ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (296 page)

              Their kissing and touching shifted over the midnight minutes to soft gasps and groans. Moving together, she guided his hips and thrusts hungrily. She smiled and leaned down to kiss his neck as she ran her hands along his strong back muscles. He was deep inside, lost within her.

              Their sex reached an intensity and friction that distracted her beyond thought. She no longer noticed the heat of the cabin, the lurching of the big ship on the waves, the snores from the adjoining rooms. In the darkness, she felt her hips and leg muscles tighten as she neared climax.

              “More. More, Harry!” she whispered frantically. He drove into her and she forgot to be quiet, crying out with release.

              After, she couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m so sorry, dear. I didn’t mean to be that loud. The whole ship might have heard.”

              He snickered. “Ah well. Let them be jealous of us, I say. We’re nearly to Perth. I’ll buy us a house as we discussed and you can be as loud as you like.”

              “How many bedrooms Harry?” He had been generously rewarded by the admiralty for his capture of the two pirate ships.

              He thought. “At least three. I’d like to have one for a study and Louisa shall need one, of course.”

              She ran her fingers through his hair and smiled at him. “It would be better if it were at least four.”

“Oh. You wish a room for yourself? Of course my sweet.”

              “Not quite.” She gently took his hand and placed it on her belly. “I was thinking we might need it for our first child.”

              He nodded. “Of course.” Then as the understanding grew, he stammered. “You mean- wait, do you mean you’re with child?”

              “Harrison Hargrove, meet your child. I’ve been pregnant for perhaps a month.”

              He shifted down to kiss her stomach. “Very well. Our lives and our family begin in Australia.”

              Sarah sighed and gazed into the darkness. “Yes. At last, all of our dreams shall be fulfilled.”

THE END

The Billionaires' Offer

             
Fran was a hard working journalist who wanted more than anything to cover video games as her “beat,” as a focus is called in journalism. Fran had grown up playing video games of all kinds: Role Playing Games, Real Time Strategy, First Person Shooters, Action Adventure, and so many other weird niches of the industry. Video games were the kind of thing that let her escape from reality. Not that Fran's reality was that bad. She kept her long, silky black hair tied in a tight pony tail because she thought it made her look more business-like, but she knew it was hard for anyone to miss her busty hourglass figure, especially when she wore a plunging neckline.

              oday was one of those days she wore a plunging neckline. She needed to make some headway on figuring out when Figure Four would release the new game in the Radioactive series. The series so far was two installments, but the third promised to be the best yet. It was like most games set in a post-apocalyptic future where the main character had to scrounge about the first third of the game, trying to find weak enemies and easy quests to level up while trying to scavenge better gear and horde ammunition. The thing that made the third installment different from the rest of the series, and the rest of the genre, was that in the third the player would be able to change the waste into whatever kind of utopia desired.

This event was said to supposed to happen early in the game—about a third of the way through. So right when the player's character was getting on its feet everything would change and the player would have to adapt to the new environment. But there was said to be a lot more to it. In the first two games there had been a really good plot with plenty of twists and turns, but the developers had said they'd been forced to keep the kiddie gloves on most of the time since their investors wanted to have, over everything else, a successful series. But now that the first two had been smash hits it was all right for them to play around a little bit and they knew it. Fran needed to find out what exactly the plan was, and how they were going to achieve it. The rest of the video game media industry had decided to simply wait and see what would transpire.

Fran wanted to be the best video game reporter out there, though. So she couldn't afford to do what everyone else did. She didn't want to sit around and wait to see what might happen in the future. She wanted to find out from the horses' mouths what was going to happen. That way she could weave the information into a compelling and informative news article that would boost her reputation and hopefully help her move up in the world of video game reportage.

Fran stepped out of the cab she'd been riding in, alone with her thoughts and the driver. It was raining out, a slight mist, the kind of thing that people in Seattle grew to know too well. But it still bothered her, though. Fran hailed from Denver, the city with the most days of sunshine in the country. And she missed dearly the beautiful summer days that were most of the year. What she didn't miss was the volatile weather that could turn a peaceful mountain range a place where people ran for their lives to the nearest shelter. Seattle didn't have weather quite that crazy, but it could get pretty intense during the spring squalls that came in off the Pacific.

The building she was headed into was the place where all of the magic of the Radioactive series was taking place. She planned on spending the day with two men: Brad and Chad. Fran couldn't help but smirk at how their names rhymed. She liked little things like that that could almost make a person wonder if there wasn't something high up in the sky that was much more intent on doing funny things with peoples' names then trying to cure cancer or end world hunger.

