Page 74 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
Leander’s face remained neutral, not a muscle in his face or body moved. But his eyes, oh, how his eyes burned straight down into her soul with such a fierce blaze of anger she nearly took a step back.
“Yes,” he replied, his voice deadly soft. “I would.”
She raised her chin another fraction of an inch, unwilling to be intimidated. “I don’t think they would let you.”
He gazed back at her, inscrutable and terribly beautiful, as magnificent and untamed as the vast black forest that stretched beyond the windows into infinity.
“I am the Alpha of this colony, Jenna. They don’t allow me anything. I do as I please.”
“And if there’s a price to pay?” she asked, knowing there would be. Not even he would be exempt from the Law. Her father certainly wasn’t.
His voice dropped and he said, “Then I will pay it.”
She chewed the inside of her lip, unsure of what to say next. The sky outside the windows was going from pale gray to pewter, a silver dawn turning dark. Clouds heavy with rain floated on the horizon, waiting to drop their bounty of water to the trees and mountains and plains below. It looked cool and dewy and inviting, when everything in this room suddenly seemed so densely close and heated and filled with nothing but him.
“I came here for answers,” she finally managed, after an endless, aching moment. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” She cleared her throat after a tickle made her voice crack. “That’s what’s most important to me. Finding out...who I am. Filling in all those missing holes in my past.”
His eyes softened. He reached up and twisted a strand
of her hair between his fingers. “I’m here to help you, Jenna, but you’re keeping me at a distinct disadvantage if you don’t tell me everything.”
He lifted the lock of hair and stroked it over the slope of her cheek, down the curve of her neck. She shivered as he trailed it over the swell of her breasts, his gaze dropping to follow the path.
“Yet I have to think,” he said, his voice lowered to a husky whisper, “that can’t be the only reason you came here.” He brought his gaze back to her face, dropped the strand of hair from his fingers, and lifted his hand to brush her cheek with his knuckles.
She felt the heat bloom over her cheeks under the weight of his frank, knowing look.
“Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” she said frostily, angered by his arrogant assumption. She’d had just about enough of everyone’s assumptions about her and Leander.
“Of course that’s the reason I came here.” She turned away, clenching her fingers so hard around the edge of the sheet it pinched and puckered in her fist. “This was just,” she said, waving a hand to indicate the two of them, the sudden, stifling heat of the room, the disarray of the unmade bed, “an unfortunate accident.”
He dropped his hand to his side. It must have been her imagination that made the temperature in the room seem to drop several degrees. She chanced a look in his direction. The narrow, assessing look was back again.
“I see.”
He turned his head, shifted his gaze toward the misted morning outside the windows. She was struck again by the sculpted, arresting planes of his face, the full, solemn mouth, the curve of long lashes so pure and perfect with the glimmering fairy-light catching the tips and turning them to silver.
He looked, she thought with a shiver crawling up her spine, exactly like what he was.
Dark magic.
Magnetic and dangerous and beguiling. Capable of anything.
“Well then,” he said through thinned lips, “if it’s only answers you’re after...”
He slid away from her, moving toward the marble fireplace on the opposite side of the room. It hadn’t been lit last night; the hearth was cold with day-old ashes. She followed his progress with her eyes as he paused with one hand propped against the mantel.
He turned to look at her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.
“It’s answers you shall have. Follow me, if you please.”
He Shifted to vapor and vanished into the black mouth of the fireplace. A wisp of trailing gray smoke curled out behind him as he rose up the chimney and into the gathering gloom of the morning sky.
It took only a moment before her surprise wore off and she Shifted herself. She dropped the sheet to a puddle of satin on the floor and darted up through the soot-crusted flue to emerge over the lip of the bronze chimney cap, but he was already quickly becoming invisible against the cloud cover that hovered over everything, swallowing the light.
He was a pale specter of fluid movement high in the sky, far beyond the green and manicured gardens of Sommerley, already breaching the first line of trees in the forest.
He was moving fast.
