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Authors: Erika Masten
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TURNING WILD
(AN
AESIR SHIFTERS BBW ROMANCE)
by
Erika
Masten
Copyright
© 2014 Erika Masten
ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED
Erika
Masten
Contact:
[email protected]
Website:
http://erikamasten.com
Blog:
http://erikamasten.blogspot.com
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http://eepurl.com/pTLx1
Published by Sticky Sweet Books. This book contains
material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties.
Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. Without
limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored on, or introduced into a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of
both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to actual
persons or events are purely coincidental.
Warning: Explicit content. Intended for mature readers
only. All characters depicted herein are 18 years of age or older, and all
sexual activities are of a consensual nature.
This is a work of erotic fantasy. In real life, please
protect yourself and your lover by always practicing safe sex.
Turning Wild
Excerpt From Erika
Masten’s
The Ringmaster: Cirque de Plaisir
Excerpt From Erika
Masten’s
Flower-And-Willow In New Angeles
TURNING WILD
There were days that
reminded Holly not to get too big for her britches—and that wasn’t a
self-deprecating crack about being a curvy girl. She felt one of those humbling
experiences coming, even though she’d just put ten hours in at her research
desk at the Agency and all she had been thinking about until that moment was
getting home and shucking off her painfully professional skirt suit and
ill-fitted overcoat and brushing her brown hair out of its overly tight bun.
Walking up to the front door of the supermarket, however, brought more to mind
than the fact that she was out of eggs.
The chubby little girl,
maybe all of twelve years old, standing on the wide slab of cold gray sidewalk
with her brown hair whipping across her face in the chill wind could easily
have been Holly ten years before. The situation was familiar enough, as well,
with three older boys standing over the girl and sneering down at her as she
glared silently back at them. The children were all still so awkward in their
bodies, one boy far too scrawny for his baggy jeans, another with arms too long
for his sleeves, posture stilted by an adolescent effort to look cool. For her
part, the girl was round-faced and round in the middle, padded out to silly
proportions by her puffy pink coat. And all of them so serious about
establishing and enforcing the social pecking order that always slotted brains
and chubby kids at the bottom.
This little Holly kept
her expression cold, smooth, disdainful in the face of jibes about fat girls.
Holly knew from experience that the boys’ interest in tormenting the girl
wouldn’t last as long when their victim refused to cry or tremble or show much
concern at all over their cruelty. The very same tactic had insulated Holly
from the same kind of bullying as a child, as an orphan shuttled from foster
home to foster home, as a pudgy teen with zero fashion sense beyond the
knowledge that black was slimming, as a bookish college student with a couple
too many hours to her hourglass figure.
As Holly got closer to
the door, she could see there was a little more to the story, with the little
chubby girl clutching a small husky pup. The dog’s pale blue eyes showed
considerably more fear than the child’s as one or another of the lanky boys
grabbed for its tail or poked at it. There was no way for Holly or the girl to
explain to the pup their particular method for freezing out the pointless,
indiscriminate anger of soulless people, so it showed its panic too readily,
trying to burrow into her puffy coat.
On another day, Holly
might have walked past the kids without stopping. It seemed heartless, she
knew. Most of the other adults who went about their business without
intervening did so because…. Well, kids will be kids, and plenty of them had
themselves teased and bullied classmates for being fatties or weaklings or
brains. Plenty of others had been teased and didn’t want the reminder of the
humiliation. Holly, had she just let it go, would have done so for the sake of
the girl, because Holly knew that look, because Holly herself had worn it.
Sometimes, it didn’t serve to interfere when a child like that girl was
standing strong. Best not to undermine her when Holly didn’t know what she was
going home to. A household of skinny sisters and a hypercritical mother? A
classroom with a teacher who didn’t like fat kids because she’d been one?
Or…nothing—a foster home or a shelter where she was either the whipping girl or
the invisible child? Sometimes, it was better just to pass by with a knowing
glance, a shared moment of recognition, older to younger.
On another day, Holly
might have let the child handle her own business, but there was something about
that particular little girl on that day protecting that runt of a husky pup
from those boys. And it was simple enough for Holly, now that she was older, an
adult. Now that her life with the Agency had taken on an element of mystery,
secrecy, intrigue, danger that the average person knew nothing about. Mundane
confrontations like this seemed so much less intimidating.
Arms crossed, the
expression on her full face mirroring that of the girl’s, Holly stood about
three feet from the cluster of children and waited for them to notice her. When
they did, one of the boys even had the nerve to snicker and say, “What? She
your kid? You look like her.”
Holly tilted her head
and kept staring, until the boys’ gazes started shifting anxiously back and
forth between hers and the girl’s, back and forth, hers and the girl’s. It
creeped them out after about thirty seconds. “Fuck this,” the same smart ass
said before all three boys shuffled away, casting ugly looks over their
shoulders at Holly.
Advancing a few steps
to stand next to the little girl, both the older and younger still watching the
bullies skulking through the parking lot toward the street, Holly said, “Cute
dog.”
“Yeah,” the girl sighed
in a relieved breath, finally looking down to pet the pup. “Wish I could keep
him.”
“He’s not yours?”
