Torn: A Dragon Shifter BBW Menage Serial (Seeking Her Mates Book 1)

C
opyright
© 2015 by Carina Wilder

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

A
Note to my Readers
:

T
his is
the follow-up to the Sought by the Alphas serial, which chronicles the story of Gwynne, a woman who finds herself thrust into another time and a life she never expected with two dire wolf alphas for mates.

If you haven’t yet read it, you can find the books below. They’re all available for FREE on Kindle Unlimited. It’s not necessary reading, of course, but does occur in the days before Torn begins.

The five-book boxed set is available here:
Sought by the Alphas Boxed Set

Sought by the Alphas individual books:

Encounters

Rituals

Trial by Fire

Kinship

Dragon Queen

H
appy reading
!

~Carina

C
haring University
, London. March 2015

T
he young woman
sat alone on the far side of the lecture room, apparently in a self-imposed isolation from her fellow students. She occasionally jotted down notes, her determined right hand gripping a fountain pen in anticipation of any facts that might come her way. But more often than not her eyes seemed to stray away from the page before her or from the rambling professor at the front of the class, who never seemed entirely successful at capturing her interest.

She hadn’t yet noticed the man who had positioned himself in a corner by the classroom’s broad set of windows—the man who’d been staring at her for some time, assessing her face, her movements, and the one reason that he’d been drawn to this place: to find her.

H
e recalled
the moment weeks earlier when he’d first become aware of her existence. The revelation had hit him like a blow to the chest, all but knocking him backwards with its undeniable force.

The day had been a typical one: he’d been strolling through one of London’s busy shopping areas during a free afternoon when a blinding flash had shot through his mind’s eye. At first a vivid image of a face came to him—green eyes with tinges of gold and other shades, drawing him in. Full lips and ivory skin.

In the split second when his hand had reached for a nearby wall to steady him, he had known only one thing: he had to find her.
She was to be his.
And yet the notion of such a fate had almost made him laugh. How did a modern man walk up to a woman and announce these things? He wasn’t a caveman, after all, who might club her over the head and drag her back to his lair.

Among other things, people liked to term his gift “
clairvoyance,”
a word that he’d always enjoyed for its French roots meaning “clear-seeing.” But the word wasn’t accurate, really; after all, the young woman to whom he’d been drawn had only shown herself clearly on that first day. After that she’d appeared to him only as a fuzzy sort of image: a shape, ghost-like and fluid, moving through a large, bright apartment, settling slowly into a new home in a strange city.

Where she’d come from, he didn’t yet know. Before she’d found her way into his mind, there had been no indication that she even existed.

Since his youth he’d displayed these gifts, this ability to see events which were occurring elsewhere in the world, often before they’d taken place. His grandmother had told him that his sight had come from his ancestors, a great tribe of Scottish lords who had moved easily between human and animal forms; “shifters,” as she’d called them. Some of these creatures, she’d said, had other powers—a second sight like his, or other abilities that could only be imagined by most humans.

It was a myth, or so he’d always thought. A way of explaining away his strange talents. The Scots always did enjoy a good legend, after all. No doubt they thought that the Loch Ness monster itself was one of these “shifter” creatures.

The only thing of which he was certain was that he should find the young woman who had taken up residence in his mind, or rather he should facilitate her finding
him.
It seemed, given the message that he was receiving in vague and frustrating bits and pieces, that she needed to realize that they were to be together.

And that would be a tricky achievement, even for a very attractive man.

It was only weeks after his initial vision that he was able to decipher her plan of action. The image in his mind’s eye had become clearer: she was intending to study for a while at the university. History classes.

Interesting,
he’d thought.
And enticing
. An inquisitive mind was admirable and desirable in a woman, particularly when coupled with a beautiful face.

It was a perfect scenario, really. He was young and could easily enough enroll in a class or two, or, if the university rejected him, offer them money so that he might sit and observe. That way he could watch her from afar, and for weeks now he had done just that. His initial movements had been stealthy; he didn’t want her aware of him until he’d begun to figure her out a little, and the jumble of students in the classroom allowed him to blend into the crowd for a time while he observed her.

Lilliana.
He had heard the professor say it in one of his classes, calling on her as she stared out the window. As always she’d seemed to be ignoring the lecture, but was attentive in her own way, too polite to appear truly bored. She had once corrected him, saying that people called her “Lily.” It was an apt alternative to her other name. Like the flower, delicate, white.

