Tithed (6 page)

     
I love you.

     He answered her thought with his voice. "I love you too. My Ella."

     His pace became ragged. His breath shortened, and hers did too. Starlight filled her, tension coiling, every part of her focused between her legs where the pressure built and built until it let go and she surged with climax again.

     Connell thrust inside her once, twice, the last time falling forward to bury his face in her neck. He cried her name and gathered her into his arms.

     His cock pulsed inside her. The thrall let her feel his seed filling her. Connell's climax sounded like moonlight and tasted like thunder, and it left her gasping and quaking with a third and final orgasm of her own.

     The thrall had never filled her the way it just had. Connell rolled off to lie beside her, his head next to hers, his lips pressed against her shoulder. Elspeth lifted her hand and formed an orb. It was perfect, without flaw, a deep and gleaming gold tinged with blue the color of summer sky.

     She closed her fingers and it absorbed into her skin. She made another, as perfect as the first. This one she released. It hovered above them, waiting for her to command.

     It was almost too much. She closed her fingers again and withdrew the orb. Her body hummed. Every sensation remained colored by a new awareness. By the thrall. By the magic Connell's love had let her access at last.

     Elspeth began to weep.

     "Ella, love, what's wrong?"

     How could she explain how it felt to hold the thrall in her hands rather than have it slip away from her grasp? To know she could do anything now, make anything happen, create and destroy. How could she tell him, who had no magic, how the years of working so hard to harness what she'd been born to do had left her convinced she would never be able to do it?

     How could she explain to one who did not have magic how empty she had been, and how full she was now?

     "Ella?"

     She looked down at him and brought him to her again for a kiss. "Thank you, Connell. Oh, thank you."

     His brow furrowed at her tears, but he held her in his arms and kissed them away. "Shh, love. Please don't cry."

     How could she explain that she wept from joy, not grief? That she had found her way at last along the path she'd thought never to walk. How could she tell him she had believed she would always be alone.

     She could not. Numbers, not words, were her strength. She could not find the means to tell Connell everything in her heart.

     She could only tell him what she'd already said. "I love you."

     And it was enough, because he demanded no more from her. Her words were not inadequate to him. They were enough. At last, for her, everything was enough.

     When she was in the third grade, Megan Hart fell in love for the first time. Not with a boy (that would wait until fourth grade), but with a story. "The Homecoming" by Ray Bradbury leaped out at her from the pages of a library book, and she tumbled head over heels. In the dark ages, before the days of photocopiers, the only way for her to keep a copy of this story was to copy it out by hand so she could read it over and over again. Something funny happened, though, as she carefully printed it on lined notebook paper.

     She made "improvements."

     At age 12, reading Stephen King's T
he Stand for
the first time one memorable summer, it occurred to her that people really did write books for a living. That's when she decided to become an author. Megan began writing short fantasy, horror and science fiction before graduating to novel-length romances. In 1998 as a stay-home mom, Megan took up writing in earnest, attending her first writing conference and getting her first request for a full manuscript. In 2002 she saw her first book in print, and she hasn't stopped since.

     Published in almost every genre of romance fiction, Megan also writes fantasy, science fiction, women's fiction, horrifyingly awful screenplays, and continues to occasionally dabble in horror.

     Megan's goal is to continue writing the kind of books she'd like to read. She spends too much time playing The Sims. Her dream is to have a movie made of every one of her novels, starring herself as the heroine and Keanu Reeves as the hero. Megan lives in the deep, dark woods with her husband and two monsters…er…children.

Passion Model Amidst a Crowd of Stars

     Marrin Levy needs a man. Not to have children. Her husband gave her three before he died—along with a failing homestead and crushing debt. What she needs is a strong back to help her wrest a living from the harsh, desert plant of Lujawed.

     She's sent away for a field-husband to take over the hard labor, nothing more. She never expected the devastatingly handsome, forever-young Seveeran, Keane Delacore, would fit so easily into her family's life.

     Keane's heart is as strong as his back, bringing Marrin more than just help in the fields. He offers her love she never thought she'd feel again…if she has the courage to reach out and take it.

     
Warning: Contains three-alarm love scenes and a three-hankie love story. Read it and weep—in a
good way!

Enjoy the following excerpt for Amidst
a Crowd of Stars:

     The colony was still small enough to support group celebrations like this one. The tables had been set with flowers and pretty cloths. A band hired to provide music. Food, laid out in a bounty that proved to any who doubted how prosperous they'd all become.

     Marrin watched Sarai chattering with her friends. Her other daughters, Aliya and Hadassah, had also abandoned the dull company of their parents to seek their companions. Marrin had a plate of salad and a glass of iced water, but wasn't doing much beyond looking around in amazed pride.

     "You're Sarai's mother, aren't you?"

     Marrin turned at the question to see a woman of about her own age she faintly recognized. "Yes. I'm Marrin Levy."

     "Arlene Simpson. I'm Jack's mom."

     Marrin didn't know Jack, but she smiled and nodded anyway. Keane came up beside her and put his arm around her shoulders, squeezing gently before stepping away to take the plate from her hands and begin finishing the salad.