As Fran moved into the revolving door and shuffled along with it as it slowly rotated she wondered if the rumors she'd heard about the duo was true. Word on the internet was that both of the brilliant game designers liked to party as hard as they worked. And from some of the pictures she'd seen Fran had no doubt this was true. That wasn't what had these thoughts on her mind, though. What made her think of it was how the last female reporter that had tried to cover a story like Fran was trying to cover ended up putting the duo on blast, posting on internet forums about how she had been sexually harassed, and how both men had said that until she got naked and started playing with their cocks there was pretty much no way that they were going to give her any of the information she wanted.

Fran wasn't sure what to believe, since the woman that this had happened to had then used the ensuing media coverage to bolster her career, so it seemed just a little too convenient that the woman had someone ended up with what she'd wanted even without the initial information she'd said she needed to make a story. But what if the woman hadn't been lying? Fran thought about it as she made her way through security, was x-rayed, then got on an elevator headed to the top floor. If the men came on to her she'd have to cross that bridge when she got there, because, she couldn't lie to herself, the men were extremely attractive. Often times they were confused for brothers because they both looked like they belonged on the cover of dime store romance novels, with their broad shoulders and flowing blonde hair. It was their piercing blue eyes and square chins that made people wonder if the two men were related; and it was lucky that they had slightly different shades of brown hair or no one would be able to tell them apart!\

The elevator chimed softly as it reached the top floor. Fran stepped off expecting to find herself standing in some kind of hallway that she saw on the first floor, but instead the entire top floor was one big room. Mostly it was empty, but it had a giant flat screen television of some kind taking up a small part of one of the walls. The rest of the walls that didn't have the television were mostly glass, so that it seemed like she was in some kind of glass bubble in the sky. It was still raining slightly out, and the sky's overcast had saturated more completely, to even include some lightning. But it all seemed so muted and distant through the glass. Fran walked up to one of the glass walls and put her hand against it, forgetting for a moment that it would probably leave smudge marks. When she put her fingers against the glass she could see the reflection of her hand on a pane of glass behind it. Her face got close to the glass as she tried to figure out how many panes of glass there were.

“They won't tell us how many panes of glass there are,” a voice from behind her said.

Fran whirled around to find both Brad and Chad sitting at a bar in the middle of the room, a little behind the elevator that looked like an old phone booth.

              “How does the elevator not connect to anything at the top?” Fran said. “I mean, how is something not pulling it up?”
                           

“I'm Chad,” the one with slightly darker brown hair said. “And this is Chad.”

The other took a bow.

              “And the elevator works because we paid a bunch of money to have smarter people figure out how to do it. I think it has something to do with the elevator being passed up the shaft smoothly from cog to cog. I guess it's the only one like it in the world. Kind of like our glass ceiling.”

His arm swept up and out to gesture at the bubble of glass.

“Pretty fucking cool, right? Well, like I was saying, the architecture firm that we hired to create this little feat of glass and air insulation won't tell us how many panes of glass there are, but we think there are something like fifteen and that they're very thin.”

Brad threw back the rest of his drink and let the tumbler slide across the granite bar top toward the sink.

              “Not only are there a bunch of panes,” Brad said. “But we think that the insulation between them is void. As in a vacuum.”

Fran looked around her in wonder. The glass ceiling high above her was clear as crystal, and it wasn't until her eyes reached the corners of the glass top that the outside world distorted. Outside the small shower was whipping itself up into a regular thunderstorm, and she couldn't hear it or feel the booms of thunder, even though lightening flashed outside as hail pelted the glass briefly. Fran couldn't help but take a step back as she watched the clouds boil and seethe.

“Don't feel silly,” Chad spoke again, his voice accompanied by his footsteps as he approached her. “Sometimes I smoke too much weed and get seriously freaked out watching a storm roll in. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Would you like a drink?”

Chad took her by the hand and led her back to the bar. Fran was impressed that Chad could take her hand and lead her somewhere without seeming creepy about it. It made her think that she really wasn't the first visitor to gawk at the weather outside as it proudly unfurled itself. Fran didn't look away from the sky until she was back at the bar. Then, after a Brad handed her a drink, she finally started to feel at ease.

“So, you two are going to change gaming forever,” she said.

              Fran figured it was a good enough ice breaker as any.

              “We are, actually,” Chad said. “You see, up until now people have merely created static worlds for the main character to knock about in. Take the
Fallout
series, for example. Sure, you can change of change the game—you could more so in the past games in that series, but I digress. What we are going to create is a world that the player can actually manipulate. And we aren't talking about some horse shit like maybe you kill some bad guy villain and then he doesn't run the town anymore but all the Non Player Characters keep talking about him like he's alive or some shit. We're talking about an actual, and quite literal, immersion experience.”

