? Would it matter? She couldn’t be sure Thomas would spare her life any more than Simon would have.

Using the bed and all the strength she had left, Angie climbed up to her knees and blinked hard to bring the room into focus. Dizzy as she was, it spun around her briefly before finally steadying. She had just the right timing to see an already severely bloodied Thomas Davenport slash his enemy across the throat deeply enough that Simon fell back against the wall with eyes wide.

That was it, surely that was the final blow, she thought. But before she’d even finished that thought, Simon had gathered himself enough to dash back out through the open balcony door and into the night. Then Thomas Davenport collapsed onto the floor at the foot of the bed.

“No, you have to get up,” Angie said in a groan as she crawled to Davenport’s prone body. “You have to stop the rogues. You have to help Calum if you want help stopping a war between the packs and the vampires.”

Almost too softly to hear, Thomas breathed, “Too weak. Lost blood.”

Angie shook his shoulders. “Now, get up. This is your only chance to get what you want out of this. If you help Calum now, he’ll help you hunt down Simon and anyone else who’s been working against the truce. You have to get to Steamworks.”

Thomas had at least opened his eyes, but they didn’t focus on her or on anything. “I don’t even know…. Steam works…. What is…?”

“It’s a nightclub in an old industrial complex. I know the place. I know the property. And every fucking thing about Las Vegas. Been here my whole fucking life.” For once Angie was going to make that count.

But Thomas kept insisting he was too weak. He needed to heal. He needed blood.

Angie knew the pack, even if she sent them right that second, could very well be too late to save Calum. But a vampire, this vampire, could move with far more speed. He could fly through the night in a fraction of the time it would take the Highlands pack to reach their alpha.

There was only one way for her to make that happen.

Angie put her wrist up to Thomas Davenport’s mouth. “Drink,” she told him. “Goddamn you, you drink.”

I
n his last few moments
, what struck Calum most was the feeling he was abandoning Angharod again. The way he had when he had insisted on dealing with his father’s death without dragging her into it. Without dragging her into the messier parts of his life where he was less than the perfect man for her.

Still in his wolf form but with his dark fur mottled crimson red, Calum used his beast’s fangs and powerful jaws to rip a rogue wolf off his back where its teeth were tearing into his flesh. Odd that he would notice now, in the midst of battle, how cool the desert wind was against his wet coat. Wet with his blood. His human side was thinking too much as he tired physically.

Another, ruddy wolf crashed into the alpha as soon as he was rid of the last. Was it Ballard’s wolf? Calum lost his footing and tumbled but took his enemy down with him in a ball of teeth and claws. Was this how his pack would find him later? Dead but with an enemy’s throat still gripped in his jaws?

His pack brothers would honor such a death, but Angie…. She would still be alone, again. The sharp ache in Calum’s chest kept the man and beast fighting for survival, for their mate, against five or was it ten or was it more rogue wolves? When they were piling onto him, though, on his back and at his throat and on each haunch, the Highlands alpha struggled and failed to keep his feet under him.

At least Kenzie and Angie were safe. Calum didn’t want to but he couldn’t help closing his eyes and holding his breath as the pain of his wounds mounted.

A sharp yelp pierced the night, and it surprised Calum that he didn’t think it was his. Then he heard another. And then finally there was that voice that shouldn’t have been there but meant so much in that moment.

“Calum,” Angie called out. She sounded weak. “Calum, standup. Fight. We’re here. I’m here for you.”

We? Had his pack found him? Hew and Ewan had been on their way. Aye, surely that was it, but why had they brought Angie them? And why did the alpha smell vampire? There couldn’t have been a worse time to add vampires to the mix.

The sickly sweet stench of undead, enticing to humans but putrid to wolves, was overwhelming for an instant. Then Calum felt all the weight come off of him, and he looked up to find a dark-haired vampire tossing rogue wolves in every direction. They leapt upon him, attaching themselves to him with their fangs in his flesh everywhere they could. Calum recognized the vampire was in a kind of blood frenzy. Like the wolves had their battle frenzy.

“Calum, get up. Get up now, you mangy fur ball.”

Leave it to his bossy little lass to sass him at a time like this. Good thing for the alpha he found that sassy streak so invigorating, because he needed that adrenaline right now. He needed it desperately if he and one dark-haired vampire he couldn’t explain helping him were going to hold their own against at least ten werewolves until his pack brothers arrived.

Aye, and indeed that was exactly what they were going to do.

“
T
here’s
something I should tell you.”

Angie looked sidelong at Lord Calum Ferguson as they rode bicycles side-by-side along a rutted Scottish dirt road. As usual, with the Highlands wind in his mussed hair, he looked too handsome by half. The ass-hugging blue jeans didn’t hurt either.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever liked hearing what comes after a statement like that.”

