This ebook boxed set features all-new, never-before-published hot paranormal romances by eight New York Times and USA Today best-selling romance authors. Tortured alpha-male bad boys will ignite your darkest, most secret desires in these stories about vampires, shifters, dragons, fallen angels, werewolves, demons, psychic warriors and ghosts.
Here’s more about this fantastic eight book boxed set, including an excerpt from one of the stories.
Dark and Damaged: Eight Tortured Heroes of Paranormal Romance is available from Amazon Kindle, Kobo Books, Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iBooks stores and other retailers. Find the links to your preferred retailer at: http://www.felicityheaton.co.uk/dark-and-damaged/
Dark and Damaged: Eight Tortured Heroes of Paranormal Romance
By Jennifer Ashley, Caris Roane, Erin Kellison, Felicity Heaton, Erin Quinn, Laurie London, Bonnie Vanak and Colleen Gleason
LION EYES by Jennifer Ashley
Bree has just decided to give up trying to be a Shifter groupie when a lion Shifter slams into her truck and tells her to drive. Seamus is on the run from hunters, other Shifters, and who knows who else. All Bree knows is that he’s compelling, needs her help, and most intriguing of all, wears no Collar...
BLOOD FLAME by Caris Roane
Vampire Officer Connor of the Crescent Border Patrol tries to suppress his desire for the powerful witch, Iris Meldeere. Because the woman possesses the ability to kill him with the tips of her fingers, how can he possibly fall in love with her? When a double homicide throws them together, he soon finds his deepest fantasies fulfilled as Iris succumbs to his seductions. But as they battle together to stay alive, and love begins to consume them both, will the witch be able to forgive the dark secrets of his past …
HER SINFUL ANGEL by Felicity Heaton
Cast out of Heaven and now the king of Hell, Lucifer is a powerful fallen angel warrior with a heart as cold as ice and soul as black as the bottomless pit. For millennia, he has ruled his realm with an iron fist as he plots the demise of his ancient enemies. When one of those enemies dumps an unconscious mortal female in the courtyard of his fortress and leaves her there, Lucifer finds himself entranced by the beguiling beauty and tempted beyond all reason. But is the enchanting Nina an innocent pawn in the eternal game or part of a plot against him?
TEMPTED BY FIRE by Erin Kellison
A powerful dragon shifter has waited six hundred years to avenge the loss of his family, but the beautiful mediator sent to prevent violence among the Bloodkin doesn’t want to be his key to discovering the murderer—in fact, she wants nothing to do with dragons at all...
REBEL’S DESIRE by Laurie London
A jaded Iron Guild warrior cares about nothing except battling a ruthless enemy, but when a beautiful woman literally runs into his arms, he realizes she holds the key to his success. As passion ignites, he must decide whether to sacrifice the woman he’s falling for or dare to trust his heart again.
THE RESURRECTION OF SAM SLOAN by Erin Quinn
Trapped in the body of a human, the Reaper is about to fall in love with a woman he was never meant to have… When a reaper is trapped in Maggie’s estranged husband’s body, she knows only that the man with her husband’s eyes feels like a stranger… a compelling, seductive stranger who touches her in ways her treacherous husband never could. She wants to trust him, but what about the ghost who haunts their home, implicating him in a gruesome murder…
REDEMPTION by Bonnie Vanak
A cursed alpha wolf promises to free an enslaved Mage if she mates with him so he can sire an heir, not realizing she can destroy the dark secret keeping his pack alive.
RAGING DAWN by Colleen Gleason
After the vampires Max Denton hunts brutally murder his wife, he is nearly destroyed himself and spends the next ten years living a life of violence and revenge. But when sensitive information about his young daughter falls into the hands of the vampires, Max is forced to team up with the woman whose father ultimately caused the death of his wife. Savina Eleaisa has secrets of her own, and she’s determined to do whatever it takes to clear her father’s name: even if it involves seducing the most dangerous of vampires--with or without the help of the arrogant, brooding Max Denton.
