In the Heat of the Bite Read Free Page A

her toward a well-worn path.
    Rhiannon winced. She certainly was not about to admit to having sent her maid ahead with her luggage to Thorpe House so no one would witness her encounter with Aunt Greer. Especially not to a man she knew nothing about, not even his name. Wait! “How did ye ken I was from Edinburgh?”
    She hadn’t told him where she was from.
    “I know a great many things, Miss Sinclair,” the gentleman replied enigmatically. “Now, where is your chaperone?”
    She dug in her heels, refusing to move one more inch. Thunder crashed in the sky above them. “Unhand me.”
Havers!
She didn’t even know the man’s name.
    The handsome Englishman turned her to face him. One black brow darted upward. “You can harness your thunder. I’m not so easily intimidated.”
    Harness her thunder? She couldn’t believe her ears.
    He knew!
How could he know what she was? No one outside her own coven knew except family members. And this man—whoever he was—was certainly not family. Rhiannon tipped her nose back and leveled him with her haughtiest glare. “I doona ken what ye’re talkin’ about. Have ye been imbibin’, sir?”
    He snorted. “I don’t have time for this, Miss Sinclair. I truly don’t. Point out your chaperone, and I’ll leave you in his or her care.”
    “
Mrs.
Sinclair.” Rhiannon lied through her teeth. But it was a good lie. After all, a
Mrs.
wouldn’t need a chaperone, would she? If this man would just leave her be, she could dry herself with a warm wind and then make her way to Caitrin’s home. She’d had as much of his interference as she intended to take.
    In an instant the man dropped her arm. His brow crinkled, and Rhi was almost certain he sniffed the air in her direction. Without a doubt he was the oddest creature she’d ever met. And then it hit her.
A creature!
She looked again into his coal-black eyes, and her heart stopped beating in her chest.
    It had been right there all along. How foolish of her to not to have seen it earlier. “Creature” was most assuredly the right word. She hadn’t seen
this
man before, but she’d seen one like him. She’d even been enchanted by his dark gaze and lost her will to the blood-sucker. It was not an experience she ever wanted to repeat. She still had nightmares about the encounter, and she had no intention of spending even one second longer in the company of a vampyre.
    Rhiannon grabbed a handful of her skirts and bolted for Hyde Park’s gated entrance, her ruined slipper squishing the whole way. She raced as fast as she could across Park Lane, down Curzon Street, and around the little jog of Charles Street until she finally reached Berkeley Square, out of breath but still alive.

     
    Matthew raked a hand through his damp hair as he watched Miss Sinclair escape into Thorpe House without even a look over her slender shoulder. And he knew she was
Miss
Sinclair. He could smell an innocent from ten feet away, and
Miss
Sinclair was as innocent as they came. And lovely, she was that too, even if she did have a temper that lit up the night sky.
    Did she truly think she could outrun him in a foot race? Matthew scoffed as he watched through Eynsford’s big bay window as she entered a parlor at the front of the house. He could have run from Hyde Park to Berkeley Square a dozen times in the amount of time it had taken her to run from him.
    What a mystery she was. Not
what
she was; he’d known instantly she was a witch. After all, he’d known other weather-controlling witches throughout his life-after-death,
her
ancestors to be exact. The revered
Còig
. The mystical coven of witches who had bestowed upon him the most powerful gift he’d ever possessed. Matthew glanced down at the ring he still wore on his right hand. Without that coven, he would have been reduced to skulking around in the shadows for eternity. But they’d given him the ability to stand in the sun as though he still possessed a beating heart, as though he was a living,