Crave the Night by Sharon Ashwood, Michele Hauf, Patti O'Shea, Lori Devoti Read Free Book Online Page A

tenuous common ground. “But once we got cable TV,
the naysayers shut up. There’s no such thing as a werewolf who can
resist the World Series.”
    To his utter surprise, she laughed. It was
the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, and it changed
everything. He’d found a way to win her confidence.

Chapter Five
    “ What kind of place did you grow up
in?” he asked her hours later.
    They had done nothing but sit there and
talk, at first about the wolves. It was all inconsequential things.
Grandma Reed’s wild berry pie and rose hip cordial. The old
drive-in movie theater down in Blainesville. The calf that got its
head stuck through the gate. His young nephew Ben’s antics. He had
spread himself out like a photo album, leafing through the pages of
his childhood and pointing out the events and characters at a
leisurely pace. As he rambled on, he could almost smell the
sun-washed earth of a Wolf Creek summer afternoon.
    Clearly fascinated, Lila listened to every
word. She leaned forward on the desk, her chin cupped in her hands,
her green eyes searching his face for every nuance of expression.
This, then, was what fey liked, what they absorbed like meat and
drink—stories. It didn’t seem to matter much what they were
about.
    That suited Rafe fine. He’d always been able
to spin a good tale, and if that was what moved Lila from fighting
him to trusting him a little, he’d talk until he turned blue. But
turnabout was fair play. Now it was her turn to share
something.
    “ I grew up in the forest.” She looked
down, playing with a pen. It was the one small item on her bald,
featureless desk. “We don’t form a village, exactly, but
scatter—sometimes with big distances between our homes. We do that
so we don’t have to cut down the trees. The only thing we ever
built of stone was the great hall where we all meet at the quarters
of the year. Those are times of celebration.”
    She looked up, a sudden look of mischief in
her eyes. “It’s a good thing we’re far away from anyone else. The
dancing can get a bit noisy.”
    Rafe imagined a forest full of drunken,
frolicking gargoyles, and backed away from the image as quickly as
possible. The thought of Lila dancing in the moonlight glades was
quite a different prospect.
    She looked out the window at vast blue sky
with the air of someone making a careful decision. “Are you
hungry?”
    “ Sure, I could eat.”
    She gave him a sidelong glance that was
almost shy, and pushed back her chair. “Follow me.”
    Leading him through a different door, she
went down a spiral staircase that ended in the room nearest the hot
tub. Floor to ceiling windows covered one wall, showing the view of
the water and the mountains in the distance. The silver ribbon of
the Owl River linked the lake and the foothills like a long,
sinuous leash.
    “ Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked,
pausing near the window.
    “ Yes, it sure is.” But Rafe was
looking at her still form, as slender and tall as a rush by the
riverbank. He was supposed to be getting information out of her,
but he was getting dazzled in the process. Her sheer loveliness
tore at him, a constant ache that had a little to do with her
magic, and much to do with his natural desires. He stood next to
her, barely an inch between them. He could feel each one of her
breaths and see how the sunlight played on the soft architecture of
her throat as she spoke.
    By the way she stared at the horizon,
she didn’t belong indoors any more than he did. They both were
creatures of the field and wood.
If only
we could stop pretending and run for the wilds.
He
imagined taking her in the long, waving grass of the fields. In the
fall it would be as pale a gold as her hair, her skin luminous in
the fading autumn sun.
    But they were tied by fear and magic. The
only way out was past the steel door she’d built around her reasons
for being here. He’d barely caught a glance of the woman behind the
triple locks.
    He had to be careful. Even in