Dark and Damaged: Eight Tortured Heroes of Paranormal Romance is available from Amazon Kindle, Kobo Books, Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iBooks stores and other retailers. Find the links to your preferred retailer at: http://www.felicityheaton.co.uk/dark-and-damaged/
Something hit Bree’s pickup full force.
Bree whipped her head around as a man landed in the pickup’s bed and swarmed up to the cab. She watched in numb astonishment as he swung his long body feet-first into the cab through the open passenger window.
“Bree? Are you still there?” came the strident tones of her mother. “If you’ve hung up on me …”
The man landed on the seat, closed a huge hand around Bree’s cell phone, and threw the phone out the open window.
Bree’s frozen moment of amazement broke. She clung to the steering wheel, opened her mouth, and screamed as loudly as she could.
The man was across the seat in a heartbeat, clapping a strong and dirt-streaked hand over her mouth. “Drive,” he said, his voice so guttural she could barely understand the word. “Now!”
No way in hell was Bree going anywhere with this guy. She’d fight him off, run back inside the bar, yell for help. Who cared that the groupies were unfriendly? She’d hide out in the bathroom and let the bouncers deal with him.
Two more men materialized out of the dark. They had shotguns, and they pointed them at the man and at Bree.
“Go!” the man roared.
The shotguns boomed. Bree’s truck wasn’t there to receive the blast, though, because she’d stomped on the gas.
The pickup jumped forward and hit the ground, wheels spinning. A thick cloud of dust boiled up behind them as Bree shot out of the parking lot to the road.
The road itself was dirt, washboard rough, slippery with dust that weeks without rain had made bone dry. Another shot rang out behind them, and Bree’s right mirror shattered.
She screamed again and pushed harder on the gas. The truck shimmied and danced, but Bree had helped Remy rebuild this baby, and she knew it inside and out. She expertly maneuvered up and down the washes and out to a paved road.
Bree raced down this empty stretch of back highway for a minute or so, until multiple glances behind them told her no one was following. Not yet, anyway.
She swung to the grass at the side and slammed the truck to a halt. “Get out,” she said firmly.
The man who looked back at her in the dark didn’t move. He was a Shifter—she’d guessed that the moment he’d leapt with the grace of an acrobat into the cab. His large body took up most of the passenger seat, dark T-shirt stretching over a tight chest and arms that could lift this pickup if he wanted to. His hair was cut short but a mess, black, she thought, though it was hard to tell in this light.
His eyes … They were golden, intense, pinning her as Bree stared at him in shock. Lion eyes, whispered through her head.
The Shifter wildcats—Fae cats, they called themselves—had been bred to mix the best qualities of big cats, but individual Feline clans tended to favor one species or other. Leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, and mountain lions were most common. Tigers were very, very rare—so rare Bree knew about only one of them.
And then there were the lions. The Morrissey family, who ran the Austin Shiftertown, were black-maned lions. She’d seen photos of the men of that pride on the Internet, but she’d never seen this Shifter.
He cranked around in his seat to look behind them. “It’s not safe to stop here,” he said in an accent that sounded faintly ... Scottish? Irish? Bree was no expert on accents other than those around her hometown. “Keep going.”
Bree didn’t answer. She was staring at his neck, more of it revealed when he’d turned his head.
He wasn’t wearing a Collar.
All Shifters wore Collars. It was the law. Collars had some kind of chip in them that triggered a series of nasty shocks when the Shifter who wore it became violent. There were those who claimed that the Collars also contained Fae magic, meant to control the Shifters, though Bree was a little skeptical about the magic part. But then, shape-shifters had turned out to be real, so who knew?
This Shifter had no chain of silver-and-black links around his neck, no Celtic knot at his throat. No red line around his neck to show that he’d pulled his off either—the Collars were embedded into the skin for life.
Bree was terrified at the same time her insatiable curiosity rose and demanded to be satisfied. It would get her killed one day, that curiosity, her mother always said. Well, maybe today was the day.
“Are you feral?” she asked cautiously.
