Mona Lisa Eclipsing m-5 Read online

  He was the most terrifying creature I’d ever laid eyes on. The sheer size of him, not to mention those wickedly long saber teeth, complete with a spine-chilling roar, stunned the attackers. If I was standing in their shoes, I would have shit myself.

  Two hunters managed to hurl their darts and roll out of the way. The rest froze in that critical moment as they saw death racing toward them in prehistoric form. The beast swiped with his enormous paws, claws fully extended, several inches long, sailing past two attackers and grabbing up another in his jaws. The two long ivory sabers sank through the hunter’s chest like the weapons they were named after. A savage chomp with the powerful jaw, and most of the hunter’s chest, including the heart, was bitten off as easily as taking a bite out of a hamburger. Before the body, what remained of it, hit the ground, there was a bright flash of light.

  The body poofed into ashy dust, empty clothes and weapons falling to the ground.

  I thought for a moment the tiger had missed the other two hunters because they stood frozen there like statues. Then in slow, ponderous motion, as they started toppling over, a thin line of blood appeared across their necks like red paint seeping out. As their heads slowly separated from their necks, a bright light leaked from their open bodies. With an immolating poof, two more piles of ashes dusted the ground.

  With an easy pounce, the creature swatted the three other men into the air like a big cat playing with amusing mice. He broke the spine of one, by the sound of it, partially eviscerated the other, and tore through the ribs of the last, sending them thudding to the ground, an incapacitated bloody mess.

  The prehistoric tiger glanced back at me.

  I stood there with my mouth opened, stunned by the carnage and odd light-and-poofing-dust display—was that how Monères died?

  The two darts protruding from the tiger’s chest didn’t seem to bother him; too big, perhaps, to be knocked unconscious by them. He chuffed at me, a loud coughing sound, and tossed his head in a gesturing motion, like he was trying to tell me something. Oh yeah, to run away. Or more like, fly away.

  I tried. I brought the image of a vulture to mind and tried to picture myself becoming that image, but nothing happened. I didn’t know why—perhaps it was the shock of seeing Dante becoming that tawny, striped, enormous beast. Or maybe sensing more than fifty hunters running toward us wasn’t enough peril yet to force the change. Maybe I had to be hurtling down a gorge, in eminent danger of going splat, before I could shift.

  “I can’t change,” I said to the huge creature, not sure if Dante even understood me. “I tried but I can’t shift, and I know you want to be heroic and hold them off while I escape, but hello, here. I need some help. For one thing, if you didn’t notice, I have no shoes, and my feet don’t have the inch-thick calluses these guys seem to have. Are my words even reaching you? How about this? Here, kitty, kitty,” I coaxed.

  The big, magnificent cat eyed me balefully.

  My heart lifted into my throat as I felt—and saw—the first wave of reinforcements crest the small ridge above us. “We have to hotfoot it out of here, Dante, and I can’t do it without you. Please, Dante. I need you.”

  With a hissing snarl, the saber-toothed tiger delicately snatched up with his teeth the dark, reddish bracelets from the ground where they’d fallen in his transformation. Then he was in front of me, crouching down on his belly.

  “What do you want me to do? Climb aboard?”

  Dante chuffed and nodded his head, so much bigger than my own. Jesus, was he big! Big, but not invulnerable. Especially against fifty of those heathenish hunters who were streaming down the hill in a dark, brown-skinned wave, holding spears, swords, daggers, and those nasty venom-tipped darts, which reminded me . . .

  I dashed in front of Dante to pull the two darts out of his chest and throw the nasty things away, then leaped onto his broad back. “Go,” I cried, clutching a thick ruff of fur. Powerful muscles bunched and rippled beneath me, and he leaped away. Too late, I saw, looking back—my fault. Dozens of launched darts were coming at us like a dark and feathered malevolent cloud. Dante and I were about to look like a porcupine. Forget about knocking me out—that many venomous darts would be lethal! Me, definitely. Maybe even to him.

