by Cynthia Eden
Yeah, they’d probably be closing almost all of Lillian’s unsolved crimes going back for the last twenty years, right to the date when good old Harper had first appeared in the city. “I’m on my way.”
He’d have to pay a visit to Katherine. Let her know that she and the boys were safe.
Then there would be other families to visit. Explanations to be made.
Explanations that wouldn’t include a story about a man who could shift into a wolf. Not that anyone would believe that, anyway, not without proof.
Those dog hairs. They’d been all over some of the vics. He’d never even suspected the truth about them.
“I’m on my way,” he said again and ended the call.
His eyes darted once more to Erin’s dark house. He’d be back. Erin had meant too much for him to just walk away with things shot to hell between them. They wouldn’t be together again. Donovan would see to that. And so would Erin. The way she’d watched the hunter—never looked at me like that.
The car’s engine purred to life.
Maybe, maybe after this case, it would be time for his life to take a change. Maybe a new start. A new city.
Hell, maybe Antonio needed a new detective—one who was learning the real score.
Werewolves. Who the hell would have thought those bastards were real? And sitting on court benches?
She’d wrapped a towel around her body. After Jude’s big confession, Erin had finally managed to snap her jaw back into place and now she paced next to the bed, trying to figure out what to say.
“Erin?”
Her gaze flew to him. He hadn’t dressed. Ah, damn but he was sexy. Those broad shoulders. That chest with the rippling muscles and light covering of golden hair. Erin gulped as she stared helplessly at that flat stomach—and that huge cock. Already fully erect again and so close. Hers for the taking if she just would reach out and touch—
Focus!
She sucked in a deep breath. Okay, she’d killed the wolf shifter tonight. She could handle this. Right? Right. “Did you mean it?”
His hands were on his hips. His narrowed stare never left her face.
Okay. The knot she’d hooked between her breasts seemed to dig into her flesh. “You said you loved me.” Sure, lots of men were known to get a little wild and chatty during sex, but Jude wasn’t most men. “Did you mean it?”
He took one long, gliding step toward her. Another.
She didn’t retreat, and in seconds, he was right before her. “Hell, yeah, sweetheart, I meant it.”
And that lump in her throat—the one that appeared pretty often when he was near—came back with a vengeance.
“I think I’ve loved you since that first hellish night at your place.” Since then? “You were standing there, with the blood on your walls, and your chin was up and you were holding onto your control as tight as you could with both your hands.”
She swallowed so she could speak. “My first instinct was to call you that night.”
“You knew you could count on me.”
Should have been impossible. She wasn’t the trusting sort, never had been, but, yes, she’d known he’d help her.
And he had.
Erin wet her lips. “There’s something you…need to know about the judge.”
He waited. Just waited with that steady gaze.
“He was my mother’s lover. The man she left my father to be with.” The man who’d nearly killed them both. “I didn’t know, not until tonight.” Because the surprises just kept coming for her. But she’d been trying to make sense of things and maybe…“Maybe I wasn’t his mate, maybe he just got everything twisted in his mind because we look alike, maybe—”
He pressed a fingertip against her lips. “He was a fucked up bastard, sweetheart. I don’t give a shit what he thought. You were never his.”
His finger lifted, and her breath left her lungs on a soft sigh.
His blue stare held her gaze. “Something you need to know. This stopped being a case for me a long time ago.” He shook his head. “I’m never supposed to get personal with the clients, but with you, I didn’t have a choice.” His fingers lifted and skimmed the edge of her jaw. “You were the case, and I would have fucking killed to keep you safe.”
He almost had.
“I don’t care if you’re human or wolf. You’re mine, Erin. The woman I want. The only one I’ve ever loved.”
Oh, hell, and he was hers.
“Forget the past. Forget that twisted bastard and start over again—with me. You might not love me yet, but give me a chance, sweetheart. The blood and hell are behind us. We can go slow now, date like humans, play normal.”
