Hunted, The Complete Edition: A Full-length Steamy Vampire Romance (New England Nightwalkers) Read Online Free Page A

life.

3
    Chapter Three
    C herry blossoms .
    Christ almighty, why couldn’t she have smelled like anything else? Vanilla, coconut, hell, even honeysuckle would’ve been better than cherry blossoms.
    He resisted the urge to bury his face in her hair, and kept his muscles as loose as possible.
    You’re supposed to be injured, he reminded himself. It would only take one slip-up to tickle her intuition and make her untrusting. She’d already had a moment of apprehension back at the car. He had scented it on her. Fear, sharp and metallic. Once she’d seen his injury though, she’d pushed aside her instinct to fear him and had come to his aid.
    That part of being human, he didn’t miss. Empathy to the point of carelessness. As a nightwalker, instincts were everything. The difference between eternal life and damnation.
    Although sometimes he wondered if those were one in the same…
    “Just a little further,” she murmured, curling her arm around him more tightly as they stepped off the street and over a curb.
    The move pressed her lush breasts against his side and he swallowed a groan. Maybe this was some cruel form of karma. The universe’s way of punishing him for deceiving her. He recalled the stricken expression on her face when she’d realized she’d hit him and barely repressed a shudder of self-disgust.
    Just suck it up and get through it . The sooner he got the information he needed to call Irena off, the quicker he’d be out of her life.
    “Usually I love the solitude of having a lot of land to myself,” she said, her breath coming in short pants now from the exertion of supporting his body weight. “But today I can’t help but wish I had some closer neighbors.”
    Gabriel wished he could call it done then and there. Vampire hunters, by nature, were far more cautious than this slip of a woman. The fact that she was not only bringing him to her house but had also basically acknowledged that no one would hear her if she screamed made him question not only Irena’s read, but also his own initial suspicions about her all-too-clean file.
    Zara Matheson was almost certainly exactly what she seemed to be.
    A sexy librarian with no social life who made a killer pumpkin pie.
    It was only the memory of the photo in her file that stopped him from walking away. The steely resolve in those china blue eyes. The firmness of her stubborn little chin. A pain he knew all too well reflected on her face. The kind of pain that could make a person do strange things…things so out of character, even friends and loved ones would say they never saw it coming.
    One hour. He’d give it one hour, and if he didn’t find anything damning, he’d call it quits.
    He tried to block all his senses as they picked their way across a tidy yard and up the cobbled pathway to her door. If he could just get away from her scent and the warmth of those curves, maybe he could think straight.
    She unlocked the heavy front door with her free hand and led him through, a tacit invitation without which he would’ve had no choice but to stand outside. It was one of the few bits of folklore that still held true. Lucky for his kind, they’d managed to find ways around most of the rest of their limitations after centuries of trial and error with various chemical compounds and herbal supplements. Not only had they evolved to enjoy other food along with their diet of blood, they could season it with garlic and follow it with a refreshing glass of holy water and a jaunt outdoors on a cloudy afternoon.
    Entering a human’s home without a freely given invitation, though?
    No.
    If they’d been anywhere else, he could use his powers to enthrall her and convince her to do just about anything. But here, on her turf, she was in control, even when she invited him in.
    It was a hollow defense…a thin thread of right in a whole tapestry of wrongs he’d committed, but for some reason, it gave him comfort that he wasn’t a complete monster.
    “Let’s get you