Heart Mates (29 page)

About the Author

As a girl, I spun romantic, happily-ever-after stories to get to sleep. A husband, a family, two degrees and a black belt later, I’m delighted to spin them for readers.

I’ve lived with love and loss, in bright times and dark, and learned we can all use a break from reality every now and then.

So join me for action, sparkling humor and red-hot love. Strong men. Stronger women. Hugs! ~Mary

I’d love to hear from you! Write me at
[email protected]
.

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www.maryhughesbooks.com

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Look for these titles by Mary Hughes

Now Available:

Biting Love

Bite My Fire

Biting Nixie

The Bite of Silence

Biting Me Softly

Biting Oz

Beauty Bites

Downbeat

Assassins Bite

Pull of the Moon

Heart Mates

Coming Soon:

Biting Love

Passion Bites

Only her light can burn away his shadows.

Assassins Bite

© 2014 Mary Hughes

Biting Love, Book 8

On her first night as a police officer, Sunny Ruffles takes down three felons…only to be attacked by a gang of vampires who are a whole new level of hurt.

Then a mysterious shadow man intervenes, saving Sunny before he disappears. She runs after him, telling herself her pursuit has nothing to do with his sharp, stubbled jaw, his powerful shoulders, or his sexy-as-hell, kissable lips.

Rescuing the humans makes Aiden Blackthorne late for a critical meeting with the vampire Nosferatu’s daughter. Yet clompy, bumbling Sunny draws him back like wild honey. He kisses her, and he’s almost got her down to her underwear when a bomb meant for him explodes.

The last thing Aiden wants is to drag Sunny into his hellish conflict with Nosferatu. But Aiden’s a loner whose only friend has mysteriously disappeared, and the woman who smells and tastes like his mate is the only backup he has left. He’ll need her, everything he is, everything he was—and everything he might have been—to defeat his evil master and claim the love he never dared hope to have.

Warning: This book contains shadowy assassins
shooping
off vampire heads, cops bumbling in at the worst of times and opposites attracting, colliding, and exploding in lust—a.k.a., explicit fighting, humor, and sex.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Assassins Bite:

I had
less than an hour to clean myself up before Captain Titus arrived. That wasn’t quite enough time to go home and come back—at least, not if Mom was awake and talking—so I went to the restroom. I’d been at the MCPD before so I knew where they were. I put on my jacket and shirt to walk there. I wasn’t shy or particularly modest, but I didn’t like offending anyone else’s sense of propriety.

I regretted that decision. The cut blouse was no protection and each step rubbed scratchy wool against my poor skin. By the time I got to the restroom I was biting back whimpers, my eyes stinging with tears.

The first floor ladies was three stalls, scarred wood countertop, sink and mirror. Various sticky notes decorated the mirror, including a couple that read “Glock For Sale. Retired officer, rarely used. Contact Blatzky”. I stood in front of the mirror, peering at what showed of my pale, round face as I opened the buttons and peeled off wool and cotton. I set the shirt and jacket on the sink.

My chest was red and raw. Smeared blood streaked my skin. No wonder it hurt so much.

“Nasty.” Behind me, a shadow separated from the gunmetal-gray stall doors.

“Crap!” I spun. Aiden Blackthorne was
right on top of me
, his eyes burning. I swallowed hard. Inanely, I said, “Can I help you?”

The corners of his lips turned up, making me want to grab him by the ears and scuba dive. He said, “I want to help
you
.”

My experience with people trying to help was my mother baking brownies for my GirlGroup Troop, treats which sent us all running for the bathroom because she’d substituted sauerkraut for sugar because they both began with S. Not that I was doing so well on my own, but the pain made me whiny and he got the brunt of it. “Nobody can help me. Have you paid your parking ticket?”

“I have ten days.” His head tilted as he considered me. “Let me treat your wounds.”

I coughed. “No thanks. You’re not supposed to use ointment for burns—”

“Not ointment. This.” He seized my wrists. I was so surprised I let him lift my arms up and away from my body, exposing my chest to whatever he wanted to do. Which was to drop his head, open his mouth…and
lick
me, one broad swipe across the length of my collarbones.

My pain…lifted. Just along that swatch, so I knew it wasn’t coincidence. My belly fluttered. He had a magic tongue?

He licked again, and though his hot, rasping tongue should have been excruciating, it was lovely, exhilarating. As he continued licking, my pain melted away.

Gradually I became aware of how intimate this was. His rough tongue, the heat and moisture of his mouth, excited me—and he was heading lower. In a few more swipes he’d be tonguing the tops of my breasts. My belly thrilled at the thought.

So when he released my wrists, I slid my fingers into his black hair, thick and strong yet silky warm, and urged him to go lower. Faster. “
More
.” I moaned it.

