Page 14 of Falling for her Guardian

Which, hello, was exactly why she needed to keep moving and find someone to get her home. Storm was just sexy enough, just sweet enough, to make her forget all the careful walls she’d erected around her heart to keep from falling into a trap with another shifter again.

Hadn’t she sworn off them?

With a frustrated grunt, she shoved the door open and gasped at the blast of frigid air that bit at her cheeks. She’d opened an exterior door. Crap.

“Come to me, I’ll help you.” It was the most peaceful, kind voice she’d ever heard in her life. A combination of her grandfather who’d passed away when she was a child and her first-grade teacher.

Seren stared into the night. The Northern Lights swirled overhead, and beyond the stunning neon were millions of stars against the indigo backdrop. She couldn’t see anyone, but she had the urge to walk out of the building.

She took a step out, the snow crunching under her boot. She shivered and reached for the gloves in her pocket. As she twisted to pull them from the pocket, the hip that she’d been pressing against the door slipped, and the door swung shut before she could stop it.

The handle wouldn’t budge. She slapped her hand against the door a few times but was pretty sure that no one would be able to hear the sound.

Crap.

“I’ll help you. Come to me, sweet one.”

There was that voice again.

She shivered and turned back to the darkness. Something glittered in the distance and she squinted but couldn’t see it anybetter. It was just something shimmery, but she felt drawn to it nonetheless.

Tugging on her cat ears stocking cap that Noelle had crocheted for her the previous winter and her gloves, she buttoned up the front of her coat and trudged forward, the shimmery, glitteringsomethingbeckoning her.

Was she being an idiot?

Probably.

But she couldn’t help herself. She felt compelled to move toward whatever had called her. She glanced over her shoulder toward the building where Storm had taken her to keep her safe. It was a shadow in the darkness now, and an eerie silence was all around her.

The snow was knee-high now, her steps heavy and her skin prickling with the cold.

Why had she left?

Come to me.

Frowning, she kept moving forward until the shimmery, glitteringsomethingmorphed into two men.

She could just barely make them out in the darkness, but she suddenly didn’t feel quite so warm.

One of the men spoke softly, and she felt like he was whispering in her ear.

“Just a few more steps, sweet one.”

“I want to go home,” she said.

“I’ll take you there.”

She stepped once. Twice.

And then she felt resistance for just a moment as she took another step. The moment she pushed through that resistance, she felt all that warmth and safety disappear as if they’d never been there.

There was a scrape of what sounded like a lighter wheel spinning, then a spark and a flame illuminated the face of a man she knew very well from the news.

Jack Frost.

He lit a cigarette and clicked the lid of the lighter closed.

As he pulled on the cigarette, the red glow from the tip lit up his face just enough to make him look like some kind of demon.

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