Sensational Six: Action and Adventure in Sci Fi, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Read online

  Gina’s lush body cushioned him as he took her mouth in a hungry kiss. Flavor that was all her filled him and he sank into it, nibbling, biting and kissing his way across the exposed skin of her neck and shoulders. He filled his hands with luscious breasts and rocked his hips against hers, trying to get closer. Sharp nails scored up his back as she hooked a leg over his hip and undulated against him.

  “Yes,” she moaned. “More. I want more, Caleb. Now.”

  He tugged the collar of her tank top down and growled at the lacy bra that blocked the path of his lips. Eager hands tugged his T-shirt from his jeans as he struggle to undo her bra clasp. Finally, with a frustrated growl, he stepped back and tore the button fly of his jeans open. “Strip.”

  Clothes flew and flesh was bared as they got naked with a speed that would’ve been funny if he wasn’t so damn anxious to bury himself inside her. When Gina wore nothing but her socks and boots, he couldn’t wait any longer.

  “Fuck, who knew motorcycle boots could be so damn sexy?” he said as he moved in.

  Reaching around, he grabbed her by the ass and lifted. With one hard thrust he was home. Bracing her against the wall, he began to move. Wet heat surrounded his cock, and he fought not to lose it as she wrapped her legs around him and her booted feet bounced against his ass.

  “God, yes!” she shouted before sinking her teeth into his shoulder.

  The little bit of pain had pleasure shooting to the base of his spine. Burying his face in the crook of her neck, he sucked in air and pumped faster. Heart pounding and blood rocking through his system, Caleb shifted a hand between them to palm a breast and tweak the rigid tip. Pressure built inside him and he pinched at the nipple between his fingers, making Gina gasp and squirm against him. Her cunt rippled over his cock and he groaned. He wouldn’t last long.

  Pulling out, he set her down and spun her around. “Hand on the door,” he commanded as he kicked her feet apart.

  As devilish and sassy as ever, Gina flipped her hair and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Yes, sir!”

  With a feral grin, he grabbed her hips and slid his cock between her swollen pussy lips, torturing them both. “Are you sassing me, girl?”

  “Never.”

  With a laugh, he entered her again and began a slow and measured pace. “That’s my girl.”

  She arched her back and wiggled her ass against him. Without thinking, he swatted her and she jumped. Her cunt clenched around him and they both groaned.

  “God, Caleb. Stop fooling around and fuck me.”

  “Your wish is my command.” Planting his feet and bending his knees, he reached around and cupped her swinging breasts. His hips pumped hard and fast, sliding in and out of her slick heat while she moaned loudly and pushed back against him. Her insides clenched greedily around his cock and his balls tightened, the pressure damming up at the base of his cock until he couldn’t hold back any longer. Leaning in, he reached between his wife’s thighs and pinched her clit.

  Gina screamed, her pussy spasming around his cock as the top blew off his head and the world disappeared in a swirl of sensation. A primal groan of satisfaction roared up from deep inside and echoed through the room, mixing with her moans as she milked every drop from him.

  2

  Gina came out of the bathroom late the next morning and saw Caleb still lazing about on the bed, all naked and yummy looking. He might be behind the desk of his construction company most days, but you’d never know it by looking at his body. He was well muscled, and hard all over. Her insides fluttered and she laughed softly. Hard to believe just looking at him could make her sex clench after the night they’d had.

  “What are you going to do today?” she asked as she buttoned up her blouse.

  “Nothing.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t want to go to Stanley Park or Granville Island or something?”

  “Nope,” he said as he flopped over. “I’m just going to stay here and relax.”

  Uh huh. “You mean sleep.”

  “What can I say? You wore me out last night.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows at her. “I need to regain my strength so I can wear you out tonight.”

  She laughed. “Good luck with that, stud.”

  He scratched his stomach — his flat, hard, rippled stomach — and the sheet shifted to show the mouthwatering V that led to his package. The same muscles she’d run her tongue over only an hour ago.

