Page 73 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
His eyes drank her in, her breasts and hips and thighs, all so softly rounded, all so lushly feminine.
“As you wish, dear lady,” he drawled. He pulled the covers away from his body in one long, slithering rustle of fabric, revealing his naked body, the flat, hard muscles of his abdomen, his unabashed, impossible-to-ignore erection.
She blanched and yanked the sheet away from the bed with a hard pull, then wrapped herself in it, leaving nothing visible of her body save one bare forearm and her forehead and eyes, which blinked at him, fast and startled like a baby bird’s.
“Not that!” came the squeak of her voice through the sheet.
He lay back against the mattress with his fingers laced behind his head, a wicked smile lazing across his handsome face. The morning light gleamed in molten streamers across his chest. He crossed his ankles and slanted her a look of mock distress. “It grieves me to hear you find the sight of my naked body so distasteful, love. I rather think I might cry.”
“I meant the forest! I meant how to Shift to a panther!”
His body drew down to complete stillness at this. His eyes grew flat and dark, the smile vanished from his face. He sat up, ramrod straight, planted his feet on the floor and gripped the edge of the mattress. His legs were spread wide open, his stiff member jutted up to push against the reticulated muscles of his belly.
She looked away. His lack of self-consciousness, the perfect ease in which he inhabited his skin, struck her as more viscerally appealing than anything else she had seen of him so far. He exuded heat and untamed power, he was lithe and beautiful and unfathomable, he was utterly enticing and charismatic without one ounce of effort.
Yet she knew in her heart, for all his beauty and refinement and the poetry of his words, there lived beneath a primal creature, poised to pounce. A creature that had had a hand in her father’s death.
She could never allow herself to be drawn into his world, no matter how skillfully he spoke words like my beautiful girl and home and tell me you’re mine.
It seemed a very long time before he spoke. The room was still and cool around them.
“What you said last night,” he began, his tone dark and controlled, “in front of the Assembly, about Shifting at ten years old.”
Her gaze was drawn back to the startling, feral beauty of his face. A crackle of electricity fluttered over her skin. “Yes?”
“That was the truth, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,” she snapped, failing to keep the affront from her voice. The sheet slipped down to her neck. She clutched at it with stiff fingers, drew it back around her throat.
He only stared at her, gripping the edge of the mattress with those long fingers that had stroked her only moments before, and narrowed his eyes.
“And what else?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her lips flattened to a thin, stubborn line. She raised her chin.
“I mean,” he said, with that same narrowed, assessing look, “that if you have been Shifting since you were ten years old—and successfully hiding that fact from everyone around you, including our scouts—you are, in all likelihood, capable of all manner of interesting tricks. I’d like to know what they are.”
She ground her teeth together. Don’t let him bait you! Don’t let him win!
“I honestly have no idea what you are talking about,” she said, plucking at the sheet to wrap it more securely around her body. “But if you prefer not to accompany me into the forest so I can try to Shift into something more substantial than a wisp of air, suit yourself.”
She began to march toward the windows with her head held high, the sheet billowing out behind her like the train of a wedding gown. He stood quickly from the bed, strode over to her, and gripped her arm.
She turned to him, startled, and was instantly snared in the heat of his eyes. The slanting light from the windows turned them a pale, clear jade.
“You can trust me, Jenna,” he said. His voice was surprisingly soft for all the hard, unyielding edges in his face. “In spite of what you may think, I do have your best interests at heart. If there is more to this story than you are telling us, if there is anything else you are hiding from me, from the Assembly, I need to know it now. You are out of danger from them now, but your place in the colony will not be secured until we establish exactly what you are capable—”
Jenna removed her arm from Leander’s grasp with as much dignity as she could muster, dressed only in a ridiculous, trailing sheet, shaking from head to toe with outrage, with a naked and resplendent man by her side.
“There is no securing me, Leander. Not here, not anywhere else. I told you last night, I won’t be locked up. I won’t be your prisoner.”
They squared off to face each other, unsmiling.
“Yes,” he said. “I recall. But you have apparently forgotten what I told you last night.”
But she hadn’t forgotten. She was acutely aware that his promise to let her go was the one thing that had let all her fear and hesitation melt away. His promise was the one thing that had allowed her to surrender to the moment, to the desire that sang through her blood and shortened her breath and ate through her veins like poison. But now in the cold light of day the certainty of last night seemed foolish, wishful thinking, and was replaced by doubt.
“You would really do that?” The memory of her meeting with the Assembly brought the metallic bite of anger to the back of her throat. “With all your rules and restrictions and secrets, you would let me just walk back out into the world, back to my old life? When no one else can leave Sommerley without permission from you? When even Morgan, an Assembly member, can’t be free to live her life as she pleases because she’s a woman?”
