Bait This! (A 300 Moons Book) Read Online Free Page B

push down the bear’s agenda in favor of his own again.
    But this time, the bear was not interested in being pushed aside.
    Through Derek’s eyes, the bear searched the trees.
    Derek felt his own lips huffing and blowing in search of the scent.
    Impossible.
    He was in the middle of the woods with no civilization in sight. There was no way the bear could be scenting a woman.
    Yet, even as he thought it, the whisper of her came to him. A shimmering blue trail of scent in the twilight.
    The bear chuffed within him, as if to say, “I told you so.”
    But Derek didn’t give a fuck.
    The scent, that incredible scent…
    He had to find its source.
    Derek charged through the trees, back down toward the direction from which they had come, slipping on wet leaves and scraping himself on branches.
    Just the scent of her was enough to make him rock hard, despite the sting of the branches and the burning sensation in his hip. The heat radiated from the exact spot where he’d seen the strange marking swirling, as the plane was crashing. He’d forgotten all about it in the commotion.
    Some sense of the unreality of the night’s events streaked through his head, but was gone before he could latch onto it.
    Derek wanted that female.
    And Derek got what he wanted, always.
    The longing inside him was nearly at a breaking point when the blue shimmer of the scent trail intensified to a blinding ocean.
    Dark against the bright cloud of her breathtaking scent, the silhouette of the woman appeared.
    She was looking out into the gathering darkness over the mountain. Her stance was powerful.
    The bear drank in a long pull of her scent approvingly.
    Females should be brave, and strong enough to protect and discipline cubs.
    As Derek stared at her in awe, she turned to face him.

7
    H edda heard the demon long before it arrived.
    She was at first surprised at the natural sound it made. The creature crashing through the underbrush sounded like an animal that was frightened or hungry.
    Or both.
    But there was no time to dwell on the trickery of the evil, whatever it was.
    If Hedda cowered it would surely attack, so she decided to display the kind of regal confidence that might throw it off momentarily, giving her a slight advantage.
    She thought of her mission and surveyed her kingdom below, such as it was: an abandoned hillside, a ghost town, a mine fire, a creek, and the abandoned hill on the other side.
    She knew that landscape so well she could fight this thing with her whole concentration, while the evil might have to worry about the rocks and the cliffside if it had taken a corporeal form. That had to be an advantage.
    Of course, she only had a chance if this was actually a demon.
    If it was a moroi, she was already as good as dead.
    The smashing sounds stopped, probably fifteen feet behind her.
    Slowly, she turned to see whether her fate was sealed.
    What she saw made her believe she was hallucinating.
    Instead of a demon, a disarmingly gorgeous man stared back at her.
    Dark hair, a bit too long, hung over his gorgeous blue eyes. His handsome face was dirty, a smudge across the left side of his face only highlighting sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw.
    He was wearing what must have once been a very nice white button down shirt and expensive looking gray trousers. Now the shirt was shredded, showing off rippling abdominals and a pair of cut biceps. His massive erection was outlined through the trousers.
    But none of that had anything on his expression.
    The man was staring at Hedda like he was starving and she was a ten course meal.
    It had to be her magic. Her other gift had this effect on men. And women. And just about everything.
    It wasn’t her he was seeing, not really. He wasn’t transfixed by the way she actually looked…
    To him, she probably looked like a gilded angel or a magazine centerfold, shimmering at the edges.
    Not like the very human and down-to-earth woman who had just hiked a mountain.
    But Hedda felt her body respond to