Feral Shifters were those who had left any civilized behavior behind and were becoming wild animals, nothing more, no matter what their shape. Bree had heard they usually stopped bathing and wearing clothes, and this guy was definitely dressed—jeans, T-shirt, and motorcycle boots. Though she saw black smears on his skin, he didn’t look like he’d missed many showers.
He stared at her with those golden, lion eyes, and said, “Maybe. Not yet. Now, go.”
“Or, I can go, and you can get the hell out of my truck.”
“Damn you,” he said, his voice quietly desperate. “I’m dead the minute I hit the ground.”
Bree’s heart pounded sickeningly, but she remained in place. “You weren’t at the bar. Are you from one of the Shiftertowns around here?”
He was over the seat and right next to Bree before she could blink. His foot slid alongside hers and pushed the gas.
The truck leapt. Bree grabbed the steering wheel, cranking it around before they slid into the ditch. The pickup hit the pavement, shimmying until Bree righted it and sent them down the road in the correct lane.
At least the Shifter had moved his foot once she’d got the truck going.
“I don’t care where you take me,” he said. “Just get me away from the hunters.”
Bree peered down the dark road, a straight stretch, empty this late. They were a long way from Austin, a long way from anywhere, really.
Lights appeared behind her. The hunters? Hard to tell, but the lights were coming up too fast. The Shifter next to her twisted in the seat to look back at them. “Hell—go!”
The headlights got larger, far quicker than they should have. Bree’s breath came too fast, her blood pumping. She’d been chased before. She hadn’t liked it then, and she didn’t like it now.
“All right, all right.” Bree shoved her foot down on the gas, the truck rushing forward. The speedometer crept past sixty, seventy, eighty.
“Who are you?” she repeated over the engine’s noise. “What Shifter clan are you with, and why aren’t you wearing a Collar?”
The man said nothing. Bree risked turning her head to find herself pinned by his golden stare.
“Why do you know so much about Shifters?” he demanded.
Bree waved her hand at her made-up face as she focused on the road again. Her eyeliner had started to run, forming black tears. “Hello? I’m a Shifter groupie. We know everything about Shifters. The clans, the prides and packs, the family trees. What you can do and can’t do, where you live, who your mates are, what the Collars do. I’m not as into it as some of my friends back home—they would know exactly who you were and where you came from. Kind of creepy, right?”
He kept scrutinizing her, like a big cat trying to decide whether or not to pounce on a gazelle. “My name’s Seamus.”
“Nice Irish name. You Irish?”
“No.”
He snarled it. Bree let out her breath. “All right. No need to bite my head off.”
More scrutinizing. Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned biting—he was the most predatory Shifter she’d ever met. Probably because he didn’t have a Collar. Why didn’t he? What …
The black truck in her rearview put on a sudden burst of speed. The crazy driver shoved the truck between Bree and the right-hand side of the road, on the very narrow shoulder. One wrong bump, and they’d both flip.
Apparently, the driver didn’t care. Three guys in the bed of the other truck had shotguns, and they lifted them and pointed them at Bree and Seamus.
“Shit!” Bree yelled. Her instinct was to slam on the brakes and let the other truck shoot forward, but the truck might hit her, and they’d all be whirling across the road to likely death.
“Pull over and give us the Shifter!” the driver called through his open window.
“No way in hell!” Bree shouted back. Only one thing to do. “Hold on,” she told Seamus.
Seamus must have seen something in her expression, because he stopped snarling and closed his hands around the seat.
What the hunters didn’t know was that this truck had belonged to Remy Fayette, Bree’s brother, before his military stint in the Middle East had ended his life. A missile had taken out the helicopter he and his team had been in, while carrying out a rescue mission. The army had given Remy a hero’s burial, and their mom a flag and a little money in the bank every month. Bree kept the truck in his memory.
Before Remy had given up his wild life for the discipline of the army, he’d spent his time modifying cars and trucks and racing them—legally and not so legally. Bree sent him a silent blessing as she flipped a switch to deploy the nitrous oxide boost.
