Twilight Vendetta Read Online Free

voice, inside her head.
Hold on. I’m coming.
    It worked! Hallelujah, it worked! They were coming!
    Then the buzzing sound of a motor interrupted her gasping, choking celebration, and a spotlight started dancing around the water between her and shore. A boat was racing toward her from the beach. No!
    Humans. Dammit, she had to warn the vampire whose voice she’d heard just now, inside her mind.
    “I don’t know if you can hear me, but–”
    “I hear you just fine, Emma Louise.”
    He’d surfaced right beside her, his arms wrapped tight around her middle, holding her easily. His face was very close to hers, so close she could see the droplets beading along his jawline and trickling down the length of his nose.
    And then she met his eyes, and she knew him. She knew him even dripping wet in the dark. “You,” she whispered. Her heart sped up. He was holding her so close, her entire body was pressed against his. Everything in her wanted to touch, to explore, to feel him. Her hands splayed across his soaking wet shirt, a couple of fingers on the skin of his chest, where the top few buttons had come open. His arms around her were as powerful as she remembered. And his face—seeing his face again filled her with an emotion too big to name, or even to explore just then.
    “Yes, me,” he said it at length. For a few heartbeats, he’d been looking at her just the same way she’d been looking at him. She could almost believe he felt the same heady combination of relief and joy at seeing her again.
    A sound broke into her thoughts, or rather, the cessation of the sound. The approaching boat’s motor had been shut down, and now there were oars slicing through the water.
    “Someone’s coming,” she told him softly.
    “I know that. And they’re not DPI. Just a couple of fishermen. I’m only holding you up until they get close enough to save you.”
    “No. No, you have to take me with you.”
    His brows bent, thick and dark over eyes like melted chocolate. “Why would I want to do that?”
    Because it’s not my imagination,
Emma thought, staring into those eyes and feeling as if she could drown in them more easily than in the sea.
Because I’ve been telling myself it was, this whole love at first sight thing, just a teenager’s dramatic fantasy. But I still feel it, and I’m not a little girl anymore. That’s why.
    She closed her eyes, reminded herself that according to her lifetime of research, vampires could read human thoughts if they cared to try. So she cast around inside her brain and found the reason she’d had for taking such drastic measures before she’d seen him again and forgotten everything else. The kids. “They’re alive. The two teenagers, the boy and the girl who were shot in the water. They’re not dead. I know what it looked like. Even those goops thought they were dead, but they...revived or something. In the boat. They revived, and there were screams, and there was blood. They killed two of the guys who shot them, but then they were drugged or something and taken–”
    “Can you hear us?” someone shouted from the boat that was heading her way at an alarming pace.
    “We have to go,” Emma insisted. “I’ll tell you everything else later.”
    “Yes, you will. Are you all right for now, Emma?”
    “Yes. Yes, I’m fine. You saved me. Again.” She pushed her hair back with one hand, staring up at him. “Third time.”
    “Fourth,” he said. “You were too young to remember the first. You’re a very troublesome Chosen.” And then he let go, just like that, and vanished beneath the waves.
    “No! No, wait, don’t go.” She whisper-shouted her plea, because the humans intent on helping her were almost on top of her now. She turned in the water, searching for him.
I still don’t even know your name.
    And then four hands, human hands, gripped her and hauled her out of the water and into a small motorboat. She had taken in water, was still choking on it, and was shivering with