Shadow’s Edge

She flung herself off him with a frustrated huff, but he caught her before she rose from the bed and pushed her back into the downy softness of the mattress. He threw one heavy leg over hers, caught her wrist, and pinned it to the pillow over her head.

“You are so endearingly literal,” he said softly. Light spilled through his inky hair to paint the angles of his face deepest chocolate, espresso, and gold. She relished the heat and weight of his leg over her body, the firm muscles of his thighs and stomach and arms, the tickle of his hair against her skin.

She looked into his emerald eyes, filled with warmth and a deep, mischievous tenderness, and felt the cold and impenetrable thing that had been lodged inside her chest since childhood dissolve, like a block of steel lowered into a smelter.

She blinked up at him, dazed by an uncomfortable new feeling, something she hadn’t felt in years, something that made her body feel so light it was as if she was filled with helium and was in danger of floating off the bed and drifting up toward the ceiling.

She had a terrible suspicion this uncomfortable new feeling might be happiness.

No, she thought. Oh, dear God, no.

“Literal?” she repeated weakly. Her pulse was a sudden, thundering roar in her ears.

You cannot fall in love with him. You cannot.

He drew his hand down her arm, stroking the skin of her wrist and the soft place inside her elbow, caressing her shoulder, then her neck. He brought his hand up to cup the side of her face and lowered his head. He brushed the tip of his nose against hers.

“The New Forest has succored the Ikati of Sommerley for almost twenty generations. It’s kept all our secrets, allowed us to flourish and live undiscovered through hundreds of years. It’s in our blood. It’s in your blood. Your body may not have been born there, but your soul was, your spirit was. It’s your home, Jenna,” he murmured. “You’re finally home.”

“Oh.” She laughed, a little too high and breathlessly, turning her face to avoid his eyes. “Is that what you meant?”

She’d never known exactly where she was born. It was just another of the many mysteries of her childhood, an unimportant fact lost in the shuffle of moving and hiding and pretending to be something she was not. “Somewhere near the water,” was her mother’s standard response, and whether she really didn’t remember or just didn’t want to say, Jenna never found out. And so it was tucked away with all the other questions that were never answered, frozen into the bitter cold that solidified around her heart so long ago. It was the kind of cold that burned like fire.

That’s why you’re here, remember? she reprimanded herself. Answers. Nothing more.

Leander lowered his face to hers. She exhaled and he stole it back from her lips, mingling their breath together. He drew his mouth over hers with a lovely, silken brush of skin against skin that made her shiver.

“My beautiful girl,” he murmured, kissing the corner of her mouth. He spread his fingers around the back of her neck, his fingers warm and strong in her hair, stroking, possessive. “My lover.” She felt the heat of his erection growing stiff and insistent against her hip. He bent his head and nipped the tender skin of her neck, pressed his lips gently where he had bruised the skin from the night before. “Say you’re mine. Tell me you’re mine.”

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. NO!

She squirmed beneath him, trying to escape, but he only laughed low in his throat and pulled her even closer.

“So demure,” he teased in that pirate’s voice that made her weak all over. He slid his hand down to her chest and cupped the fullness of one breast in his palm. His voice dropped an octave. “You weren’t quite so demure last night.”

He pinched her nipple between his fingers and she fought back a gasp.

She leapt up from the bed and stood quivering and wide-eyed before him. “Show me!” she blurted out, desperate for any distraction that would restore her rapidly shrinking sense of control.

His eyes drank her in, her breasts and hips and thighs, all so softly rounded, all so lushly feminine.

“As you wish, dear lady,” he drawled. He pulled the covers away from his body in one long, slithering rustle of fabric, revealing his naked body, the flat, hard muscles of his abdomen, his unabashed, impossible-to-ignore erection.

She blanched and yanked the sheet away from the bed with a hard pull, then wrapped herself in it, leaving nothing visible of her body save one bare forearm and her forehead and eyes, which blinked at him, fast and startled like a baby bird’s.

“Not that!” came the squeak of her voice through the sheet.

He lay back against the mattress with his fingers laced behind his head, a wicked smile lazing across his handsome face. The morning light gleamed in molten streamers across his chest. He crossed his ankles and slanted her a look of mock distress. “It grieves me to hear you find the sight of my naked body so distasteful, love. I rather think I might cry.”

“I meant the forest! I meant how to Shift to a panther!”

His body drew down to complete stillness at this. His eyes grew flat and dark, the smile vanished from his face. He sat up, ramrod straight, planted his feet on the floor and gripped the edge of the mattress. His legs were spread wide open, his stiff member jutted up to push against the reticulated muscles of his belly.

She looked away. His lack of self-consciousness, the perfect ease in which he inhabited his skin, struck her as more viscerally appealing than anything else she had seen of him so far. He exuded heat and untamed power, he was lithe and beautiful and unfathomable, he was utterly enticing and charismatic without one ounce of effort.

Yet she knew in her heart, for all his beauty and refinement and the poetry of his words, there lived beneath a primal creature, poised to pounce. A creature that had had a hand in her father’s death.

She could never allow herself to be drawn into his world, no matter how skillfully he spoke words like my beautiful girl and home and tell me you’re mine.

It seemed a very long time before he spoke. The room was still and cool around them.

“What you said last night,” he began, his tone dark and controlled, “in front of the Assembly, about Shifting at ten years old.”

Her gaze was drawn back to the startling, feral beauty of his face. A crackle of electricity fluttered over her skin. “Yes?”

“That was the truth, wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was,” she snapped, failing to keep the affront from her voice. The sheet slipped down to her neck. She clutched at it with stiff fingers, drew it back around her throat.

He only stared at her, gripping the edge of the mattress with those long fingers that had stroked her only moments before, and narrowed his eyes.

“And what else?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her lips flattened to a thin, stubborn line. She raised her chin.

“I mean,” he said, with that same narrowed, assessing look, “that if you have been Shifting since you were ten years old—and successfully hiding that fact from everyone around you, including our scouts—you are, in all likelihood, capable of all manner of interesting tricks. I’d like to know what they are.”

She ground her teeth together. Don’t let him bait you! Don’t let him win!

“I honestly have no idea what you are talking about,” she said, plucking at the sheet to wrap it more securely around her body. “But if you prefer not to accompany me into the forest so I can try to Shift into something more substantial than a wisp of air, suit yourself.”

She began to march toward the windows with her head held high, the sheet billowing out behind her like the train of a wedding gown. He stood quickly from the bed, strode over to her, and gripped her arm.

She turned to him, startled, and was instantly snared in the heat of his eyes. The slanting light from the windows turned them a pale, clear jade.

“You can trust me, Jenna,” he said. His voice was surprisingly soft for all the hard, unyielding edges in his face. “In spite of what you may think, I do have your best interests at heart. If there is more to this story than you are telling us, if there is anything else you are hiding from me, from the Assembly, I