  Heat whispered through her, so she reversed the direction of her fingers and she walked toward the bed, licking her lips.

  “What’re you doing, naughty lady?” Caleb asked softly.

  “Suddenly, I’m very hungry.”

  “Uh, uh uh. You have to go to the gallery.”

  “I don’t have to go,” she said as she shrugged off the blouse.

  Caleb sat up, touching her hands and stopping her movement. “Honey, I wish you didn’t but, if you don’t go check in, you’ll regret it. This is your first gallery showing and you need to experience every aspect of it.”

  Gina paused, torn between wanting to go the gallery and wanting to curl up, undisturbed, in bed with her husband. Sensing her dilemma, Caleb got out of bed and pulled her shirt back up on her shoulders, buttoning it for her while he spoke.

  “We’re going to have dinner with your family in about six hours then we’ll go to the opening, drink free champagne and listen to everyone rave about how talented you are. Tomorrow, we’ll have all day and night to be alone. Nothing and no one will disturb us, except for the room service guy who’ll have to bring us food and water to replenish all the calories and fluids we’re going to lose romping around here naked.”

  Heart swelling with love, she grinned into his true-blue eyes. “You stand here stark naked and tell me I have to leave?”

  Smirking, he pressed a light kiss to her lips before dropping back onto the bed and pulling a sheet over his lap. “Not that you have to ... but that you should.”

  Damn the man for being right.

  “Grab my lip gloss from my bag, will you?” She waved a hand at the bag on the other side of the bed as she went to put her boots on.

  “Christ, what do you have in this thing?” he complained as he dug through the backpack she used instead of a purse.

  “Normally it has diapers for your son and some snacks and toys to keep him from having fits in public.”

  Caleb lifted a purple lace thong from the bag and held it up. “Oh really?”

  “That’s something I use to keep you from have fits,” she said with a wink.

  He stared at it. “Yeah, this would work.”

  With a laugh, she got up and strode over to the bed. Grabbing the backpack from his hands, she dumped it upside down and shook everything out. Shifting pens, pencils, and a small notebook she used to doodle in aside, she found her lip gloss. After opening the small mirror she carried with it, she slicked red tint over her lips while Caleb looked on.

  She tossed the mirror into the pile again and reached for her wallet. Pulling out her I.D. and credit card, she shoved them into her back pocket just as Caleb reached for the pile and pulled something out.

  “What’s this?”

  The odd note in his voice drew her attention to his hand. There was nothing in her bag that should bring that particular tone of voice about. That was the tone he used when she had a vision or something supernaturally weird happened.

  She stared at the rock he held. “I don’t know.” Reaching out, she picked it from the palm of his hand and a shiver danced up her spine. Not good.

  Ignoring the way her blood chilled, she took a closer look at the object. It was really rough and ragged on one side, but super smooth on the other, rounded side, almost like glass. She rubbed some of the dust off it and it started to warm, the dusty gray of it swirling about, turning milky until it cleared and a feral face glared out at her.

  “Yikes!”

  Caleb stared at her and she stared at the thing she’d dropped like a hot potato. “Oh shit.” She tur
ned on her heel and started pacing in the small room muttering. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Why now? Why me? What the hell am I supposed to do about this?”

  “Honey?”

  She kept pacing back and forth, muttering. She had to get a grip before she started to freak Caleb out. Shit, she hated this. She couldn’t deal with things like this, not alone. She was precognitive; she got visions. The only time she’d dealt with demons there were others around to do the actual dealing; she was just part of the support team.

  The others.

  Closing her eyes, she focused on Angelo, and the birthmark on her wrist, the one that matched the one on her brother’s biceps, tingled.

  Caleb watched his wife quietly freak out and fought to stay calm. He hadn’t been able to see anything wrong with the rock, but something about it had certainly felt off. Gina’s extreme reaction told him he was right, when he really, really wanted to be wrong.

  “Honey, calm down and tell me what that is,” he said just as the trill of her cell phone echoed through the room.