Fran sipped her drink and looked around the giant room with glass walls she was in, that had the two leading men in the gaming industry, a bar, herself, and of course the elevator that looked like a phone booth.

“What do you mean literally?” she asked, looking up suddenly from her drink. She was surprised to find the two men looking out toward the ocean as the storm crackled with electricity before them, instead of looking down her cleavage. Maybe she just couldn't compete with mother nature, she reasoned.

“Well,” Brad said. “You will pretty much be wearing this thing on your head. It's kind of like some of the other devices you've seen, but different. For starters this thing isn't going to blind you. Some of the other contraptions that you wear on your head come pretty close to damaging your eyes after you wear them for long enough, and by long enough I mean for a few hours. Since we want people to play our games for more than a few hours we have head gear designed for it. The head gear is light, it's sleek, state of the art. And it's not just the device itself but how it interacts with several other devices. It's kind of technical and we aren't really trying to just tell everyone how to make the best game ever, but they sure as hell can buy a ticket and enjoy the ride if they want.”

Fran nodded and took a sip of her drink.

“I understand that you have to play your cards pretty close to your chest at this point. The gaming industry seems to have become more and more cutthroat in the past few years.”

“You think?” Chad said incredulously. “I mean, come on. Cutthroat is putting it nicely. Some of what openly goes on in the industry is appalling! I mean, it's just corporate espionage dressed up to look like something else. And you know what? Everyone goes along with it, like a bunch of fucking dunderheads. Well not us. We aren't just going to give out the secrets of how our shit works. I mean, sure, once someone buys the gear and the game there is no way from keeping them from reverse engineering it to figure out how it works. But you know what, they'll have to fucking pay us first, and these things won't be cheap. And also much like other electronic devices, there will be a lot of fail safes that don't allow for tampering. So it'll probably take about a dozen purchases to crack the head gear alone, and then what?”

“I'll tell you what,” Brad said with a chuckle. “Then they figure out that the entire thing was coded using program that we designed. So then they have to figure that out. I give them maybe three to four months to crack it wide open. But by then it'll be too late.”

“How will it be too late?” Fran asked.

“By then we'll have cornered the market,” Chad said. “By then it won't matter if they rip off our product and get something just like it out for less eight months later because we'll already have released the next game by then. And it'll be even better than this game because this game is going to help build the next game!”

Fran was having a hard time figuring out if these two were full of shit or not. There was something in her that wanted to believe everything they said, and take every claim at face value. After all she was in a glass bubble on top of a building, so maybe these dudes were legit if they could get the money and had the imagination to create these swank digs. But at the same time there was something inside of her that kept telling her to keep her distance from belief, that she needed to know much more before she would be able to write a proper story. It wasn't going to be enough to just say that Figure Four was going to change everything and leave it at that.

“So what can you guys show me?” Fran asked as the sky grew ever darker around them. “I mean, I don't need to know the deepest darkest secret of the plot, or know the lines of code, but I need more, fellas. And you know that. I need more so I can pen out something that will really help you guys move product, and help the industry by making people believe in it again. Gamers right now are burned out on the drama and ever increasing prices of games that have less and less emotional pay out. People want things to be strong and dynamic.”

The air around the glass bubble started to shimmer, then turned to an iridescent glow before blooming into countless long tendrils of electricity that twined together at the top of the glass bubble to shoot a spike of static electricity high into the clouds above.

“Holy Christ,” Fran said.

“Quite the show, eh?” Brad said, making himself another drink. “That was pretty much the entire idea behind having this place be a glass bubble. We both thought with how storms roll off the ocean here that we'd be able to harness static electricity off the building and maybe channel it into the air. Of course we had no real idea what we were doing because we are programmers, not scientists, but it worked out somehow!”

It happened again, and this time, though it was still silent in the bubble, it made the whole building tremble as another jolt of energy jumped off the tower and spiked into the air.

“Damn!” Chad hollered. “That was a good one!”

Brad nodded and turned to Fran.

“You see, we aren't just shooting all of the juice off into the atmosphere,” he said. “We're harvesting some of it to be used to power this place. You'd be surprised how much we are able to collect and keep. So this glass bubble we're standing in isn't just for looks, it has a function. Without it we wouldn't be able to cook off the excess. Of course, how this all works is really complicated, and like we said before we aren't really sure how it's done, but we know enough to tell you about it.”

“Which is how much I want to know about the next installment in the Radioactive series,” Fran said.

Both of the men looked at her and nodded.

“So we wanted to get away from strapping goofy shit to our head, but it just wasn't what panned out,” Chad said. “So here is the head gear. Try it on.”

Fran slipped the device over her head. It was a box that rested over her eyes that she looked into. Some of what was happening was going on inside of the box, but some of it was going on outside of the box, as if there were other devices projecting things that only the head gear could pick up.

