Taming The Shifter. Lisa Childs

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СКАЧАТЬ probably realized that there was somebody more welcoming waiting for him,” Campbell said.

      “Since you wouldn’t come to happy hour, we brought happy hour to you,” Lizzy said.

      Paige held up a bottle of white wine, and Kate snorted in disgust. Then Campbell raised another bottle, of liquor nearly the same amber as the man’s topaz eyes. Whiskey was Kate’s drink—when she drank, which wasn’t often. Just during happy hour, which was whenever the busy women managed to get together.

      “You’ve been so busy the past couple of months,” said Renae who was equally, if not more so, busy but always made time for her friends, “that we’ve missed you.”

      “So let us in,” Campbell said.

      “Sorry,” Kate murmured as she stepped back so her friends could enter her messy living room. She had one couch, which was littered with clothes and newspapers, and a coffee table that was buried under plates and fast-food containers. If she’d known she was having visitors...she still wouldn’t have had time to clean up. Not with the shifts she worked and not with all the time she spent off duty trying to solve a case nobody believed was a crime—because they hadn’t seen the body.

      But she’d seen the body. That night and again in her bedroom.

      “Kate?” Lizzy asked, her soft voice full of concern. She was the mom of the group—having raised four kids on her own. She tended to mother them, too. “Are you sure everything’s all right?”

      Kate nodded and lied, “Yeah, I’m fine.”

      Her place was small, hardly enough room for herself. But she picked up and tossed stuff aside, making room for her friends just as she had made room in her life for these women; their friendships were vital to her sanity. She had never needed them more than now.

      Renae and Campbell dropped onto the floor while Paige and Lizzy squeezed together on the couch, making room for her to join them.

      “I’m really glad you guys came over,” she said with gratitude for their friendship and their concern.

      But she dare not tell them about her other late-night visitor, or they might think her as crazy as she already thought herself. He couldn’t have really been in her bedroom—in her bed. She couldn’t really have kissed him.

      He was dead. She’d killed him.

      * * *

      Warrick hit the ground on all fours then glanced over his shoulder at the leap he’d taken off the fire escape outside Kate Wever’s fourth-floor apartment. “Damn...”

      “You’re lucky you didn’t kill yourself,” a deep voice murmured.

      He tensed and cursed. He couldn’t be discovered. Not like this...not after he had already turned into the form he took every night from midnight till dawn. But the man was too close for Warrick to disappear, unseen, into the shadows.

      “But I already know that you don’t die easily.”

      Finally recognizing the voice, Warrick whirled around, claws drawn—teeth bared as he uttered a warning growl.

      “And neither do I,” Sebastian Culver reminded him. “So you can put those away.”

      Warrick had just been messing with the other guy. He felt no hostility—only gratitude. He sheathed his claws and grinned at the dark-haired man. Well, actually, Sebastian wasn’t a man—or not just a man. Either. “I’m glad to see you again.”

      “I can’t say the same,” the vampire replied, his voice and pale blue eyes cool. “I thought you would have left Zantrax by now.”

      “I have unfinished business here,” Warrick said, tensing at the other man’s unfriendly tone. Why was the guy hostile toward him now? Had Reagan gotten to him somehow?

      “She,” Sebastian said as he gestured toward the bedroom window four floors up, “better not be your unfinished business.”

      Warrick had been in Zantrax long enough to hear the underground gossip. Sebastian Culver was quite the playboy. Had he been involved with Kate? Or did he want to be? Warrick’s guts knotted, jealousy twisting them. “Why?”

      “Because if she is,” Sebastian replied, “it’ll make me regret saving your sorry life.”

      “I appreciate your help that night.” Warrick had wanted to thank the man for a while for pulling him into the underground passage to the club when Detective Wever had briefly left the alley after shooting him. Sebastian hadn’t brought him into the club but to a secret room between it and the passageway—and to a special surgeon. “But you can’t actually save a man who can’t die.”

      “You can die,” Sebastian said. “Same as I can die.”

      “But I wouldn’t have died that night.” The surgeon, Dr. Ben Davison, had eased his pain, though.

      “But your secret would have been discovered,” the vampire pointed out. “And to men like us, that’s worse than death.”

      “And will lead to death.” Someone’s death...

      He glanced up to that dimly lit window, too. She hadn’t turned on any lights in her bedroom, so she must have left the door open to the living room. What was she doing in there? Maybe someone other than Sebastian had been ringing her bell. Who?

      “She’s a smart woman,” Sebastian said. “She’ll figure it out.”

      “Your secret or mine?”

      Sebastian gestured at him—in his changed form. “Your secret is more obvious. You cut it close.”

      “Cut what close?” he asked, feigning innocence.

      “I saw you jump out the window,” the other man informed him. “You were with her.”

      “Jealous?” he couldn’t resist goading.

      Sebastian uttered a sigh of such weariness that it revealed he was much older than his physical appearance would lead one to believe. “I’m concerned.”

      “For her or me?”

      “I don’t know you.”

      Yet the man had been compelled to help a stranger—a strange creature, no less. Fortunately one legend—the one about vampires and werewolves constantly being at war—was myth.

      “How well do you know her?” Warrick asked, that insidious jealousy winding through him again. He hadn’t been a jealous man until the people he’d loved the most had betrayed him. But he’d been a fool then. Their betrayal had made him much wiser.

      “Kate is a friend,” Sebastian replied. “A good friend.”

      “Does she know your secret?” Warrick asked. “Does she share your secret?” He didn’t think so; he had felt no fangs when he’d kissed her—only softness and warmth.

      “She’s human,” Sebastian said. “And unaware of the Secret СКАЧАТЬ