  She spun on her heel and pointed at the rock in the middle of the bed. “There’s someone — something — in that glass. Didn’t you see him?”

  “I didn’t see anything.” He climbed from the bed and shook his head as he pulled his jeans on. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a vision?”

  “No. It wasn’t a vision.”

  He held up his hands. “Just making sure.” And now was not the time to ask why she thought it was glass when it looked like dirty rock to him.

  Gina nodded, still looking a little ... manic, as she snatched her cell phone from the pile of stuff on the bed. “Angelo?”

  Caleb listened as she told him about what she’d seen in a piece of broken glass. “How the hell am I supposed to know who he is? I saw a man’s face, and no, it wasn’t an etching or a painting. He was glaring at me. He was moving!”

  Feeling defensive on his wife’s behalf, he put his hands on her shoulders and rubbed. He really didn’t like it when someone doubted her.

  “They’re coming,” she said after closing the phone and turning to look at him.

  Biting back a sigh, he gave her a quick, hard hug. “You better get to the gallery.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  Rubbing his ears to clear them of her screech, he stepped back a bit. “Look. Whatever, or whoever, is in that ... that thing, isn’t going anywhere, and I’m not letting this ruin your experience with this gallery. You go to the gallery, and check things out. I’ll wait for the boys and we’ll deal with this together.”

  Indecision flashed through her dark eyes and he straightened his spine. “I’m right and you know it, Gina. Whoever you saw has obviously been there a while, and neither of us has a clue what to do about it, if anything. Angelo and his crew are much better suited to handling something like this.”

  “You’re right.” She walked over and stood right in front of him. “Promise me you won’t touch it again, though. I don’t know who, or what, that is and I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you.”

  Love swept through him, followed quickly by disdain. “I’m not stupid, darling.”

  Her lips lifted and the spark came back into her eyes. “No, you’re not. That’s what worries me.”

  He stared at her, waiting.

  “I don’t need a hero to protect me or figure everything out. I need a partner; someone who’ll be my rock when the world around us gets a little whacked.” She stretched up and kissed him. “I need you, Caleb, to be you. A partner who keeps me balanced, and rocks my world at the same time.”

  His chest swelled and he held for a moment. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Know exactly what to say to make everything right.”

  “As long as we’re together, everything is right.”

  Heart bursting Caleb took her mouth, pouring his love and concern into the kiss before pulling back and swatting her on the ass. “I’ll wait for the others, it’ll be fine. Now get to the gallery.”

  3

  “I knew a weekend away was too good to be true,” Caleb muttered as he stared at the stupid rock in the middle of the rumpled bed.

  Turning his back on the stone, he headed to the bathroom. He needed a shower before the others descended on them and all hell broke loose. God, he hoped Hell didn’t really break loose.

  Thirty minutes later Caleb opened the door and stared at the four people there. Two men, and two women. The men were big, muscular and hard, the women beautiful and strong. And all of them ‘gifted’, much like his psychic wife.

  “Where is it?” Gina’s brother, Angelo, or Devil as everyone but his sister called him, asked before Caleb could even say hello.

  Unable to leave the bed all rumpled and smelling of sex, Caleb had cleared it off and let the maid make it up with fresh linens. He pointed to the desk the rock now sat on and greeted the others as they streamed into the room.

  Drake, Devil’s partner and Gina’s best friend, entered first, followed by Devil’s wife Jewel. Melissa, Drake’s long term girlfriend and the shape-shifter of the bunch, entered last. Each person nodded and smiled at Caleb when they walked past then went immediately to the stone.

  They congregated there, all talking at once except for Drake, the empath, who was always the quietest of the group.

  “It looks like some sort of crystal.”

  “She said she saw a man in it. Did she say who it was?”

  “Where did she get it?”

  “Pick it up, Devil. See if you can hear anyone.”

  Gina’s precognitive. She gets visions of possible futures, but her brother Angelo’s psychic abilities were a bit different. He was a telepath. It stood to reason if Gina could see someone in the rock, Angelo would be able to hear someone.

