Shadowed Stranger
Page 19
But by the look of him, Atlas had been living off something else entirely.
A black, dark fury, if Lexi had to guess.
“And how do you find the estate?” she asked, as if she hadn’t taken his warning to heart.
Atlas stared at her until a new heat made her cheeks feel singed, and she felt very nearly lacerated by her own shame.
“I find that the fact you are all still standing, unchanged and wholly unruined, offends me,” he growled. “Deeply.”
“Atlas, I want to tell you that I—”
“Oh, no. I think not.” His teeth bared in something she was not foolish enough to call a smile. She remembered what his smiles had looked like before. How they’d felt when he’d aimed them her way. They had never been like this. Ruthless and terrible in turn. “No apologies, Lexi. It’s much too late for that.”
She found herself rising then, as if she couldn’t help herself. Maybe she simply couldn’t sit there another moment, like some kind of small animal of prey. She smoothed down the front of her pencil skirt and hoped she looked the way she’d imagined she had this morning in her mirror. Capable. Competent. Unworthy of this kind of malevolent focus.
“I know you must be very angry,” she began.
And he laughed. It was a hard, male sound that rolled down the length of her spine and seemed to lodge itself there in her lower back, where it spread. Until there was that same old aching thing again, low in her belly and made of a kind of fire Lexi didn’t pretend to understand.
But there was no getting around the fact that she’d never heard a laugh like that before. So utterly devoid of humor. So impossibly lethal she wanted to look down and check herself for bullet holes.
“You have no idea how angry I am, little girl,” Atlas told her, that grim fury and something else making his black eyes gleam as they tore straight through her. “But you will. Believe me, you will.”
Copyright © 2018 by Caitlin Crews
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ISBN-13: 978-1-488-09902-1
Shadowed Stranger
First published in 1982
This edition published in 2018
Copyright © 1982 by Carole Mortimer.
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