The pickup shot forward, jerking Bree and the Shifter. The truck following them dropped instantly behind. Ninety miles an hour, a hundred. Bree hung on to the steering wheel for dear life.
The headlights behind them swiftly grew smaller. Seamus was clutching the seat so hard his fingers tore the upholstery.
“Whoo—hoo!!” Bree yelled. “Eat that, dirtbags! Thank you, Remy Fayette. I love you!”
As usual, when Bree thought of her brother, her eyes filled with instant tears. Not now. She had to drive, to see the road.
She also had to get them to ground somewhere. Bree couldn’t keep this speed without attracting every highway patrol in the county, but if she slowed down, the guys chasing Seamus might find them.
Nothing for it.
“I’ll take you to a Shiftertown,” she said. “Which one are you from?”
Seamus’s gaze was on her again, unrelenting. “No. No Shiftertowns. Just put enough distance between us and them.” He had a hand on the door handle, as though contemplating when it would be safe to jump out. What the hell?
Something bad was going on here. At the same time, Seamus was a Shifter, and those guys chasing him were ready to shoot him. He’d be safe in a Shiftertown, where hunters didn’t dare go—they weren’t allowed to bother Collared Shifters. But if Seamus refused to go to a Shiftertown, then where?
“I have an idea,” Bree said. “I know a place you can lie low. Not the best choice, but no one will think of looking for you there.”
Seamus didn’t answer. He glanced behind them again, and his body finally relaxed. The headlights were gone.
Bree turned off the extra juice. The truck slowed abruptly, rattling and bumping. Remy had taught her how to drive a rod though, and Bree maneuvered the truck to handle the sudden change in speed. She took the next corner, heading off into the darkness of the back roads.
“Where?” Seamus asked, his voice harsh.
“You’ll see,” Bree answered. “I’m just telling you now, though—you get to explain why you threw away my cell phone while I was talking to my mom.”
Bree whipped her head around as a man landed in the pickup’s bed and swarmed up to the cab. She watched in numb astonishment as he swung his long body feet-first into the cab through the open passenger window.
“Bree? Are you still there?” came the strident tones of her mother. “If you’ve hung up on me …”
The man landed on the seat, closed a huge hand around Bree’s cell phone, and threw the phone out the open window.
Bree’s frozen moment of amazement broke. She clung to the steering wheel, opened her mouth, and screamed as loudly as she could.
The man was across the seat in a heartbeat, clapping a strong and dirt-streaked hand over her mouth. “Drive,” he said, his voice so guttural she could barely understand the word. “Now!”
No way in hell was Bree going anywhere with this guy. She’d fight him off, run back inside the bar, yell for help. Who cared that the groupies were unfriendly? She’d hide out in the bathroom and let the bouncers deal with him.
Two more men materialized out of the dark. They had shotguns, and they pointed them at the man and at Bree.
“Go!” the man roared.
The shotguns boomed. Bree’s truck wasn’t there to receive the blast, though, because she’d stomped on the gas.
The pickup jumped forward and hit the ground, wheels spinning. A thick cloud of dust boiled up behind them as Bree shot out of the parking lot to the road.
The road itself was dirt, washboard rough, slippery with dust that weeks without rain had made bone dry. Another shot rang out behind them, and Bree’s right mirror shattered.
She screamed again and pushed harder on the gas. The truck shimmied and danced, but Bree had helped Remy rebuild this baby, and she knew it inside and out. She expertly maneuvered up and down the washes and out to a paved road.
Bree raced down this empty stretch of back highway for a minute or so, until multiple glances behind them told her no one was following. Not yet, anyway.
She swung to the grass at the side and slammed the truck to a halt. “Get out,” she said firmly.
The man who looked back at her in the dark didn’t move. He was a Shifter—she’d guessed that the moment he’d leapt with the grace of an acrobat into the cab. His large body took up most of the passenger seat, dark T-shirt stretching over a tight chest and arms that could lift this pickup if he wanted to. His hair was cut short but a mess, black, she thought, though it was hard to tell in this light.
