Dark Awakening Read Free

sweet as she smelled? Or would it be darker than she appeared to be, ripe with berry and currant? Every human had a singular taste—this he had learned—and it spoke volumes about them, more than they would ever know.
    She lingered only a moment longer, and her heart-shaped face, delicately featured with a pair of large, expressive eyes he was now determined to see close up, imprinted itself on him in a way he had never before experienced. Ty’s mind was too hazed to question it now, this odd reaction to her, but he knew he would be able to ponder nothing else later.
    Later. Once he had tasted her.
    When she turned away, when the burnished waves of her hair spilling over the collar of her dark coat were all he could see, Ty found he could at least move again, and he did so with the ruthless efficiency of a practiced hunter. Like a predator that has latched on to the scent of its prey, his eyes never left her, even as he rose up, his feline form shifting and elongating until he stood on two feet among the straggling bushes.
    He breathed deeply, drinking in that singular scent with anticipatory relish.
    Then Ty turned up the collar of his coat and began the hunt.
    Lily rounded the corner of the house with a sigh of relief.
    Probably she should feel guilty about bailing on the annual Bonner Mansion ghost hunt. Bailing before anything interesting happened anyway—so far, all she’d seen was a bunch of overly serious amateur ghost hunters who thought every insect was a wayward spirit. Oh, and that couple who had set up camp in a closet with the door shut, she remembered with a smirk. Whatever sort of experience they were after, she was pretty sure it wasn’t supernatural.
    Why she’d even let Bay con her into this was a mystery; their weekly date to watch
Ghost Hunters
didn’t translateinto any desire on her part to
actually
go running around inside a dark, musty, supposedly haunted house. Thank God the hottie from the Bonner County Paranormal Society had shown up when he had. Lily wasn’t sure which had made her best friend’s eyes light up more: the tight jeans or the thermal-imaging camera. Either way, she wasn’t even positive the group had heard her when she’d claimed a brewing headache as an excuse to leave them there, but Bay’s grin told her she’d be thanked for going at some point in the near future.
    She lifted her wrist to glance at her watch, squinting at it in the darkness, and noted that it was about quarter to twelve.
    “So much for another Friday night,” she muttered. Still, it didn’t have to be a total waste. Maybe she’d get crazy, stay up late with some popcorn and a Gerard Butler movie.
    Wild times at Lily Quinn’s house. But better, always better, than running the risk of sleep. She didn’t need a silly ghost tour to scare her. Nothing could be scarier than the things she saw when she closed her eyes.
    Lily crunched through dead leaves, then stopped, frowning at the unfamiliar view of bare trees and, a little farther off, the wrought-iron fence that bordered the property’s grounds. Despite the reasonably close proximity to the town square, the Bonner Mansion sat back a ways from the road, and the historical society had managed to hang on to a portion of the original property, so there were still grounds to the place. But there was, as a nod to modernity, a parking lot.
    And it was, Lily realized, on the
other
side of the house. She tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and groaned.
    Her impeccable sense of misdirection had struck again.
    After a moment spent silently cursing, Lily shoved her hands deeper into her pockets and set off on what she hoped was the correct course this time. Directional impairment was one of her defining features, right along with her inexplicable aversion to suitable men. If she could only find a well-educated, Shakespeare-quoting bad boy who still had a thing for sexy tattoos and maybe a mild leather fetish, she might at least have a shot at avoiding her