Authors: Astrid Lee Donovan
And that was it- my happy-ever-after - or at least, for as long as we stay together. Right now, we have an arrangement where I hang out with one or the other of them once a week, and we do a three-person date every weekend. Even in three-way relationships, you have to make sure that you’re putting in the effort to keep the romance alive, after all.
And they grew to be far more to me than just a crazy Craigslist hook-up. After all, they were my first polyamorous relationship, and I was theirs - there was a lot of learning and growing together to be done to make sure that we all wanted to same things, and to make sure that we were all satisfied, all the time. I guess a lot of people assume that this sort of arrangement is all about the sex, but they couldn’t be more wrong if they tried. For me, it’s more about companionship - being able to share my love of fashion and food with Paula, and talk sports over beers with Ian. They fulfil me in a way that I could never have imagined being fulfilled before, and that’s one of the most immensely satisfying things about our relationship. They supported me when I quit my job and went back to college to consolidate my skill as a designer before I headed out into the big wide world. They are what I’ve been looking for all along- smart, funny, kind, good-looking, and totally attentive. And, most importantly, I’m no longer restricted to just one person- I can indulge my whims with either of them, and that feels both naughty and nice. Yes, there have been little flashes of jealousy, but we know that that’s normal and not something to be freaked out by. After all, we’re only human.
And yes, if you’re wondering, the sex is amazing. Paula and I spent a long time getting to know each other physically - for me, it was an all-new learning experience, and for her, it was a re-learning one. For the first time since the end of college, Ian and Paula were with new partners, and that gave them the leeway they needed to be that bit more crazy and experimental in bed - both with each other (you should have heard some of the stories Ian told me) and with me. I didn’t mind the trickle-down effect one bit, even if we did keep our threesomes for special occasions only. Special occasions being whenever we goddamn felt like it, of course.
So, there you have it: I started off a straight, single thirty-something office drone, and ended in a bisexual polyamorous relationship, pursuing the career I loved. And it doesn’t get much better than that.
THE END
ENSLAVED BY SHIFTERS
Paranormal Romance
CHAPTER ONE
Deck growled deep in his throat. As he watched the crowd in front of him, energetic, yapping, eager to the point of salivating, their multitude of scents assaulted his sensitive nose. From his vantage point on the high cliff, he could see the shifters that had gathered for the auction. Criminals - all of them. And as a bear, he had been raised to enforce shifter law and bring them to justice. His clan all watched from their posts around the canyon.
Deep beneath the smell and sound of wolves, cougars, tigers, lions, horses, and all the other myriad species, there was a scent sweeter than anything in the world - the smell of ripe, fertile human women.
Women who could mate with shifters were few and far between, and while most shifters preferred to find those women the humane – and legal – way, plenty resorted to less-savory means. So great was the desire to continue one’s lineage that the temptation to simply buy a viable mate was strong. Deck understood this. But he didn’t condone it. He couldn’t. It wasn’t in his blood.
But the fact that he alone out of his clan had yet to find a mate made these jobs hard for him to endure. If it was just a matter of putting down a shifter who’d gone mad and started attacking humans or other shifters without reason, he had no problem controlling himself. But here, where a veritable harem of human women were gathered together, his bear went rigid with desire to claim one of them for its own. But he was strong. He could withstand it. He had to.
The low growl rumbled across the top of the canyon as his clan communicated, careful to keep their voices low to not attract the attention of the men below them. If they weren’t careful, the bastards who ran these auctions would catch wind of them and break it up before the bear clan could descend and dole out justice.
As it was, the bears were outnumbered by a couple handfuls of shifters. Luckily, there was only one lion and one tiger amongst the crowd, and of the types of shifters, only big cats could truly threaten a bear. Wolves were canny and strong in groups, but they were also smart enough not to risk one of their pack in a circumstance like this. They would turn and run, saving their own skins to live another day, attend another auction. It was the shifters who ran the thing who truly needed to be punished, anyway.
This particular auction was run by a pair of horse shifters; brothers. They had evaded capture once before when a raid had gone foul, courtesy of a rabid wolf pack that had somehow gotten into the auction undetected. Once one wolf went bad, the whole pack was likely to follow. When the wolves had failed to back off, it had become clear by their crazed eyes and foaming mouths that they were rabid, and they became the main priority of the bear clan. Deck didn’t like killing rabid wolves. He pitied them too much. But what needed to be done eclipsed his rather sensitive nature.