Normal was losing its appeal. “That’s not what I want anymore,” she told him and her hand brushed against his abdomen.
Jude sucked in a sharp breath and his pupils flared. “Erin, we can do this, we can—”
“I tried ‘normal.’ That wasn’t really for me.” Wished I’d realized that sooner.
Silence for a beat, then, “What is for you?”
A man who wasn’t afraid of the darkness inside her. A man who had a wild side to match her own.
A man who’d saved her from death.
A man who kissed her like she was his life.
“You are, Jude.” She was taking a risk. One big-ass risk. But for him, for what they might have, she’d do it. “You’re the man I want.” More than a man. So much more. “The one I love.”
That scar, the thin line on his lip that she always wanted to lick, rose as his lips curved. “You mean that? Be sure, very, very sure, because I’m not talking about a fling here. I’m talking about forever.”
Forever with her tiger. Sounded pretty good. She leaned toward him and used her tongue to trace that line on his lip. Then she said, “So am I.”
She’d never thought about spending all her days with someone else before. With so many secrets, she hadn’t even come close to trusting another man with her life.
But Jude knew all of her secrets, and he didn’t care about her past. He didn’t think she was broken or weak. When he looked at her, he looked at her with lust and hunger and—
I can see it now—should have seen it before.
Love.
Maybe she had seen it, but she’d been afraid.
It was time to stop being afraid. Time to start living. Really living.
Her hand rose between their bodies and caught the knot of her towel. With one tug, she jerked it loose. The towel hit the floor.
His gaze brightened. Such a bright blue. The tiger was close.
Good. She liked the beast and loved the man.
Life wouldn’t be perfect for them, she knew that.
But screw perfect. She’d take her tiger and she’d take her wild ride.
And she’d take the love she’d found, forever.
“Fucking beautiful, sweetheart, fucking beautiful.” His mouth pressed against her neck.
Her head fell back and the hunger rose. Jude.
She let her claws out and got ready to take her lover.
A man with more than a bit of the animal inside.
The perfect man for her.
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She knew it now without a doubt.
She wasn’t alone.
Fighting the sudden lump of fear in her throat, Cassandra pressed herself against the granite slab. Not for protection, but to better see whoever, whatever, prowled in the darkness. She held her breath, waited.
There, again. A justified chill of fear scraped down her neck. Someone was sliding from shadow to shadow, movements so swift, so silent, anyone who wasn’t trained to spot such subtlety would have missed it. Who could it be? Another Heir of Albion, like Broadwell? It couldn’t be a Blade, for Cassandra had been unable to send a telegram to let them know Broadwell’s whereabouts. Someone else, then.
Something els
e. The shadows gathered, shaping themselves into the form of a man gliding from darkness to darkness—tall, long-limbed, powerfully built. Twenty feet away. At a slight sound, he turned to investigate. His eyes literally glowed. Hollow and white, unearthly.
Cassandra stifled a gasp. Oh, it was one thing to read about and study magic. Entirely different to sense it, see it.
Whatever this…man…was, he moved with unearthly speed and stealth. She could not see his face as he shifted back into the shadows, more subtle and elusive than any human or animal. What was he? Before she could study him further, he melted into darkness, disappearing.
For several moments, Cassandra peered into the night, straining for another sense of him. Yet he was gone, absorbed into the fabric of shadow like a half-remembered dream. Cassandra, trying to refocus, turned back to keep her vigil on the tavern.
The unknown man stood right in front of her.
They both started, neither expecting the other.
Her pistol came up immediately.
Ambient light from the tavern revealed his face, the glow of his eyes vanished, and her fingers around the trigger slackened in shock. The tall man also started again, as shocked as Cassandra.
It could not be. Yet it was. She took a step forward, lowering her weapon, hardly daring to believe what she saw.
“Sam?” Her voice was a stunned whisper. “Samuel Reed?”
