Shameless Desire (The Outlawed Realm) (8 page)

A few short years before, Staci’s beauty had enticed many guys, mostly the wrong kind, like her last boyfriend. His actions had changed Staci forever, stealing her confidence, the future she thought she’d have. Reflexively, Staci reached for her shoulder but didn’t touch it, no doubt reluctant to feel the horrible scars her clothing hid.

“You all right?” Gwen asked.

Staci waved her hand as though to dismiss the question.

Gwen murmured, “I’m sorry this shit happened tonight.”

“Don’t be. You’re okay…and he is a great looking guy.” Staci’s expression grew thoughtful as though she was recalling Kuma as he’d stripped, his potent, magnificent form. “Really great looking,” she added, “considering.”

That he was a werewolf? Yeah, he was definitely hot in spite of that—maybe because of it. As rattled as she was, Gwen wasn’t certain what she should be thinking or feeling. She rubbed Staci’s arm. “Get my clothes and the gun, okay?”

“Promise you won’t leave.”

“Like this?” She gestured to her nudity, far less perfect than Staci’s had been before her injuries.

Staci gave her a wan smile, then paused just short of the hall. “One more thing.”

“Sure—what?”

“If he gets back before I return, please do not do it with him on the table.” She flicked her hand at the bright yellow-and-chrome furniture, a retro set Gwen had picked up at a yard sale. “I eat there, you know.”

Gwen rolled her eyes, but it didn’t stop her from imagining herself on the furniture, nude and vulnerable. A feast for Kuma’s eyes, mouth, hands. He’d order her to pull back her legs and she’d obey, wanting want he did. Her pussy would already be wet, aching for him, the coolish air glancing off her damp folds, bringing on a small shiver.

He’d warm her with his hands, dragging them from her inner thighs to her cunt, spreading her even more, exposing her to all he desired. With ease born of confidence and hard male lust, he’d enter her, his rod burrowed deep, making her feel taken, used, enjoyed. Before she could catch her breath, he’d slide his hands past her curls to her belly and onward to her breasts. Not stopping there, he’d wrap his fingers around her wrists, holding her arms to each side, trapping them as he plowed into her, his thrusts so savage the table’s legs would jump and scrape the floor.

She’d moan long and loud. He’d—what? Groan? Bellow? Howl?

The thought of him behaving like an animal should have troubled Gwen, but it didn’t. Despite her nudity, her skin stung with heat, her nipples were so hard they hurt, while her pussy pulsed, hungering for him to fill—

“Here you go.” Staci tossed Gwen a clean pair of jeans and a tee.

She tugged them on, biting back a moan as the crotch rubbed her unappeased pussy. “Where’s my gun?”

“Still on your nightstand. Bitch all you want,” Staci added hurriedly, “but I’m not bringing that thing in here. You want a mindless slave, get a pet. I’m not the good girl I used to be. Just ask the cops.”

Gwen zipped her fly and used the softest tone she could. “That SOB you lived with caused all the problems. How many times do I have to tell you, it wasn’t your fault.”

The girl shrugged. “So much for love, huh? And thinking you found Mr. Perfect.”

Aw, sweetie.
“There are good guys out there, you’ll see.”

Staci pulled in her arms, an instinctive move of protection, to make herself as invisible as possible.

Gwen would have given her a hug if not for the tapping sounds she heard, different from the still-falling rain. Parting the curtains on the kitchen door, she saw Kuma—in human form—on her back porch. Moisture streamed down his hair, plastering it to his skull and neck. Ribbons of water coursed over the solid lines of his body. He’d turned his face to the side, his attention on something in the distance.

She opened the door, grabbed his arm and pulled him into her kitchen. It wasn’t easy, given his superior strength and size. However, surprise gave Gwen a faint advantage. Handing him a dishtowel, she asked, “You all right?”

He blotted his face and nodded.

Gwen didn’t want to ask but couldn’t help herself. “Was anyone out there?” Had he killed that person? Had he eaten—

Uh-uh. No way did she want to think about that.

“No,” he said. “The scent faded. He must have gone.”

There was a God. She bolted the door and peered through the curtains one last time to make certain her backyard was still empty. Not seeing anything that didn’t belong there, she spoke to Staci. “Grab a towel from the hall closet and get his jeans.”

