Edge Of Darkness

43

. As if someone had injected a mind-numbing chemical straight into her veins that set her body aflame and squelched the little voice of reason in her head that should have been screaming Slow down! She didn’t want to slow down. She wanted to drown in him. She wanted to forget the past and all her terrible memories. With his lips on hers and his body against hers and his delicious taste on her tongue, she was forgetting. If he asked her at this moment if he could take her against the brick wall, she would have said an unequivocal yes.

Beneath her expensive, elaborate panties, she was soaking wet.

The kiss went on and on, deep, electric, and fevered, until Christian pulled back and panted a quietly strained, “Fuck.”

Ember moaned at the loss of his mouth. She felt hot, so hot and strangely uninhibited she had a wild notion to tear off all her clothes. She didn’t know what was happening to her, and honestly, she didn’t care.

“Don’t stop, Christian. Please don’t stop,” she whispered, her own breathing as irregular as his. Her hands on the back of his neck trembled.

“You want more of me?” he whispered back, his fingers tightening in her hair.

“Yes. Please. More.” It came out in three separate panted breaths as she strained against him, rising up on her toes when he wouldn’t lean in far enough for their lips to touch again.

“How much more, September? Tell me exactly how much you want.”

He held her back with that hand in her hair, still holding her tight against him with the other hand around her bottom, his gaze fierce on her face, almost ferocious. She shivered, alight with desire and a dark, burning need.

“I want all of you,” she whispered, staring straight into his eyes. His lids closed for a moment, he inhaled a ragged breath, then he opened his eyes and lowered his head to hers.

Just as his mouth was about to touch hers, he stiffened and let out a sharp, preternatural hiss. A deep, low, animalistic growl rumbled through his chest and lifted all the hair on the back of her neck and arms. He turned his head and stared down the alley.

Shocked out of her haze of lust by the unnatural sound, Ember followed his gaze.

Three men stood at the far end of the alley. Their bodies were facing away but their heads were turned in Ember and Christian’s direction, frozen mid-step as if they’d been walking past on the street beyond and had been arrested by the sight or sound of something. All three of them were tall and dark-haired, vaguely familiar looking, handsome in a predatory sort of way, all eyes and appetite. Pedestrians flowed by on the sidewalk unheeded, as the men stared down the alley with expressions ranging from hostile to flat-out murderous.

That frightening, sinister growl rose in Christian’s chest again, but this time it was louder, closer to a snarl. His lips peeled back over his teeth. His body went completely rigid.

“Christian?” Ember said it very quietly, now frozen in fright.

“Get back to the car, September,” he answered without looking away from the men. “Go find Corbin and tell him to take you straight home. Now.”

Very slowly, he stepped away, pushing her behind him with one arm so he was between her and the men at the end of the alley. As Ember peeked around Christian’s shoulder, the men turned, in unison, to face them. They took a step into the alley, very slowly, then another, and Christian’s hands curled to fists.

Ember whispered, “Christian, who are those—”

“Get back to the car! Now!”

He’d whipped his head around and snarled it out before she could finish her question. But it wasn’t his snarl that had her shrinking back in terror. It wasn’t because his voice had turned different, deeper and whiskey rough. It wasn’t even the look of cold, monstrous violence on his face.

It was his eyes. They’d changed. Something about the pupils.

She realized the change just as Christian turned away and pushed her back, growling another warning to go find Corbin. She stumbled back one step, then two, then finally turned and fled the alley in a flat-out run. Ember didn’t even bother to look behind her when the growling turned to a horrifying, unearthly roar of pure, animalistic rage that echoed off the stone walls, reverberating into silence.

She couldn’t look back because all she could see as she ran was Christian’s brilliant green eyes, the rounded dark pupils in the center that had elongated and narrowed to slits.

The three men at the other end of the alley—who weren’t really men at all—began advancing with the slow, measured gait of experienced predators honed in on their prey.

Christian stood his ground as they came, that low growl that had so frightened Ember still rumbling through his chest, the electric charge that gathered just before the Shift surging up to sting his skin.

He crouched to a defensive stance, ready to spring. One of the men held up a hand bringing the other two up short with the motion. They stopped, staring at Christian in silence, until the one with his hand up said something to the other two, in a language that sounded like Latin.