  Caleb watched Devil pick up the rock and hold it. “Nothing,” he said before handing it to Drake.

  “Sad,” he said. “There’s some anger, but mostly just unbelievable sadness.”

  Jewel took the crystal from him but shook her head quickly and passed it to Melissa, who also shook her head. “I can feel something’s off, but I couldn’t tell you what,” the shape-shifter said.

  Caleb might be the only normal human in the room, but he was starting to get pissed off at being ignored. “Listen. I don’t give a fuck what that is, or who’s trapped in it. I don’t even care how it got in Gina’s backpack. All I care about is that it’s not a danger to her. I want you to get it out of here, and tell her everything is fine.”

  Devil met his eyes. “Sounds good to me.”

  “Not so fast,” Jewel said to her husband. “If this is what I think it is, Gina might be the only person who can figure out exactly who’s in there.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “She connects to things through touch. Devil can read minds, but he can’t read an inanimate object. Gina can. She might be able to communicate with this guy. Find out what happened, and maybe even help.”

  “Can’t you guys use your contacts at your office to figure this out? Doesn’t Hunter Protection Group specialize in this type of thing?”

  Drake shook his head. “HPG specializes in hunting and killing the things that go bump in the night, not in helping them. And what I get from the crystal is whoever is in there needs helping, not hunting.”

  Dread filled Caleb as acceptance crept over everyone else’s expression. When Devil met his eyes and nodded, he knew he was beat. Angelo Devlin would do everything in his considerable power to keep his little sister away from anything that even hinted at danger. If he agreed with the others that this was the only way then it was the only way.

  “Okay, fine. So she has to be involved, but can’t you guys better figure out what we’re dealing with somehow? I really don’t want to ruin her night.”

  “None of us want to ruin her night,” Drake said quietly.

  Everyone nodded, but then Caleb watched helplessly while they moved to set up in the middle of his hotel room. So
much for a weekend of naked indulgence with his wife.

  Gina stood at the window of the gallery and stared at the hotel across the street. The boys and their women were there now. The warmth radiating from the birthmark on her inner wrist told her things were going smoothly. So why was she still worried?

  “Is everything all right, Ms. Devlin?”

  Gina turned from the window and smiled at Mary Randal, the gallery’s manager. “Gina, Mary. I told you, I’m not much for formality.” Not to mention that she’d chose to use Devlin, her maiden name, for her art, because when people called her Miss. Mann it always made her giggle like an idiot. “And yes, it looks like all everything’s arrived safely. No dings or scratches on any of the canvas’ at all.”

  The sophisticated brunette smiled, her dark eyes serious behind her glasses. “And the ones we chose to frame, are they acceptable to you like that?”

  Turning around, Gina gazed around the small showroom. The Gallery was a small, but upscale little place. She’d gone over their website and spoken with other artists who’d shown their work there before she’d agreed to the exhibit, but nothing had prepared her for the real thing. Damn the man, but Caleb had been right to insist she experience every aspect of it.

  “Yes, the frames are perfect,” she said with a grin at Mary. “This whole place is perfect. You’re perfect.”

  The building had high ceilings and a mezzanine that covered the back half of the showroom. Movable walls with her paintings and sketches were set about the main floor, and the outer walls would soon feature more of her work. She hadn’t needed to say a word about how to group her pieces or anything.

  A lovely blush rolled over the woman’s fair cheeks. “I’m glad you’re pleased. I know we’re small, but we do have quite an illustrious clientele.”

  Gina waved. “I’m less concerned about the prominence of your client list than I am with their heart and, from what I’ve heard, you’ve been able to find good homes for a lot of work.”

  Mary smiled. “Art lovers are a lot like pet lovers. A good home is more important than an esteemed one.”

  “Exactly.” Pleasure warmed her heart at Marty’s comment. She’d definitely made the right choice in agreeing to a show at the small gallery instead of one of the other better known ones that had tried to get her to show in the last year.