“Like we said before,” Brad said. “There is more than just the head gear. That's really where we felt like the devices of the past had fallen short. They wanted you to put something on your head and then play a game. We want you to put something on you head and let the game play you. So, while the head gear is necessary, it isn't the end all be all of the system.”

Fran couldn't believe what she was seeing. It wasn't like a hologram, and the in game environment didn't try to look hyper realistic. Instead the head gear made it seem like there were actual people in the room with her. There was a dark figure in the corner she focused her attention on.

“This is a demo,” Brad said. “And the dark man is the demo man. Well, part of it. Enough that you'll get a really good idea of what's going on. Just go talk to him.”

              Fran wasn't sure what to do, but she tried to steady her gate as she walked over to the dark figure she knew wasn't really there even though she could see him. By the time she got to him the dark figure had become an old man, and then when she opened her mouth he morphed into a young man, then shrunk down into a baby in a pile of clothes. Just when she'd finished recoiling from the cries of the baby the form was back to standing in front of her, its features with a pallor cast over his complexion that would have spelled death for a living being.

“What can I do you for?”

The voice came easy, as if straight from the south, but it also had a slight tremor in it that seemed to reverberate for an instant before disappearing completely, as if the sound itself was a stream of water plunging down from fountainhead to a pool below.

Fran didn't know what to say. What kind of game was this?

“What's your name?” she asked.

“What's in a name?” the figure asked, then went on. “I'm a projection of your imagination. Everyone that meets me thinks that I'm some kind of Non Player Character, or some other kind of NPC, but I assure you that I am not. I am the player. I am you. What you see before you now is exactly what your mind wants you to see.”

Fran didn't know what to think. If this dark figure turned pasty white middle-aged man was really from her mind then he was from a place that she never thought of or went to very much. Maybe he was though.             

“But how can my brain act without me?” Fran asked.

“That's simple,” a voice in her ear said. “This is Brad by the way. I've tapped into your head gear. Basically your mind is infinite, believe it or not. I know that most people would scoff at the idea of the human mind being this enormous untapped resource because it seems like science fiction, but believe me when I tell you that your mind is the ultimate game. The figure that you see in front of you now isn't one that the rest of us see. Sure we see a figure, but the figure is different for all of us. I see my mom whenever I look at the demo's 'dark man,' but Chad sees someone that he knew that died in Iraq. It's whatever your mind decides you're going to see. And you can't control it.”

“What?” Fran asked.

She pulled off the head gear and the figure in front of her was gone.

“You can't control it,” Brad said again. “Most of the real work we had to figure out was how to build in enough safeguards that there is no way that a person in the game can get lost in the game, and that if person becomes upset enough the game shuts off.”

Fran looked down at the head gear in her hands. It didn't look special at all.

“So what you're telling me is that there is a lot more to this than just the head gear.”

Both Chad and Brad nodded from the bar, where they had both returned to their previous seats to sip drinks and watch her interact with the demo.

“A lot more,” Chad said. “Like if we really wanted to we could sell this stuff to the government and there wouldn't be any more need for the CIA interrogators because the government could use our stuff to just rip the information right out of peoples' minds. But we don't want to sell it to the government, not that it matters much anyway because as soon as the console hits the market they'll figure out how to do what we're doing and things around the world will change dramatically.”

“How so?” Fran asked.

“Well for starters there won't be any more conference calls. People will just be in the same 'room' together and figure out whatever it is they need to figure out, or talk about. I don't know, that's just one example of many. Another way to use it would be to--”

Brad cut him off.

“Consider this,” he said. “There is one highly qualified brain surgeon in all the world who can look at a brain scan and accurately tell what the fuck is wrong people. I'm not sure if you caught the special on NPR last week or not. Anyway, so there is only one guy, right? So that means that demand is high because supply is so low. Well if the guy plugs into the mainframe he could see brain scans in real time, but 'virtually.' Also, after a long enough amount of time his mind will imprint on the mainframe.”

“What's the mainframe?” Fran asked.

Brad let out a long sigh, and Chad shook his head.

Chad was the one who answered.

“There is some kind of current out there. We have a little bit of it in each of us, and that's how we manipulate the 'game.' But the current is funny and we don't know how to predict what it will do. Something that we have noticed is seeing what we call shadows of ourselves sometimes when we plug in outside of the game world. We aren't going to allow people to do that, by the way, but I'm sure they'll figure out a way to jail break or system.”

Fran walked over to the bar and sat down. She looked around the room at the glass walls. Outside the sky is clearing and birds were soaring between buildings. It was amazing, something that she never thought she would see.

“It's too bad you have to wear those things, though,” she said.

“You don't,” Chad answered.