Free Bad Boy Romance: Bad Marine (Bad Boy Military Romance) (Alpha Bad Boy New Adult Contemporary Male Stories) by GP Joyner Page A

outside, as well as utterly distinct and separate from it.
    Everything about her was absolutely mesmerizing.
    The last time the two of them had made love was still as fresh and as crisp in his mind as if it had happened only the day before, and the wound of its being the final time was still as open and as bloody as it had been during the same period of its occurrence.
    It had been the morning after one of his transformations, his body weary and exhausted from a long night of running, and his mind no less weary, reeling as it was from the constant threat of destruction, to himself or others. He always fell into something of a haze of melancholy following the waning of the full moon, recovering slowly from the monstrosity of his transformations, trying to still his mind of the murderous thoughts that had plagued him for nights on end.
    He was off brooding on his own, wishing he had something to occupy his mind or to ease the pain, when as if on cue his medicine came stepping into the clearing. Lily, compassion in her warm eyes as always, her dark skin seeming to radiate into him from even the considerable distance at which they were separated, an expression of concern reading clearly on her face.
    “Are you alright?” she asked, knowing the answer without having needed to ask the question. She, of course, went through the precise same transformations as he did, but having been afflicted with shifterdom since birth it didn't trouble her in nearly the same way as it did him.
    “I- yeah, I'll be fine. I just, um... I always get a bit tired out after the full moon, is all...” He turned away from her, not wanting to maintain eye contact, and wishing desperately that he had a cigarette in his hand right now, simply as a means of occupying himself, and despite the fact that he had never before smoked one in his life.
    Lily, intuitive as ever, saw straight through his self defenses at this. Sometimes it troubled him how damn easily she could do so, as though all the barriers he spent such great care in erecting could keep out anyone but her, giving her the most acute power over him, but overall he knew it was a gift. The one consolation that he'd ever been presented with for his misery as a shifter, the love of this wonderful woman, and her ability, without exception, to make everything better, always.
    He looked up, and suddenly she was standing mere inches away from him, staring intently into his eyes, his reflection staring back at him in those great, dark pools of irises, her breath light, flowing toward him in a soft, sweet mist, her heart beating audibly in her chest, the sound of it like a symphony in his ears. Still, he had to maintain the appearance of strength, to shrug off any semblance of weakness, for her, he told himself, though he knew it was mere pride.
    “I'm fine,” he said, but he didn't turn to look away, and he thought that his heart might wither and die if one day she actually believed him when he told her this, turning away, and leaving him with the stupid, stupid pride of refusing her beautiful, perfect love, the one thing in the world that could revive him from the monthly death of his transformations.
    “Fine is fine,” she said simply enough. “But I want to help you feel better than fine...”
    And true to her word, she proceeded to do precisely that.
    Before he could even think to object, her lips were on his, and as always, Lily was breathing away all of his worries, all of his pain for him, her taste a substance that was as powerful an inebriating substance as the most potent alcoholic substance. His lie was now truth- he really was fine now, and everything in the world was fine, and there was a certain impossibility to the idea that things had ever not been fine.
    Desperately he seized onto Lily's warm body, pressing her into him, her hear melting away the gloom as he felt her naked body dissolving into him, perfect and pure and unlike anything else he could care to imagine. She put her hands