That sensitive nature was often ridiculed as the reason Deck was still unmated. His brothers in the clan – even if they weren’t related, they were still his brothers – had no qualms about forcing a woman to love them. The bear inside knew when the right mate was near. There was something about her that called to each particular bear.
There may be three, or five, or ten women on the entire globe who would call to a man’s bear. If you were lucky, you found one of them. If enough time went by without finding the right woman, a shifter might take any viable mate – and live with a restless, unhappy bear for the rest of his life.
Deck had been lucky once.
Unfortunately, he’d also been hideously unlucky - or hideously stupid, as his clan had said. He should have taken her by any means necessary, done whatever he had to get her to stay. Keep her chained to his bed, if that would do it. Buy a private, desert island and keep her there. One did not simply let one’s mate go when she asked to go.
But Deck didn’t have the heart, when he looked into his Lila’s blue eyes, to force her to do anything. He loved her far too much for that.
The auction was beginning. The brothers stood on the “stage”, a raised portion of the naturally formed amphitheater. The auctioneer – a quick-tongued, sketchy-looking human male who was forced to work with shifter crime lords because regular humans wouldn’t have him – called the attention of all who gathered in the canyon. Deck watched his tongue dart over his lips, eyes moving quickly back and forth as the first girl was brought across the improvised stage to the unrelenting excitement of the audience.
And Deck.
But he wouldn’t bow to his temptations.
Ever.
Corinne coughed, a dry rattle made drier by the oppressive heat. Her body was burning under the California desert sun. She thought she felt a dip in the air temperature that might signal night, but it was impossible to tell, really, with the thick cloth around her head that had kept her eyes useless and mind numb for so many hours – or days – now.
Time had ceased meaning anything.
She remembered thinking she could hear the ocean.
But she knew it wasn’t the ocean, it was the roll of tires on pavement. At one point, her skin had been shielded from the sun. And then the rolling tires had stopped for a while, and the sun had hit hard and harsh. And then she’d been lifted, unable to struggle because her wrists were tied to her ankles, a gag in her mouth. She was still clothed in the dirty crop top and shorts she’d worn. For that, she was thankful. She knew she could have been stripped down and…well, she was sure the end of that story would find her soon enough.
Some time ago, she’d been sleeping under the boardwalk on Venice Beach, in the company of her small tribe of sisters from different misters. It behooved girls to stick together. She could remember waking up, yawning, tasting the salt air on her tongue while she tried to judge what time it was by the height of the sun in the sky. Failing that, she could look at the tide.
She liked starting her day at the ocean, anyway. Without waking any of the girls, she crept forward until she could fully rise up and stretch, taking in the early day. It would be a good one. At least, where weather was concerned. But that was kind of the bitch of it, wasn’t it? Every day was a good day and a horrible day.
She’d enjoyed the warm sand; silky and tumbling around her toes as she took long strides toward the surf, shaking sand from her long, wavy brown hair. Under different circumstances, she could have passed for a surfer. Her body, long and lean with taut muscles, looking like it was made to cut through water. And she had been a swimmer once. In a roundabout way, it’s what had led her here.
She never made it to the water.
Always aware, even when she wasn’t really aware she was aware, she’d become cognizant of a strange presence to her left. Looking, her heart had stopped in her throat.
A cat, larger than life, panting slightly, fur the color of the sand on which it stood, was staring at her. So were two men behind it. Corinne had barely enough time to process that there was a damn mountain lion on Venice Beach before it advanced, pouncing across the sand, and swallowing her scream as it pushed her down, the air rushing from her lungs as her back hit earth.
It didn’t claw her. It didn’t bite her. It smothered her.
Lay its girth on top of her, on top of her chest, making her gasp for air. She could barely breathe, let alone scream. And when it looked down at her, she swore she saw something human in its eyes - something lecherous; scornful; prideful. The cougar licked its lips. Shadows surrounded her as the two men took to either side. And then it all when black, and she’d woken up with the sound that wasn’t the ocean at all, her wrists tied to her ankles, a sack over her eyes, and a gag in her mouth.
Corinne closed her eyes. It didn’t make a difference in the amount of light she saw – none – but it made a difference to her body, which had yet to catch up with her new state of normal. She couldn’t remember sleeping since being taken, but she slept then. She knew she slept because when she woke up, it was loud and cold. Night had fallen, and her body was chilled from its long exposure to the sun, all the warmth suddenly gone.
The sounds were plentiful and seemed almost like a concert – at least, it reminded her of the dull roar of a crowd waiting for a concert to begin. Someone was holding her with rough hands that twisted and kneaded on her skin, raising her to her feet, forcing her to stumble forward. They had cut the ties between her ankles, and the ties that bound her wrists to her feet, but her arms were still tied behind her back.