The girl shook her
head, one hand fighting all that long brown hair still whipping into her eyes.
“No, it was just sitting on the sidewalk all cold, and those boys were kicking
at it and talking about doing some…some really mean stuff to it.”
Holly nodded. “Pretty
lucky you stepped up.”
The child squinted
briefly, doubtfully up at Holly. “Not smart, though. They’ll remember this when
they see me at school.”
Holly nodded again.
“But sometimes you just have to. Don’t give them anything to grab onto, and
they’ll give up after a few days.”
That statement hung
between the girl and the woman, until the child shifted abruptly to bundle the
pup into Holly’s arms. “I gotta go.”
Holly sucked in a
sudden breath and opened her mouth to protest, but the little husky squirmed
hard, trying to dig its way up under her suit jacket. By the time she had
calmed the pup, made sure it wasn’t going to tumble right out of her arms, the
child was yards away walking head down into the wind. The sight churned uneasy
feelings in the bottom of Holly’s stomach. In part, it was because of how much
the girl really did resemble her, in size, in attitude, and in that somberness
behind her eyes that no kid should have had. And in part, it was in
recollection of the snide comment from the mouthy boy, when he had asked if
Holly was the girl’s mother.
She wasn’t. Holly
wasn’t anyone’s mother, no one’s sister or niece, not even a daughter anymore
or so much as a cousin. And certainly not a wife or girlfriend, which made
Holly snicker just briefly, without real humor. Many aspects of her life had
changed drastically over the previous few months—since the Agency had taken her
on, since the attack that had prompted the covert government team to contact
her in the first place—but the overall desirability of
Rubenesque
women to the average American male was not one of those miraculous alterations.
At this rate, without
so much as a date in a year and a half, there weren’t going to be any little
Holly’s in her future. That made the new job, her career with the Agency, that
much more important. It got her up in the morning, gave her something to be
passionate about, a sense of self-worth even if no one outside the office knew
how smart and resourceful and persistent she could be. At least someone needed
her, had a place for her.
“You got a dog? That’s
unexpected. And extremely cool.”
That voice. That deep,
muted rumble of a voice, like a distant storm—a huge crashing torrent rolling
toward her, but from so far off it was only a low grumble, a promise of
thunder. Few things in the world made Holly feel so much dread and excitement
at the same time. Rainstorms and Dustin Berg. And one was right behind her.
The man was Holly’s
neighbor, having moved into the townhouse next to hers about two months after
the Agency had relocated her for her own safety. The man was her gadfly, always
just behind her back or just beyond her peripheral vision right about the time
she was doing something embarrassing, like trying to jog her size sixteen body
around the local park trail when she hoped it would be deserted, or like trying
to wrestle a puppy out from under her coat while its paw was hooked in between
her blouse buttons and flashing her bra. The man was five-feet-ten-inches of
hard runner’s muscle and slow drawl, vaguely southern-sounding, military around
the edges. The man was, well, her fantasy lover in the flesh, the unobtainable
hunk she dreamed about on very good nights. And only God knew why he bothered
to talk to Holly so much, except that maybe he was just that nice a guy. An
absolutely
cut
, rock-jawed,
deep-voiced, boy-next-door grown up nice guy. She rolled her eyes at herself.
Holly took in a breath
and swallowed hard before pivoting to face her neighbor. She found him huddled
down into his black leather coat, collar turned up against those perfect,
hard-angled cheekbones. Coffee brown eyes squinted against the wind, which had
lightly chaffed and
pinkened
his broad, soft smile.
That and the sight of his thick brown hair, cut short along his neck and over
his ears but left in sensually mussed ruffles along his crown, took her breath
away. Her body flashed hot from her groin to her knees.
“Hey, Dustin,” she
said, careful to sound unaffected by her surprise or his glaring good looks or
the fact that she could smell the earthy, woody scent of him even from two feet
away in a strong gust.
When Dustin reached
toward her to pet the puppy, Holly almost gasped. Her heart definitely stopped
for the full second it took her to realize he wasn’t reaching for her. Of
course he wasn’t. And yet….
And yet his steady
brown eyes were trained on Holly, not the pup, as he looked up from under the
thick fringe of his coal black eyelashes, head tilted down against the flurry.
“He’s adorable. Huskies, they’re kind of wolfish. That and the eyes, that makes
some people nervous.” The hiss of the wind made him lean in just a little bit
to be heard, and that meant his body was sheltering hers, so near, so right.
Cedar and rain and leather
. She trembled
in the cold. Yeah, the cold. “That doesn’t make you nervous, Holly? That
wolfishness? The eyes?”
His
or yours
, she wanted to ask. Instead, expertly covering her
physical reactions to Dustin’s nearness, she shrugged. “Not really. I’ve always
thought their eyes were beautiful, sort of otherworldly, like they’d seen
things only they could see.”
Holly bit her lower lip
to shut herself up when she saw Dustin react to her overly fanciful ideas with
a strangely approving smile, ringed with the subtle shadow of stubble he left
around his mouth and along the firm, strong line of his jaw. Those kinds of
piercing looks from him made her heart skip and then flutter erratically, every
time. They even made her think that he was flirting with her now and then.