  With a quick, desperate pull of power from my innermost core, I threw out my left hand and let energy spill out from my mole, familiar yet different. Broadening the focus, I spread it wide with a grunt of effort. Instead of acting like a shield, which was what I was aiming for, it did even better. When the oncoming darts collided with my streaming energy, it not only repelled them but also launched them back at the hunters, some of whom had shifted into their animal forms—leopards and hyenas—all of them notably smaller than Dante’s prehistoric tiger form. Then my pulse of power hit the wave of attackers themselves like a soundless sonic blast, and sent them flying backward.

  I glanced down at my hand, staring at my innocent-looking mole from which that surprising blast of power had come, then hastily gripped fur with both hands to secure myself as Dante stretched out in a loping run.

  FIFTEEN

  WE RAN FOR Several hours. The jungle was denser this far south, and the trees taller, providing more shade. Riding the back of a huge tiger might have been better than running barefoot through the jungle, but it had its disadvantages. Especially when you didn’t have any underwear. Going commando was not something I planned to do ever again.

  While he ran for our lives, I was being tortured and flayed with erotic stimulation, and had become embarrassingly wet while riding him, not just perspiration of skin but damp between my legs where his thick but surprisingly soft fur brushed up against bare and sensitive parts of me. Dante, polite saber-toothed tiger that he was, didn’t say anything when I first became stickily moist, not that he could anyway. But the heavy, musky scent of arousal I began to emit soon made my condition pretty obvious, if the honeyed wetness starting to drip down his sides wasn’t a big fat clue already.

  If that wasn’t bad enough, the stimulation down below stirred things up above. My nipples peaked into hard pebbles and swelled my modest bosom, made worse by the rhythmic surge that rubbed them against the soft, furry pelt. I had more nerve endings than I had ever imagined. Nerve endings that became increasingly sensitive at each brush, each back-and-forth movement atop stimulating fur as Dante ran in long, loping strides.

  I alternated my position, trying to ride more up on my knees to alleviate the torturous fur-rubbing friction, but that just made my weight harder to balance; alas, riding on top of a giant prehistoric tiger was not at all like riding a horse. When I almost toppled over, Dante turned his head and growled softly. Plastered tightly against him once more after almost falling off, I felt the deep rumble pass right through his back up into my own chest, and more jarringly, between my thighs. “Oh God,” I gasped, swallowing down a moan. “Don’t growl. I’m sorry!”

  Boy, was I sorry. If he growled again, I was going to light up like a freaking lightbulb and give our position away. Not that I’d heard any signs of pursuit after that surprising power blast I had thrown at Mona Sierra’s minions, knocking over their front line like ninepins.

  I clung to Dante and endured with gritting teeth and glazed eyes for another hour before we finally stopped at a stream. By that time I was thirsting for something far beyond water.

  Sliding off him was almost unbearably, sensually painful. I was never going to look at fur quite the same way ever again. By now, I was so aroused, I wouldn’t have cared if a horde of hunters were about to descend on us. I just wanted, needed, something I couldn’t name, but that wasn’t quite true because in the next second I opened my mouth and did so. “Dante,” I whispered, my eyes huge as I panted and trembled with need.

  That great jaw opened, dropping the bracelets he had carried, then transforming light sparkled and glimmered as fur formed back into naked skin, silver-blue eyes, and a prominent state of arousal. “Mona Lisa,” he growled.

  He was magnificent: that arresting fac
e, the riveting body. A gorgeous study of pure masculine form. I touched his chest—smooth skin flowing over hard, rippling muscles, softness over leashed power—trailed my marveling hands down the ridges of his abdomen, finally touching what, two days ago, would have sent me shrinking away in anticipation of pain, not pleasure. My fingertips trailed lightly over his jutting arousal, feeling him, learning him.

  “Your skin is even softer here,” I murmured in wonder, “like smooth silk over hard iron.”

  Dante’s eyes blazed. He held still, so still, not even breathing as I slowly leaned forward and pressed my nose, my lips, against his throat, inhaling deeply. “I still smell you—tiger . . .” And the animal scent of him was as compellingly attractive, as enticing and intoxicating as the rest of him. “Taste you . . .” My lips trailed down over the graceful slope of his chest. Strength, power, pleasure . . . all inherently combined in him.

