Shadow’s Edge

self-control. The way she was looking at him, looking at his mouth...“France had an outbreak of phylloxera that season, thousands of trees were infected.”

She glanced back up at him and he was pinned by the power of that gaze, the beauty and haunting luminosity of those eyes. Not only were they a startling, clear green, the irises rimmed with shimmering gold, but they contained gorgeous deep flecks of amber and citrine embedded within that sparked fire into their cool emerald depths.

He pictured her reclining atop his massive four-poster bed at Sommerley, her curves nestled into the glossy fur coverlet, those lucid eyes mirroring his own desire, her body nude but for the diamonds he wanted to give her: at her throat, around her wrists, on her finger...

“They had to burn all the trees that year to stop the spread of disease,” he whispered.

The desire rising inside him suddenly transformed into a beast, hissing, clawing just under his skin, poised to devour him. His fingers tightened over her own and he parted his lips, letting the flavor of her burn bright against his tongue.

“Windbreaks,” she murmured, leaning into him with a dreamy, half-lidded look. “Oh...that’s...”

Heart pounding, he bent his head. One second more...one inch more and his lips would be on hers...

Then her eyes clouded. She began to blink. Her brows drew together and her eyes focused sharp. “Can you feel that?” She turned her head, searching the restaurant, her gaze moving toward the black sky framed in the windows that lined one wall, a view to the street.

Leander wondered if Jenna somehow smelled his desire for her, so acute was this sense of hers proving to be, but then she turned back to him, grimacing.

“What is that?” She seemed close to being sick. Her fingers began to shake under his.

He was abruptly alert, wary, a sense of peril eating through his chest. “Jenna? Are you unwell? What’s wrong?”

But she was rising from the table already, her face paling, her eyes wide, her gaze flying around the room. Her lips parted and she breathed out a few words as she tried to steady herself with a shaking hand on the banquette.

“That vibration. That—friction—static—”

She gasped and stumbled.

He was next to her before she could fall, pulling her to him with one arm, supporting her body against his chest. Her heart was pumping a violent, staccato beat. She was satin and fire in his arms, the skin of her bare arms prickled with goose bumps, burning with unnatural heat. His heart began to thunder in panic when she gave a low, keening moan and sagged against him, eyes huge and round and staring at nothing.

Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

Then the shaking began.

7

Morgan had discovered Rodeo Drive.

And not just in a touristy kind of way, gawking in star-struck wonder as she passed by on the top deck of a sightseeing bus. No, she had gone native.

Which wasn’t a precise description for the way she’d spent the past three days, because no one in Beverly Hills seemed to walk anywhere—except for the tourists—and she had walked from Valentino to Prada, from Bulgari to Armani, from Dior to Tiffany.

She loved to walk, having spent her entire life roaming the New Forest, finding all the best spots of damp, wooded earth and soaring vistas glimpsed from the tops of fir trees. Moving her body was second nature. It was easy to walk for miles, carrying packages, the sun on her face, wind playing through her hair. It was being confined within the gilded cage of the Four Seasons Hotel she found difficult.

She hadn’t stayed in human form this long for years.

So, to distract herself from the growing discomfort of denying her animal side, she went shopping.

Her purchases were beginning to take over a rather substantial portion of her suite at the hotel. Square red cardboard boxes, rectangular black paper bags with turquoise tissue peeking out, plain white parcels with logos from the most expensive boutiques, and those perfect, darling little robin’s-egg blue boxes with the white ribbon. Her favorite.

She couldn’t wait to try it all on again.

The fact that she’d charged everything to the credit card Leander had given her—for emergencies only, Morgan—made it all the more satisfying. It appeared his little black card had no purchase limit.

Morgan stood barefoot in the middle of the plush butter creme carpet, surveying the damage, feeling rather proud of herself. She’d ordered breakfast again from the fabulous French cafe just down the street—another luxury thanks to the wonderful little black card—and the remains of what was once a fat, smoked bacon, gruyere, and apple omelet lay on the dining table in the master suite, next to a pot of steaming hot coffee and pastries.

She probably couldn’t get out onto the balcony if she wanted to: the glass sliding door was hidden behind a chin-high stack of Ralph Lauren boxes. She briefly wondered how she was going to get it all back to Sommerley, but then shrugged her shoulders and put her hands on her hips. Leander would figure something out for her, he always did.

He was the Alpha. That was his job.

A delighted smile lit up her face.

It was in exactly this posture Leander found her when he came crashing through the door.

“I need you,” he growled, curt and tense. A stack of parcels on the glass console table in the foyer toppled over as he shouldered past them, spilling a four-thousand-dollar Hermes crocodile-skin handbag to the white marble floor.

“Don’t you knock?” Morgan complained, turning to shoot him a flinty stare.

“My suite. Now.”

His body was tense in a way she had never seen. He normally moved with a dark grace, stealthy, all poise and menace and feral-eyed vigilance. But now he was visibly distracted—taut as a bowstring, grim-faced, and unshaven—so Morgan only pursed her lips and swallowed the retort on her tongue.

“What is it?”

Without another word, he yanked the door open in one swift, hard motion and disappeared through it. His hair swung in a loose, handsome ruff around his shoulders, black as midnight against the rumpled white silk of his shirt.

Morgan sighed and turned to gaze again, with more than a hint of melancholy, on the piles of expensive plunder. It looked as if her plan for the morning had been derailed.

Trying everything on again would have to wait.

Leander had watched Jenna all night, crouching silent and still in the gloom of her bedroom as she slept, tensed to vanish as vapor into the air if she awoke, waiting for any sign she might not be as fine as she repeatedly told the EMT she was.

They’d been called to Melisse because of the injuries. Paramedics and firemen and police had been dispatched all over the city to care for the wounded. They were mostly minor things: cuts from shattered glass, scrapes from falling down, contusions, a few cases of shock in the elderly.

No major damage had been reported to any structures, though many buildings—like the one Melisse was located in—suffered a few broken windows, some cracked plaster, damage to the facade. He’d been told it was one of the milder earthquakes to hit Los Angeles in recent years.

No matter how mild the quake, it caused a major upheaval for him.

At the first ripple in the bedrock, as Jenna sagged against him in that half-faint that made his heart climb into his throat, his animal instincts went into overdrive.