With a satisfied growl, he complied, swiping heat into the valley between my breasts.

I sighed in pleasure and lifted my breasts, encouraging him to do more, again. My flesh tightened in anticipation.

But he raised his head and looked me in the eye, an unspoken question in his. How far did I want him to go?

In response I smiled.
As far as you want.

He made a small, choked noise and dashed to the bathroom door. Before I could panic, he flipped a shiny-new thumb lock with an urgent
click
and stood before me again almost instantly.

That revved me hotter.

Cupping my chin, he asked another question with eyes gone velvety black.
Are you sure?

I didn’t know what this hot attraction between us meant, or if it was more than physical—after all, how permanent could an assassin get with a cop?

But for now? I nodded and smiled again.

With a sigh, he reached around and unhooked my bra with one quick flip. His eyes flicked over my revealed breasts as he tossed the bra onto the counter. Before I could wonder how interesting he’d find my small, tight body, his gaze went nova. “You’re perfect.” He bent, grasped my breasts, one in each hand, and lifted them to his mouth.

It was hard, hot and fast. As if he wanted to devour them both at once, he kissed and licked and sucked nipples in quick turn. Whichever breast he wasn’t lavishing with attention he stimulated with his thumb.

I gasped. His kisses were hot; his suckling was incendiary. His fingers were extraordinarily strong and clever. I’d been with older boys—these were a man’s hands fondling me, strong and sure. I closed my eyes and savored.

He finally settled on my left breast and suckled the nipple until it was diamond-hard with longing. My fingers threaded into his hair again and tightened in response to each tug, until I was practically pulling his hair out by the roots. All he did was make a tiny sound, half-pain, half-bliss.

He kept suckling. Each draw on my nipple yanked a silken cord of need deep inside. The sensations came closer together, hotter, deeper, until I was churning with them. My belly was heavy, my lips swollen, my legs yielding and my skin screaming to shed the rest of my clothes. All that, just from
suckling
.

My mouth ached with the need to suck on him in return. My fingers were still tight in his hair so I wrenched on his head, trying to lift him from my breast, to get my hands under his shirt and peel it off over his head.

He made another small sound, an
uh-uh
of undeniable
not slowing
, and continued to suckle.

With the last of my willpower I reached over his bent head, grabbed his sleeveless T-shirt as far back as I could and started winching it toward his neck.

I’d made about two inches of headway, barely enough to expose the small of his back, when the suckling drove me completely insane. I gave a throttled shriek and tried to rip the shirt off.

He chuckled. With a see-you-soon lick to my ripe nipple, he straightened and finished what I’d inadequately started, stripping himself of the shirt even faster than last time.

My eyes drank their fill. If he was a vampire it didn’t show in his skin, a sun-drenched bronze. His nipples were tight and dark. His chest was smooth and hairless. I reached for it.

He tossed his shirt on top of my bra and reached for me at the same time. As I palmed his pectorals, he crushed me to him. My breasts and palms flattened against male flesh, its warm scent filling my every quickened breath. He grabbed my mouth in a searing kiss and his taste filled me. I basked in him, touch, scent and taste, meeting his mouth and clutching his chest and rippling against him with the need for even more.

Opening his hands on my back, he went exploring, gliding along my skin until he met the thick wool of my trousers.

If I thought that would stop him, I didn’t know him very well. His hands continued to glide down, rubbing the cloth over my buttocks, then grasping me and pulling me into him. My hips met a large, firm and growing bulge. He backed off on the kiss, his tongue flicking and teasing. Now he was trying to go slower, but I wasn’t having any of that.

I stood on tiptoes and went after his mouth, thrusting my tongue between his lips and rubbing my hands over him, feeling the pinpricks of his nipples roll under my palms.

He huffed, and his teasing tongue got serious, diving back into my mouth to claim me. I thrust my tongue in return, finding much more of him to deal with. Lips that were thin but sexy when viewed were exquisite acres when tasting and licking.

He pushed a hand between us and for a moment I thought he was still trying to slow things down and moaned my protest. But a couple wags of those clever fingers managed to undo my belt and pants. The uniform slacks slid languidly open for him and coyly slipped off my hips.

With a satisfied purr, he opened one hand on the base of my spine to hold me in place—and thrust the other down the front of my panties.

I gasped.

His fingers unerringly found my clitoris, the bud already rising to meet them. I groaned. He stroked. His purr became more pronounced. He stroked again, and again, setting up a good hard rhythm. I whimpered. His purr became a rumble that shook my ribs.

I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him like I was going to mate his mouth. My naked breasts rubbed against his torso as he beat fingers against me. His hips rocked hungrily in the same rhythm. I dropped a hand to try to open his pants too.