Lilliana was a beautiful name, and the woman who wore it was even more so; much more lovely in person than the vague shape that had taken form in the young man’s mind.

His initial reaction to seeing her in the flesh had been that she moved like an animal, one that he couldn’t quite place. At first he’d decided that she was very like a cat, but he quickly dismissed that notion. She was more like a bird in flight, a swallow, easing her way through rooms without disturbing anything around her; even managing to go unnoticed by her classmates. For that he was grateful—it meant that she remained a solitary figure, easy for him to study.

There was a regal air to Lilliana which separated her from all the other young female students, as well as a sort of knowing look that never left her face. She tried on occasion to conceal it when speaking to the professor, but consistently failed miserably by revealing a comical surplus of knowledge that a woman of twenty shouldn’t possess. Lilliana, for all of her obvious talents, was terrible at pretending to be anything but brilliant.

And for all his gifts of clear sight, the man failed to delve deep into her mind as he could with so many other people; his usual talents were failing him and his subject remained an elusive mystery. He knew only, still, that he was to be with her; not why or how, or even when.

It was during one of the final classes of the term that he decided to catch her eye. He’d given up on stealthy observation from afar and now wished for her attention; to capture her gaze and determine whether she could feel their connection. It might be his only chance to reach out to her.

And so as the wind howled just outside the window to his right, he fixed his eyes upon her. He chewed on his pen since his lips, which were all too interested in hers, needed a distraction. Something in this woman reminded him of the scent and appearance of a delicious meal, and watching her for any length of time rendered him famished. He’d found himself often biting his lip or putting a thumb to his mouth while he watched her, as though replicating the act of eating.

And yet he remained hungry, never satisfied, always too far away from her.

In the instant when they finally made eye contact, he felt a surge of nervous excitement shoot through him as though he’d been plugged into an electrical socket and quickly recharged.
Lilliana was now aware of him.
And from the look on her face, all too aware of his attraction to her.
Good.

There was nothing in the young man that felt ashamed of his desire; it was in his blood, in his very cells, to want her. In that moment he would have stood proudly and announced it to the entire class if it hadn’t meant that he’d be kicked out immediately for disruption and certified insane by the object of his attentions. And so he would go about this the hard way.

“Lilliana,” he thought as she turned away, satisfied if only for the moment. “
My
Lilliana.”

G
loomy
.
The word stuck in Lily’s mind, though it didn’t even begin to describe the wretched weather just beyond the classroom’s time-warped windowpanes. Withered branches of an ancient tree threatened to pierce one leaded window as they blew repeatedly against it in a menacing rhythm, and a vast sky of dark grey coloured the spaces between the tree’s dark tendrils.

It wasn’t raining, not yet, but Lily was convinced that the sky sat in wait; as soon as she stepped outside a downpour would explode overhead, as had so often been her experience during her time in London. Her best friend was now an umbrella which she kept tucked securely in her satchel.

From the front of the large room came the professor’s dull voice droning on about the Black Plague, something of which Lily had first-hand knowledge. Her official home, after all, was fourteenth-century Cornwall in the southwest of England, and many in the area where she’d been raised had succumbed to the cruel illness. Many
humans,
that is. Shifters such as herself were immune to the affliction, a fact which had thankfully failed to make it into history textbooks.

By the year 2015, the Plague seemed to have evolved over centuries into a romanticized and legendary version of itself, as though it were a carefully selective virus that the powerful and important members of society had survived, rather than the actual unrelenting assailant that had ravaged lands and attempted to indiscriminately kill everything in its path.

Modern minds were very good at ranting angrily about any horror that had occurred in the last hundred years, but anything before their lifetimes was treated like a fairy tale; a story beyond imagining—at least for those who hadn’t been witness to it as Lily had.

She found herself daydreaming, wondering how dragons, phoenixes and dire wolves would fit into this modern world. All of the creatures were now myths, remnants of a long-forgotten past, preserved only in drawings and paintings by the time the twenty-first century had rolled around. Lily’s immediate family was nothing more than a fairy tale to the students surrounding her, and she herself was legend.

