JUMP (The Senses) by Cindy Paterson Read Free Book Online

feel the muscles that were like mountains and valleys merging into one another under her fingertips.
    All her senses were overflowing with him, the touch of his velvet tongue, the taste, a mixture of scotch and something sweet, the sound of his breath hard and fast to match their heartbeats. And his scent . . . it was erotic, soap and earth.
    His kiss moved down to her chin, and she tilted her head back further, eyes closed , afraid to open them and discover that this was all a dream. A wine-induced dream.
    “Little one,” he murmured against her ear, his tongue flickering across the lobe sending shots of desire between her legs.
    Not wine-induced. It was real. He was real.
    His hands gripped her on either side of her neck and his lips trailed slow warmth down the column of her throat, tongue darting out to lick and kiss her skin. She moaned as heat swept across her sensitive flesh.
    It was the slightest graze of his teeth. A nip on her throat that caused the flash of horror to come barreling into her like a punch to the stomach. She cried out, scrambling from his encompassing embrace, staggering backwards, hand pressed to her throat as a familiar feeling came over her, so frightening that her legs gave out and she crashed to the floor on her backside.
    He came towards her, hand outstretched , and she scuttled backwards on her palms until her back hit the door. “No, don’t.”
    He stopped dead in his tracks, arm lowering. The hurt that swept across his features was unmistakable. Eyes closing for an extended second, mouth drawn, the outer corners drifting downward.
    The pulse in her throat danced, a foreboding tension constricting her muscles. She kept her fingers on the spot, knowing that it meant something but unable to decipher what. She ’d had strange puncture marks there when she woke in the hospital, but still she had no recollection how they came to be. And neither did the doctors.
    “ I apologize,” he said, hand sweeping through his hair in a frustrated gesture. “I shouldn’t have come.”
    Danielle was speechless . Her confusion between what was happening to her now and what had happened then meshed together to make a bewildering puzzle that refused to fit together. She didn’t want him to leave—he couldn’t leave her again.
    Please end my pain, she begged.
    His eyes flashed a deeper green for a split second and she saw the rage within, that single lethal expression, before he turned abruptly on his heel.
    He was walking away. Leaving. No, he couldn’t do that to her. The man in the painting, the man she had grow n to know, his voice, his scent. He wouldn’t walk away a second time.
    “Don’t you dare leave me,” Danielle shouted as she scrambled to her feet. “Don’t you do this to me, damn it.” She ran after him as he kept walking and flung herself at his back, slamming her fists into him, pounding his muscles as tears of frustration ran down her cheeks. “Two years. Two years I’ve waited for you.” She had no clue why those words came out, but it sure as hell felt like they fit.
    He halted, spine stiff, hands clenched into fists at his sides, taking her assault without any attempt at stopping her. She punched his back again and again with half efforts to hurt him the way she was hurting inside, yet wanting him to turn around and take her back in his arms and hold her, protect her like he had once before.
    He jerked. Muscles flexing as if he sensed what she thought.
    She stopped, her hands still on his back. “Why did you come? To torment me?” Her voice was ragged. “I’m already tormented. I live in it day and night. But you can take it away, can’t you? You know what happened.”
    She heard him take a breath, felt his heart beating, strong and rhythmic like a clock. The tears stopped, yet inside she continued to cry, for herself, for him—for them.
    Both had suffered, she knew this like she knew her own name. He’d protected her somehow, that was how she felt whenever she