  Moving farther down, I pressed a kiss over the firm, round head of him, finally eliciting a reaction, a sound. His hands buried themselves in my hair, gripping tight as I licked and delicately tasted the drop of wetness at the tip and found it salty sweet, such contrast, like the rest of him. Discovered that it could be a delight, a pleasure in itself to learn, to taste and touch, the male form, envelope it into your mouth—the smooth, hard slide of him in. To suckle and lap and stroke over that silky, plump smoothness, the vein-rich shaft, testing the firmness beneath.

  I moistened him there, as much as I could take of him into my mouth. Then, pulling away with a gasp—both his and mine—I stood and pressed myself against his strong, smooth chest, his hard, wet shaft rubbing above my own wet feminine folds. His harsh moan twined with my breathless mew of need. “Dante, please . . . I ache.”

  His hand reached down and pulled my leg up around his hip, opening me fully to him so he could rub against me, once, twice, letting my swollen, sensitive tissues ride along the turgid ridge of his length. The movement, the pressure, made me cry out. An exquisite bombardment to my senses . . . sharp twinges of pleasure and even more throbbing, aching need.

  I wrapped my hand around him to guide him in.

  With a wrench, he pulled away, whirled me around. “No, this way,” he said in a guttural tone and dropped me down to my knees, guiding my hands to the ground. “Yes,” he murmured as I felt him kneel behind me, one hand reaching beneath my shirt to knead an aching breast, the other hand splaying over my triangular tuft of hair, tugging it gently, teasingly, before stroking me down farther below.

  Sublime bliss. Whimpers, cries, indecipherable words.

  More primitive, urgent sounds from my throat as he pushed a finger into me and stroked wetly, one finger, two . . . Oh, God, oh, God! Stretching wetness, more melting honey. The withdrawal of those fingers. My protesting cry of distress. Then those wet fingers touching me behind in a spot that shocked me still.

  “Shh, it’s all right,” he husked as he spread the honeyed wetness over my surprisingly sensitive rear hole.

  I whimpered with distress at the unfamiliar touch.

  “No condom. Let me love you this way,” Dante said hoarsely, and I understood then that even now he was trying to protect me.

  My tenseness and uneasiness melted away. “Yes,” I breathed. “I need you inside me, any way.”

  There was the touch of lips to my back, then the press of his shaft pushing into me. Pressure . . . so much pressure. As the tip of him breached me anally with a forceful push, I felt his fingers push into my welcoming wetness in front, a twin forging into me combining stretching pain with sobbing pleasure.

  Glimmering light and sweat dewed our skin, glowing brighter and brighter as he pushed his way steadily into me with both cock and fingers, and my body accepted him, if not easily, then hungrily, with wet, thirsting desire.

  So good, so good . . . So unbelievably, wonderingly good to feel him inside me, so deep and full. Then the slow drag of him back out with both fingers and shaft, almost to the end but not quite, fingers sliding out completely to search out my hidden pearl.

  “Oh!”

  A light touch over the swollen nub to send exquisite bursts of spreading sensation within me. Licking, teasing fire that grew hotter and hotter with each burning stroke in, each heavy pull back out with that thick, stretching shaft while those clever, wet fingers played over me, stroking my pleasure higher and higher, winding me desperately tighter as he moved in and out, smoothly, fluidly, in increasing force and rhythm.

  His fingers shifted—thumb pressing my swollen pearl, two fingers thrusting back into my tight sheath—his shaft drilling me, filling me behind, and I exploded in screaming climax. He drove into me one last time, his own body convulsing in release.

  The light around us, from us, was so blinding that for a moment the moon’s light outshone the day’s sun, then slowly, slowly, it began to fade until our skin no longer glowed, no longer shimmered and shone.

  He pulled out with a heavy groan and drew me into his arms, both of us lying on the ground, breathless.

  “Better than before?” he murmured.

  “So much so that I almost fainted.”

  “Good,” Dante murmured. “Wanted to keep my promise.”