     "Hi," he greeted Arlene.

     The other woman's eyes widened slightly. "Hello. I'm Jack's mom." Her smile thinned as she looked at Marrin.

     Keane smiled and shrugged, more honest in his reply than Marrin had been. "Sorry, I don't know Jack."

     "Jack Simpson?" Arlene's tone clearly said Keane ought to know him. "He might be a year or two behind you."

     Keane paused with the fork halfway to his mouth, an eyebrow raised. "Sorry?"

     Marrin tensed, her gut twisting. It wasn't the first time their apparent age difference had been brought up in casual conversation, but it had been quite a while. Anyone who knew them knew Keane wasn't as young as his Seveeran genetics made him appear.

     "My son," Arlene said patiently, as though Keane were an idiot. "He graduated today with your girlfriend."

     "My girlfriend?" Keane's face showed an amusement Marrin envied, but didn't feel. He looked around the room, clearly biting back a laugh.

     "Well, yes…you're Sarai's boyfriend, aren't you? I just guessed you—"

     "You guessed because I was here with Marrin and behaving in such a familiar manner that I must somehow be related to her, and you assumed for some reason I was here because of her daughter, who graduated today with your son." His smile remained pleasant, his voice light, but he'd set down his plate and put an arm around Marrin's shoulders.

     Arlene looked confused, from Keane to Marrin and back again. "Well, yes."

     "Marrin is my wife," said Keane without changing his tone.

     If the woman's face could have blushed any more crimson, Marrin didn't see how. Arlene Simpson stammered and stuttered and backed away like Keane had somehow insulted her when really, she was the one who'd put her foot in her mouth.

     It made Marrin feel no better to watch the other woman's distress. Much of the time she could forget her husband was of a different race that didn't age the same way Earthers did. She aged every day. Keane did not.

     Maya, leader of the temple maenads, has learned nothing but contempt for the weakness of her human body. She lives for the ritual that transforms her into maenad form, ready to administer the vengeance of the volcano god.

     Killing a fugitive shifter is not just her duty, but her delight—until, against all odds, he captures h
er
, trapping her in her worst nightmare. Her vulnerable, easily controlled human form.

     Marked for destruction by his forbidden gifts, empath and shifter Philos fled the city years ago to become a warrior for persecuted people like him. Now he has the enemy at his mercy—a maenad desperate to regain her power. But when they touch, he finds his empathic power not so much a gift as a terrible danger. To his people, and his heart.

     Gradually, Maya realizes Philos is not a monster deserving of death. Yet even as she hesitantly offers to help in the war against the priests, she can risk no more than the bare beginnings of friendship with the man she was supposed to kill. Anything more, and she will forever lose access to the power she cannot bear to live without…

     
Warning: Contains violence, deadly spider-venom, sex that gets interrupted at the last minute, sex
that
doesn't
get interrupted at the last minute, and plenty of not-your-usual shape-shifters.

Enjoy the following excerpt for Bl
ood of the Volcano:

       Maya watched him drink, cup water in his hands and splash it over his face, run wet fingers through the long strands of black hair. L
onger than mine…but then he was not born to be a fighter.

       The shame ate at her, that he, a runaway, a condemned criminal, had kept her prisoner this long. It had been only luck and a spider bite that had reversed their positions, nothing to do with her god-given powers or her years of experience running with the maenad pack.

       She watched him, an ordinary man, maybe five years older than she. Prettier than most, with the sweep of glossy hair and the dark eyes she remembered staring, terrified, into hers, but nothing that should have made him able to beat her, nothing that should have allowed him to keep her prisoner for a whole night and day.

       
Except he's not ordinary. T
he thought held her still with sudden surprise. I'
d forgotten that—
forgotten why we were chasing him in the first place. There's something wrong with him, some unholy
power, demon- not god-begotten.

       She didn't need to know. It was nothing to her. In a short while she'd pack up supplies and leave, and if she ever saw him again it would be because he'd been stupid enough to try returning, and she—or another of her pack—would tear him to pieces. There was no reason to want to understand more about him, how he'd been able to overpower her.

       There was even less reason to want to make him look at her, now that she was no longer helpless, pathetic and bound. No reason to want to make him remember her as in control, sitting here with the knife ready to her hand, on the spot where she'd successfully saved his life.

       
And it's stupid. I've already saved him when I should have let him die, am already letting him go
when I should march him in chains back to my people. I do not need to talk to him, let him pretend to be a
person.

       She said it anyway, as she'd known she was going to, and her warring thoughts came through into her voice, making the words shiver and run together so she sounded uncertain and almost afraid. "What is your power?"

       He turned. She was looking straight at him, so his eyes met hers. Her question must have taken him off guard, because for a moment his eyes held no wariness, nor fear, only an amusement that warmed his face. It reminded her suddenly of the laughter she'd heard in his voice yesterday, when they were fighting and she'd thought he meant to rape her, then he'd said something silly, too outlandish to take seriously, and she'd known that whatever else he might do, she would never need to fear that from him.