If you’re just going to kill me in a different location, she’d said as he led her away from the alley, I have to tell you that it will be very disappointing.
They’d made it out into the street by then. She could hear the pumping sound of the club she’d so foolishly wandered away from, though she couldn’t see it. Had she wandered into the alley from the other side? And yet Indy hadn’t really cared, because there had been a streetlight and she could really see him then.
He was built like a weapon far deadlier than any old hatchet. His beautiful eyes were breathtakingly blue, and he had a set of lips that should have made him a courtesan—and might have made him pretty if his face wasn’t drawn in such harsh, male lines. She’d thought she would happily pay the whole of her life savings, and then some, to have that mouth between her legs.
But those were the only two soft things on his body.
Everything else was muscle. Thick and honed at once, so that he fairly hummed with power. With threat.
She remembered thinking how odd it was that she had been with so many men and had always happily explored all the various ways they used their power. Physical and intellectual alike, but nothing like this. Like him.
This man was darkness personified and his body showed it.
Indy had noticed a tattoo rising from the neck of his T-shirt, the same T-shirt that strained to contain his biceps. The same T-shirt that seemed unequal to the task of his hard, ridged abdomen. He wore dark jeans and the kind of dress shoes men wore on this side of the Atlantic because trainers were frowned upon for nightlife purposes in so many European countries.
She had been fully aware that he had that gun tucked in the small of his back. But looking at him, not only did she also know that his hands were weapons all by themselves—not to mention the feet that she’d seen in action with her own eyes—but that he likely had other things stashed around on his body, as well.
His profession seemed pretty clear.
I’m not going to kill you, he had said in that accented voice of his that lit the night on fire, low and gravely with that impossible blue gaze behind it.
Or maybe the fire was only in her, making her wet and hot and something too close to desperate.
When she had never been desperate in her life.
She had tipped her head slightly to one side as she regarded him. You sound surprised.
I should have killed you the moment I saw you. His voice was matter-of-fact, suggesting that roaming about killing people was an ordinary occurrence for him, and yet his hand was still on her arm and she’d felt the heat of his grip. And she still hadn’t been afraid. That’s what happens when foolish girls stumble into business meetings in the wrong part of town. Would anyone have missed you?
Not tonight. Why had she said that? She might as well have knelt right down again and invited him to use that gun of his. Worse yet, she had kept talking. It was something about that faintly arrested look on his face, like he didn’t understand what he was doing, either. It was that grip on her arm. It was her certain knowledge that something had happened between them in that alley. Eventually, people back home would miss me, but they wouldn’t know where to look. Most people think I’m still in Croatia.
He had gripped her arm harder, though not hard enough to hurt. He’d pulled her closer to him then, his poet’s eyes blazing with a distinctly unpoetic fire as he’d gazed down at her—and she still hadn’t been afraid.
She’d been exhilarated.
I fucked up my life for you, he’d gritted out at her. I don’t ever fuck up my life. For anyone. The kind of life I have, fuck it up too much and you lose it.
Indy hadn’t understood anything that was happening. All she’d known was that it was happening to both of them—and it was as intense as it was impossible.
They should never have met. She should already have been a statistic.
None of this should have been happening, but she’d been wearing red and he was clearly a wolf and somehow, it had all made sense. She had felt the sense of it everywhere, like fate.
Indy had reached up with her fingers and spread them over those beautiful lips of his.
Careful, he’d warned her.
But Indy had only smiled. Too late, she’d said.
Then she’d surged up on her toes and kissed him, like the dark little fairytale she’d always wanted to come true at last.
Copyright © 2021 by Caitlin Crews
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ISBN-13: 9780369702593
Reawakened
Copyright © 2021 by Rachael Stewart
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidentsare either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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