Sylvia Day - A Touch of Crimson

“What are you?” Her heart was beating too fast, forcing her to acknowledge how wound up she was. With rigid focus, she made her brain stop spinning around what she didn’t understand.

She couldn’t slide back toward that dark precipice in her mind, that place where insanity whispered along her subconscious like a lover. Her childhood therapist considered her one of his greatest successes. He thought she was remarkably well adjusted for a woman who’d witnessed the brutal murder of her mother at the tender age of five. He didn’t know that when the foundation of her reality had been torn from her, she’d forged a new one. An existence where creatures with inexplicable powers worked in grocery stores and ripped open the throats of parents in front of their children. She’d become a warrior in that world of black and white, that world of humans and vicious inhumans.

Yet Adrian and his bullet catchers made a lie of what she’d come to accept as the truth. What was he? What was she ? Where did she fit in a construct where beings who weren’t inhuman also weren’t evil?

Lindsay swallowed past the lump of uncertainty and confusion clogging her throat.

Adrian’s lips pursed so slightly the action was almost imperceptible. The hot, pulsing energy charging the air around him was totally at odds with his insolently apathetic demeanor. He sprawled elegantly in the bucket seat, sleekly graceful and inherently lethal. When Adrian had issued that softly voiced threat to Sam, she hadn’t blamed the whatever-the-fuck-he-was for looking like he was going to piss himself. While there hadn’t been even the tiniest fissure in Adrian’s composure, he had felt like a tornado to her, a violent and sweeping unstoppable force of destruction.

If death had a face, it was Adrian’s when he was pissed: a terror made more horrifying by its impossible beauty.

“You don’t know what I am,” he said, the unique resonance of his voice even more pronounced, “but you knew what the store clerk was?”

“The only time I like showing my hand first is when there’s a knife flying out of it.”

He moved so swiftly. One instant, he was arm’s distance away; the next, he’d immobilized her. Her hand holding the knife was pinned at the wrist to the leather seat, while the other was locked to the seatback in an iron grip. His blue eyes were aflame, literally glowing in the darkness.

Her heart raced in awe and mad fear. She had no idea what he was, but she knew he could break her far too easily. Power radiated from him like a heat wave, flushing her skin and stinging her eyes. “Let me go.”

Adrian’s gaze was hot with rage and sex. “You’ll find me to be amazingly lenient with you, Lindsay. I’ll concede and bend for you in ways I won’t for anyone else. But when it comes to your safety, there can be no games or evasion. You just took out a dragon who didn’t attack you first. Why?”

“A dragon?” Shock stuttered her breathing. “Are you kidding?”

“You didn’t even know what he was before you killed him?”

Realizing he was serious, Lindsay deflated into the seatback, all fight and resistance leaving her in a rush. “I knew he was evil. And not human.”

Just as she knew Adrian wasn’t, either. Not human but not vile. Capable of being terrifying, yet he didn’t incite the chilling and paralyzing fear that had afflicted her when her mother was killed. Lindsay searched for it, waited for it to rise and choke her with sick dread. But the anxiety never came. The tempest she sensed in him lacked violence, but even that-his effect on her inner radar-was unique. She read him as she would the weather, as if he was one with the wind that had spoken to her for as long as she could remember. There was a familiarity about him that she couldn’t explain or deny. And though he subdued her, he did so with an unbreakable but gentle grip, the look on his face filled with longing and torment… Everything about the way he dealt with her humanized him.

Whatever he was, she saw him as a man. Not a monster.

Adrian stared at her, his jaw taut. Above them, the panoramic glass roof afforded a backdrop of black sky and stars. The moment lengthened into two, then three, with neither of them capable of looking away. Finally, he whispered in a language she didn’t recognize, his voice throbbing with an emotion that elicited a quiver of warm surprise. His head bowed. His temple touched hers, nuzzling. His lips brushed against her ear, his hair drifting like thick silk against her brow. His scent-the earthy, wild fragrance of the air after a storm-enveloped her. Her lips parted on gasping breaths and she sought his mouth blindly, overcome by an inexplicable hunger for the taste of him.

He shoved back, reclaiming his seat. His head was turned away from her as he asked in too calm a tone, “How did you know?”

Lindsay sat unmoving, devastated by that moment of tenderness and yearning so fleeting she wondered if she’d imagined it. She struggled to pull herself together, swallowing hard to find her voice. “I can feel it. I know you’re not human, either.”

“Do you intend to kill me, too?”

His menacing purr set her teeth on edge. She straightened. “If I have to.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“More info.” She deliberately flipped her small blade up and down through her fingers, trying to regain her center of balance by engaging in a familiar activity. She wasn’t going to tell him about the wind and the way it spoke to her. For all she knew, it could be a major weakness he’d know how to exploit. “You’re… different. Not like the others.”

“What, exactly, constitutes an ‘other’?”

“Vampires.”

“Vampires,” he repeated.

“Yes. Sharp teeth, claws, bloodsuckers. Evil.”

“How long have you been killing vampires?”

“Ten years.”

A long stretch of silence. “Why?”

“Enough questions,” she shot back. “What are you?”

“I can hear your heart racing,” he taunted softly. “You’re smart to be wary. You don’t know what I am or what I can do. And you’ve lost the element of surprise. Now I know what you’re capable of.”

Lindsay smiled without humor, rising to the challenge. He was in a volatile mood, and it whipped against her senses like the lash of tropical rain. “You have no idea what I’m capable of. You haven’t seen anything yet.” Leaning toward him, she repeated, “What. Are. You?”

He turned his attention ahead. “When we get to the house, I’ll show you.”

Lindsay stared at him and played loosely with her knife. He’d gotten the drop on her moments earlier, taking her completely unawares, and even that wasn’t enough to put her on full alert. He disarmed her in every way, despite knowing how dangerous he was.

Whatever else she discovered about Adrian Mitchell, it was irrefutable that he beguiled. And that was more hazardous to her than any claws, fangs, or scales he might reveal. A damned sight scarier, too.

She focused on his magnificent profile. Even after receiving the entirety of his attention for the last few hours, she was still arrested by the strength of his jawline and the aristocratic line of his nose. And she loved the shape of his lips, which were so beautifully etched they were a work of art in their own right…

Mental images of that seductive mouth brushing across her skin, whispering heated, erotic words and curving in full smiles seized her heart in a fist. In her mind’s eye there was an entire repertoire of intimate, shadowy images that were so moving they were almost like memories. Arousal swept over her skin, tightening her nipples and spurring a slow, hot trickle between her legs.

Tearing her gaze away, she looked out the window and fought to regulate her erratic breathing. Fuck . What was wrong with her? She was a mess. A quivering, pissed off, turned on, jittery mess.