Carnal Thirst Read Free Page A

she whispered. She looked around the bedroom. There were two other doors.
    She was betting one of them was a god damned closet.
    The narrow one had to be the closet.
    Tiptoeing across the room, she pressed her ear to the other door. Still tremendously unsettled by her first wrong guess, Maggie only listened at that door for a few moments. Slowly, she turned the knob.
    It was locked.
    "Shit!"
    "If you'll tell me what you're looking for, perhaps I can help."
    The deep male voice directly behind her nearly gave Maggie heart failure. Acting purely on instinct, she whirled, swinging the poker for all she was worth—and buried it into the wall on her other side. Plaster burst from the impact like snow.
    Stunned, she merely stared at the poker for several moments, wondering how she could have possibly missed him. That thought made her look around quickly.
    He was lounging very casually against the bedpost.
    Maggie gaped at him.
    Even if she'd been blind, she would've sensed the danger surrounding him. Lethal practically oozed from Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    his pores. It was hard to explain with certainty why she felt it, but he looked like the last person in the world to play good Samaritan.
    He wore a black, peasant-style shirt open to the middle of his chest—the opening revealing a pale olive expanse of sculpted pectorals free of hair except for the thin beginnings of a happy trail that disappeared beneath the fabric before she could follow it. Leather pants hugged every inch of his legs and groin, showing off his package like prime rib in the meat department. He wore ass kicking boots, laced up to the knee with overlay buckles meant for tearing the hide off anyone dumb enough to brush against them.
    He had an odd ensemble going on. Part tortured poet, part bad ass biker—all succulent man.
    Leather tended to lend itself to a “bad” image, but this guy went way beyond that. Inky black hair framed his face, falling around his shoulders in thick tendrils almost indistinguishable from his clothing. His face was the most arresting part of him, however, and what set her heart to pounding uncontrollably.
    It wasn't the square jaw or high cheekbones that were testament to high testosterone. It wasn't the wickedly black eyebrows arched sardonically as she continued to stare at him. It was his eyes. They were the eyes of a predator—so dark a gray they could easily be mistaken for black, and with the smallest tilt to them, making them appear as exotic as an Egyptian painting. They were intensely scrutinizing without seeming to be, lazy and hooded, like a cat just before striking.
    Calling him dangerous would be an understatement.
    "How did you do that?” she gasped when her brain finally seized on the warning and began functioning again.
    "Which ‘that’ are you referring to?” he asked, throwing her off balance. He didn't act in the least threatened by her weapon.
    She stared at him. She'd been thinking about the fact that he'd managed to move so quickly out of the way when she'd swung at his head. The remark, however, reminded her that she'd thoroughly checked the room.
    "How did you get in the room?"
    "I walked."
    Maggie gritted her teeth and jerked the poker out of the wall. “Look, I don't know who you are, and I don't know what you had in mind when you brought me here, but I'd like to leave now."
    He shrugged. “Unfortunately, I can't allow that. You've been bitten."
    Her eyes widened. “You son of a bitch! You're the one that attacked me, aren't you?"
    He smiled faintly. “Not I."
    She wanted to wipe that smug look off his face with the poker, but she didn't want to get that close to him. If he was the one who had attacked her, he had thrown her around as if she was some shrimpy ninety pound weakling. “Why is it that I don't believe you?"
    Again, he shrugged, as if it was a matter of indifference to him one way or the other.
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