He raised his mouth from mine. “Not yet. Don’t touch me, I’m too aroused. You first.”

It took my breath away.

He lifted me by the waist and swung me toward the wall. I thought maybe he was going to smash me against it but he set me on the broad tiled ledge under the window. He pulled my pants off over my cop black shoes and socks. Not very alluring—until he stepped between my legs. He looked damned good between my thighs.

Her betrayal is unforgivable. But their passion? Unforgettable.

Hawk’s Revenge

© 2015 Vivi Andrews

Lone Pine Pride, Book 3

Hawk-shifter Adrian Sokolov made the mistake of trusting the beautiful Dr. Rachel Russell once—and wound up drugged, captured, and experimented on inside Organization Labs.

He isn’t about to make the same mistake again, but when she offers to help him escape this hell hole, he can’t say no. Her only condition? That he take her with him.

From the moment Rachel discovered her bosses’ true intent, she’s been secretly smuggling shifters out of the Labs. But now the higher-ups suspect they have a mole, and it’s time to flee—but not before she frees the golden-eyed hawk she was forced to betray.

When their escape goes wrong, Adrian wakes, confused and alone, in the safety of the Lone Pine Pride infirmary and realizes he may have left behind the one ally the shifters had within the Organization—the same breathtaking woman who invades his dreams.

Now he must face the Organization that destroyed him… before she pays for his freedom with her life.

Warning: This book contains betrayals, escapes, rescues, plots, double-crosses, a sexy surly hero, a heroine who deserves sainthood… and a pride full of trouble.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Hawk’s Revenge:

They say you can’t keep a good man down, but the truth is with enough horse tranquilizers, you can drop just about anyone.

Adrian drifted up through the layered fog of his consciousness, the sensation oddly familiar, mirroring the memory of his wings catching air current above air current to lift him higher into the sky. The
distant
memory.

Panic wanted to arise, but the fog wouldn’t allow it. The pharmaceutical cocktail they’d been feeding him was thorough, dulling everything. His senses. His thoughts. His ability to shift. But not his will to fight. That still burned, an angry ember in his gut, fueling this latest push toward consciousness.

He became aware of his body in a hazy, detached way. Muscles heavy and aching. Head throbbing. How long since he’d moved his arms and legs? He didn’t want to think about how badly his muscles must have atrophied by now.

His throat was so raw and dry it felt like it had been lined with sandpaper and his eyes stung and burned from a dozen needle pricks. An endless source of fascination for the bastards, his eyes. Gauze and surgical tape bound the top half of his face—either in a half-assed effort to bandage the latest wounds to his corneas or an attempt to blind him, hooding him like the raptor he became, as if that would make him more docile.

He’d often overheard them talking—when they didn’t realize they were in range of his hawk-fine hearing—complaining about how troublesome he was, debating how to deal with the difficult subject. Fucking with their experiments was one of his few sources of pleasure and he took a fierce satisfaction in being as disruptive as possible, refusing to be cowed.

The rough fabric padding the restraints at his wrists itched, chafing the skin. Instinctively, he tried to call to the hawk, but the dense, syrupy fog blocked his other half from rising.

It was a mistake, he knew. The block. The doctors had argued for hours about whose fault it was. One of the drugs they’d given him was designed to force a shift so they could observe the process—but it had been designed for felines, and avian shifters were a different breed entirely.

His body had rejected the shift, violently, and at the time he’d been viciously satisfied. Served the bastards right if they broke their own fucking toy because they were too busy shooting him full of shit with side effects they didn’t fully understand.

But now—however many months later—the vindictive satisfaction had faded and he felt the loss of his feathers like a missing limb, a piece of his soul that had been hacked away with pharmacological amputation.

The door slid open with a pneumatic whisper. Soft footsteps. A whiff of delicate, feminine perfume.

“Hello, Hawk. Waking up again, love?”

He jerked, twitching against his restraints.

There it was. The voice. That same fucking voice that always whispered in his dreams. Soft and ladylike, with that genteel southern lilt.

The voice of his betrayer.

It sounded different now. Edged with cruelty. Or maybe that was just the sound of his illusions being stripped away.

He wanted to snarl at her not to call him
love,
but his tongue was sluggish and uncooperative.

Anger sharpened his thoughts, rushing him up through the last few layers of drug-induced morass until he could open his eyes. The gauze was thin and the light in the room harsh and bright enough to let him see the outline of a woman leaning over his bed. His memory eagerly filled in the details he couldn’t see—the curve of her cheek, the chocolate brown curls and bright, save-me-protect-me-trust-me clarity in her rich brown eyes.

