The Awakening Read Online Free Page A

be a good idea
to find a less hands-on job for Mary-Ellen. She didn’t trust
Mary-Ellen around the vampire and any slip up in protocol could
wreak terrible consequences. She hit send — her thoughts already
traveling to the next task on her mental to-do list — and
swallowed a horrified shriek when Julien de Valsan stood framed in
her doorway.
    Impossible…how ? Her throat worked
convulsively on a scream that wouldn’t budge. The slow, terrible
smile on his finely aristocratic mouth caused her to take a
faltering step back until she touched the shower door. No escape,
her mind cried though she kept her lips seamed shut until she
quieted the fear under a blanket of iron will. “How did you get
out?” she asked, mentally going through the exhaustive fail-safes
that somehow, he’d managed to circumvent.
    A muffled twittering sounded from his pant
pocket and he fished out a cell phone with a wicked curve of his
lips. She gasped when she recognized Mary-Ellen’s cell phone. “I’ve
always found the modern age with its gadgets and technology to be
tedious and tiresome with all their beeps and bells but I must
confess, your assistant’s device was most helpful in finding you. I
might have to get one of my own. Or I could just keep this one.
Mary-Ellen won’t be needing it any longer.” He crushed the phone in
his palm and dropped the fragments to her floor as he advanced.
“Enough with the pleasantries. There will be a reckoning between
you and I, and I do not wish to delay my gratification a moment
longer.”
    Her eyes watered. “What did you do to
Mary-Ellen?” she asked, knowing her own death stared at her through
the eyes of the man stalking her, yet she had to know what had
befallen her assistant. The memory of her parents’ death bloomed in
her mind and her knees threatened to buckle. “What did you do to
her?” she cried, hating him, hating his race of monsters.
    In an instant he was on her, ripping the
damp towel from her body and yanking her against him, her frantic
struggles as she beat his chest and kicked with her bare feet did
little to loosen his grip. If anything, her attempts at violence
seemed to spark a hunger that had less to do with sustenance and
more to do with sex and dominance. His face so close to hers, she
could feel his breath on her cheek, could see the irregular black
spirals in his pale blue iris that gave away his alien nature. Yet,
as horrific as it was, there was a hypnotic beauty that sucked at
her, seduced her with its difference. Noooo , she wouldn’t
succumb to die at his leisure. She ceased her useless flailing to
conserve her strength and lifted her chin to stare into those deep,
fathomless eyes, daring him to kill her now or forfeit his chance.
“Likely a platoon of heavily armed Marines are canvassing this
house this very minute,” she said with a calm that was only surface
deep. Inside something quivered and shook, but not entirely from
fear. She pushed aside the obscenity, not willing to examine it
more closely. “If you wish to live, you will leave me and go. You
have only a few minutes before the sun rises. We’ve watched you
long enough to know that you cannot withstand the sun.”
    He ignored her statement for the moment and
chose instead to inhale deeply at the junction where her shoulders
met her neck. She couldn’t quite quell the shiver that followed. “I
could kill you and be gone within seconds,” he murmured, his lips
touching her bare skin with the softest touch until something sharp
grazed and she realized with a shudder he’d raked her flesh with
his canines. “The question is…do I slake my hunger now with little
preamble or finesse, or do I take you with me to savor for many
nights to come?”
    Take her with him ? She stiffened in
horror. “I would never be your plaything. I would kill myself
first,” she hissed, wishing for something sharp and deadly to
plunge through his black heart. “I swear I’d die before letting you
touch me in