Gwen went to the thermostat and set the heat to eighty-five degrees. She wanted to ease the chill Kuma must have felt from having stood on her porch in the buff. If not for Staci’s presence, Gwen might have used her body, hands and mouth to do the job. “It’ll be warm in here in a few…”

She didn’t finish, noticing Staci wasn’t moving except to chew on the edge of her thumb as she regarded Kuma’s balls and cock. His rod was more flaccid now than earlier, but still awesome.

“Hon,” Gwen prodded, “he needs a towel and his jeans.”

“Ah, sure.” Staci backed out of the kitchen, her attention still riveted to his groin. She bumped into the jamb before pivoting to go down the hall.

When her cousin was finally out of sight, Gwen went to him and spoke as quietly as she could, “What happened out there?”

“Nothing.” He tossed the wet dishtowel on the counter and faced her, all naked and sexy, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for him to do. On his realm, it probably was.

It took a great deal of effort for Gwen to concentrate on his face rather than the other delicious parts of him. His irises were gray again, no longer that odd silvery shade. His lips were a faint pink, not black, his nose well defined, not at all as it had been when he’d left a few minutes ago, and how she’d seen him earlier tonight in the alley. “You killed that man who attacked me.”

“I kept him from harming you,” he countered.

Right. How could she have forgotten that? She sure as hell hadn’t been able to erase the awful images of Kuma going at the thug. “You tore away his face. That happened to another man days ago. I saw his body in the ER. Did you…” She couldn’t continue.

“Another of my pack did that.”

There was more of his kind here? Gwen clutched her elbows to keep from shivering. “The man’s hands and feet were missing. Why? Are his fingerprints and toe prints like yours—nothing but single circles? Were you afraid a patrol unit would see them?”

He regarded her. “What’s a patrol unit?”

“Cops…police…the authorities…guards that keep people safe.”

“You have such a thing here?”

Clearly, he wasn’t that familiar with the way things worked on this side. Or, at least, how they should. “Some might argue that we don’t, but yeah. Answer me. Why were his hands and feet missing?”

“Without hands, he can’t hurt or kill any longer. If he has no feet, he can’t follow those he preys on.”

“Here you go,” Staci said for the second time tonight as she hurried back into the room. She held the towel and all of his clothes—jeans, tee, suede jacket—at arm’s length, as though afraid to get closer to Kuma even as she resumed ogling him.

In silence, he rubbed himself dry and pulled on his jeans, leaving the rest of his garments in a heap on the linoleum. A Chippendale’s stripper couldn’t have captured Gwen’s attention more. She noted the dark hairs hugging his arms, his muscles flexing with each movement. In a few more seconds, she’d be on her knees before him, begging him to do her.

Maybe it was time to stop behaving like a sex-deprived virgin and get a handle on this. She pulled out a chair. “Sit down, please.”

The moment he did, Gwen sank into her own chair and leaned toward him, resting her hand on his arm. A shiver of delight ran through her at how solid and masculine it was. “I want to know everything,” she murmured. “Tell me about the rulers you mentioned, the guards, the experiments. Why you’re here. How long you intend to stay.”

She talked too much. Not that Kuma minded. He enjoyed the silky sound of her voice. Those melodious sounds, along with her touch, kept him from answering her, driving away every word he’d ever known, dispelling each thought.

All that remained was stark need, the urge to pull Gwen into his arms, capture her mouth, run his hands down her lush body. Lose himself in her heat and scent. She smelled of life, of freedom, the kind he’d known in the jungle when the guards weren’t hunting his kind and the rulers weren’t slaughtering them.

Gwen pressed her fingers into his forearm. “Please,” she whispered, “tell me.”

He slanted a look at Staci. She was biting her thumb and shifting from foot to foot, seemingly uncertain as to whether she wanted to stay and hear everything, or flee and spare herself the horror.

As though the girl had read his thoughts, she lowered her hand and frowned. “I’m not leaving.” With more resolve than she’d shown earlier, she sank into the chair on the other side of him, rather than the one that was the farthest away. No doubt, so she was close enough to stop him from mounting or harming Gwen.

“I’m from E4,” he began.

“Yeah, we know,” Gwen said, “you already told us that.” She ran her thumb over his wrist.

