Claiming Rights
By ID Locke
Many thanks to my betas for their kind assistance and for my readers for their continuing support.
I had a bounce in my step and a bag crammed full of the most mouth-watering Chinese food this side of the Far East. One thing I could say that I loved about living in the big city over the bump-in-the-road town I’d grown up in was the great food opportunities. One of the shifters in the cackle I’d joined was Chinese and he’d taken me to his second cousin’s, friend’s, uncle’s restaurant one day and it’d been instant love for what was served. I’d brought some take-out back for Etireh once and he’d adored it as well. He now demanded take-out from the place pretty often, actually.
I was still a little surprised that a dryad ate meat, never mind all the take-out he somehow convinced me to get him.
I also knew that by bringing him one of his favorite foods, I was pretty much guaranteeing he’d rock my world. Not that he wouldn’t even if I showed up empty handed. Etireh was always willing to nail my ass and I was totally happy to let him. The guy had a kink streak a mile wide and enjoyed my personal favorite, domination and submission, to a degree that perfectly clicked with my needs. When I’d first met him, he’d been working under the little fuck-fest of what he called the spring bloom. Even when that was done, Etireh still liked to get his freak on with me with cock-stirring regularity.
Lucky me.
I came into view of Etireh’s tree and paused for a minute to admire how pretty it was. Because Etireh was technically a half-dryad, he had what he said was an unusual tree that wasn’t really a tree. It was a bougainvillea, which was really a climbing vine, and was one of the most gorgeous plants I’d ever seen. Fine, I was a little biased because it was my boyfriend’s and I could barely tell one tree from the next, but it really was beautiful by anyone’s standards.
The main plant looked like a tree and was close to twenty feet tall with flowered vines spreading easily that distance around the base. The bracts, what I’d first thought were the flowers, but were actually leaves, were a vibrant red, with tiny white flowers nearly hidden in them. Thorns covered the vines, some only a quarter-inch long and needle thin while others topped eight inches long and were as thick around as my baby finger. The thorns had some stuff on them like poison ivy that made you want to claw your skin off from the itching it caused. It was like the ultimate in home security.
Raised voices, one of them being Etireh’s increasingly annoyed one, had me moving around the spreading vines to see what was going on.
“I said no. I’m not in the market for some random fuck. I have a boyfriend,” Etireh said in a cold voice.
“You should be honored that a pure-blood such as myself has decided to grace you with not only my presence but allow you, a lowly half-blood, the chance to worship my body. It does you no good to try and put on airs when we both know what you are. So you have a boyfriend. He can’t possibly compare to me.”
Somebody had an awfully high opinion of himself I stepped around the vines and stopped in my tracks. I’d seen Fae before, but the sheer beauty of them always made me pause. Etireh was better-looking than any human I’d ever seen, but he did look a little on the plain side standing next to the gorgeous hunk of Fae trying to get into his pants.
The Fae was facing my direction and he really was the picture of a Fae from stories and legend. Long golden hair; flawless, translucent skin; a lithe body that almost begged for you to do wicked, nasty sexual things to it; and gorgeous eyes the blue of a cloudless sky on a lazy summer day. He was impossibly hot and it was dead easy to see how the Fae were able to seduce humans without needing to do anything more than stand there and breathe. I’d heard that they could make humans come from nothing more than a kiss. Hell, I was
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