“Cassie.”
Oh, God, she knew that voice. Knew it as well as she knew the deepest recesses of her own heart. A low, masculine rumble, much deeper now than it had been ten years ago, but it was him. Sam.
“Cassandra now,” she said automatically as she grappled with understanding. Nothing made sense. It could not be that Sam was the creature she had just witnessed prowling through the darkness. “What the blazes are you doing here?”
Sam emerged slightly from the darkness, wariness evident in the guarded movement of his long, lean body. He’d been only eighteen the last time Cassandra saw him, verging into adulthood. Now there was no debate. Sam had grown up. He was, positively, a man. She noted it in the breadth of his shoulders, his broad chest, and powerful limbs. Even in shadow, even dressed in clean but slightly threadbare clothing, she could see it. Sam had left boyhood long ago. This man radiated potent strength, barely restrained.
Cassandra stared up at his face and felt another jolt of shock. The softness of youth had vanished entirely. Sam’s face…there was no other way for her to describe it…it was hard, a collection of sharply chiseled planes that made no allowance for leniency. Bold jaw, tight-pressed lips, sharp nose, and forbidding, dark brow. Too severe to be handsome, but undeniably striking. Such a change from the boy he’d been.
“I should ask you the same damned question,” he growled. “You shouldn’t be out. Alone.” He moved, as if to reach for her, but his hand stopped, curling into itself and falling to his side instead.
Fear suddenly danced along her neck. His voice was rough, almost menacing. But that was ridiculous. This was Sam, her brother Charlie’s best friend, the boy she’d known—and adored—almost her whole life. Ten years ago, he and Charlie both bought commissions, joining the army and serving in the same unit together, as they had done everything together. Including—
“For a lady,” Sam growled, “you’re pretty damned free with that gun.”
She glanced down at the weapon in her hand, then tucked it into her skirts. Proper young women did not carry pistols. Certainly not during the day, and most assuredly not in the middle of the night while lurking in deserted stonemason yards.
“Pistols are all the rage this season,” she said. She could not tell Sam anything about her mission, bound by a code of silence, as well as for his own protection.
Although, she amended, gazing at Sam, he seemed perfectly capable of protecting himself. If forced to use only one word to describe this man, the word she must choose would be lethal. She’d never met a man who held such dangerous intent in his body, including the most seasoned Blade field agents. He did not even offer a veneer of a smile at her attempt at humor.
“Nothing good brings a woman out at night,” he rumbled. “Some kind of assignation, then. A husband? Lover?” He raised a brow.
Cassandra wondered what kind of lover necessitated having a gun. “I might not be the same girl who collected spiders in jars,” she said, “but I’m not the sort of woman who arranges moonlight trysts.” However, she wasn’t a maiden any more. She’d seen to that a few years ago, though she wasn’t about to tell Sam.
Truthfully, she did not know what to say to Sam. She’d so often dreamt of this moment, how she would greet him upon his return. She had even contemplated something as frivolous as the dress she would wear. It would show him she was no longer a girl with dirt under her fingernails, but a grown woman, with a grown woman’s desires. And he would see her as if for the first time, a slow smile of wonder illuminating his face, and realize that what he had been searching for had been at home all along. Her nails, too, would be clean. She curbed the impulse to check them now—for often, after touring factories and inspecting conditions, her fingernails did get dirty. But that was a minor detail compared to seeing Sam again.
Her dream of their reunion had ended two years ago, but she remembered it vividly, an imprint of abandoned hope burned into an afterimage on her heart.
Yet this…fierce, dangerous man…was entirely unlike the Sam she’d longed for, resembling him only in the most superficial way. He burned with a deep, profound coldness that seeped into her own bones.
She realized that it had been Sam, stalking the darkness. Moving with an eerie fluidity. More at home within the realm of unnatural shadow than light and life. But how could that be possible?
“I’ve no idea who you are anymore.” Sam’s voice glinted like a knife in the darkness.