But of course she knew better. She knew that if she’d so chosen, she could have inflicted a fiery dragon on the class to liven things up, shooting flames of crimson, blue and violet in every direction.
How great would that be?
she thought, allowing herself a brief smile.

She reprimanded herself, resolving to focus on the reason she was in the university’s lecture room to begin with. With that she turned her attention once again to the professor, but it was only a minute or so before her eyes began to wander again, the monotonous voice failing to capture her interest. This class was important, she knew, if she wanted to spend more time in this, her mother’s era. But Professor Boringpants, as she’d dubbed him, knew nothing of the actual history of England.

Perhaps she should have taken courses on Psychology instead of History. Or human anatomy—now
that
could have been interesting; particularly the section on males. She’d always wanted to learn more about their inner—and outer—workings.

Her wandering eyes ran over the students sitting throughout the large room, which was by all accounts an ancient structure. The university had been founded in the thirteenth century, after all, though this classroom had been renovated many times over the generations. But it still contained charming, worn wooden desks and chairs from past generations, once occupied by great minds and now housing the most bored-looking pile of zombified young faces that Lily could imagine.

The classroom was shaped in a sort of semi-circular theatre setup, its desks on ascending levels which allowed the students to look down at their allegedly wise instructor and allowed him to see each of their faces, presumably to keep them in check when they misbehaved. He never did; though. The only student he ever seemed to call out for inattentiveness was Lily herself though why he picked her out of the crowd, she didn’t know. Her one goal was to blend in with the masses and yet apparently she’d succeeded in doing the exact opposite.

As she glanced around, perusing the room, she saw that most of her fellow students were attentively taking notes on laptops and tablets, and some were using the ancient art of employing pen and paper, though this seemed to Lily to be a dying skill set. This rapt attention would please the dull professor and stoke his ego. Many hands writing down his words as though they were gospel, as though he had any clue at all.

A young woman and man of about twenty caught Lily’s eye for a moment. They seemed to be writing notes on one another’s papers, and the hilarity of their scribblings was enough to cause the woman to giggle and the man’s eyes to light up as though he were now certain to find his way into her bedroom later that night for hours of sexual pleasure.
How easily men are encouraged,
Lily thought.

Uninterested in their exchange, she was about to surrender and once again turn her pretended attention to the front of the room when a set of bright eyes in a far corner stopped her.

The man’s face was fixed in her direction and a pen seemed to tease his lower lip as he bit its lid gently, which only served to bring out the shape of an enticing mouth. He sat alone up in a corner near one of the windows as a nearby twig tapped lightly on the glass next to his face, as though nature itself were pointing Lily deliberately to him.

His hair was a shock of dark brown and somewhat messy, his eyes an indiscernible shade which shone brighter than they should have as they appeared to stare through her from afar. At first Lily’s eyes darted around to see what the stranger was examining so intently, but eventually she had to confess to herself that she was the only possible object of his gaze. Once again, she’d failed to go unnoticed.

She turned back to her professor, pretending as well as she could that her heart wasn’t racing and that beads of sweat weren’t forming at the small of her back. That her life hadn’t just altered in a way that she couldn’t yet grasp.

“
T
housands died in Trekilling alone
,” the ignorant PhD at the front of the class was saying.
Wrong,
Lily moaned in her mind, relieved to have a distraction from the beautiful man in the corner. Now the professor was speaking about the town near her family home.
Trekilling didn’t even exist when the plague was running rampant,
she thought.
A smug smile crossed her face as she contemplated putting up a hand and correcting him.

But she’d promised her family of shifters that she wouldn’t give away her true identity when she went to London, and too thorough a knowledge of the small towns of Cornwall in their century would have been a definite clue as to who and what she really was. No history book could compete with a woman who had stepped out of the fourteenth century into this one, and she reminded herself it was best that history be allowed to write itself, wrong though it might be.

“I’ll see you next Wednesday,” the professor’s voice uttered at last. So, the interminable class had ended. Lily found herself wishing that she could have used her time traveling abilities to leap to its end prematurely, but unfortunately her skills were not so fine-tuned as all that; she could move with vague accuracy from one century, one location, to another. But she couldn’t speed up the passage of a time in which she sat.

Closing her notebook, a sigh of relief escaping her parted lips, she reached for her satchel. “The exam is in two weeks, remember, so come prepared for course review.” She registered the words, wondering if she could memorize hundreds of years’ worth of wrong information in fourteen days. Well, if she could turn into a flaming dragon and fly around medieval England, surely she could accomplish this one simple goal.

