Lightning Strikes: Vol 1 PRINT

Excerpt From: The Viking in my Bed

Oh. That felt just toooo good.

Warm lips on my sweet spot. A lot of guys had made the mistake of thinking my sweet spot was in the obvious location, but I have a thing for having my right armpit licked and suckled, right over this little mole.

A soft beard scraped my skin with just the right amount of pressure. I shivered, arching my body.

I was aware I was close to waking up, like a boat about to bump onto a beach, but the hand stroking my bare chest felt so good I didn’t want to. What was good about Thursday? Thursday was rain, midterms, coffee with Candy, and maybe I’d be able to squeeze in an hour boarding. Maybe.

Thursday was not vivid blue eyes staring into mine. A wide, delighted smile, like a kid’s smile. Plump ribbons of braided blond hair that framed a tanned face. Miles of muscle that I was...stroking?

I sat up.

"Good. This will be better when you’re awake, yes, seiðmaðr?" a heavily accented voice boomed.

He was so loud I covered my ears. The guy on top of me had a chest like a fog horn.

"What are you doing?" I squeaked.

I was naked. Since I’d moved into college residence, I could sleep naked, which saved a lot of time on laundry. My two other roommates were guys, so it’s not like I was going to offend their tender sensibilities.

"I am making love to you, of course," the gigantic blond bellowed.

"Stop shouting!" I yelled.

He frowned, looking like a puzzled golden retriever. "You shouted."

"I live here!" I said with, I have to admit, very little logic. "Listen, Conan, can you get off me?"

He was built like Arnie and he was squishing my legs into my bed. This had to be a set up. I wondered who wanted to yank my, uh, tail—which was hard enough to wag right now.

But so was Conan’s.

"I am not called Conan," he told me stiffly.

"Uh huh. So how much did my friends pay you?" He pushed back the blankets. His name might not be Conan, but if they made a rubber to fit his dick, it would be Conan-sized. I stared, my mouth watering.

Focus, I scolded myself. Just because he has the kind of cock I’d love to suck, I mean love, going down as far as I could on the monster and holding those big rocks and squeezing them...

Right, focus. I got out of bed and grabbed some briefs off the back of a chair.

Conan got out of bed and stood there, hands on his hips, as naked as Michelangelo’s David.

"Where’d you put your clothes?" I looked around, then sniffed. "Do you smell smoke?"

"You ask a lot of questions," he noted.

"Is that a new kind of weed? What is that smell?" Had I left the boiler plate on again? Geez. It smelled like scorched earth in here. It hadn’t been that long since I’d done the laundry.

"It is the mark of my passage to this world," Conan said.

Mark. I saw the hardwood floor was scuffed up. There was a burn on my fake wood wall and a seared heap of cloth that was a weird red colour. I stared at the wool, trying to figure out why it looked both familiar and strange. Oh, it had been dyed with raw madder. I’d helped Mom mix that natural dye for her weaving projects. I picked up the cloth, seeing fragments of a round neckline and cuffs with metal links featuring a snarling animal face. Wow. Mom would be really into this. I was about to ask Conan where he got the shirt when I noticed something else...

"Oh no, my graphic!" The new knot design I’d finished the night before was scorched, the paper curled. Damn. I stuffed it carefully in my messenger bag. Maybe I could photocopy the design. I wanted to show it to my prof later today.

I looked at the guy I’d woken up with.

He was very tall, towering over me. He wore a neatly trimmed dark blond beard. On either side of his face were golden braids, though the rest of his hair was long and free.

He was gorgeous, but obviously obsessed with some kind of role-playing. Figures there’d be something wrong with him since I’d woken up with him. I’d always picked the lemons in the barrel.

But he had a sweet smile.

And I had class in less than an hour.

I tossed more of my clothing, looking for a clean T-shirt. I found one with palm trees and camels my Mom had snagged for me on a trip to Cairo. It was clean. Now I needed my favourite pair of stonewashed jeans.

Conan was still standing there, glowering at me like I was a servant boy who’d forgotten to dress his royal highness.

"Okay," I said. "I gotta get to class. It was real funny." I swallowed. How he got me so hard, so excited. How he felt covering me. "Ha ha. Now go, your Lordship."

"I am Freyr Grímsson," he continued, in a language I didn’t understand. Maybe it was Middle-earth. I found my jeans.

"There’s coffee and, I think, some left over pizza in the fridge," I told him. "Bye."

I sneaked one last look at him over my shoulder as I snagged my backpack.

He took my breath away. Glowing golden skin, glowering at me out of electric-blue eyes, hands on his corded hips, the kind of hips with dimples created by muscles. He had scars on his body too. Probably some kind of makeup to go with his persona. His cock hung long from a thatch of blond hair almost as bright as the gold on his head. Holy geez. I gave it a wistful glance and then slammed the door behind me.