A surge of warmth rushed through Kuma, stiffening his cock even more, making it difficult for him to breathe, to think.

“Who are the rulers?” Gwen asked.

He cleared his throat. His words still rasped. “They were once my people when our worlds began.”

“Worlds?” Staci asked.

He clarified. “Realms. Dimensions.”

“Five of them,” Gwen said. “If they were once your people, then your kind didn’t always come from E4?”

“No.” He tightened his fingers into fists.

Gwen noticed, pulling her hand back. Before she could move too far away, Kuma wrapped his hand around her wrist, holding it gently, not caring what Staci thought.

“My anger isn’t with you,” he explained to Gwen. “It’s because of them. My people were born on E2, the same as the rulers. Those in charge sent my ancestors to E4 as punishment, for their crimes against the realm. Long before the current rulers thought to build the Pleasure Palace—with sex slaves to indulge their every whim—E4 was a prison without walls without any chance of escape.”

“A penal colony,” Gwen mumbled. “Like Devil’s Island.”

Staci leaned closer. “Is E4 surrounded by water?”

Kuma shook his head. “It’s a jungle, a twilight world, the sun far fainter there than it is in this dimension. The plants are enormous and golden, the creatures bigger than anything you have here. Men and women weren’t only banished there, the rulers ordered E2’s scientists to experiment on them. To see how they could manipulate what your side calls DNA.”

Gwen sagged in her chair but didn’t pull her wrist from him.

Grateful, Kuma stroked her with his thumb, savoring her skin’s velvety texture.

She whispered, “They turned your people into werewolves?”

Staci made a gagging sound.

He pretended not to notice, concentrating on Gwen. How could he not. In the room’s pleasant light, she was silky warmth, her rich complexion as inviting as her scent. He’d seen how she responded to his attention earlier, the deepening rose in her cheeks, the surrender in her eyes. He noted a flicker of it now within her concern.

Unfortunately, her worry won out.

“Worse than werewolves?” she asked.

He nodded, then added, “Most of those beings died off, unable to survive the hunt for food and predator attacks. Only my kind and what the rulers refer to as subhumans remained and thrived.”

“Sub—what?” Staci croaked.

“Creatures that are somewhat human in appearance,” he explained. “However, they’re not as advanced as the ones in my pack. They have no language. They behave and communicate like animals.”

“Why?” Gwen asked, her arm tensing as she made a fist. “What would possess anyone to do something like that?”

“They wanted to see how much they could change their own species. They used E4’s prisoners to further their goal, altering their features so they no longer resembled them, enhancing the mental and physical abilities of some. When they discovered they could breed beings that were part-human, part-animal—the perfect warriors—they conducted those experiments, stopping only when they couldn’t control them as they liked. They tried to exterminate my kind then, but were unable to completely eradicate the line.”

“And that’s why you escaped here…to this dimension,” she said, “to avoid being killed or used for whatever other sick thing they planned to do.”

He shook his head, recalling the last time he’d been on E4, watching the two pleasure slaves in the bowels of the cave. The man was tall and blond; the woman had long black hair. They fought off the guards as best they could until a tranquilizer dart hit the male slave in his shoulder. On the edge of consciousness, he urged the female to move back. The cave wall behind them glowed with energy and liquefied, allowing them to go through it. Guards chased them. Kuma and several in his pack followed, the portal sucking them deeper inside, bringing them to this place.

“If you didn’t escape,” Gwen said, “then why are you here? How’d you get on this side?”

“A portal opened on E4. I entered it to follow the guards who were chasing the two pleasure slaves who escaped. The gateway brought all of us to your plane.”

She looked as though she were trying to digest that. “Okay…so how did the portal open?”

“I don’t know. It just happened over there. Here, I’ve seen the guards use an instrument to create an entry back to E4. After they point it, the air grows cold and—”

“There’s a weird sucking sound,” Gwen cut in. “Right?”

“Yes. You heard it tonight.”

“Unfortunately.” She appeared far more troubled than she had earlier. “These guards, they’re the rulers’ personal security force?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“They’re there to keep the rulers safe from your pack and the subhumans?”

“Only if the rulers are in the jungle. For the most part, the guards keep the pleasure slaves from knowing there’s a world outside of the Palace. They withhold food or whip the slaves to make certain they’re always obedient. They use them for whatever vice they desire.”