Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 84864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84864 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 424(@200wpm)___ 339(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
My chest heaved as I caught my breath, cradling her against my chest.
“That was…” I didn’t have the words.
“Mmmm,” she replied.
I grinned, and brushed her hair back from her face so I could see those gorgeous eyes.
Shit. My stomach hit the floor. She was pale. Too pale. Even her lips were a dusky hue.
Acting on instinct, I lifted my wrist and sliced into it with my fang, then lifted it to her mouth. “Drink,” I ordered, panic rising. “Please, Grace.”
She blinked, but did as I ordered, closing her eyes and drawing from my wrist.
Fuck. It was wrong to feed her, but I’d taken too much, and knowing that it was my blood coursing through her veins had my dick already hardening again.
Once she’d taken enough, I pulled my wrist away and licked over the wound as she watched me quietly.
“I’ve never seen you this quiet,” I said, stroking my hand down her face, her eyes luminous in the moonlight coming through the window. What the hell was wrong with me? I couldn't seem to stop touching her.
“I think you fucked me speechless.” She grinned, but I heard the slight raspiness in her voice, and the questions in her eyes? I wasn’t ready to answer those.
“I think I fucked you hoarse.” I leaned in and brushed my lips across her throat, ghosting a caress across the tiny pinpricks I’d fed from. “Wait here.”
A kiss later, I rolled out of bed and pulled on my leather pants while she watched, biting her lower lip. It took everything I had not to crawl back into that bed and suck that lip into my mouth. But she was thirsty. I heard it in her voice, somehow…felt it, too.
Fucking weird, but okay.
I grabbed a bottle of water from her refrigerator and then headed back upstairs, reveling in the peace, the relative quiet in my head.
My instincts had finally stopped screaming at me with incessant demand. The predator inside me seemed content to sit back and watch as I carried water to my woman, satisfied that she was being provided for. What the hell? I rubbed at my chest absentmindedly as I headed down the hall to her bedroom.
I think I preferred my instincts shouting at me over whatever was going on inside me right now.
I found Grace in bed, a thigh-high silk robe wrapped around her delicious curves as she sat back on her heels, waiting for me.
“You look delicious.” I closed her bedroom door the way she liked and sat on the edge of the bed, handing her the water.
“I was thinking the same thing about you.” Her gaze raked down my naked chest as she took a drink.
Everything happened at once.
Glass shattered as her bedroom window exploded. The bedroom door splintered and two men stormed in. A bullet hit the wall above Grace’s headboard only inches from the top of her head.
The Sons had found me.
Moving with preternatural speed, I grabbed my dagger off the nightstand and spun, slicing open the throats of the intruders in one smooth motion before throwing my hands out, stopping time around us and forcing the world into a standstill.
Fuck, I should have left one of them alive for questioning.
“What the—”
“Don’t move!” I ordered her. Rage pounded through my veins, instant and lethal.
Protect, my instincts demanded as I armed myself with every weapon I’d brought.
No shit. I turned toward Grace and a growl ripped from my throat. Not only did glass surround her, inches from cutting into her smooth skin, but there was a red laser dot on her forehead. The next shot could kill her when time started again.
The fuck it will.
“Come here.” I held out my hand. I had to get her out of here, now.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, taking my hand and moving sideways off the bed, out of the path of the glass, her dainty feet landing beside mine.
“There are men who hunt us,” I explained it as simply as I could, dropping Grace’s hand and cursing myself with every step I took toward the men. “They’re hunting me.” I brought this on her.
The men looked to be in their mid-twenties, dressed in hundreds of dollars in tactical gear and carrying expensive assault rifles. I sniffed the air. Assault rifles with Night Thistle bullets.
Fuck.
Their blood hadn’t yet spilled, but the cuts through their throats would see to that once I restarted time. A folded slip of paper stuck out of the first man’s pocket, and I took it, careful not to touch him so time didn’t start up again.
“They’re here to kill you?” Grace asked, her voice trembling behind me as I flattened the paper, my stomach hitting the floor at the list written there.
“No,” I whispered as wrath unfurled throughout my body, stiffening my muscles at the first person on the list.
Grace’s name.