Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Such a delicious tangle of toxic emotions. For her.
Oh, and the chaser? Underlying all of it was the fact that her beloved Daniel, once so strong, so capable, so well-trained, could have gone after “Kurtis Joel” himself, had he been physically able to do the job. But he was dying, and his disease had made it such that he’d had to send his female up here, to ask his sworn enemy to do something he would have completed quite easily just half a year ago.
The duality of the cruelty was delicious. A two-for-one feast.
And Blade was such a glutton.
Under normal situations.
“So,” he forced himself to prompt as he deliberately regarded his extended hand. “Whatever are you going to do?”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she lifted her chin. “Just tell me what you know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’ll take care of it myself.” Her golden stare was unblinking. “You’re right, we both know what I’m looking for and I don’t need you to do my work for me. Tell me where the man is, that’s all I need from you.”
As she regarded him down the bridge of her nose, he recalled her riveting transformation, that which was lupine becoming human in appearance not with some ghastly series of cracks and pops and drooling à la eighties horror films, but rather with a graceful shift that was molecular ballet as opposed to anatomical car crash.
His sex stirred beneath his robing, thickening.
How could he be erect, though? He did not favor females. And he certainly had never tiptoed into the quicksand of obsession over something as transitory and unimportant as an orgasm. Or twelve. Or twenty.
Be a hero, he told himself. Give her what she—
Blade shook his head. “No.”
“Why are you so heartless?”
“It is my nature,” he heard himself reply. “I am what I am.”
“Well, that’s true for me as well.” She glared at his palm. “And my answer is no. We do not have a deal.”
A blaze of pain went through him, and he found himself swallowing a gasp with a grim surge of masochism.
Naturally, his unparalleled reactions merely piqued his interest further.
He was not a male to whom people said no.
Well, not unless they were answering the question Would you like to die under mine hand this night?
“What are you going to do about your friend,” he asked softly as he lowered his arm. “Let him go?”
“You don’t have to worry about that, do you. And now you’re right. You are never going to see me again.”
As she turned away, he bit out, “Daniel doesn’t know what I do about dear old Kurtis.”
The wolf glanced over her shoulder, her whiskey-colored eyes as cold as January. “My husband can find everything out. He’s very resourceful.”
“He told me that you were not mated—forgive me, I believe ‘married’ is the word.”
“He is my husband—and we will take care of ourselves. I’d thank you for the kind offer, but it wasn’t kind and I am never going to thank you for anything.”
“Do not go after Kurtis Joel yourself,” he said grimly.
“Goodbye—”
“If you want to live long enough to see your husband die, do not go after him.”
The female stared at him for a minute. Then she took three steps forward until they were face to face. She was tall enough so that she didn’t have to tilt back to meet his eyes, and as her upper lip pulled up off her canines on one side, he could sense her wolf coming to the fore, just under her skin.
“You have no idea who I am,” she growled. “And no clue what I will do to protect what is mine.”
Blade’s own fangs descended as his cock positively pounded with need under the drapes of red. “I pray you do not find him.”
“Pray for him, not me.”
With that, she ran off without a sound, ducking into the pines, moving with the kind of coordination that one rarely saw in humans, but that was true of every nimble animal of the forest. In her absence, he exhaled and fought a wave of mourning so great, he felt certain it would knock him off his summit perch and send him tumbling to his death in the valley far, far below.
As devastating as it was to think he would never see her again, there was something worse.
For the first time in his life, he hated that someone thought he was an asshole.
TEN
LYDIA PULLED THE SUV she’d borrowed under the porte cochere and parked it at the stone mansion’s front door again. After cutting the engine, she left the blacked-out box where she’d found it. As she jogged up to the fortified entrance, she was pissed off and still talking to that symphath in her head.
Who knew there were so many different ways to use the word “asshole.”
Courtesy of C.P. Phalen’s state-of-the-art security monitoring, her entry into the house was facilitated by one of the guards, and as he unlocked the bolting mechanism and opened things, she ripped by him—and his frozen, expressionless face reminded her of Blade’s rankling superiority. Which made her want to punch something—