Page 20 of Hunting Pretty

I tried to suck in a breath, but it felt like there was a hand around my throat.

Hestood among the trees. Motionless.

It was my intruder.

His head was tilted to one side. Like he was curious. Like he’d found a toy, a plaything, and he wasn’t sure whether he would mend it. Or whether he liked it better broken.

I couldn’t make out his features. From the high turret, his face was a smear of pale paint on a black palette.

But I knew it was him.

I wasn’t crazy.

He was real.

And he was looking atme.

The unbidden memory of him spearing my pussy with his fingers slammed through me.

Need spread through my belly, radiating out to my limbs.

At the same time, anger flared in my chest, mixing with my lust, spreading through me like wildfire, my pulse pounding so hard it felt like my body might burst.

This bastardtookLiath.

“That’s him!” I pushed back off the sill and raced across the office. “He took Liath.”

“What?” Lisa called out behind me. “Who are you talking about?”

I ignored her as I barged out of the office, taking the stone steps two at a time as I raced down to the ground.

I didn’t even think that I might need a weapon until I tumbled out the side door and ran around the corner of the arts building to where the edge of the woods stood.

My breaths heaved in and out of my lungs and I clung to the side of the cold mossy stone wall, staring at the spot that my intruder stood.

He’d gone.

If he was ever there.

“I’m telling you,” I slammed my palm on the dean’s antique desk, “Liath didn’t run away. Someonetookher.”

Dean McCarthy, the head of Darkmoor college, seemed unaffected, staring back at me from his leather armchair, his fingers templed together in front of his weak chin. The only emotion emanating from him was the slightest purse of his thin lips and the narrowing of his watery eyes.

Damn him. He didn’t believe me.

I turned to the garda commissioner, sitting to my left in a high-backed, ornately carved wooden chair, with one ankle resting on his fleshy knee.

“Youbelieve me, don’t you?”

Commissioner O’Neill cleared his throat and brushed some invisible crumbs off his impeccably pressed uniform studded with shiny gold buttons. “Ms. McKinsey—”

“Ava,” I interrupted, bristling at his formality.

“Right. Ava.” The commissioner smoothed down his white handlebar mustache and spoke slowly as if I was a wild mare he was trying to placate. “I understand that losing a friend is very upsetting but—”

“Stop treating me like I’m some hysterical woman,” I snapped.

“Ava,” Ebony admonished from the other seat next to me.

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