The end of the term meant that she’d soon return to her home: the year 1369. It was so odd, she knew, that home was a
time
rather than a place. But that had been the agreement; after her months away, she was to return to Dundurn Castle and to continue the tradition of her kin, a long line of powerful shifters. This meant a continuation of her bloodline, just as her mother had done with her fathers, Rauth and Lachlan. Lily would perform the Ritual. And the thought terrified her.

Her greatest hope was to persuade her parents to let her spend a few more years in London, studying. Perhaps not the torturous History courses, but there was a good deal of other information to gather in this modern era and Lily wanted desperately to take advantage of the opportunity.

Gwynne, her mother, had come of age in the twenty-first century. Women were experienced here; they had sex before marriage and experimented in various ways, some of which were downright shocking. Not to mention the fact that their marriages and pairings weren’t arranged by others, except in some cultures she’d heard of, in far-off lands. Lily was to be mated, essentially as an animal would at a stud farm, and it was the animal within her that dictated this need, even more than the rules of her species did.

Of course, her
inner animal was pleased. Shifters’ non-human selves, known in old English as déors, invariably responded enthusiastically to the idea that they would find their way to a mate, or in her case two. She had no doubt that sexual pleasure was a probability—how could sex with two men be anything but?—But the question was whether she would
care
for the men. Would there be love? Even a guarantee of
attraction
would be nice, promising. But ultimately it would come down to suitability, and that was no guarantee of happiness; only a guarantee that their offspring would exhibit powers greater than her mother’s, and even greater than those of her twin, Rohan, and herself.

L
ily realized
that she was still sitting, staring into the distance, a veil of worry coating her mind when she was brought back to earth.

“You have the most interesting face I’ve ever seen.”

The man’s deep voice served to break her out of the hold her mind had taken, and she turned towards the source of the words. To her delight and horror, the young man from the corner was standing next to her, an amused expression replacing the previous intensity of his stare.

“I did notice that you seemed to be enjoying gawking at my ‘interesting face’ and making me self-conscious,” she said. “But you know, there’s a very good portrait gallery not far from here. I suspect that you’d find much better faces there…”

With that she turned away to pack her small bag. Best, she told herself, to keep up the trend that she’d begun months back and not develop friendships with strange men in this place; in fact, she’d made an effort not to befriend anyone, male or female. Intimacy was dangerous for a time traveler, not to mention impractical.

“I cannot imagine a better face,” he said. “Or why I’d want to look at anyone’s but yours.” She looked up at him again, searching for irony in his expression. He hadn’t moved from the spot he occupied, and she realized that he was blocking her escape route.

“Thank you for the compliment,” Lily replied. His forwardness, which from some men might have felt incredibly off-putting, was causing an unexpected chemical reaction within her. She felt nerve endings pulse in places where she’d never realized she
had
nerve endings. “Excuse me, please,” she said, looking up once again. He was still staring at her, his eyes back to their former penetrating selves. Lily felt certain that he was trying very hard to see inside her soul. “I…need to get home,” she added.

The stranger stood to the side, allowing her to pass and so she rose, intending to make her way quickly up the stairs and out of the room. It was his scent that caused her to freeze for a moment, her legs resisting her brain, wishing to remain where they were and to allow her body to take it in.

No,
she told herself. This mischief came from her her déor, her dragon, who was attempting to take control. For too long she’d forced it to remain inside her human form and now it was growing excited within her at the prospect of a sexy man in its vicinity.

But soon she’d be home and able to let it loose to fly, to roam free without fear of discovery. For now, she reminded it that inhaling the scent of attractive men was a terrible plan. So she walked by him at last, trying to ignore the look of amusement on his face as she did so. It seemed to Lily that he’d figured out exactly what she was thinking—that he was something she’d like to eat.

She walked towards the hallway, her satchel clasped under folded arms which served to cover her chest. As she made her way towards the door, she turned back to look at him.

Why did I do that?
she asked herself a split-second later as she caught him staring at her once again, amusement transformed to something approaching desire.

But as she assessed him it was he who turned and walked away, leaving the classroom via another exit and leaving Lily stunned at what had just occurred.