“That feeling,” she said, “is mutual.”
Truthfully, she had no idea who he was. Or, her mind whispered, what he was. She tried to push that thought away, but it would not be staved off.
Unfamiliar, this terror. Something clammy and frightened uncoiled in her stomach as she stared up at his impassive face. The changes wrought in Sam went beyond the shift from youth to maturity, from civilian to veteran soldier. Yet she did not know what, exactly, was different, was deeply, profoundly not right.
A burst of noise careened out of the tavern. Both Cassandra and Sam shot alert glances toward it, but no one exited the building. As Sam continued to rake the tavern with his gaze, Cassandra could feel the waves of anger and purpose emanating from him, palpable as frost. The gentling of his expression was gone. Nothing gentle in him now.
Sam had been a soldier, a major, the last she’d heard, and still held himself with a soldier’s vigilant, capable presence. He wore civilian clothes, yet carried, she saw at that moment, an officer’s sword and wore tall military boots. The war in the Crimea ended two years ago. What had become of him since then?
“This makes no sense,” she said. “I was told….” Her words dried as he swung his gaze back to her. Even in the weak light from the tavern’s windows, she saw his eyes were the same palest blue, edged in indigo, only now his eyes did not dance with humor or mischief. They were…haunted.
“I was told,” she began again, “that you were dead.”
He stared at her with those anguished, cold eyes. And said, “I am.”
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The dining room was nearly bursting at the seams. There was only one unoccupied table by the time Sarah and Whitman arrived to eat. Unfortunately, it was in a corner and made for two.
“Told you to hurry,” Whitman grumbled under his breath.
Sarah couldn’t stop a very unladylike snort, again. “Next time I’ll run up the stairs and you stand at the bottom then.”
He didn’t respond, but she saw the corner of his mouth twitch, as if he was holding in a laugh.
Perhaps the serious Yankee did have a sense of humor after all.
When they sat down, Sarah realized it was the first time they were face-to-face. On the train and even walking to the hotel, they’d been beside each other. Facing Whitman was an entirely different experience.
He wasn’t classically handsome, but damn, he was exactly the kind of man Sarah was attracted to. His face was angular, the late-day whiskers only added to his appeal, his nose was slightly crooked, and a few scars were scattered here and there as if he’d been wounded by small pieces of something.
But it was his eyes that captured her attention. Deep, green, and framed by those long eyelashes, Whitman had the sexiest gaze she’d ever seen. Fortunately or unfortunately, she felt a tug of sensual awareness just looking at the tousled chocolate locks above those eyes.
Hell and crackers.
He frowned. “Why are you scowling at me?”
“I’m not scowling.” She fiddled with the fork and knife on the table while hoping the missing waitress would appear to save her from the awkward situation.
Damn Mavis Ledbetter. The woman was over by the window with that same gentleman, completely ignoring the fact she’d been paid to take care of Sarah. Whit had been right—she was going to fire Mavis and leave her in whatever town this was.
“She looks to be a spinster.” Whit followed Sarah’s gaze. “Looks as if she hasn’t given up the quest for a husband, though.”
“She spent so much time declaring she was a spinster, she kept most men away from her.” Sarah frowned at Mavis. “Nobody in town wanted anything to do with her because of her reputation.”
“You’re from the same town then?”
His question was one anyone in polite company would ask, but Sarah found herself unwilling to answer any personal questions. So she decided to insult him to keep him disliking her. “You’re nosy.”
“You’re rude.”
“You’re pushy.”
He barked a laugh. “And you’re refreshingly honest.”
Sarah found herself holding back a chuckle. What was it about this annoying Yankee that set her on her head? Aside from being handsome, there wasn’t anything else remarkable about him. She needed to figure out his appeal so she could combat it and keep her distance, at least as much as she could, considering they were going to be stuck in a train compartment together for fifteen hundred miles.