“What is it?” Pia’s voice had softened to a near whisper, as well.

  Anna gathered all her courage. “I believe I’m in love with you.”

  Pia didn’t gasp or step back, as Anna had half hoped she would. They stood like that in the dappled glade—staring at one another—until the autumn noises of the forest were like clanging cymbals all around them. Insects skittered and dried leaves crackled into the air. An acorn falling might as well have been a hundred-year-old oak crashing to the earth for how the small sound resonated.

  Finally, after what felt like an entire rotation of the moon, Pia’s eyes blinked slowly, then drifted shut. The sparsely filled basket slid out of her weak hold. “Touch me,” Pia pleaded. “I beg you.”

  That was all the encouragement Anna needed. Within seconds, she had pinned Pia against one of the large oak trees. After so many months of wondering and hoping, the reality of Pia’s lips and skin and hair threw Anna into a sort of frenzy. Kissing her lips and then along the strong turn of her ivory neck, nipping at her ear, Anna reveled in the physical reality of Pia in her arms. The smell of her—a mixture of fresh autumn air and spices from the convent kitchen where Pia had baked bread that morning. The sound of her—a loving compilation of supplication and devotion.

  Anna began removing Pia’s clothes without asking permission, pulling desperately at her tightly wound coil of hair. The more Anna pushed, the more Pia bent. As if they were both perfectly attuned to the moment and its meaning: that they were both discovering their true natures. Pia was made to soften and sway into Anna’s controlling, greedy hands.

  “You are so beautiful, Pia, so strong and wise,” Anna gasped between kisses and fumbling fingers. “I watch you all the time, how you manage everyone without flouting the abbess’s authority.” Her lips trailed down Pia’s neck. “I’ve seen your lovely drawings and your modesty about them. I’ve seen your patience with the younger girls. I love watching you.”

  “I’ve watched you too, Anna,” Pia confessed, her breath shallow. “I’ve watched you grow into this woman who knows her own mind. I see how you look at the world. How you will take what you want.”

  “I will take you. I know that now.” Anna’s voice was low and demanding, and she watched as Pia’s body responded to its strength—her strength. “My wild ideas about you have become so real to me.” Pia whimpered at the words, and Anna kissed her full on the lips, savoring the texture and taste, the feel of Pia’s tongue against hers.

  Anna broke away for a moment. Pia leaned her forehead against hers and said, “I’ve dreamt of you so many times, Anna.” She reached tentatively to hold a strand of Anna’s silky blonde hair between her curious fingers. “You come to me at night, into my bed, like an angel.”

  Anna laughed, low and mischievous. “If I am an angel, I’m an angel of darkness.” She spoke as she worked, removing the last of Pia’s clothes with rough, tugging movements. Every time she gave a firm pull at a piece of fabric, Pia seemed to come emotionally, as well as physically, undone. “The thoughts I have about you, Pia, they are dark and heathenish. Beautiful and raw.”

  “Oh God,” Pia whispered after Anna removed her coarse overdress and her well-worn underclothes. All that remained was the long skein of linen that Pia used to bind her large breasts. She had never been naked in front of anyone. Out of fear or habit, she reached up quickly to prevent Anna from removing the last vestige of her modesty.

  A stormy look of disapproval passed across Anna’s face, and she took a step away from Pia. Many years later, when Pia would look back over the course of their life together, Pia knew this for what it was: the first small punishment for her defiance. At the time, Pia was confused, both timid and exhilarated at once.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” Anna said, in a gritty voice that Pia felt in the deepest parts of her throbbing body.

  Pia had spent her entire life in the convent, where her very existence had been defined by obedience; this felt like something else altogether.

  “Drop your hands and open yourself to me, Pia.”

  The submission Anna was demanding of her was something far more complex—far more rewarding—than the monotonous conformity of her daily life. Anna’s voice elicited a kind of sensual obedience that required strenuous complicity, not complaisance. A shiver ran down Pia’s spine.

  “Do you like when I tell you what I want?” Anna trailed a single finger along Pia’s neck. “When I am firm with you?”

  Pia nodded, almost weeping with the truth of it.

