Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Soleil didn’t understand, but she suddenly had another priority, her head rising and eyes going directly to the Psy male that her cat was obsessed with—it was as if he’d activated an emitter that lit up the baffling homing beacon in her feline brain.
Her cat prowled to the forefront of her consciousness.
She scowled at its attempts to take over but was glad to see that the stranger had finally eased his at-attention stance. As she watched, he shifted to sit against a wall, his hand braced on the raised knee of one leg and his head pressed back against the wall. He’d taken off his jacket at some point, now wore only the blue jeans and white tee, his feet clad in laced-up black boots.
As if he’d felt her scrutiny, his eyes opened without warning, locked on her. They weren’t black any longer but that searing blend of blues that shot ice into her blood—and made her cat rub against her skin, urging her to go closer, sniff at him.
Sniff at him?
Soleil was appalled. Yariela had not raised her to go around sniffing random men. Even Soleil’s free-spirited parents would’ve been taken aback by the idea. But driven by her—insane—cat, she inhaled deeply, as if she might catch his scent on the air, figure out the reason behind her primal response.
What she sensed was fresh blood—and though they were surrounded by carnage, she knew it was his.
Her cat growled. How dare he be hurt?
Struggling to her feet, she said, “It’s okay,” to Lucy when the other woman began to stand. “Quick job.”
Since she’d be shriveling away in a DarkRiver prison soon enough, maybe she’d go and sniff at the pretty and dangerous stranger to satisfy her cat. A small piece of feline wildness in the midst of all this horror, a reminder that her cat had always walked to the beat of its own drummer—though never before had it fixated on a stranger.
First, she opened up the much-better-stocked first-aid kit that a paramedic had provided for her. It was all but empty at this point, but she managed to find a couple of gauze pads. Grabbing them, she made her way across a street filled with the sound of zippers closing over people’s faces.
Her stomach lurched. Her cat flinched.
Don’t look. Don’t think. Don’t remember.
The orders a mantra inside her head, she made it all the way to the stranger who hadn’t taken his eyes off her. It struck her again, how good-looking he was—ridiculously good-looking. The kind of good-looking that made fools of women.
Her cat snarled, swiped again. Mine, it growled.
Too tired to fight the feral beast that was the most primal part of her nature, or to keep her feet, she came down onto her knees in front of the stranger in a barely controlled descent.
Snapping out a hand in a motion almost as fast as a cat, he clasped her upper arm to stabilize her. Soleil saw stars. Actual stars. Pinpricks of dazzling light against a vast blackness. Her cat meanwhile was preening. Any longer and it’d be batting its eyelashes.
The stranger released her when she made a slight pulling-away motion. Her cat was not pleased. She was meant to sniff him, not reject him. A few strokes of his hand through her fur would also be acceptable.
Mad, she was going mad.
But she stayed. And held up the gauze. “Your nose.”
A blink—as if he hadn’t noticed the bleed that had barely begun—before he accepted the offer and used the gauze to stanch the blood flow. “Thank you.” His eyes were even more striking up close, electric in their attention.
Her own eyes threatened to semi-shift under the force of the cat’s will. “It’s medicated,” she said, a slight roughness to her tone that came from that same cat. “Should help heal any minor trauma.”
From what she’d picked up from having lived next to Psy for much of her life, and due to the more open channels of information of late, such nosebleeds in Psy often augured an overuse of power, but that didn’t mean the bleed itself wasn’t a result of broken blood vessels and the like. In the worst-case scenario, it might be a sign of major brain trauma.
She held up two fingers. “How many?” He was cognizant of his surroundings and had sustained no obvious injuries, the reason why he’d been passed over by the paramedics, but that could be a false impression, his brain bleeding out on the inside.
“Two,” he said, continuing to watch her with an unrelenting focus that—in a changeling—would’ve been a challenge. “I don’t have a brain injury.”
Soleil’s cat wanted to hold the eye contact, wanted to show him that it wasn’t a submissive—but the healer in her took priority. Ignoring his self-diagnosis, she continued to run through the procedure for checking his mental acuity and reflexes.