Wicked Beauty: Wicked Inked duet, Book 1

Wicked Beauty © March 2023 by Candace Blevins All rights reserved under United States of America copyright law, and the International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text, including without limitation technologies capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models. This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, organizations, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older. This book is for sale to ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors. Cover design © 2023 Candace Blevins First Edition March 2023 Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. 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Table of Contents Blurb Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Bibliography Only Human Excerpt Chapter One Chapter Two ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Blurb Gavin has perfected the art of being terrifying. His value to Zander lies in his being the junkyard dog — the one who doesn’t merely kill their enemies, but does so in a spectacular fashion. Lauren is about to graduate college and head off into the rest of her life. She and her mom are in Alaska, visiting her mom’s friend, when Lauren ventures off to the local university’s campus on her own. Gavin follows, telling himself he’s keeping an important guest of the coterie safe, but then dislikes the two bears the young woman flirts with, and he runs them off. At first glance, these two souls would seem to be complete opposites, but once they begin talking, it becomes clear how Lauren’s early beginnings in a Chinese orphanage made her ultimately practical, and the two mesh together better than anyone could’ve possibly imagined. The Wicked Inked duet can be read as a stand-alone. Chapter 1 Lauren strolled through the Fairbanks University campus because she was bored and looking for something to do. She loved spending time with her mom, and this had been a fun trip, hanging out with her mom and Kendra, but Lauren wanted to let loose and have some fun of a different kind. She’d been broken up with Wyatt for eight months, and it was time to date again. She’d gone out with a few people, but nothing serious, and she hadn’t had sex with anyone besides Nick, and she’d only seen him over the summer when she’d gone home from Harvard, and then over fall break when he’d come to Cambridge to hang out. Nick was one of her best friends, and a fantastic fuckbuddy, but they just didn’t get to see each other that often. If she was going to have a wild sexual fling, Alaska would be the place to do it. If she did it at Harvard, word would get around, and she didn’t want everyone to know. Or rather, she didn’t want anyone in her theater group to know, because she’d turned nearly all of them down by telling them she was going through an asexual phase, and maybe it wasn’t politically correct to say it, but it’d made most of them back off without damaging their precious little egos. She looked up to the full moon and wondered how the werewolves in Alaska felt about the long nights. It was only four in the evening and dark already. In mid-December, the sun rose before eleven in the morning and set at around two-thirty, which meant the powerful vampires like Kendra were down less than an hour a day, and were outside at two-thirty, if they wanted to be. Lauren wandered into a charming little mom-and-pop coffeeshop, ordered hot tea, and sat to wait for them to bring her teacup and teapot. She caught the eye of two males she sensed were shapeshifters, and she grinned at them. They looked at each other, then back at her, and walked to her table. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing all alone?” one of them asked. “Bears, right?” she asked. One of them leaned down, sniffed, stood back up, and frowned. “You aren’t from around here, are you? The bears live in the woods. College students live in the coffeehouses.” She smiled. “Except when they don’t. The sniff told me all I need to know. Ya’ll can sit and talk if you want. The sniff should’ve told