  Anna held her chin. “Answer me, my sweet. So I know you feel it, too. I want to hear your gentle voice crack under the weight of it.”

  “Yes, Anna . . . I love when you speak to me thus.” Pia gave herself to Anna in that moment, gave herself into the other woman’s keeping. With her head tilted back against the rough bark of the tree and her hands hanging loosely at her sides, Pia arched slightly forward, offering herself to Anna. It was as if they had become one in mind and spirit before they had even begun to explore one another’s flesh.

  “Remove the binding, my love.” Anna’s hands grazed over the linen where it was pulled tight and firm across Pia’s breasts. “Slowly.”

  Pia wanted to do as she was told. Resolved, but with trembling fingers, she began to unravel the fabric from around her ribs. She feared her heart was unraveling right along with it and hoped Anna was not orchestrating their mutual destruction. The possibility was distinct, if not deterring.

  When the fabric pooled at her feet, near the overturned basket, Pia didn’t know what to do with her hands. Seeking something to ground her, she reached her hands behind her and let the rough bark of the tree dig into her palms, as if she were tying herself to the mast and Anna was the siren.

  Her heart pounded madly as Anna stepped closer and said, “You are the most gorgeous creature, my wild forest nymph.”

  Pia arched her chest closer to Anna’s outstretched hand, her body begging for contact. “Please, please, please touch me.”

  When Anna’s small delicate hand finally caressed the bare skin of Pia’s breast, they both stopped breathing. Pia’s eyes were heavy with desire, an unfamiliar thick warmth that pounded through her veins and prickled her skin.

  “Pia . . . I want to do so many things . . . with you . . . to make you feel . . .” Anna pinched Pia’s nipple and watched as her skin tightened in response.

  Pia could do nothing but gasp.

  Then Anna looked down at the thatch of black hair between Pia’s legs. “Do you touch yourself here?” Anna reached with her other hand and cupped Pia’s mound before she could answer. The sensation was explosive and grounding all at once. The physical contact of Anna’s hand pressing against her most private self—imprinting Anna’s ownership upon her body—had Pia shuddering as if she’d been struck. A seeking finger slipping into her moist channel had her crying out. Anna’s assault was a declaration that Pia was hers—as if she were silently asserting, These breasts, this moist heat: mine. It was a consummation.

  “Yes,” Pia confessed, her voice reedy. “At night. When I think of you. I tried to stop, but when I imagine you—” Pia gasped again when Anna’s finger began to circle her sensitive nub.

  “It’s torture, isn’t it?” Anna asked.

  “Mmm hmm.” Pia bit her lip at how sweet the torture was, all the sweeter now that it was really Anna’s hand and not Pia’s imagination.

  “Hold on, Pia. Hold on for as long as you can. And then let me take you.”

  “Yes, Anna . . .” The words floated out of her.

  When Anna’s lips captured Pia’s hard sensitive nipple and her tongue mimicked what her fingers were doing below, Pia wasn’t able to contain her reaction. A cry of complete surrender ripped through her. From that moment on, Anna’s hands and mouth took complete possession of Pia’s body. The hard bark pressing against the flesh of her back contrasted with the press of Anna’s soft mouth and demanding hands.

  “You are so slick and hot, Pia. So good for me.” Anna’s narration heightened Pia’s response; warm liquid heat slid down her inner thigh. “Ah, you like when I tell you how good you are, don’t you?”

  Pia nodded helplessly.

  “You are very good,” Anna whispered in her ear as she put a second finger, then a third into Pia’s throbbing, swollen sex. “I want to know every inch of this body of yours. I want to make it sing for me.”

  “Oh God,” Pia whispered. “It’s coming over me, Anna. I’m going—”

  Anna kissed Pia’s lips and plunged her tongue into Pia’s mouth while she turned her fingers against the sensitive inner walls of Pia’s channel.

  “Anna! Stop!” she protested against Anna’s sensual assault.

  But she didn’t stop, and Pia was glad. Anna kept stroking that inner place she must know so well from taking her own pleasure. The desperate pleading of Pia’s voice only seemed to drive Anna harder to prolong the agonizing pleasure.

