Page 4 of Bombshell

I worried at my lower lip with my teeth, glancing from him to the sisters. Everyone looked encouraging save for Aunt Willow who looked upset as she was gently pushed to the back of the crowd.

“I’ll go,” I finally said, pleased when Alexander—no, I would need to call him father now—whenfatherpulled me in for a tight hug.

Maybe if I went to live with him, then I would finally find the place where I belonged.

Chapter 1

“Effie, Lass, you’re going too fast,” Dallan’s usual Scottish brogue was tight and strangled as he spoke, his face tilted toward the ceiling as the tentacles on his face writhed.

The normally brusque man only ever looked like this when we did this up in my tiny little apartment above the shop, and despite the reason for it, it never got old for me.

“Sorry,” I told him, my own voice high and thready as I pressed myself up against his length and shuddered as the usual lightning bolt sensations zinged up my spine. “But we’ve been putting it off the past couple of weeks and you’ve got a special client this afternoon that requires some nice, fresh enchanted ink.”

“Ithasbeen a while,” Dallan grumbled, his fingers digging into my thighs as he pushed up the skirt of the dress I hadn’t bothered to take off earlier to get a better look at where our bodies

were connected. “But that’s exactly why I want you to take your time.”

Our relationship definitely wasn’t the typical one a business owner should have with his residentbookkeeper-slash-witch, but it was one that kept our shop full of supernatural creatures looking to get inked up by our artists.

Before meeting me—and for about a decade afterward—Dallan made do with using the same ink that humans used with magical tattoo tools that were enchanted by a witch much older and skilled than me.

But one night, after far too much to drink, I’d asked him why he never considered using his own ink.

The Cthulhu race was rare and upon meeting him when I was seventeen years old, I’d scoured through every resource I could find about his species. While there wasn’t much to find, there had been information about his ink and its special properties. So I’d eventually risked it and brought up using it with him.

At first he’d refused to even consider the idea and it was months later that I learned that the reason he refused to let me use the ink was, well, because of the extraction process.

“Eff—” Dallan began as I lifted my hips and notched the thick head of Dallan’s cock at my entrance and began to bear down, holding in my own groan of pleasure as his ribbed length filled me.

Once I was fully seated, I glanced up at his face, my eyes going to the steadily leaking black ink that was coming from the place just underneath his jaw—normally hidden by the many tentacles on his face.

“You’re already letting out this much?” I couldn’t help but tease, reaching over to the table next to the chair we usually used. On it were several empty glass vials and I snatched two up,bringing them to the source of the dribbling ink, pleased that we’d probably get enough to last us the rest of the month if not two months.

“It’s been a minute, Lass,” Dallan grumbled impatiently as his hips jerked up to meet mine, nearly making me drop the vials I was holding.

It turns out that ink extraction with a Cthulhu can only occur during high emotion situations—fear, anger, and well, lust were some of the easiest ways to get his ink glands to express and give up the gold.

Scaring Dallan was out of the question—I wasn’t sure if the man was scared of anything—and anger? Let’s just say that while he wasn’t quick to it, the handful of times I’d seen him truly angry was not something I cared to repeat.

So, after gathering up my courage and giving in to the tiny crush I’d been nursing since the Cthulhu had pulled me off of the streets a decade earlier, I suggested a business-with-benefits relationship.

I would help him extract the ink with no strings attached and he would let me use it to practice my magic.

Somehow, he agreed to it. I thought for sure he would have given me a resounding Scottish‘feck no,’but when I brought it up he gave me a strange look before tentatively agreeing only as long as his ink was useful for business.

And, boy, was it.

Dallan’s ink, enchanted by yours truly, made the tattoos more vibrant, permanent and allowed us to tattoo and piercea larger range of monsters than ever before. Because of it, supes came from all over the world to get inked by our artists and it was largely thanks to the ink that I was currently collecting from the man underneath me.

“We’ll have to make sure not to wait so long next time,” I told him, absentmindedly rolling my hips as I switched out the vials for two more. I tried to ignore the tingling sensation that the motion brought and as always, Dallan refused to let me.

Rough fingers slid up into my dress and I cursed inwardly as he cupped both of my breasts before giving my nipples a pinch. I should have worn a dress that didn’t stretch so easily.

This was the same song and dance we’d been doing for nearly forty years, but even then it never got old.

I would pretend that I didn’t feel anything, that what we were doing was strictly clinical—just business—and Dallan would do his utmost to prove me wrong.

It was even harder than usual today because wehadbeen putting it off. So every twist of his fingers and jerk of his hips nearly sent my eyes rolling back in my head as I tried to focus on the task at hand.

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