Calum winked at her. “You’re always annoyed with me anyway, aren’t you?”

“Mildly,” she confirmed.

More truthfully, Angie was beginning to feel startlingly vulnerable again to this man she’d fallen in love with as a wide-eyed college girl. These last three weeks with him back in the UK had eroded years of emotional defenses she’d build up against Calum. There was no distance between them now and no job back in Las Vegas to occupy her when she tried not to think about him. Which was constantly.

God but he was adorable when he lowered his head and regarded her intensely from beneath his sandy brow. “I won’t pretend any longer. I could have gotten you your job back at the Shifter Access Unlimited Hotel had I spoken to the owner. The truth is, lass, I didn’t even try.”

Angie squinted at Calum and slowed her peddling slightly to ease back even with him and look him in the face. “Well, for one, I think you’re underestimating how mad Monsieur Black was with me and how much he means to—and lives for—that hotel. Don’t underestimate the passion of a werepenguin. He’d never have tolerated having me back. But for the sake of argument, let’s just ask why you didn’t, mister.”

Smiling and using those blue eyes on her, Calum said, “Because otherwise you wouldn’t have let yourself accept my offer of spending the rest of the summer with me in Scotland while I recuperated.”

Angie laughed aloud and hard. “Your recuperation,” she scoffed. “Your wounds were nothing but bruises by the time we got on the airplane in Las Vegas. Jeez, but the way you shifters heal. I’m not going to feel so bad for you from now on knowing you can practically be torn apart and then fully recovered less than a week later. Mere mortals like me nurse paper cuts for that long, and
they’re
excruciating. Hey, where you going? Don’t be mad.”

In the midst of Angie being unsympathetic, Calum and his bike had veered off to the right along the curve mounting a hill in the grassy landscape. Angie’s natural competitiveness kicked in, and she pedaled harder to keep up and then to pass the man. The downside was losing sight of that amazing ass of his in those jeans from behind.

Then again, the view from the top of the hill was pretty damn amazing, too.

Below them, in a cradle of grassy green fields between the striking Scottish hills, sat a two-story manor house out of a fairy tale. Large enough to be Cinderella’s house. Large enough to be a bed and breakfast.

“Do you recognize it?” Calum asked.

Angie nodded. “It’s even prettier than the photos. This is the manor one of the hotel guests had told me he had for sale, but how did you…?” Midway through the question, Angie knew the answer. “Letty. She told you about it.”

“She did. She said you got all mopey about it but refused to even consider buying it with your savings because it was in Scotland. In my pack territory. You knew that, didn’t you, lass?”

Chagrinned, Angie shrugged.

“Well, you can’t keep dancing back and forth about it now that it’s yours.”

“It’s what?”

“A wedding gift,” Calum said before he started down the hill toward the house fast on that bicycle. “Let’s go see your hotel, Lady Ferguson.”

Angie glared at the alpha before kicking down hard on her own bike pedals. “You haven’t even asked me to marry you, fur ball,” she called out to his back. “It’s rude to buy a wedding gift when you don’t even have a fiancé.”

Inside her, Angie found her heart beating erratically, and not from the effort of their bicycle race. Mate. Marriage. Wedding gift.
Lady Ferguson
. It was too much to take in when she’d been spending the last three weeks wondering when this fling with Calum would come to an end.

She chased the alpha—that fur ball could move even just on two legs—into the manor house to find it in the process of being remodeled. No workmen were there just then, but all the scaffolding and tools and plasters and paints cluttered each room. Still, it was so beautiful. Stone walls and carved wooden panels and massive fireplaces.

No, this couldn’t really be hers. Could it?

Angie had to search the house for Calum and found him, unsurprisingly, in the master bedroom. What was unexpected, and breathtaking, was the only piece of furniture in the whole house in the only room to have been completely restored. Calum was standing with arms folded and a flirtatious look on his face in front of the biggest polished wood four-poster bed she had ever seen. It even had curtains on each side like the ones in real castles.

Breathlessly, she asked, “Calum Ferguson, what have you done.” Angie stood teary-eyes for a moment, before her brow knit. “You’re not…. You’re not giving this to me to keep me busy while you go off with Thomas Davenport to hunt down Simon Crowley and his rogue vampires, are you?”

The woman had underestimated Calum’s reach and found herself abruptly jerked up against him, into his arms.

“No, lass, that’s for Ewan and Hew and Orla to do now. Though once, they’ve tracked the rogues down, I will need to hunt with them. Packs from London, Wales, and Ireland will be with us. But I’ll not leave my bride on her honeymoon unless it’s that serious. And I was planning on a good two or three month holiday for us.”