  “Never,” Anna whispered. “I’ll never stop loving you.” She moved her fingers in and out several more times until Pia was completely spent, the final reverberations of her climax shuddering through her.

  Anna kissed Pia more gently, then helped her settle to the ground. She spread out Pia’s dress, and they used it as a blanket to rest upon. Anna lay back and pulled Pia’s naked body alongside hers, rubbing her bare back in long soothing strokes to warm her skin against the cool air.

  When Pia began to come back to herself, her hands started wandering over Anna’s slim body. “You are so much better than any dream.”

  Anna laughed. “I certainly hope so.”

  Pia blushed. “I meant . . .”

  Anna softened and kissed her again. “I know what you meant. I’m sorry to tease. You are so sweet and perfect. So natural. I feel as though you have always been mine.”

  God, how those words soothed and excited Pia. “I feel it too, as if I have always been preparing for you, to be yours.” And there they were: no negotiation, no confusion, only the simple realization that that was the nature of their relationship, the fabric of their love for one another. That Pia belonged to Anna.

  Want to read more of Bound to be a Groom?

  Visit riptidepublishing.com/titles/bound-to-be-a-groom.

  EXCERPT: IRON & VELVET

  First rule in this line of business: don’t sleep with the client.

  When an eight-hundred-year-old vampire prince came to me with a case, I should have told her no. But I’ve always been a sucker for a femme fatale. It always goes the same way: move too fast, get in too deep, and before you know it, someone winds up dead. Yesterday a werewolf was murdered outside the Velvet, the night-time playground of one of the most powerful vampires in England. Now half the monsters in London are at each other’s throats, and the other half are trying to get in my pants. I’ve got a killer on the loose, a war on the horizon, and a scotch on the rocks. It’s going to be an interesting day.

  Available now.

  Ebook: ISBN: 978-1-62649-048-2

  Paperback: ISBN: 978-1-62649-049-9

  riptidepublishing.com/titles/iron-velvet-kate-kane-paranormal-investigator-1

  I woke to the taste of stale whiskey and the smell of stale cigarettes. Rolling over, I found a picture on the pillow—Patrick had been drawing me again. I stared into the face of the girl I used to be: someone young enough, pretty enough, and stupid enough to find that shit romantic. I’d dated a vampire when I was seventeen. It was a mistake I was still paying for.

  The portrait wasn’t quite up to his usual standard. Normally he shaded every eyelash. I’d given up hoping he’d get bored, so he must have been interrupted.

  I tried to go back to sleep, but knowing somebody had been watching took all the fun out of being unconscious. Giving up, I crawled out of the covers and went to close the window. It wouldn’t do any good, of course. I’d have to talk to Nimue about fixing the wards. But the last time I’d seen her, I’d been rebounding hard from Eve, so we’d been a bit busy for rituals.

  I couldn’t be arsed to shower, so I threw on what had been yesterday’s clothes yesterday, and made myself a breakfast of reheated coffee and ibuprofen. The post was mainly bills. All right, entirely bills. And I hadn’t paid my TV licence, which meant no more late night Diagnosis Murder marathons.

  The truth was, since Archer’d died, since I’d let Archer die, work had been slow. Well, slower.

  There was a voice mail from Dad on my laptop. I hadn’t sent anything back for a while, but the messages still came in every month or so. And my mum, or rather my stepmum—as I’d discovered around the time I went through my dating vampires phase—had emailed a photograph of their new garden. They were standing in front of a shed, smiling and waving, Dad with that slightly off-kilter look that came from not being able to see the camera. It’s weird to think of your parents having a life, but my dad was once the mortal consort of the Queen of the Wild Hunt. And by consort, I mean . . . yeah. Jenny—my stepmum—eventually got him out, but the Queen kept his eyes. They found me on the doorstep a few months later, wrapped in a wolf skin, in a basket made of briars. An honest-to-God faery princess. But since my mother’s the immortal embodiment of an abstract concept, it’s not like I’m going to inherit a magical kingdom anytime soon. And she’d never shown up at parent-teacher night.

