Rush of Darkness Read Online Free Page A

street out front and heading into this place.”
    Disbelief filled her gaze. “So you just happened torun into me? In a city the size of Paris? Do you realize how… improbable that is?”
    He shrugged his shoulders again. “What can I say?” he muttered, feeling almost embarrassed by the strange coincidence. Trying to make light of it, he added, “Maybe the fates were looking to bring us together.”
    “The fates?” Shock widened her eyes, while anger darkened them. “Isn’t that a little fantastical for a man like you?”
    Seth arched a brow at her snarly tone, enjoying the way her cheeks burned with color as her temper rose, the fierce emotion a welcome relief to the pale fear she’d worn the last time he’d seen her. “You think I could still be close-minded, after all the crazy crap I’ve witnessed? I might not understand most of it, but I know the world works in mysterious ways.”
    “Great,” she snapped, the panic in her eyes growing sharper. “So now the fates are conspiring against me?”
    Suddenly feeling like a jackass for riling her, he softened his tone. “I’m here to help you, Raine. I didn’t come to cause you any trouble.”
    “Well, I haven’t asked for any help, and better yet, I don’t want any. Especially not from you!”
    That quickly, his guilt vanished. “In case you didn’t notice,” he growled, “I didn’t ask.”
    She muttered something under her breath that he couldn’t quite make out, but it was clear she didn’t trust him.
    “And to be honest,” he added, “I’m surprised you didn’t see me coming.”
    With a delicate snort, she said, “My powers are hardly working right, remember?”
    Yeah, he did. But he also couldn’t help recalling that when she started to…well, care about someone, the less she could see them. In fact, she could barely read her loved ones at all, which is why she wouldn’t have known that he’d visited her parents unless she’d talked to them directly.
    But before his brain could run away with that intriguing thought, she said, “You still haven’t told me why the others gave you this ridiculous job.”
    Seth shook his head. “That’s not how it happened.”
    “No?”
    “They didn’t send me after you. I came on my own.”
    That seemed to throw her a little, though he could tell she was trying to keep it from showing. “Well, now you can just turn around and go back. I have things I need to do, and they don’t involve you.”
    “It’s strange you would say that,” he muttered, his muscles bunching with a renewed wave of tension.
    “Why?”
    “Because I thought we had an understanding.”
    “What kind of understanding?” she asked, her voice laden with suspicion.
    He ground out his response, wishing they weren’t having this argument in the loud nightclub, surrounded by drunken idiots. “The kind where you didn’t do anything stupid, putting yourself in danger again, after I helped save your ass.”
    The thought of exactly what he and the others had saved her from had Seth’s gut coiling, a trickle of sweat snaking down his spine beneath the soft cotton of his shirt. The woman had been through hell during her captivity at Westmore’s compound, both physically and mentally. She’d been raped by groups of those vile monsters, beaten repeatedly and shown the slaughtered pieces of her younger sister’s body. And yet, she’d somehow survived, refusing to let them break her completely.
    She’d looked away from him when he’d finished laying into her, her expression a beguiling cross between mutinous and contrite. Time stretched out, marked only by the staccato rhythm of their breaths and the muffled electronic pulse of the music, and then she suddenly gave herself a little shake. “I’ve said thank you,” she told him, locking her gaze with his again. “Several times, in fact. But what you did for me after the escape does not mean that you have any say in what I do now.”
    Like hell it didn’t. “Whatever