Chasing Adonis Read Online Free

plastic oxygen mask over her nose and mouth didn’t mar her
pretty face. Pale blond hair surrounded her head like a platinum cloud.
Tissue-thin lids veiled her eyes, but he recalled their color with no prodding.
Golden, glossy brown. Like honey. With the help of the mask, she inhaled in a
normal rhythm now.
    She’d scared the hell out of him when she fainted against
him like some damsel in his nephew’s fairy tale book. Damnedest thing he’d ever
seen. With such extensive injuries, he wondered how she’d managed to stay
seated upright as long as she had. According to the EMT’s quick exam, she had a
couple of fractured ribs, a broken ankle, and a collapsed lung.
    Shane frowned. The man on the sidewalk, the supposed second
victim of this accident, looked perfectly fine. No bleeding, no broken bones,
not even a bruise. With the help of the EMTs, he managed to get to his feet and
now hovered beside the woman named Adara, as if terrified to let her out of his
sight.
    What the hell had really happened here? Because he sure as
shit didn’t buy the ludicrous hit-and-run excuse she’d given the 911
operator. 
    Strange how she’d sounded coherent when the operator asked
if she was injured. She said she’d bumped her head. She was fine, but shaky. Yeah,
right. And I’m President of the United States. She oughta be a
helluva lot worse than shaky after surviving the battering she’d apparently
endured.
    “Hey, Detective.” Sergeant Andrew O’Reilly stepped out of
his black and white and approached, notebook in hand.
    “How’s it going, Andy?”
    “Same crap, smaller shovel. What are you doing here?
Slumming?”
    “Nah, I just happened to be near the Silk Club when the
first call came in about some guy hassling a female customer. Heard about this
when I got back in the car and put the two together.  Figured I’d give it
a look-see. Make sure you guys used proper procedure.”
    “Bull.” O’Reilly’s baby face and chipmunk cheeks softened
the severity of his frown. “You have a nose for this stuff. You smelled a
rat—even over the radio.”
    Shane raised a brow, but truth overcame professional
courtesy, and he shrugged off the disrespect.
    The patrolman jerked his head at the ambulance. “What do you
think of this one?”
    With a calculating eye, he took in the woman struggling to
breathe. Black eyes on her swollen face, arms striped with red welts, bruises
on her legs. Meanwhile, the man seemed perfectly fine, coherent, without a
scratch on him. Both vics resembled the description the bartender had provided
of the male and female from the Silk Club incident. “I think it stinks.”
    “Figured you might,” Andy said with a grimace.
    Adara and Pretty Boy probably had a fight sometime
yesterday, no doubt because she planned an evening out with her girlfriends, without
him. Later in the evening, jealousy already spiking his temper, he caught
up with her at the Silk Club. Trying to avoid a fight, she hid in the club’s
storage room. But when the guy started calling her cell, she must have figured
she’d be better off hightailing it outta there altogether. Unfortunately, when
she left the club, he followed her out. They got into a heated debate on the
street, he started knocking her around. She hit back. Not as strong as Pretty
Boy, she took the brunt of the abuse. But she must have hit him hard enough to
knock him out. Then, panicked at what she’d done, Adara called in the details
as a hit-and-run accident.
    Shane sighed again. Even his scenario didn’t sit
right in his gut. He wished she’d killed the bastard. She wouldn’t be the first
abused woman to take the law into her own hands. Hell, he wished Cassia had
done that. At least she’d be alive now.
    “Did you get a whiff of the guy?” Andy’s question shook him
out of his crime scene reconstruction.
    “No.” But he could hazard a guess what the young cop
suspected. “Alcohol?”
    The sergeant nodded. “The smell’s oozing out of his pores,
but