Шеррилин Кеньон - Dark Side of the Moon

How had the door come open?

“Hey!” she snapped. “Get back in the box!”

But the cat didn’t listen.

She took a step toward it only to realize that it was acting strangely. The cat could barely walk and appeared to be choking. It fell down and rolled to its side.

Her heart stopped beating. “Oh, don’t you dare die on me. Angie’ll kill me. She’ll never believe I didn’t do something to kill you.”

Wiping her nose, she crossed the room in short strides to reach for the lump of fur. Its breathing was labored and pain filled.

What on earth could be wrong with him?

It was then she realized that the cat’s collar was extremely tight on its neck. Poor Puss appeared to be asphyxiating. “Okay,” she said calmly. “Let’s get this thing off you.” She reached for the latch only to realize that it didn’t have a buckle.

Susan frowned. What on earth?

“ Pull at it. Hard.”

It was that same deep, masculine voice in her head and it coincided with the cat hissing and squirming as if in even more pain.

“Just relax,” she said soothingly as she grabbed the collar and pulled. What the hell? Maybe the weird voice knew something she didn’t.

At first the collar seemed to tighten even more, causing the cat to wheeze and choke. Susan pulled at the collar with all her strength. Just when she was sure it was useless, the collar snapped in half with a foreign surge of electricity so powerful, it actually knocked her back three feet.

Cursing, she righted herself, then froze as she caught sight of the cat, which was growing on the carpet, right before her eyes. In a matter of heartbeats, it went from small house cat to full leopard size.

And still it writhed on the floor as if it were in agony.

“ Run!”

She flinched at the man’s voice in her head. Far from a coward, she moved forward… at least until all hell broke loose. Lightning shot from the ceiling and rebounded all over her room, shattering frames and breaking lightbulbs. The hair on her body stood up on ends as the air was rife with static electricity that snapped in her ears.

The leopard let out a feral snarl as it clawed at her carpet.

Unsure of what to do and unable to get to her gun since the cat was between her and the staircase, Susan took cover behind her couch as more lightning flashed and the windows rattled so badly that she wasn’t even sure why they hadn’t shattered. She shrieked as a bolt came dangerously close to her, making her hair stand on end in what she was sure was a truly attractive sight.

Just as she thought her house would ignite into flames from the powerful bursts, the lightning stopped abruptly. It was eerily quiet as she sat cringing with her hands over her ears. So quiet that all she could hear was the pounding of her own heart. The heaviness of her own breathing.

She half-expected the lightning to return.

But after a minute of waiting with nothing else running amok, she dared a glance over the back of the couch to discover the most incredible thing of all had happened…

Her leopard was gone and in its place was a naked man.

I have got to be dreaming ….

But if she were, wouldn’t she have given herself a better house than this?

Ignoring that thought, she narrowed her eyes. The man lay unmoving on her dark green carpet. From her angle, all she could see was a well-muscled backside with a strange double bow and arrow tattoo on his left shoulder blade. Long black wavy hair was plastered against his damp body and he had the nicest naked butt she’d ever seen in real life.

Granted he looked mighty fine lying there, but then Ted Bundy hadn’t been hard on the eyes, either.

Susan grabbed the closest thing she had to a weapon—her table lamp that had fallen over during the chaos—and crouched low, waiting for him to move.

He didn’t.

He just lay there so still and quiet she wasn’t even sure he was alive.

With her heart lodged firmly in her throat, she unscrewed the lamp shade and crept closer to him.

“Hey?” she said sharply. “You alive?”

He didn’t respond.

Preparing to run just in case he was faking, she poked him with the tip of the lamp. Okay, I’ve seen this movie before, she thought. Hapless moron sticks head over unconscious body to check vital signs and the bad guy opens his eyes and grabs her.

She wasn’t about to fall for that. So she decided to creep around to the front of him.

Still, he didn’t move. “Hey,” she tried again, poking him with the lamp.

Nothing.

Nothing but a body so prime that it made her want to take a bite out of it to see if he tasted as good as he looked. Stop it, Sue! She had much more important things to think about than how good he looked naked.

Susan narrowed her eyes as she sat back on her heels. It was hard to get those thoughts out of her head. He had a long, lean body that was dusted with short black hairs and lean, hard muscles that let her know he would be extremely formidable while awake. He was well over six feet tall and there was something about him, even while out cold, that said he wasn’t meek or mild.

A body like his wasn’t something a woman came up against often. In more ways than one. He was all tanned flesh from tip to toe. But what captured her attention was the beauty of his hands. He had elegant, strong fingers and the palm of his right hand appeared to be blistered.

How absolutely odd. But that wasn’t what concerned her. The fact that he was on her floor did.

Ready to whack him hard if he moved, she used the lamp to roll him over onto his back. Something that wasn’t exactly easy to do, since he appeared to weigh a small ton, but eventually she had him there. His long hair completely obscured his face even though the rest of him was laid out bare to her gaze.

Feeling a teensy bit better that he hadn’t made any moves to grab her, she crept closer. So close that she could finally touch that delectable skin. Susan frowned as she saw a line of awful bruising around his neck—like the cat might have had from the collar…

She wasn’t sure if that comforted her or scared her. Lowering the lamp, she reached to touch the bruised area so that she could feel for his pulse. God, he had a sexy neck. The kind a woman dreamed about teasing between her teeth.

Focus, Susan, focus. This isn’t about sex, this is about a naked stranger in your house.

One she wanted out of here, ASAP. And luckily his pulse was beating strongly against her fingertips.

Still, he didn’t try to grab her.

Maybe he wasn’t faking after all.

“Okay,” she breathed. He was alive and unconscious on her floor. Where did that leave her?

Up stinky creek sans a paddle.

Sighing, she continued to stare at the bruise on his neck. He couldn’t really be the cat, could he?

“Oh, don’t be stupid. This so can’t be happening. Not now. Not to me.”

And yet it was. She couldn’t deny the fact that there was a gorgeous naked man on her floor and the cat appeared to have completely vanished.

No, it had to be some kind of trick. Something like a Criss Angel stunt—he was the king of pulling off incredible illusions while millions of people watched. Never had she believed in magic of any kind and she wasn’t about to buy into that crap now. She only believed in what she could see and feel.

And you could feel him right now. No one would ever know …

“Oh, get thee behind me, Id.” But then it had been way too long since she’d had a naked guy around, and she’d never had one around who was quite this fine. Of course there was a really good reason for that. Most guys who looked like this weren’t exactly date material. They were more the players who came and went so fast that they often left skid marks on a woman’s heart and in her bedroom.