Love Beyond Sanity by Rebecca Royce Read Free Book Online Page A

family is for. I'm going to help you. We won't lose Gabriel to them. Even if I have to go up there to that god-forsaken place and drag them down here to release him."
    This next part was pivotal. Sebastian looked at her hard. The battle for Alexa's soul was coming fast. "And if it takes more than that, Alexa? What if we have to do something that on a normal basis we would both never consider? I don't want misconstrued ideas here. I'm talking about killing them. What if that is what it takes?"
    Alexa stood still, as far as he could tell she barely breathed. "I would do whatever I needed to do to save you and Gabriel. But I would want, of course, to see if there was another way first."
    "I just need to know that we're on the same page, darling."
    "Let me think on this for a while. I'll come up with a solution, and in the meantime I'll put off going to Gabriel's for a little while so I can figure out the best way to handle this."
    Her desire for space was one of the things he knew well, and so, like the dutiful brother he was, he nodded and walked into the kitchen. He wanted a drink and it wasn't of the liquid offering. Problem was they couldn't keep losing household staff. Someone was bound to notice that the people who worked for them all ended up dead.
    This particular body would have to be dumped creatively. She smelled so good and he wasn't even sure of her name. The upstairs maid. Her skin was the color of lightly mixed milk chocolate. He wanted to lick it. But there was no time for that. If he didn't get a soul soon he would start to lose his façade. Not yet.
    He took the wooden staircase two steps at a time but stayed light on his feet. There would be no use giving himself away before he was ready. Sniffing the air, he caught her scent. It was the pine needles and jasmine. There was nowhere in the New Orleans area where she would have come into contact with pine needles so it must have been some sort of bath soap. No worries. He had taken the souls of foul smelling men. A beautiful, pine-scented woman would be a nice change.
    She was in Gabriel's old bedroom; he turned left and walked down the long hallway. Quietly he opened the door. She stood with a feather duster individually dusting each and every book on Gabriel's shelf. He suppressed a shudder. There was nothing more interesting on that shelf than science fiction. Blah.
    "Hello, my dear." She spun around and gasped as she started to smile. He never let her finish her thought. Within seconds, she was in his arms, secured in his strong embrace as he stripped her of her will to fight. Humans were so easy. They never fought him. Never even understood they were doomed.
    Her body quivered under his embrace as he sucked in deep breaths through his nose. Her soul came to him without hesitation and the empty shell that was her body went limp in his arms. His prey could not live without their souls. It was humorous that a lot of them questioned whether the soul was real or a thing of myth. All the better for him or he might have a harder time getting them.
    She tasted like the jasmine he'd smelled but the pine was stirringly absent. Oh well. He dropped her and she hit the ground, her heart stopped, and her brain no longer transmitted signals. He hoped whatever religious deity she believed in didn't forsake her. It wasn't his problem whether she'd been a good person or a bad one, whether or not she'd been forgiven before she died. She was done. She'd been his dinner.
    It was noble.
    Somehow.
    He looked down at the floor as he decided on a plan for disposing of the shell. To her left stood a bottle of pine scented cleaning product. A-ha. The pine needles scent. The cleaning products. It made sense.
    The stirring of a slight wind in the room brought a tingle to the back of his mind that spoke of home. He shook his head. Sister . His sister was here . He flung around and there she was. Shocked, he didn't respond to her presence right away. She looked good. But then she'd always