His eyes … They were golden, intense, pinning her as Bree stared at him in shock. Lion eyes, whispered through her head.
The Shifter wildcats—Fae cats, they called themselves—had been bred to mix the best qualities of big cats, but individual Feline clans tended to favor one species or other. Leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, and mountain lions were most common. Tigers were very, very rare—so rare Bree knew about only one of them.
And then there were the lions. The Morrissey family, who ran the Austin Shiftertown, were black-maned lions. She’d seen photos of the men of that pride on the Internet, but she’d never seen this Shifter.
He cranked around in his seat to look behind them. “It’s not safe to stop here,” he said in an accent that sounded faintly ... Scottish? Irish? Bree was no expert on accents other than those around her hometown. “Keep going.”
Bree didn’t answer. She was staring at his neck, more of it revealed when he’d turned his head.
He wasn’t wearing a Collar.
All Shifters wore Collars. It was the law. Collars had some kind of chip in them that triggered a series of nasty shocks when the Shifter who wore it became violent. There were those who claimed that the Collars also contained Fae magic, meant to control the Shifters, though Bree was a little skeptical about the magic part. But then, shape-shifters had turned out to be real, so who knew?
This Shifter had no chain of silver-and-black links around his neck, no Celtic knot at his throat. No red line around his neck to show that he’d pulled his off either—the Collars were embedded into the skin for life.
Bree was terrified at the same time her insatiable curiosity rose and demanded to be satisfied. It would get her killed one day, that curiosity, her mother always said. Well, maybe today was the day.
“Are you feral?” she asked cautiously.
Feral Shifters were those who had left any civilized behavior behind and were becoming wild animals, nothing more, no matter what their shape. Bree had heard they usually stopped bathing and wearing clothes, and this guy was definitely dressed—jeans, T-shirt, and motorcycle boots. Though she saw black smears on his skin, he didn’t look like he’d missed many showers.
He stared at her with those golden, lion eyes, and said, “Maybe. Not yet. Now, go.”
“Or, I can go, and you can get the hell out of my truck.”
“Damn you,” he said, his voice quietly desperate. “I’m dead the minute I hit the ground.”
Bree’s heart pounded sickeningly, but she remained in place. “You weren’t at the bar. Are you from one of the Shiftertowns around here?”
He was over the seat and right next to Bree before she could blink. His foot slid alongside hers and pushed the gas.
The truck leapt. Bree grabbed the steering wheel, cranking it around before they slid into the ditch. The pickup hit the pavement, shimmying until Bree righted it and sent them down the road in the correct lane.
At least the Shifter had moved his foot once she’d got the truck going.
“I don’t care where you take me,” he said. “Just get me away from the hunters.”
Bree peered down the dark road, a straight stretch, empty this late. They were a long way from Austin, a long way from anywhere, really.
Lights appeared behind her. The hunters? Hard to tell, but the lights were coming up too fast. The Shifter next to her twisted in the seat to look back at them. “Hell—go!”
The headlights got larger, far quicker than they should have. Bree’s breath came too fast, her blood pumping. She’d been chased before. She hadn’t liked it then, and she didn’t like it now.
“All right, all right.” Bree shoved her foot down on the gas, the truck rushing forward. The speedometer crept past sixty, seventy, eighty.
“Who are you?” she repeated over the engine’s noise. “What Shifter clan are you with, and why aren’t you wearing a Collar?”
The man said nothing. Bree risked turning her head to find herself pinned by his golden stare.
“Why do you know so much about Shifters?” he demanded.
Bree waved her hand at her made-up face as she focused on the road again. Her eyeliner had started to run, forming black tears. “Hello? I’m a Shifter groupie. We know everything about Shifters. The clans, the prides and packs, the family trees. What you can do and can’t do, where you live, who your mates are, what the Collars do. I’m not as into it as some of my friends back home—they would know exactly who you were and where you came from. Kind of creepy, right?”
