Page 7 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
A static that increased every time she let herself think about him.
Yet she couldn’t get him out of her mind. The stranger with the glossy fringe of ebony hair, the face of a Botticelli angel, the eyes of a hungry wolf.
Something about him seemed so familiar. Though it had been but a glance before she’d passed out, she felt something leap against her skin under the weight of his stare, as if an unknown beast strained sinew and muscle, hungry to surface.
In that moment their eyes met, she suddenly felt like...an animal, awakening.
Jenna stretched her legs out and curled her toes over the edge of the tub, took a deep breath, and closed her eyes, shutting out the candlelit bathroom with its mirrored vanity, marbled counter, and enclosed glass shower. She shook her head to dispel the memory of his face, burning bright as a new penny under her closed lids.
He was just another stranger on the street. The strange electric charge couldn’t possibly have come from him. Could she have suffered heat stroke? She chewed on her lower lip and considered it. The symptoms were the same: dizziness, pounding heart, clammy skin, fainting.
But she was never affected by the heat. She never got sick or fainted or felt dizzy. She’d never even had a cavity, for God’s sake!
So she did what she always did when confronted with something she couldn’t figure out: she put it out of her mind. She sank down farther into the warm, perfumed water and thought about where she was going to do her grocery shopping from now on.
The bathroom was the one place she’d invested money to upgrade her tiny one-bedroom apartment, and it had been money well spent. The plumbing, though, she thought as a trickle of water from the faucet ran in a chilly sluice over her left big toe. She was going to have to talk to Saul about the plumbing.
The building was over fifty years old, done in a poorly executed art deco style, and had what her landlord Saul referred to as “character.” The faucets dripped, the toilet ran, the kitchen cabinets stuck, the walls were thin as paper. She had become overly familiar with her next-door neighbors’ personal problems.
Still, she loved it. It was home, and a home was what she most desperately needed after her mother died.
It wasn’t a shock, her mother’s early death. No one survived long drinking as much alcohol as she did. But her death had left Jenna, at eighteen years old, with no one, not a single soul in the world to call family. Once her father vanished when she was ten, her mother had adamantly refused to even speak his name.
Jenna had only the most fleeting memories of him. Tall and dark, handsome, somber, mysterious. And the memory of his smell was burned into her mind. He carried the cool scent of night on his skin no matter the time of day.
Her mother had no siblings, her grandparents were long dead...there was simply no one.
College was out of the question. Her mother left her with no money, nothing other than an upside-down mortgage on a small bungalow in the Valley, a few pieces of jewelry, and furniture bought from a secondhand store. Jenna sold it all and used what little money she had left as a down payment on her first month’s rent on this apartment.
She’d made her way. And knowing she could survive alone, after the chaos of her childhood, after all the unanswered questions about why she was so different from everyone else, there was nothing she would allow herself to be afraid of.
Except, maybe, what happened today. Which she wasn’t thinking about.
“Yoo-hoo, Jeennnaaaaa! It’s your fairy godmother!”
Jenna smiled and opened her eyes to the singsong warbling of her neighbor, Mrs. Colfax, calling through the open patio door.
“In here!” Jenna shouted, then hauled herself out of the bath. Bubbles slid in languorous sheets down her naked body. She set her glass of champagne down on the counter and wrapped herself in the lush white embrace of a Turkish cotton towel.
Two short raps on the thin bathroom door, then the elegantly coiffed blonde head of Mrs. Colfax popped through.
“You’re taking a bath? In this heat? My dear, are you mad?” Mrs. Colfax asked, one perfectly arched eyebrow raised.
She’d been an actress in her youth, beautiful though not particularly talented, and retained both the elocution and melodrama of the theater in her speech.
“That is debatable,” Jenna said. She gestured toward the fizzing champagne. “But I have a headache, so I thought a bath and a little bubbly would help.”
“Ah, yes,” Mrs. Colfax agreed and swung the door open to invade the bathroom with her larger-than-life persona.
She wore one of her signature Chanel suits—this one a powder blue—Valentino patent d’Orsay pumps, a double strand of pearls, and three-hundred-dollar French perfume that smelled of rare orchids and sex. She had seduced, wed, and divorced a succession of wealthy men and made efficient use of them—and of their money. She lived in a sprawling, modern mansion next door that towered over Jenna’s tiny apartment complex like a glass Goliath.
“Cristal will do wonders for one’s level of happiness and good health,” Mrs. Colfax added. “I’m glad to see you developing a taste for something more refined than that hideous whole milk you drink.”
Jenna reached for another towel to wrap around her head. “You realize there’s a reason they say milk does a body good, right? Besides, it’s more affordable than champagne. Especially the ones you drink.”
“Having money for French champagne is far more important than having money for the rent, my dear, never forget that,” Mrs. Colfax shot back. “By the way, I ordered the filet from Boa for dinner, darling, I hope you don’t mind. I’ll be in New York for your birthday next week and thought we could celebrate tonight, since you don’t have to work?”
Filet mignon, Jenna thought. Heaven on a plate.
