Chosen by Desire
“YOU’RE HARDLY IN THE POSITION TO TELL ME HOW TO TREAT MY EMPLOYEES,” MAX SAID.
“You didn’t have to bark at Francesca,” Carrie retorted, grabbing a towel from the edge of the pool and rubbing herself off. Max watched the way her bikini clung, and he gritted his teeth. Frankly, his tongue couldn’t form any words—not when her nipples peaked like that. And certainly not when she licked the drops of water that clung to her lips…
“We were just taking a break,” she said. “There’s no reason to get so worked up.”
Max grabbed Carrie’s arms and lifted her to her toes. “I couldn’t give a damn about the work,” he growled. He wanted to know what she wanted. What she was doing here.
Why she was tormenting him like this.
He couldn’t ask her, so he did the only thing he could think of. He hauled her up and crushed his mouth to hers.
Carrie melted against him as if it didn’t occur to her to fight back. Dropping her towel to the ground, she wrapped her arms around Max’s neck and pressed herself to his hard, wide body. He growled again and clasped her closer, his kiss savage. He couldn’t get enough of her…
“A sexy world of kick-ass action! You’ll want to immerse yourself in the first in [this] thrilling new series, complete with a smoldering hero and the toughest, sassiest heroine around.”
—V
ERONICA
W
OLFF
, author of
Sword of the Highlands
, on
Marked by Passion
Marked by Passion
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Kathia Zolfaghari
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-55841-9
Contents
A Preview of
Tempted by Fate
Q & A with Kate
Quiz: What kind of Guardian are you?
Interview with a Guardian
The Myth of the Scrolls
To Kathia.
I couldn’t have done this without you.
And to Nate.
Yes, love, your swordplay is more impressive than anyone’s.
The brilliant and steadfast Veronica Wolff. The trophy went to the wrong cp. I’m crossing out my name and etching yours in.
And the crew of On the Corner Café, who kept me amped—with both caffeine and electricity—while I revised this book. I highly recommend their chocolate cake.
I
can’t believe I’m doing this.” With a furtive glance behind her, Carrie tiptoed down the dark stone corridor. At the beginning of the monastery tour, they’d explicitly said it was forbidden to wander from the group, and since she’d been on the tour ten times in the past ten days, she couldn’t play blond and clueless.
But she hadn’t come all the way from San Francisco to China to go home empty-handed. Her best friend, Gabrielle, would have told her that if she wanted something, she should go for it wholeheartedly.
She wondered if Gabe would condone breaking and entering.
Stop thinking.
She had only so much time to find the room and look for what she needed before the tour caught up to her. Picking up the pace, she hurried down the hall.
There it was. The innocuous wooden door to the left. The room that held the monastery’s archives.
Heart pounding, she scurried to it and slipped inside. Carrie held her breath. She felt like she was being watched. She tensed, waiting, expecting someone to bang on the door and demand to know what she was doing.
No one.
Just nerves. She exhaled and slumped against the door as it closed. She wasn’t used to this kind of strain. Even working as a bartender in San Francisco’s Mission district didn’t offer this kind of anxiety.
It wasn’t her fault. She’d tried to go through proper channels. She’d contacted the monastery and asked for access to their manuscripts. They’d turned her down. Irrevocably.
She was a scholar of chinese history at UC Berkeley, for God’s sake—studying manuscripts was her job. The fact that they denied her access was a good indication they had something to hide.
Carrie bet that mysterious something was what she wanted. And since she’d blown her entire savings to fly six thousand miles, she wasn’t leaving tomorrow until she got what she came for.
The room looked just like it did the other nine times she’d been in it. A long rectangle, dim but light enough to read. It had that musty smell she always associated with old libraries. She imagined generations of monks sitting at the table at the end of the room, carefully working on their calligraphy. The walls were lined with shelves filled with the fruits of their labor: thousands of rolled parchments and bound tomes.
One of them had to be Wei Lin’s journal—proof of the mythic Scrolls of Destiny.
She hadn’t been sure what to look for—literally thousands of rolled parchments and old bound texts filled the shelves. Wei Lin’s journal could be anywhere. She bit her lip, willing her nerves to calm. She was close. On her sixth visit, she’d noticed one shelf that looked different than the others.
Her eyes zoomed in on it. The one shelf in the room suspiciously free of dust, as if someone cared for it or accessed its contents on a regular basis. The scrolls that lined it were different than the ones on the other shelves: thicker, tightly bound, and a third as wide.
Her fingertips tingled as she headed straight for it. One of those texts had to be it.
She’d tried to get a closer look the last three times she’d taken the tour, but it’d been impossible under the tour guide’s hawklike vigilance. Which is why she’d had to take matters into her own hands. She ran her finger along the shelf’s smooth wood. Breaking away from the tour had been risky, but giving up wasn’t in her makeup. And, truthfully, she felt a rush at her own daring, too. She kind of felt like Indiana Jones.
Carrie slung her bag across her body and kneeled on the floor in front of them. Her blood raced at the thought of her impending discovery.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, girl,” she muttered. She was operating on a hunch here. She didn’t know for certain that the monastery had a copy of the journal—she’d just overheard Gabe’s boyfriend, Rhys, say it did. And she was assuming she had the right Wei Lin. A big assumption, but how many noteworthy Wei Lins could there have been?
She bit her lip, helplessness combining with her nerves to create a cocktail of nausea in her stomach. She had to find it. Her future depended on it. She’d worked her butt off for a position at UC Berkeley, only now her advisor, Leonora, said her doctoral thesis on the Yongle Emperor wasn’t groundbreaking. For Carrie to have a chance to teach at Cal, she needed to provide some new theory regarding this Ming emperor—something to get a rise out of the board. In other words, her thesis wasn’t sexy enough.
Sexy enough.
Squaring her shoulders, Carrie picked up one of the texts. She’d show them sexy.
Dusting off the cover, she carefully opened it. The scrolls on the shelf shifted, and one caught her gaze. It didn’t look as old or brittle as the rest.
Did monks still write on parchment? Oddly drawn to it, she ran a finger over the scroll. It felt as though her fingertip trailed in icy water, and goosebumps rose on her arms.
“Weird,” she mumbled. She felt oddly compelled to unfurl it. She reached for it—
Wait—she had a book in hand already. Might as well start there. Shaking her head, she sat back on her heels and flipped to the first page. She read the first line of the tiny but beautiful black script.
My name is Wei Lin, and I have appointed myself Keeper of the Scrolls of Destiny.
“
Yes.
” Relaxing her grip so she wouldn’t wrinkle the pages in her excitement, she scanned the text. Her heart beat faster with every word.