The Beckoned

By Jaid Black

Wai Ashley has dreamt of Jack Elliot ever since she was a little girl. She knows Jack isn't a real man, yet her dreams are becoming more persistent—and Jack more possessive. En route to a job assignment, a rainstorm forces Wai to seek shelter in a run-down motel. Soon she will discover that Jack is anything but imaginary: He lived over two hundred years ago—and he is demanding that Wai come home to him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jaid Black
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463413906

Jaid Black

Jaid Black is the founder and driving force of Ellora's Cave Publishing, the award-winning online source for erotic literature. She is also the founder and publisher of Lady Jaided, a sexy new magazine for women. Her novella "Hunter's Right" appears in the collection Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, and her novel Deep, Dark & Dangerous is forthcoming from Pocket Books in March 2006. Vistit her on the web at www.jaidblack.com.

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Copyright © 2004 by Jaid Black.

Republished February 2017 & May 8, 2020.

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The Beckoned

By Jaid Black

Prologue

Jack, she breathed out. What are you doing to me?

Wai Ashley awoke on a gasp. In a cold sweat, her dark nipples stabbing against the wet silk of her nightgown, it took her a long moment to come to terms with the fact she had been dreaming.

This wasn’t the first time she’d had the vision. Indeed, she’d been abruptly awoken from the dream of the man who’d haunted her sleep on many an eve these past twenty-six years of her life.

Jack Elliot.

Who was he?

Where was he?

And what did he want with her?

She sighed. You’re being ridiculous, Wai murmured. He didn’t want anything from her because he wasn’t real. Jack Elliot didn’t exist.

She needed to get that fact through her thick skull once and for all. He wasn’t a real man. He was a nighttime hallucination—nothing more, nothing less.

A part of her wished that Jack was more than a passing mirage in a cold, lonely desert night. All these years of dreaming about him and she still knew little of him, though what she did know about her mythical lover more than made up for the parts she didn’t.

Strong. Tall. Tan. Solid muscles. Long, light brown hair with streaks of gold woven through it. Incredible body. And a really huge—

Wai frowned. He didn’t exist. There was no use in dwelling on the made-up physical attributes of a fictitious man. Jack, she had long ago decided, was a figment of her overactive imagination. Perhaps a make-believe friend she’d developed in her less than perfect, and oftentimes abusive, childhood.

The only problem with that theory was that Jack…well, he’d been there with Wai from the crib through womanhood. Warm, protective—almost paternal—from infancy through adolescence. He’d cradled her through all the tears, murmured soothing words to her she hadn’t understood, but that had somehow helped regardless…

Scared all the ghosts inside her away.

Jack Elliot had been her rock in the darkest hours of her childhood—her mental protector. Wai’s drunk of a father could beat her body, but he could never take her mind. Her mother could whip her into a bloody pulp, but she never managed to break Wai’s spirit.

All thanks to her loving, strong, invented protector.

When she’d hit puberty, though, Jack had changed somehow. He wasn’t less a hero—just more a man. A primal, arrogant male who demanded total attention—and absolute obedience. It was almost as if he’d waited for her to grow up so he could claim her as his possession.

More than once since she’d reached puberty, she’d awoken from a violent orgasm courtesy of mythical Jack—just like tonight. He’d leave her gasping and moaning, writhing beneath his knowing hands as she begged for his calloused touch.

She just wished she could stop dreaming about him altogether. Because of Jack and his nocturnal lovemaking in the world of slumber, no real man had ever been able to compare.

Lying back down, Wai pulled the covers tight around her. There was no time to ponder the mythical man her brain had named Jack Elliot. She needed sleep. Tomorrow was a big day. She had waited for this moment ever since she’d decided to go to college. If the