Page 156 of Shadowblood Souls
Jacob is staring at me with his normally cool eyes searing, as if he’s on the verge of marching across the room and peeling the towel right off me. I’m torn between the conflicting desires to recoil and to welcome that hunger.
Zian makes a rough noise and jerks his head to the side.
Dominic clears his throat, his tan cheeks gone ruddy, and tears his gaze away to look at the other guys again. “It seems like at least in this city, the monsters communicate with each other. Look out for each other.”
Yes, thank God, let’s focus on something other than my state of undress.
I nod. “I don’t think it’d be a very good idea to try to approach any others around here. I don’t know what abilities that guy had, but he felt like he had alot.”
“Yeah.” Zian frowns at the spot where the purple shadowkind was floating, still keeping his eyes carefully averted from me. “Do you think we should believe what he said about that guy in Miami?”
Jacob seems to shake himself out of a trance. He grimaces. “He just wanted to get rid of us.”
“He was pretty specific about it,” Andreas puts in, and pauses. “I mean, maybe this Rollick monster—or shadowkind or whatever—is actually a dude who eats humans for breakfast and our new purple friend figured that was an easy way to eliminate us for good, but I’m pretty sure a Rollick with a hotel in Miami actually exists.”
“Did you see anything in his memories about that?” I ask.
Andreas shakes his head. “There were some dark, murky moments that I couldn’t make much sense of, and some where he just appeared to be watching people around the city. One time when he beat up a smaller, creepy-looking dude for reasons I don’t know. Nothing very useful. I didn’t have much time.”
“That’s okay,” Jacob says. “We can look up hotels in Miami, see if we can figure out which place someone named Rollick owns before we head all the way down there.”
Dominic exhales with apparent relief. “Yeah. Get all the information before we make a decision.”
Jacob cuts his gaze back toward me, with another flare of heat that flushes my skin. “And you’d better go finish your bath, Wildcat.”
He says it mildly enough. But maybe because of that show of self-control combined with his obvious hunger and his use of my old, fond nickname, an unwelcome ache forms between my thighs.
Yes, I had better.
I whirl toward the stairs. “I’ll be out quick to hear what you’ve dug up.”
Then I flee from the longing that tugs at me from each of my men—and the answering pang rising up inside me.
Ten
Riva
There’s something inexplicably satisfying about twisting half a lemon around the notched peak of a juicer. Feeling the ridges dig into the pulpy flesh against the pressure of my fingers, watching the glass base fill with pale yellow juice.
It makes me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something, which isn’t a sensation I’ve had much in the past couple of days.
Andreas watches from where he’s nursing a mug of coffee at the apartment’s small dining table. “Had a craving you couldn’t resist?” he asks in a lightly teasing tone.
I make a face at him. “I had to take advantage of the equipment while I have it. No motel is going to have a juicer. And I’ve been carrying around that bag of lemons since The Middle of Nowhere, Manitoba.”
Zian stirs at the other side of the table, where he’s been gulping down breakfast sausages—another benefit of having a proper kitchen for once. “We don’t know for sure that we’re leaving today, do we?”
His gaze slides to Jacob, who’s sitting on the sofa across from the kitchen with Engel’s laptop propped open on his knees, now connected to the apartment’s Wi-Fi. I turn toward the kettle that’s just started to whistle.
We took shifts all night keeping watch in case the big purple dude decided to encourage us to leave town more forcefully. The guys tried to insist that I should sleep straight through until I pointed out that they weren’t going to convince me that they trust me now by refusing to let me do my bit to protect us.
But I’m not sure how much Jacob slept at all, even when it wasn’t his shift. He stayed up into the wee hours in the same pose he’s in now.
When it was my turn on watch, he made a point of going into the bedroom he’s sharing with Dominic, but I thought I heard keys clicking when I came back up to get more sleep.
As I pour the hot water into a measuring cup, he sighs. “I haven’t been able to findanythingabout a person—or whatever he is—named Rollick in Miami. Or the whole state of Florida either.”
“Maybe it’s time for some fresh eyes,” Andreas suggests mildly. “Dominic got pretty comfortable with that computer—he could?—”