She would have struggled more, but she felt sick. So, so sick. Cold and shivery and like her flesh was trying to stage some sort of violent rebellion against the body it called home. The sound grew louder. One voice seemed to rise above it all. She was barefoot, and the rock beneath her felt still-warm from the day’s heavy sunshine. She stumbled forward, scraping her big toe.
“…a bright-eyed young lass from the beach, all of 21 years old with lots of life to give a lucky man. You’re just gonna flip when you meet…SAAAAAANDY!”
The world was just too much. The bag was ripped from her head. Moonlight shone bright against the slick, smooth rocks of the canyon. It reflected off a thousand – a hundred thousand – eyes. And teeth. The sound ricocheted around her, cheering and hollering that shook her brain violently. The man holding her shook her arm slightly and turned her around. Two men stood behind her, both with arms crossed in front of their chests, long dour faces looking grim and cold. Then she was turned back around.
“Bidding starts at 10 thou, do I hear 11, do I hear 11, we have 11, do I hear 11.5….”
Reality was slow in coming, but when it came, it crashed harder than the worst waves Corinne had ever seen. An auction. This was an auction. And she was the prize to be won. She summoned the last energy she had in her bones to struggle against the last of the ties, but the man who held her was three times as strong as she was even at her strongest. When he shook her, she crumpled to her knees with a wail. It didn’t seem to diminish her worth.
“I got 16, do I hear 16.5, let’s go for 16.5, perfect brunette mate here, I got 16.5, can I get 17, pump her full and watch her beg for more, yessir, that’s 17, 17.5, oh boy do we have 18, c’mon boys, imagine her belly full of your brood, yes, that’s 18…”
And then it was all one sound - one massive, night-rending roar. The crowd stilled en masse, the sudden noise shaking every chest. And then – they scattered. The auctioneer dropped his microphone in a hurry and leapt from the stage. The man who held her began to drag her away. Her eyes just couldn’t stop looking at the auctioneer as he high-tailed it through the crowd like a jackrabbit running from a fox.
And then she realized – there weren’t just men in the canyon. There were all sorts of weird creatures. Wolves, it looked like. Some sort of cats. A horse? Was that a – a panda? And they were all running, crazed as could be, in different directions, snarling and clawing as they bumped into each other. She swiveled her head around. A bear. A big, brown bear. He was crushing a horse beneath him. The horse’s eyes rolled up and down and every which way as it whinnied in utter panic.
Someone drugged me, Corinne reasoned. They drugged me, and now I’m seeing crazy shit.
But then she felt the hand on her arm release and an inhuman shout escaped the man at her side, who was not a man anymore but a stag - a big, antlered buck. Another horse ran past her. A bear barreled into the stag. It snapped its jaws around a leg and the leg twisted, splintered. The stag bleat in pain. The horse that had run past, galloping into the crowd and was taken down by another bear. A growl behind her made her turn; slow and shaking.
The horse was dead. The bear that had killed it was looking at her. Blood dripped from its jowls. Its eyes on her were heated, intense -but not feral. Not feral at all. It took a step forward. Corinne wondered what kind of drug this was. If it was acid, it must have been a hell of a lot of acid, because this sure as shit felt real, and she’d done enough acid to know that it never felt this real. She felt sober. Which mean this must be some crazy synthetics.
The bear took another step forward.
What the hell, Corinne thought, her brain fevered from the sun and confident that this was just a crazy, once-in-a-lifetime trip. She kneeled down in front of the bear, her arms behind her back still. All around her, the melee seemed to be dying down a bit. The bear in front of her seemed to actually be more afraid of her than she was it. Of course it is, this is MY trip.
“Hello,” she said, her throat terribly sore from dehydration. “Nice to meet you.”
The bear seemed to freeze, its eyes panicking for a moment before growing cold, steely…and oddly possessive. She wished her hands were free, that she could reach out and stroke its soft-looking fur. Hell, if this was her trip, she should be able to do whatever she wanted. But she couldn’t get rid of the tie around her wrists, as much as she willed herself to imagine it gone.
And then she felt something that bypassed all the explanations her fevered brain were offering her. The bear’s breath huffed across her face. Hot, wet breath. Once, twice, three times. And when she looked in his eyes she saw – laughter. The bear was laughing at her. Well, that was pretty funny. But she didn’t feel like laughing. Not one little bit. She felt like crying, and sleeping forever.
So that’s just what she did.