Forged: The World of Nightwalkers by Jacquelyn Frank Read Free Book Online Page B

pleasure of trying to figure out how to get him up and back in the bed … preferably without his usual groping and fondling and kissing.
    Katrina tried to keep from acknowledging the warm,gooey heat that swirled around inside her as she remembered the kissing and fondling with no small amount of craving for more. A craving that she quickly stomped down inside herself. She had enough to worry about without tripping off into fantasyland. He was a stranger.
A stranger
. There was nothing about any of this that should engender trust in him, never mind the comfort level she required before considering becoming intimate with him. And she didn’t
want
to become intimate with him. Not him or anybody, but especially not him. The guy was a Neanderthal for Pete’s sake. He kept pawing at her and trying to … to screw her ever chance he got. And it was very clear he was an old hand at tumbling “wench”-like persons.
    With a sigh, Katrina went back to the bedroom. She took the opportunity to change out the soiled bedding, shoving it all immediately into the washer and dumping a hefty amount of bleach in the dispenser. It might damage the quilt, but so would blood. She had to take her chances.
    As for herself, she had showered and changed her clothing before heading to Dr. Sloan’s, but she had been covered in blood herself at one point. So much for universal precautions. If he had blood-borne anything, she would definitely be exposed. She suddenly felt a twinge of fear. What if that strange stonelike condition were catching?
    She shook that off. Partly because she simply couldn’t deal with the idea. She began another debate in her head, weary already from so much thinking, realizing she was tired because by then she would have already been tucked into bed. It was this nearly panicked rapid thinking that she had happily left behind when she’d left her life as a PA in Manhattan General Hospital. It was this kind of stress that had caused her to lose her hair, develop an ulcer, and gestate a major case of anxiety,her whole existence about being on edge for the next thing that walked through the door … even when she wasn’t working.
    Who would have thought she’d be dragging this kind of stress through her own front door years later, ulcer healed, anxiety at bay, and hair, thankfully, regrown. But she wasn’t interested in reverting to her previous state so she needed to relieve herself of this potentially high stress environment as quickly as possible. But … what if it
were
catching? Oh God! She’d potentially exposed Dr. Sloan to it!
    “Okay, don’t panic. Don’t panic,” she muttered to herself rapidly.
He’s snowed in along with everyone else. No one is going to come into contact with him
. The odds of anyone else being as stupid and reckless as she had been by driving down the mountain were extremely nonexistent.
    She hoped.
    She tried not to think about it as she stripped out of her wet, snow-saturated jeans and wriggled into her favorite pair of heather-blue sweatpants. The house had warmed considerably in her absence, what with the fire and all, so she traded her sweater for a T-shirt that said NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY! on it. It always made her smile for some reason. True, she’d never had the guts to wear it in public, her conscience paining her that some small child somewhere might be able to read it and repeat it. But she loved the idea of it. The idea of being brave enough and bold enough to don it in the first place.
    But it was not even a blip on her self-conscious radar as she hurried into the kitchen and kneeled beside her own personal feverish giant. She touched his skin and, as expected, he was burning up. Actually, she needn’t have touched his skin at all. He was radiating heat like a furnace and she could feel it all against the front of her body.
    Before doing anything else, she carefully capped and moved the empty jars around him to the kitchen counter. “Oh man!” she whined. “You