her back. She skidded several feet in the gore-stained lake that covered the decimated tile. He retaliated with a burst of flame. The inferno engulfed her, melting hair and skin from the top of her head down to her feet, boiling her in the flood that washed over and around her. The agony was such that she couldn’t voice a sound and when the flames ceased abruptly, she hoped for the relief of death.
But she wasn’t going alone.
Fueled by adrenaline and the animosity of a woman completely fed up with her life, Eve vaulted to her feet. She slammed into the beast’s neck and belly where she clung to the tips of his scales with one-handed desperation. The impact to her raw, burnt flesh was devastating and she cried out, nearly dropping her sword.
Alec was there before her, one arm banded around the dragon’s neck while the other hand gouged at the eyes. The beast flayed and screeched, whipping its neck to and fro in a vain effort to free himself of his attackers.
As Eve plunged the length of her blade through the vulnerable flesh created by the missing forelimb, she felt massive talons tearing into her spine. Her body arched, forcing her weapon the final inch needed to penetrate the dragon’s heart.
The beast howled, then exploded in a burst of white-hot embers.
Eve crashed to the ground, paralyzed by her wounds. She lay blinking, gasping, surrounded by the requiem created by the shower from the pipes.
The vibration of footsteps pounding through water assailed her, then Alec was pulling her gingerly into his lap.
“Angel . . .” His hands shook as he tentatively touched her ruined skin. “Don’t you dare die on me. You hear me? I just got you back, damn you—”
“Alec.” She tried to open her eyes, but the effort required more energy than she possessed. Shivers wracked her abused frame and rattled her teeth. The faint chemical tang of tap water filled her nostrils, as did the scent of ashes, demon, and blood. Her blood.
She could finally smell and taste the sweetness of it.
“I’m here.” His voice broke. “I-I’m here.”
“The Alpha did this.”
“What?”
“The Alpha. He wanted . . . his son . . . he tried . . .”
“Shh. Don’t talk, angel.” A hot tear splashed onto her raw skin. Then another. “Save your strength.”
“We missed something in Upland,” she whispered, sinking into an encroaching blanket of darkness. The pain was fading, the fear receding. “Go back . . . We missed something . . .”
CHAPTER 2
Six weeks earlier . . .
Eve knew, the moment her eyes met his, that they were going to have a torrid, extremely brief affair. His shoulder brushed hers as he walked by. The scent of his skin lingered in her nostrils for a delicious moment and she shivered, her blood thrumming with anticipation. She didn’t know his name, she didn’t know him, but the compulsion to take the handsome stranger home with her was powerful and irresistible.
A tiny voice in her mind urged her to use caution, told her to slow down. Think twice. She wasn’t a “casual sex” woman, never had been. But one look, and lust had hit her like a freight train.
His face . . . God, his face looked so much like Alec Cain’s they could have been brothers. Smooth olive skin, night-black hair, and espresso-brown eyes. Sex incarnate. Though a decade had passed since the night Alec had ruined her for other men, Eve doubted he’d changed much. Men like Alec just got better with age.
The man who’d just passed her carried that same air of dangerous, tightly restrained power. That sense of being barely leashed. The urbane Armani suit that draped his tall, leanly muscled frame only emphasized that primitive quality she hungered for. The animal attraction was intense, quickening her pulse and knotting her stomach.
Her heels tapped a rhythmic staccato upon the golden-veined marble floor. Somewhere deep inside her, alarm bells were ringing. She felt almost as if she were fleeing, as if the sight and smell of a dominant male were something to fear. But parts of her were far from afraid.
The vast lobby of Gadara Tower was congested by business-minded pedestrians. The steady hum of numerous conversations and the industrious whirring of the glass tube elevator motors failed to hide her rapid breathing. Fifty floors above her, a massive skylight allowed natural illumination to flood the atrium. It was that drenching sunlight gleaming on thick, inky strands of hair that first drew her