She wasn’t meeting his gaze now. He hadn’t had a good look at her in months—or what he assumed was months. Not since his capture. She was always just outside the edges of his vision, weaving in and out of the drug-induced fever dreams with her silky southern accent and soft touches that could turn excruciating in a heartbeat. And the laughter, always the laughter.

But he didn’t need to see her to know she’d still be just as heart-stopping as ever. The backstabbing bitch.

“How are you feeling, darling?” A caress drifted across his forehead and he jerked, avoiding her touch as much as the restraints would allow. She heaved a sigh, the melodramatic sound striking him as out of character—but what did he really know about her? He’d thought he’d known her, thought she could be his mate, the one he’d do anything for and she for him, and then she’d jabbed a needle full of sedative into his shoulder and stood by while her bosses at the Organization collected his body for testing.

Good work, Dr. Russell.

He’d been paralyzed, all but unconscious, his system shutting down one sense at a time, but those words had been clear as a bell. Matter-of-fact. Just another day at the office.
Good work, Dr. Russell.
Adrian couldn’t cling to the hope that she’d been coerced, forced to betray him, not with those words playing on repeat in his brain.

And not with the way she spoke to him during her visits over the last few months. She was an Organization power player, he now knew, higher up than he could have imagined. All those months when she’d been helping shifters escape from Organization cells, funneling them to Adrian on the outside so he could whisk them away to safety, all those
years
had been a lie, designed to lure him in.

He could almost admire her perseverance, if he didn’t despise her with every fiber of his being.

Her outline drifted out of his line of sight, returning a moment later. “You must be thirsty.”

A straw pressed against his lips. Probably another serum. Another poison corrupting his body so they could observe the effects, but his throat was jagged with thirst and he knew from experience they would only force a tube down his throat if he resisted.

Adrian sucked greedily, the relief of the liquid worth the risk. When he was confident he could get the words out, he spat out the straw and grated out the one question that mattered: “The date?”

He needed to know how long he’d been out of it this time, helpless and senseless as they used his body as their personal science experiment. How many months he’d be adding to the prison sentence he was constructing for the angel-faced doctor for the day he got out of this hell hole. Because he
would
get out. And she
would
pay for every second.

He’d tried to do the math, tried to add it up. It was hard to string the lucid moments together and he couldn’t be sure, but he thought they’d had him for two months. Maybe three. Hell, for all he knew it had been three years—his only source of information was what he managed to overhear from the doctors. No one ever told him shit. He wasn’t a person, after all, just another animal.

“September twenty-ninth,” she answered, and he flinched.

Jesus. Six months. Six months of his life gone.

If she could be believed. He didn’t know why he bothered to ask her. He knew from bitter experience Dr. Russell wasn’t exactly reliable with the truthfulness. He’d learned that lesson all too well. Six months in captivity could really drive home a point. If it was six.

“You’re being transferred,” that genteel southern lilt continued. “I’m afraid you aren’t going to enjoy your new habitat. The C Blocks are…something of a hostile environment. But I can help you, if you’ll let me.” A fingernail traced the side of his neck and he swallowed back his revulsion. “We have reason to believe you were part of a conspiracy to remove shifters from our facilities. Obviously you couldn’t have done this alone. You’ll save yourself a lot of pain if you tell me who your contact on the inside was.”

The drugs were fucking with his brain. What the fuck kind of game was she playing?
She
was his accomplice on the inside. She didn’t need to make a show of asking him—

Unless she was still working to free them. Still maintaining her cover so she could get more shifters out. He wanted to believe it. Wanted with an ache in his gut to believe she’d only betrayed him so she could continue to do their work. Someone could be listening to them now. Perhaps someone was forcing her to interrogate him. His Rachel could still be innocent. Still be
his
. She wasn’t this creature.

The idea was too seductive to be trusted.

But on the off chance that she was the woman he wanted her to be, he played along. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do.” The words were silky, awash with sensuality. “I can make it good for you if you cooperate, love.” Her hand slithered down his pecs, over his stomach and toward his waistband. “All you have to do is talk to me and I can make sure you feel so good. You won’t get another offer like that.”

“I’ll take the torture, if it’s all the same to you.” He’d been trained to withstand it. He’d die before compromising the safety of the shifters he’d relocated in the last three years.

“Shame.” She released another dramatic sigh. He saw her shadow move, heard her adjusting the machines at his bedside. “I suppose the C Blocks it is. You will be a challenge,” she purred. “And I do like a challenge.”

The words started to blur and bleed into another as the familiar fog of the drugs surrounded him.

“Sleep well, my hawk. When you wake up…well. You’ll probably wish you hadn’t.”

And when I get free,
you’ll
wish I hadn’t…

It was the thought he clung to as the world washed away.