  “You absolutely did.”

  SIXTEEN

  I WAS WALKING, I told Dante. Better my feet than the torture of riding him again.

  “You might enjoy riding me later, when we have a condom,” he said with gleaming eyes, pulling me to my feet.

  An intriguing prospect. “Another promise?” I asked. Pulling off my borrowed shirt, I waded into the stream to scrub it clean.

  “At least as good,” he said, lips curving in a hint of a smile. “Maybe even better.”

  “Promises, promises.” I splashed him with water and he retaliated. I squealed and he laughed, and we frolicked in the water for a bit. And that was almost as much a marvel to me as sex with Dante had been.

  My lover, I thought, running my eyes over him in wonder as we resumed our journey, walking at an easy pace, holding hands. He was unabashedly comfortable with his nudity, with good reason. There was nothing to be embarrassed about with a body like that.

  “Eyes forward, you shameless wench,” Dante said, amused at my frequent sideways peeks at him, “or you’ll get me too stirred up to walk comfortably.”

  “Would serve you right after teasing me with that comment about riding you.”

  “I’ve created a sex fiend,” he said in mock dismay.

  “That you have,” I said, surprised at the truth of it. It was a bit mind-blowing, going from thinking myself frigid to eagerly looking forward to the next time we could make love.

  “How are you doing with the sun?” I asked.

  “As long as we stick mostly to the shade, I’ll be fine,” he said, reassuring me.

  We eventually came to a thriving town nestled against the blue waters of the sea, a wonderful breath of comfortable, bustling civilization. It was a modestly affluent community with paved streets, groomed lawns, and waving palm trees.

  “Wait here.” Dashing into an empty backyard, I snatched some clothes drying on a line, sending a silent apology to the owners.

  We dressed: Dante in a T-shirt and baggy shorts, and a pair of loose trousers and a fresh shirt for me. I rolled up the sleeves and knotted the loose ends of my borrowed shirt at my waist. There. American tourists. Although the bare feet did look a bit odd.

  Dante bespelled the first fellow tourist we came across, his blue eyes lightening into true silver as he captured the man’s will with a glimmer of power. “What town is this?”

  “Corozal,” the man replied.

  “In Mexico?”

  “No. In Belize, Central America.”

  “How far to the Mexican border?”

  “About nine or ten miles north.”

  A murmured request from Dante, and the man pulled out his cell phone, dialed the number Dante gave him, and handed him the phone.

  “Hello?” answered a voice.

  “Dad, it’
s Dante.”

  After eliciting twenty dollars—they accepted U.S. currency here—Dante thanked the man and sent him on his way with instructions to forget meeting us.

  “Aquila will be here in an hour,” Dante said. “The rest will be along as soon as they can.”

  “Is Aquila the bird man?” I asked.

  “Bird man? Ah, you mean the eagle shifter.” He eyed me pensively. “You still have no remembrance?”

  “Only a few things. I’m not sure if they’re true memory or something I dreamed up. I wanted to ask you about them, but not here,” I said, looking around the crowded street. “So what will it be? Shoes or something to eat and drink?”

  Our stomachs won out over our tender feet. We chowed on fish, rice, and beans at the nearest restaurant and quenched our thirst with a pitcher of water, so hungry we didn’t speak at all until we were finished eating.

  “Eleven dollars left,” Dante said, sitting back, replete. “I think we have enough to buy you some shoes. Shall we?”

  We were able to pick up some cheap sandals for both of us, and made our way more comfortably to the waterfront where we sat on a stone bench overlooking the bay, watching the sun set in a majestic splash of color beneath the shade of a rustling palm.

  “It’s hard to believe that hours ago we were running for our lives,” I murmured, head resting on his shoulder. “Humans seem to be much more civilized than the Monère.”

  “We can be a primitive bunch,” Dante agreed, arm draped around me, fingertips stroking the bare skin of my arm. “But I beg you not to judge all Monère by what you saw of Mona Sierra and her people. That was, indeed, truly primitive. We have more ruled order in America, and our conditions are not as meager as what you saw here.”