Rhyannon Byrd - Primal Instinct 04 by Touch of Seduction Read Free Book Online

she would finally throw up now.
    “Yeah.” Olivia turned her head to look at him, her
expression obviously stricken, and she felt the powerful intensity of his stare
as he studied her face all the way down to her bones. Felt it in her blood and
her stomach and the tightness of her chest. “I know that’s not what you wanted
to hear, but I’m not going to lie to you, Liv.”
    “Well, that’s something, then,” she murmured, unable
to ignore the strange sensation that he was actually telling her the truth.
Honest men, in her experience, were few and far between. She’d have pegged
Aiden Shrader as the kind of guy who could smooth talk his way right out of any
uncomfortable situation, sugarcoating the truth if it made things easier for
him, but maybe she’d been wrong. “Have you had to do that a lot?”
    “Do what?” he rumbled as he undid his seat belt again.
Leaning forward, he reached behind him and slipped the handgun back into the
waistband of his jeans.
    “The gun thing,” she explained. “You were deadly
accurate with it.”
    Pushing back the thick strands of his hair, he slid
her a wary glance, as if worried about how she was going to take his answer.
“I’ve had to make kills, when the circumstances called for it.”
    Olivia nodded, squeezing her cold fingers around the
padded wheel. “That’s not surprising, I guess, except that I thought the
Watchmen were meant to be neutral or something like that.”
    “For the most part, yeah, we are,” he rasped. “When it
comes to the clans, our directive is to simply monitor and report our findings.
But there are times when we’re called on to take down something that needs to
be taken down.”
    A shiver traveled up her spine. “Well, I think the
Casus certainly fit into that category.”
    “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” he muttered, his tone
bitter. Before she could ask what he meant, he changed the subject, saying,
“Why hadn’t you left town, anyway? After what happened to your stepsisters, I
would have thought you understood how dangerous it was for the two of you
here.”
    “Well, we haven’t been alone,” she explained, noticing
that his eyes had bled back to hazel, though they still smoldered with an
unearthly glow of light. “Up until this morning, Jamie and I had a houseful of
aunts and uncles from my father’s side of the family staying with us. Two of
them are actually retired law enforcement, so I felt we were safe with them
there. They came in for Monica’s funeral, but after being here for several
weeks, they needed to get back to their lives, especially with the holidays
coming up. The house finally cleared out this morning.”
    “So they just abandoned the two of you?” Rough words
that practically vibrated with outrage.
    “It wasn’t like that,” she told him, turning to stare
through the front windshield. “Remember, they’re human, like me. They don’t
know anything about the clans or how Monica really died or what’s happened to
Chloe. As far as they know, a wild animal attacked Monica, and most of them
believe Chloe’s flighty enough to take off on her own without telling anybody.
Several of my aunts invited me and Jamie to stay with them, but how could I say
yes, knowing the danger we would have brought with us? I can only assume that
the sheer number of people we’ve had at the house forced the Casus to bide
their time, but they wouldn’t be daunted by a few humans once our numbers were
smaller.”
    “So you decided to leave?”
    Olivia nodded. “I packed up the car early this morning
and we left the house. I figured it would be safer to drive out of town at
night, and I actually had an important meeting in town late this afternoon with
Monica’s lawyer that I couldn’t miss. So we went to my friend Connie’s house
for the day. I thought we’d be safe there, but I guess my mistake was in
telling Georgia where we were going.”
    Slanting him a worried look, she said, “You don’t
think the Casus have