  My headache had eased just enough that I thought I could probably face daylight. It was Sunday, but I was supposed to be in the office working on the bottle of Famous Grouse in my bottom drawer. I was getting on with that, juggling my caseload of zero and reminding myself to take Archer’s name off the door, when the incubus came in.

  “Kate Kane?” His voice was sex and honey.

  “Yeah?”

  “The Prince of Cups commands your attendance.”

  I hadn’t had much contact with the four princes who ruled the vampires of England. I knew they went by Cups, Swords, Coins, and Wands, and near as I could tell, Cups got people laid, Swords killed people, Coins bought people, and Wands kept the whole thing quiet.

  “I don’t work for vampires.” I finished my drink and poured myself another.

  His whiskey-gold eyes scanned my office. “It doesn’t look like you work at all.”

  Zing.

  There weren’t many reformed sex demons working for vampire princes in this town. In fact, there was exactly one reformed sex demon working for a vampire prince. So, this had to be Ashriel, right-hand man to Julian Saint-Germain, Prince of Cups. The word on the street was that he’d gone celibate, which made him about half as dangerous as most other demons but still twice as dangerous as, say, me. And, as luck would have it, he and his boss were two of the city’s supernatural power players I’d managed not to piss off. Probably because I hadn’t met either of them.

  I leaned back in my chair and gave him the once-over, which even I could admit was no chore. The promise of sex rolled off him like too much cologne. He was beautiful, and deadly, and thankfully not my type. “Sit down, then. Tell me what this is about.”

  He poured himself into a chair like bourbon over ice, hands folding primly in his lap. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to disclose any details. I’m simply here to escort you to the Prince.”

  “Escort?”

  That could’ve meant anything from a polite drive to a bag over my head. I leaned forwards to pour myself a top-up, reaching with the other hand for the blade duct-taped to the bottom of my desk. I had a whole row of them: gold for vampires, silver for werewolves, iron for faeries, sanctified steel for demons. I hadn’t worked out how to kill an angel yet, but I’d only had to try once.

  “Escort,” he repeated.

  It wasn’t a bag-over-the-head tone, so I left the knife. Kept the drink.

  “I’ll need more than that before I agree to anything.”

  “You don’t have to agree to anything. You only have to come with me. And you will be compensated for your time.”

  “Eight hundred a day.” I chinked my glass against the empty bottle. “Plus expenses.”

  “That’s outrageous.” He sounded almost amused.

  “It’s my ‘I don’t work for vampires’ rate. Take it or leave it.”

  He stood, apparently taking it. “Shall we go?”

  Not even an attempt to haggle. That meant one of two things. Either it was something pretty serious, or they were planning to kill me before payday. I went to one of my cupboards and slid back the false panel. The incubus drew in a soft breath. I had a lot of knives. Really, a lot of knives. And I liked people to know it.

  Ashriel flicked up a brow. “There’s caution, and then there’s paranoia.”

  “I’m a big fan of alive.” I took gold and sanctified steel. And a hip flask. “Where exactly will we be going?”

  “The Velvet.”

  No surprises there. If you wanted to drink, dance, or fuck in London, chances were you’d pay the Prince of Cups for the privilege, and the Velvet on Brewer Street was the heart of Julian Saint-Germain’s Empire of Sleaze.

  “All right.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket and traced a route on Google Maps. “But this is the way we’re going.”

  He stood and leaned over me to peer at the map. He smelled of clean skin and sandalwood, with an underlying sweetness you might want to lick from his naked body. If you were into that. “What? No. That’s ridiculous. We should go down Kingsway, not Drury Lane.”

  “It’s my way or no way.”

  “Fine.” He gave an exasperated sigh, but his orders probably involved getting me to Brewer Street, not bickering about the route.

  It didn’t seem like a trap, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t one. And anyway, there were tolls on Kingsway.

  I locked up and followed Ashriel’s taut little arse downstairs.

  A metallic green Mini Roadster was parked on the double yellow lines outside my office. And here was me thinking that working for the prince of pleasure might actually involve some, y’know, pleasure. Where was the limo? The champagne? The twitchy-tailed bunny girls to drape themselves all over me? “Under-compensating for something?”