Shadow's Edge (9 page)

“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.

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 crème carpet, surveying the damage, feeling rather proud of herself. She’d ordered breakfast again from the fabulous French café 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 Hermès 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 Mélisse 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 Mélisse was located in—suffered a few broken windows, some cracked plaster, damage to the façade. 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.

He lifted her up against him—her knees crooked over his left arm, her head lolling against his right—and swept her out the back door of the restaurant to the middle of the wide, brick-paved patio. It was a deserted place, a safe place, cloaked in darkness, free from anything that could fall on them from above.

Amid the dark enclosure of the cypress and oak trees that encircled them like an open-air cathedral, the sky above them smoke and ebony-blue, Leander stood braced against the shaking, his legs open wide, his arms wrapped around her hard.

The boughs of the trees swayed and thrashed above while the eerie groans and creaks of the buildings around them—stressed to their foundations with the earth bucking like a creature alive—tightened his stomach into a fist.

If it weren’t for Jenna, lush and passive in his arms, he would have Shifted to panther, climbed the nearest tree, and roared down in fury at the insanity below.

Her face was very clear in the moonlight, pale and beautiful like something forged from marble, her long lashes a dark smudge against the satin perfection of her ivory cheek. He knew she hadn’t fainted, though her eyes were closed, her breathing shallow. He knew because she kept a hand pressed firm against his chest.

The heat of her palm burned straight through the fabric of his shirt.

He didn’t know if she was seeking reassurance in the steady beat of his heart, or trying to keep him from getting any closer. Could she sense how he longed to touch his lips to her forehead, her hair, her cheek?

He very badly wanted to kiss her, anywhere, everywhere, even as the ground under his feet went mad.

When the shaking stopped and the world settled into a more reasoned lucidity, Jenna opened her eyes and stared straight up at him, beseeching. The electronic clamor of hundreds of sounding car alarms rose into the night air above the city to create a ghostly requiem for the quake. It was underscored by the rising shouts of panic and shock from the restaurant behind them.

“I felt it coming,” she whispered up at him, her voice thin and frightened. Her hand curled around the front of his shirt. “I felt it in my bones. I smelled it. I
tasted
it.”

It was then Leander realized the Assembly had their answer.

So did he.

He set her gently down on a chaise lounge with a whispered reassurance and left her, briefly, to use the phone inside. A mild pandemonium had broken out inside the restaurant, which Geoffrey was doing little to assuage, being too busy with his alternating fits of screaming, hysterical
hand-waving, and hyperventilating. The paramedics arrived within minutes and took control. At his insistence, Jenna was one of the first to receive their attention, but they found nothing wrong with her. Though shaken, she was fit, unhurt, perfectly sound. They advised her to go home and get some sleep, and then they turned their attention to the others.

She pushed away from him when he came back to her, looked at him as if she suddenly knew some terrible secret—
his
secret—and disappeared into the night like a ghost, before he could speak, before he could catch her.

She was wicked fast. She could run even faster than he, though he was stronger, faster than anyone in all the colonies. Faster than any other predator on earth.

Except, evidently, her.

He hadn’t been prepared for that either.

When he lost her trail around the dark corner of the bank building at Second Street, when all he could smell when he opened his senses was the vanishing trace of her perfume diffused through the heated, salt-laden air like a memory of something almost forgotten, he very nearly lost his mind.

Her apartment was the only place he could think to go—the only logical place to wait for her, though he kept carefully out of sight. He shed his clothes behind a stinking Dumpster in the back alley as he Shifted, discarding the handmade Italian suit as if it were offal, then rose as a fine mist to settle against the rough stucco wall of her apartment building.

He hovered there for hours in the warm evening air, spread so thin it was uncomfortable, knowing one strong gust of wind could tear him clean apart. He was thankful it
wasn’t below freezing; there wouldn’t even be any bones left if he died like this.

The night was arid, the heated air so much drier than in England, even at the edge of the sea. He didn’t need to breathe—spread sheer and disembodied like smoke—or feel his heart beating like a drum or suffer the scorching of his blood through his veins. The sensations and burning passions of his body had disappeared. It was peaceful. Restful.

If only he could shut off his mind too.

He imagined her lost, injured, attacked by drug addicts, rapists, gang members. The longer he waited, the worse his fantasies became. For the first time in his life, he cursed himself. If he had the Gift of Foresight, he would know where to look. He could protect her.

He could
do
something.

She finally came stumbling through the silent, early hours of the morning with the look of a zombie raised from the dead: disheveled and shuffling, gray-faced, wide-eyed, stiff. The elegant lines of her dress were creased and thrown out of kilter, as if she’d slept in her car or fallen down. Repeatedly.

This did little to alleviate his anxiety.

He slid down the uneven wall of the old apartment building, molecule by molecule, flowing softly over cracks and bumps, past dark window panes, melting silently through the climbing ivy and flowering hibiscus until he found her bedroom window.

He settled as a gray plume of mist against the sill and waited.

Jenna came into sight through the dim corridor from the kitchen like a ghost materializing through the night,
moving so slowly she seemed drugged, hands lifted slightly out in front of her as if she didn’t trust her eyes to lead the way. She didn’t turn on any lights. She stood in the doorway to her bedroom with one hand on the doorjamb, just looking around. She stared silently at her bed, the small desk in the corner with its lamp and photo frame, her closet door half-opened, the shoes she’d pulled out and decided not to wear earlier still lying on the carpet at the foot of the bed.

She finally passed a shaking hand over her face, smoothed her hair, and reached behind her neck to unzip her dress.

Leander sank from the windowsill and floated above the bed of mint outside her bedroom window, the fragrant, velvet leaves brushing against him, ruffling his edges. He allowed her the privacy of undressing and climbing into bed without his gaze on her, though it was all he could do to resist breaking down her door, taking her back to Sommerley right then, forcing her to return with him to the place he now knew was her rightful home.

She looked so lost. So frightened. So...vulnerable.

You are Alpha. She is Ikati. Do not fail her!