A Twitch of Tail Read Online Free Page A

up with a queen during her heat, so the queen was allowed to create a harem of unmated males who would mate with her once the king had taken her first and then once each day to ensure that his seed would take in her belly.  The males in the harem were supposed to use condoms to ensure that any cub born belonged only to the king.
    It was four years ago when the queen went into her heat and called for her harem after she had sex with the king.  As it had been in the past, the harem joined her in her room, and she chose the order in which the males would service her.  When Tahlon was a young man, he’d thought it was an honor to be chosen for the harem.  He remembered how proud he’d been and how he’d wanted to be the best lover she’d ever had.  But as time went by, it became less of an honor and more of a chore.  There were nine males in the harem, including Melo.  The queen, tall and lithe, with long, golden hair and ice blue eyes, lay on the bed in her private chambers, her bare body spread out on red satin sheets like a goddess.  She called for a male named Jorah to join her on the bed.  Jorah stripped from the white cotton pants they all wore during the heat-spell and opened the small drawer of a side table where mating supplies were kept.
    Jorah raised his head.  “My Queen?  There are no condoms in the supply drawer.”
    One of the other males offered to get some from his own home, but the queen shushed them all with a snarl.  “No more condoms.  My mate has been unable to plant his seed and give me a child.  This heat I will bear a cub.”  She arched her back, spreading her legs wide.  “It will be our harem secret, and the king will never know.”
    Tahlon remembered how Melo had looked at him, with worry in his eyes.  And when the queen had called for Melo to join her several hours later, when he got up from the bed, Tahlon could not help but notice that Melo’s cock was still hard.  He hadn’t come, and the queen had been so lost to her own pleasure that she hadn’t noticed that Melo had merely acted as if he had.
    Tahlon was called next, and as they passed by, Melo had shaken his head at him, just slightly, and Tahlon knew that Melo was trying to warn him.  Unease settled in his stomach as he mounted the queen, and he strove to control his body and managed to hold off his own orgasm.  When he was called into her bed again and again during the heat, he never came inside her, following Melo’s lead.  They only spoke of it once after the heat, when Melo said that he didn’t think anything good could come from keeping a secret from the king.
    The queen became pregnant during her heat, and when the cub was born seven months later, it wasn’t a fair-haired cub like the king and queen, but a dark-skinned child with coal black hair and brown eyes.  The king slaughtered the child as soon as he laid eyes on it, and sought out Rafael, the only dark-skinned male in the ambush, killing him as well.  The queen had pretended to be surprised by the color of the cub’s skin and had claimed that she was tricked by Rafael.  Melo had been shaken to the core by what happened; all the males had been.  Melo decided to leave then, to join up with the tiger ambush in Whispering Creek.  He’d begged Tahlon to come, but the queen had convinced him to stay.  Instead of taking a risk of fathering a cub with the queen and watching it potentially be killed by the king, he took measures to ensure that during the next heat, he would not bear a cub on her.  He’d taken a form of birth control that worked on male tigers, made up of herbs and minerals.  And it had worked.  He wasn’t the only one who took it.  All the males in the harem did, unwilling to take the risk.
     Melo joined him on the porch and they stood in the afternoon silence, both of them staring into the woods.  Melo had opened his home to Tahlon without question.  Tahlon knew that Melo wondered what had happened to change his mind, but