Tempting The Beast by Lora Leigh Read Free Book Online Page A

you’re too weak to be of use to them any longer. Then they give you to the soldiers to use until you die. It’s not a pretty way to be taken from this earth.”
    Merinus bit her lip as she felt pain, overwhelming, intense, striking at her chest. It wasn’t fear, it was horror, revulsion, absolute pain for the women who had endured it, the man who had obviously seen it.
    “I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring back, seeing only the thin line of anger his mouth had settled into.
    “You are risking your very sanity being here.” His breath caressed her ear, a shiver working over her skin once again as he spoke to her. “Your sanity and your life. You should leave.”
    His voice throbbed with menace. It pulsed with heated arousal. Thick and husky, it rippled over her nerve endings, seared her cunt.
    “So you’ve said.” She stared forward as he moved again, coming back to face her. “I told you, I’m not willing to let them continue to kill and maim, and you shouldn’t be either. We can stop them. My uncle, Samuel Tyler, is a Senator and close to the President. He’s waiting to do whatever is necessary. I have seven brothers, each one doing their part, and my father is willing to put every resource he has within his paper to back you. We have to make them stop.”
    “And you think this will stop them?” he asked her incredulously. “Your innocence is to be envied, Ms. Tyler. It’s actually quite frightening. You can’t take these people down.”
    She had to. She couldn’t stand to live if they managed to kill him. He was proud, determined and too damned remarkable in his very humanity to allow them to murder him. She had to convince him that his only safety lay in revealing the horrors he had escaped.
    “You know who they are. You know what they are. You have the rest of the proof that we need to stop them,” she argued determinedly. “Your mother died because of this.”
    “My mother was a victim of a random crime,” he growled. “Had the Council struck her, she would have disappeared and her body returned to me in pieces. The Council did not destroy her.”
    “There was no sign of theft.” Merinus had read the police report. “It was a personal crime, Mr. Lyons. Whoever killed her wanted her dead.”
    Merinus hadn’t come to this place unprepared. Her father had made certain she knew everything involving Maria Morales’ death and the evidence they had against the Council.
    “And they succeeded. But it wasn’t the Council.” He stared down at her, his eyes hard, furious. “I know their scent, I know the stench of their evil. As cloying and cold as the scent of your arousal is sweet and hot.”
    Merinus opened her mouth to argue until the last words penetrated her brain. She felt her face flush, her heart rate increase. She stared at him in surprise. How had he known?
    “Explain to me why a young, innocent woman is standing here before me, her cunt wet and prepared for an animal? And I am an animal, sugar, unlike any you will ever know.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Merinus trembled beneath Callan’s regard. His amber eyes almost glowed, his voice lowered, husky. A quick, very brief glance below his hips showed a bulge that made her more than nervous. Evidently, she wasn’t the only one afflicted. And an affliction more than described it. She felt fevered, her skin sensitive, ready for his touch. It was unlike anything she had ever known. It was unlike anything she ever wanted to know.
    “I don’t know.” She heard the nervousness in her voice, the confusion. The longer she stayed in his presence, the worse the temptation to touch him was growing.
    She stared at his chest, no longer able to stare into his eyes. Those amber depths drew her in, made her want, made her need things she wasn’t certain she should want.
    She flinched when his fingers gripped her chin, uncertain, almost frightened now. Had he not been aware of the desires flaring in her body, she could have handled this. Could have