The Mammoth Book of Paranormal Romance (Trisha Telep) (Kitty Norville 0.50)

David recaptured my focus with a gentle kiss on my forehead. “I love you, Joanne.”

It wasn’t that he hadn’t said it before, or that he hadn’t meant it, it was the intensity with which he spoke that made me shiver down to my bones. I put my arms around his neck and stared into his eyes - hot copper, shimmering with passion and almost-alien power. “I know,” I said. “I can feel it, every moment. And I love you, David. More than my life.”

His thumbs smoothed wet hair back from my cheeks and lingered in a caress. “Then I’m very lucky,” he said. “Luckier than I’ve ever been in all my lifetimes. And I’m going to make sure your life is long and rich, my love. Despite your willingness to throw it away.”

He kissed me, and this time it was full of fire and need, and it melted me into a hot, glowing puddle inside. I hardly felt the waves lifting and rolling us; if the ocean chose to strike at us, it would find me entirely unaware.

But I surrendered to David, and I knew, in that moment, that he could protect me. He would. Not from the obvious threats I faced every day, by chance or choice, but from myself.

His hands dragged over me and, where they touched, my wet bikini faded away. Top first, and then bottom. He’d already disposed of his swim trunks.

I could feel how much he wanted me, and it took my breath away. He slid his fingers slowly from the notch of my collarbone, down between my breasts, gliding through the warm water all the way to the softness between my legs.

I bit my lip on a gasp and closed my eyes, giving myself up to the dizzying sensation of his hands, his fingers, his mouth waking sharp points of heat along my throat. The water warmed around us until the caress of the tides felt as overpowering as David’s touch - a thousand individual whispers over my skin, shredding my focus into a gauzy mist of sheer pleasure.

I wrapped myself around him, guiding him into the core of me, and he cradled me in his arms - weightless in this beautiful and silent moment, as if we had left all bounds of earth behind. The lovemaking was slow, thorough, sweetly tense. His skin tasted of the sea, of life, of all the beauty in the world. I let myself drift with him, helpless on the currents, feeling the waves of pleasure crest even as the other waves, the ones fuelled by wind and water, pounded over us.

David wanted me in water. I wanted him forever.

There, off the beach, in one stolen afternoon, we both got our wish.

The Wager

A Lords of Avalon story

Sherrilyn Kenyon writing as Kinley MacGregor

It’d been a long, cold . . . Millennium.

Thomas paused as he penned those words. Surely it wasn’t that long. Was it? Frowning, he looked at the calendar on his PDA that Merlin had brought to him from what future man would call the twenty-first century and gave a low whistle.

It hadn’t been quite that long, even though he lived in a land where time had no real meaning. It only felt like it, and therefore he left the word on the paper. It sounded better than saying just a few centuries — and that was what writing was all about, he’d learned. The truth was important, but not so much as keeping his audience entertained. News bored people, but stories . . .

That was where the money was. At least for people other than him. There was no money here, nor much of anything else.

But he was digressing. Millennium or not, it had been way too long since he’d last been free.

He who bargains with the devil pays with eternity, his dear old mangled mother had been fond of saying. Too bad he hadn’t been better at listening - but then that was the problem with “conversation”. So many times even when you paused for a breath you weren’t really listening to the other person so much as planning your next speech. Of course, he’d been a cocky youth.

What did some old crone know about anything anyway? he used to think. He was Thomas Malory. Sir Thomas Malory -couldn’t forget the Sir part. That was all-important.

In his day that Sir had meant that he was a man with standing. A man with prospects.

A man with no friggin’ clue (Thom really liked the vernacular Percival had taught him from other centuries. There was just such colour to some of the later phraseology . . . but now to return to what he’d been thinking).

Life had begun easy enough for him. He’d been born into a well-to-do family. A nice family . . . “Nice” incidentally was a four-lettered word. Look it up, it really was. It meant, “to be agreeable. Pleasant. Courteous.”

Boring.

Like any good youth worth his salt, he’d run as far away from nice as he could. Nice was for the weak (another four-lettered word). It was for a doddering fool (see how everything vile led back to four letters [even vile was four letters]).

And Thomas was anything but a fool. Or so he’d thought.

Until the day he’d met her (please insert footnote here that in French, la douleur i.e. pain, is feminine). There was a reason for that. Women, not money, were the root of all evil (it was a trick of their gender that “woman” was five and not four letters, but then “girl” was four letters too. This was done to throw us poor men off so that we wouldn’t realize just how corrupt and detrimental they were).

But back to the point of our story. Women were the root of all evil. No doubt. Or at the very least the fall of every good man.

And Thom should know. He’d been doing quite well for himself until that fateful day when she had shown herself to him. Like a vision of heaven, she’d been crossing the street wearing a gown of blue. Or maybe it was green. Hell, after all these centuries it could have been brown. The colour hadn’t mattered at the time because in truth he’d been picturing her naked in his mind.