He kept scrutinizing her, like a big cat trying to decide whether or not to pounce on a gazelle. “My name’s Seamus.”
“Nice Irish name. You Irish?”
“No.”
He snarled it. Bree let out her breath. “All right. No need to bite my head off.”
More scrutinizing. Maybe she shouldn’t have mentioned biting—he was the most predatory Shifter she’d ever met. Probably because he didn’t have a Collar. Why didn’t he? What …
The black truck in her rearview put on a sudden burst of speed. The crazy driver shoved the truck between Bree and the right-hand side of the road, on the very narrow shoulder. One wrong bump, and they’d both flip.
Apparently, the driver didn’t care. Three guys in the bed of the other truck had shotguns, and they lifted them and pointed them at Bree and Seamus.
“Shit!” Bree yelled. Her instinct was to slam on the brakes and let the other truck shoot forward, but the truck might hit her, and they’d all be whirling across the road to likely death.
“Pull over and give us the Shifter!” the driver called through his open window.
“No way in hell!” Bree shouted back. Only one thing to do. “Hold on,” she told Seamus.
Seamus must have seen something in her expression, because he stopped snarling and closed his hands around the seat.
What the hunters didn’t know was that this truck had belonged to Remy Fayette, Bree’s brother, before his military stint in the Middle East had ended his life. A missile had taken out the helicopter he and his team had been in, while carrying out a rescue mission. The army had given Remy a hero’s burial, and their mom a flag and a little money in the bank every month. Bree kept the truck in his memory.
Before Remy had given up his wild life for the discipline of the army, he’d spent his time modifying cars and trucks and racing them—legally and not so legally. Bree sent him a silent blessing as she flipped a switch to deploy the nitrous oxide boost.
The pickup shot forward, jerking Bree and the Shifter. The truck following them dropped instantly behind. Ninety miles an hour, a hundred. Bree hung on to the steering wheel for dear life.
The headlights behind them swiftly grew smaller. Seamus was clutching the seat so hard his fingers tore the upholstery.
“Whoo—hoo!!” Bree yelled. “Eat that, dirtbags! Thank you, Remy Fayette. I love you!”
As usual, when Bree thought of her brother, her eyes filled with instant tears. Not now. She had to drive, to see the road.
She also had to get them to ground somewhere. Bree couldn’t keep this speed without attracting every highway patrol in the county, but if she slowed down, the guys chasing Seamus might find them.
Nothing for it.
“I’ll take you to a Shiftertown,” she said. “Which one are you from?”
Seamus’s gaze was on her again, unrelenting. “No. No Shiftertowns. Just put enough distance between us and them.” He had a hand on the door handle, as though contemplating when it would be safe to jump out. What the hell?
Something bad was going on here. At the same time, Seamus was a Shifter, and those guys chasing him were ready to shoot him. He’d be safe in a Shiftertown, where hunters didn’t dare go—they weren’t allowed to bother Collared Shifters. But if Seamus refused to go to a Shiftertown, then where?
“I have an idea,” Bree said. “I know a place you can lie low. Not the best choice, but no one will think of looking for you there.”
Seamus didn’t answer. He glanced behind them again, and his body finally relaxed. The headlights were gone.
Bree turned off the extra juice. The truck slowed abruptly, rattling and bumping. Remy had taught her how to drive a rod though, and Bree maneuvered the truck to handle the sudden change in speed. She took the next corner, heading off into the darkness of the back roads.
“Where?” Seamus asked, his voice harsh.
“You’ll see,” Bree answered. “I’m just telling you now, though—you get to explain why you threw away my cell phone while I was talking to my mom.”
Grab the boxed set for just $0.99 to read this story and seven others…
Dark and Damaged: Eight Tortured Heroes of Paranormal Romance is available from Amazon Kindle, Kobo Books, Barnes and Noble Nook, Apple iBooks stores and other retailers. Find the links to your preferred retailer at: http://www.felicityheaton.co.uk/dark-and-damaged/
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