his gut. Her presence was curious and captivating for a man who not only had searched for such a connection, but also had forgone serious female companionship in favor of more pressing pursuits.
She stood across from him as if he had conjured her.
Maybe he had.
Still, what was she seeing? She was telegraphing her interest in him by remaining close. His senses were loud and clear about that. Some sort of combustible chemical reaction was taking place between them. The air was heavy with it, and warmer than before.
Animal magnetism at work? Lust at first sight? An instantaneous attraction between strangers on a street corner was possible, Kellan supposed, though unlikely—which surely meant that the odds against this being a benign chance meeting were in his favor.
Are you her?
With his heart misbehaving, it was impossible for him to remain inert for much longer. In order to place her importance to his cause, he’d have to get a peek at this woman’s soul. To do that, she’d have to be unwrapped. She’d have to meet him skin to skin for him to see what secrets, if any, lay hidden beneath those fragile feminine bones. And he was all for that skin-to-skin business.
“Do you recognize me?” he silently sent to her, hoping something deep inside her might rise to the surface and provide a clue.
“Yes,” she said, giving him a start.
She waved at the hospital across the street, reminding him of the other question he’d posed. “I work there, at Seattle General. Possibly that’s where I’ve seen you? Are you waiting for someone to be released?”
“Nope,” he said, unable to lie about even the simplest things. None of the Blood Knights could.
Nor was he good at small talk, especially when trying to reason things out. He kept wondering how an ancient soul could survive by being passed along from body to body in a long line of new recipients, without those recipients knowing about it. Same soul, different housing, in a special type of reincarnation. Not a myth. Absolutely real.
If this woman didn’t know what she carried inside her, though, how would she recognize him? In any case, why didn’t she run?
Did she like his looks as much as he liked hers? His appearance had once been legendary, but he was much leaner and more chiseled now. Time had done that. Time and the efforts of his quest. He’d been frozen in the body of a twenty-eight-year-old, but Kellan knew he looked older, and that he had always projected a dangerous edge. The leather and the bike helped that image along.
“I stopped for a breath and to get my bearings,” he told her.
As she continued to study him, his nerves burned. Seconds flew by in silence before she put a hand to her temple as if to ease an ache there. The brief flutter of her lashes gave Kellan the first hint that she wasn’t all right. Not just tired. Possibly she was ill. Small quakes ran through her, suggesting that her strength had ebbed.
“You couldn’t have called to me, I suppose,” she finally said. “And I guess I’m way too tired to be making sense.”
Her voice wasn’t just sexy. It was flammable.
Was that also a sign?
“Do you need help?” he asked politely, carefully managing his excitement and his reaction to her. “An escort to your car, or a ride somewhere?”
The busy street wasn’t the right place to hold an important meeting of any kind. The damn werewolf had got closer, as well as too many other people who hadn’t received the memo about their lives being safer indoors after dark.
Kellan had to pay some attention to the monsters prowling the darkness because if he hit the road, this woman, in her weakened state, would be easy prey.
Her lashes fluttered again before she briefly closed her eyes, leaving Kellan certain that the ashen pallor of her face wasn’t due entirely to Seattle’s sunless climate. The bold blonde was no longer steady on her feet. She looked as if she could have been a patient at the hospital across from them.
“Do you need a ride somewhere?” he repeated in a soft, clear tone. “Help of any kind?”
“No.” Her head shake displaced a few damp dark-golden strands that were starting to curl. “I don’t need help. Thanks for the offer.”
She inched backward without turning from him and ran into a post. After issuing a short bark of uncomfortable laughter, she muttered, “Hell, what a night,” and looked up to apologize a second time. “Sorry.”
It could have been the way she issued the apology—the rather forlorn enunciation of two drawn-out syllables—that caused Kellan to stir. He was beside her in an instant, utilizing the extraordinary speed and superior reflexes that had been built into him.
Chances were that not many others on the sidewalk had been paying attention to what might appear little more than a street-side tête-à-tête. Odds were also good that no one had noticed how frail this woman appeared to be, and how menacing he looked by comparison. He was two heads taller than she was and twice as broad. She tilted her head back to look up at him and met his eyes.
Her eyes were blue.
“I had a long shift, that’s all. I need to get home and rest,” she explained. “I used to be a cop, and that’s my excuse for confronting you, as lame as it sounds.”
Kellan’s hand hovered less than an inch from hers. She was in some kind of trouble and trying to make the best of it. He zeroed in on the thin white scar that ran from her right temple to beneath her ear, noting how the fingers of her other hand kept returning to that spot.
She’d been damaged, and she seemed to him like a real woman made of flesh and bone. Up close, he found nothing to suggest she might be a vessel housing an immortal knight’s off switch. She looked nothing at all like a Reaper in disguise.
He eyed her thoughtfully. Are you what my Makers tried so hard to hide so that my life would go endlessly on? Or are you merely a woman who appeals to my baser side?
It was conceivable that she was just a woman, but how could a mistake in identity happen between two souls intricately tied to each other for centuries, or when the termination of his life might be in her hands?
Each Blood Knight had a counterpart soul, though no one expected the two to find each other. They weren’t supposed to meet. Weren’t designed to meet. The Makers at Castle Broceliande had seen to it that the seven Knights could be taken down if they veered too far off track. This had been accomplished by planting fail-safe switches in seven other souls ultimately responsible for turning each Knight off, dealing a final death blow if called into action.
The way they’d do this was top secret. None of the Knights knew what their counterparts might have in store, or where in the world they were. It had taken Kellan years of research to pinpoint Seattle as the hometown of his, plus a lot of underground bargaining with his considerable fortune. Then there was the call he had felt all the way to his bones.
Was it this woman, then?
Is it you?
Will your touch end my existence? As simply as that? I show up and awaken what’s supposed to be off-limits, and you destroy me?
Her