Before Angie could, by habit, come up with a litany of reasons they couldn’t get married, weren’t mates, couldn’t actually start her dream B&B, or remind Calum he had skipped the actual proposal, the alpha lifted her up and tossed her into the high, fluffy bed.

It felt good, the way the bed kind of swallowed her up and hugged her when she landed. The awkwardness of Calum and Angie trying to undress each other while they kept sinking into all the fluffy down comforters and linens. The idea that… that this was actually their bed, their marriage bed.

Calum sank into Angie’s pussy in one long, excruciatingly slow but unrelenting stroke of his thick cock. The broad head of him opened her wide, made her ache, hurt so goddamn good. The contrast of the hot achy pleasure against the softness of his mouth at her breasts and the chill air on her wet skin where he kissed and sucked at her nipples was enough to keep her from thinking straight.

Or at least enough to keep her from resisting what she had always known she really wanted: Calum Ferguson, like this, hers.

“Oh, yes, lass, yes,” he groaned at her breasts. “I feel your hot pussy throbbing and fluttering around my cock. Do that again, Angharod, it feels so fucking—. Oh, fuck, yes.”

Angie had meant to say she didn’t even know she’d done that or how. That was just her body set tense and straining from the growingly insistent thrust of Calum’s cock in and out of her core. From the warm friction of his thick shaft against the trembling walls of her pussy. But hard ripples of pleasure promising a climax soon shuddered harder through her and gave Calum what he was asking for.

The alpha was breathing heavy now, panting as hard as Angie was, as his stroke grew stronger. He began to pound into Angie, making her groin burn and the walls of her sex tingle and bristle. At her breasts, one hand began to knead her soft flesh firmly, then roughly. When Calum pinched her nipples, Angie arched her back and let out a long moan, the throbbing nibs had been burning so badly in need of that little tinge of pain.

Calum was growling under his breath, barely able to speak. “Give me everything, Angharod. Your pleasure, pain, need, weakness. Stop hiding from me; let me see it. Show me you are my mate. Let me see you.”

In possibly the bravest moment of Angie’s life, she nodded and sighed out. “I am. There’s never been anyone else I could ever love.” Another, harder thrust from Calum’s cock, his strong hips, broke this final confession from her. “Only you. You’re my mate.”

Though it sounded pained from the effort of fucking her without giving in to his wolf’s more brutal nature, Calum laughed. “You can’t say you’re my mate,” he panted happily. “But you can say I’m yours. Well enough, lass. I’m your mate, and I’ll never leave you.”

The alpha gripped Angie’s hips to hold her still, to angle her just right to plunge into her vulnerable pussy over and over. His hammering strokes were so jolting that Angie didn’t recognize the first telltale tremors of her orgasm until it was a shuddering bliss ripping her apart from the inside of her mind outward.

It made it worse, better, harder to withstand without clawing at sheets and gritting her teeth and scratching at Calum’s body that he kept fucking her through her orgasm. The pleasure never let up, not until she was starting to loll and blackout.

Calum’s own climax saved Angie from the indignity of having to deny the shifter had made her come so hard she’d passed out. Just shy of that point for Angie, he stiffened and arched and poured his heat into her.

She’d be the one teasing him later about how weak and sweaty he was when he collapsed on top of her, big fucking fur ball. Then he would get offended and tease her back. And they’d argue. And fuck again. And then make up. And fuck.

Angie didn’t realize there was one thing more to attend to until Calum raised his head and looked at her with uncharacteristic seriousness in those blue eyes.

“We aren’t bound as mates until I mark you as mine, lass. My mark is my bite. And it will turn you.”

For a second, Angie choked a little in the back of her throat. She had to blink the dampness out of her eyes. “I knew that. We’ve talked. And I’ve heard things, around the hotel. It doesn’t matter, I’m not going back, but… will it hurt? Not the bite, the changing?”

Calum kissed Angie’s forehead, the bridge of her nose, then her lips. “The less you resist, the easier the transformation.”

“Oh, great,” she said and bit her lip, rolling her eyes. “I’m not good at not resisting.”

“But I’ll be here with you. The whole time. No matter what.”

Angie nodded. “I know.”

“You know?” Calum asked, his gaze searching the features of her face, reading her. “You really know?”

“I do. I do, Calum. I believe that you’ll be here for me. And it will be okay.”

“It will be better than okay, Angharod. Our life will be so much better than okay. I’ll see to it,” he promised.

Then Calum Ferguson’s bite sank into Angie’s bare shoulder over the marks left by the vampire bite, erasing them, replacing them with the mark of her mate.

T
hank
you for reading Bonnie Sass by Erika Masten. If you enjoyed the romance between Calum and Angie, please consider leaving a review. Check
Erika Masten’s Amazon Author Page
for all the BBW paranormal romances in her Aesir Shifters, Sons of Fenris, and Windemere Stallions series.