Shadow’s Edge

But he didn’t know her, this creature of gilt and satin and feminine curves, skin like roses and cream and sunlight on water where the rest of his kind were dark, with hair as dark as the forest floor at midnight, skin tones of cafe au lait and buttered rum.

He didn’t know that the force of his desire would make him sink to his knees, crouching naked in the dark with his heart in his throat and the scent of her flaming hot in his nose.

He hadn’t expected this.

His eyes drank her in and he wondered that she possessed the Gift of beauty all the Ikati shared. She was half human, after all, an inferior race evolved from mud, prone to violence, greed, and all manner of disease. He’d never found a single one of them attractive.

But her father had. He’d done the unthinkable and mated with a human.

He’d also exacted a promise from his successor that his half-Blood offspring would not be brought back to Sommerley to live a life of confinement until the time of her first Shift as the Law decreed for the circumstance. She would be allowed to grow and live as a creature free from the shackles of protection, duty, and constraint that defined life within the colony.

And for a female, there was more constraint than some could bear.

They’d had deserters in their history as well. Those were dealt with as swiftly and mercilessly as the colony dealt with any other threat.

He watched her until the muscles in his thighs began to ache with inactivity, then stood and walked silently over to her bedside. In human form, he was as silent as a cat. He saw through the darkness as if it were high noon, he retained all the heightened senses of his animal side.

Normally this was a blessing. Now...it was closer to torture.

A book lay on her bedside table. He flipped it open with one finger, read a single paragraph.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

Leander’s lips curled into an amused smile. Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Ah, the exquisite irony.

He slanted her a look, his gaze lingering over the arc of her lips, her smooth brow, the soft planes of her cheek. Was she more than just this surfeit of sensuality so pleasing to the eye? What of her sense of humor, her intelligence, her passion? Would she fight for her freedom?

But no, one way or another, her time of freedom was coming to an end. If she could Shift, if she was fully one of their kind, he would take her back to Sommerley. Force her, if necessary. She would join their colony, she would learn their ways, she might even one day be his...

It came unbidden into his mind, startled him into stillness with his hand hovering over her open book.

Mine.

He crouched down next to her bed. A long, curling lock of golden hair hung free over the pillow. He picked it up and pressed it to his nose.

And if she cannot Shift, if she is Giftless, he thought, staring hard at her carmine lips half-parted in sleep, it will fall to the Alpha to kill her. It will fall to me.

“Jenna,” he whispered, an almost noiseless exhalation of sound from his lips.

She shifted on the mattress, made a pretty, feminine sound in her throat. Her back arched beneath the sheets, a drowsy, languid movement that pressed her body taut against the fabric.

The dip of her waist. Her flat belly. Those full, perfect breasts.

“Yes, please,” she murmured, then settled back down against the mattress with a sigh.

With a stab of desire so acute it made his mouth water, he realized she was dreaming.

He felt the ground disappear beneath him, his foundation of law and order and tribe, his entire lifetime of duty and sacrifice, safety and silence. She became—with an abrupt alteration of priority that made all else fall away—the only thing and everything he wanted.

But he was the Alpha and she was an unproven half-Blood, daughter of an outlaw, her future hanging on the scales of fate, her very existence uncertain.

She was not his to have.

The strand of her hair slipped between his fingers and he rose, heart pounding, and turned away.

5

When Jenna first interviewed for the coveted job of sommelier at Melisse, she was twenty-two years old, had no college degree, no special training, and no relevant experience.

What she had was raw talent.

Her sense of smell was so keen it picked out the single note of lavender, the merest hint of graphite, the faintest rumor of black truffle hidden deep within the aromatic spice and fruit bouquet of a fine wine.

Though Melisse was renowned for its wine program—one which had been overseen since their inception by a quick succession of middle-aged, snobbish men and contained over six thousand bottles of the best wine produced throughout the world—they hired Jenna before the conclusion of her first interview, based on her rather remarkable demonstration of this talent.

The owner of the restaurant, a trim, elderly gentleman named Francois Moreau, set out ten bottles of wine wrapped in plain brown paper bags on the long oak table in the glass-walled private dining room, then poured a single ounce from each into ten unlabeled crystal Riedel wine glasses.

“Tell me,” he said in a pronounced French accent as he gestured toward the preposterous lineup, “what is the wine in each glass?”

He adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, folded his blue-veined hands over the second button of his camel pinstripe blazer, and smiled at her, serene and sharp.

Jenna smiled back and began.

Not only did she tell him the grape varietal each glass of wine contained, she told him whether it had been grown on hillside or riverbank, in high altitude or at ocean level, and what percentage of varietals contained within each if it was a blend.

Mrs. Colfax, who counted Monsieur Moreau among her beaux and had arranged the interview, had been very generous in sharing her wine and her knowledge of it, and Jenna never forgot a thing. The sense memory came as easily to her as did a great many other things, like her intuition, her strength, her agility, her speed.

Things her mother assiduously trained her to keep to herself.

She started the next night. Jenna loved her job more than anything else in her life, in spite of the inevitable discrimination she endured as a woman in what was considered—by the vast majority of their well-heeled clientele—a man’s job.

This particular evening, she had arrived at work nine hours earlier, far ahead of the evening rush, and was now standing on the opposite side of the long, curving bar from Becky, the feisty, ginger-haired bartender recently hired away from a competitor.

It was late, almost closing time, and her feet hurt.

She’d had three difficult customers tonight. They were all older men who eyed her as if wondering how much she’d fetch at auction, then grilled her with questions about the wine list, proper food pairings, and minute differences from one vintage to the next, each finally allowing she might actually know what she was talking about and wasn’t just the hat-check girl standing in for the real sommelier—the male sommelier.

She was in a foul mood.

When she felt that singular current of crackling electricity spike through her body, she should have known things were about to get worse.

“Ooh, la, la,” Becky murmured, low so only Jenna heard. Her hand paused in midair over the wine glass she was about to lift into its place on the hanging rack above her head.