Excerpt From: The Alien in My Kitchen

"What now?" I asked my best friend, Esmeralda Marks, EZ for short. She’d been calling me nonstop all afternoon. You’d think I’d never got the flu before. Okay, not just the flu, but some kind of modified flu-bomb that was genetically engineered to bring me down and make me beg.

"Mitchell Blake, don’t you dare hang up!" she screeched.

"Ouch! Don’t yell!" I thrust the BlackBerry away from my face. At her volume, I decided I was safer putting it on speaker and placing it on the kitchen counter of my swanky dirty-dish-buried kitchen.

"Mitch, I’m serious."

Something in her tone caught my muzzy attention. I dumped a load of plates into the soapy water. Since I was stuck missing classes today because I was still sick, I figured I should catch up on the chores my experiments usually eclipsed.

"You’re serious..." I prompted, my gut twisting when I heard her audible swallow on the phone. "You aren’t pregnant, are you?" She was my best friend, and despite her nickname, EZ, she wasn’t. But her voice was all about bad news.

"No, I’m not pregnant. Why would you think that?" She sounded cross.

"I don’t know. But if you were, we could raise the kid together. I could be the gay-best-friend daddy. It’d be cool. They’d make a movie—you know, showing us struggling with diapers and baby poop and going on dates with the wrong people but then, because it’s Hollywood, I’d suddenly realise I was straight and we’d wind up together."

She laughed. "Mitch, you are such a weird guy."

"Hey, it’s my pitch for the day."

"You haven’t been watching the news?"

I blinked, washing out a serving bowl. I had no memory of using it to serve anything to company. I probably had it for instant noodles when I’d run out of clean plates. "Nope. News free. I was busy with this new experiment, calculating the velocity of mould growing on rocks when speeding through a vacuum."

"Uh-huh." Her voice said she was already tuning me out. "Okay, this is more important than your nutty inventions. Mitch, Jaden is dead."

"Jaden is dead," I repeated.

Heavy silence fell like a cloak.

"Uh, who is Jaden?"

"Mitch! Goddess save me, how can you ask me that?"

I was chewing my fingernail. When I caught myself, I frowned and stopped. Social interaction often was the stimulus for this kind of reaction. It’s partly why I avoided it.

"Because I don’t know who he is?"

"You had a super crush on him, remember?"

I sneezed and sneezed again. When I’d finished my fit, I tried to bring the sluggish gears in my brain around to Jaden. "I did?"

"Oh, Goddess help me," she muttered. "Keep me from being best friends with a geeky super genius who will probably invent hyperspace-capable starships but can’t keep the important stuff in his head."

"Hyperspace-capable starships aren’t important?"

"Jaden Ross, the gorgeous, tall, dark and dangerous guy with the motorcycle and the tats. He was killed swerving to avoid a litter of kittens on the freeway into campus."

"Oh." I decided it was better not to say it seemed like a very worthy way to go. "Are they going to name one of the kittens after him?"

EZ laughed and then she growled, as if she was pissed at me for making her laugh. I did that often, sometimes for reasons that escaped me. But I was lucky I was entertaining because she was one of my only friends. Being a freak genius inventor was on the isolating side.

"That’s terrible, Mitch."

"I didn’t know this guy, EZ."

"You did know him. You stared at him all the time in the cafeteria."

"I stare at a lot of people." Usually while I’m calculating elaborate math problems. It had got me in trouble sometimes. I don’t know why, but people misunderstand.

"He was the one who was a ringer for Mr Darcy if he’d lived in modern times."

EZ had a major crush on Mr Darcy.

"He looked a little like the guy in the most recent Pride and Prejudice movie—Matthew Macfadyen."

"I liked Colin Firth’s Darcy." I tried to picture Jaden. I seemed to remember a tattoo on silky golden skin hinted at through a white T-shirt. "He wore a lot of black?"

"Yes. He was a literature major. I think they have to wear black."

"Uh-huh..." I shrugged. "I’m really sorry he’s dead."

She gusted out a sigh. "Me too. I thought you’d finally met someone special enough to knock you out of your lonely tower."

"I use a spare room for my experiments, not a tower," I said. It’s why I’d rented this dumpy house. It was expensive, but I could manage it with the patents I had so far accumulated. And I needed the room.

"A spare bedroom with beeping electrodes and a weird light show."

I had to admit there was a certain Dr Frankenstein resemblance, but why fight with a classic? And all the equipment served a logical purpose.

"Well, I’m sorry the guy is dead, but I don’t see why that means you have to call me nonstop," I grumbled.

EZ sighed. "Another chance at love bites the dust."

"I don’t think I’m meant for love. And anyway, it’s a myth. It’s a molecular reaction stimulated by the impulse to procreate. In my case, that’s a dead-end street."