Phantom Embrace Read Free Page A

leader couldn’t do.
    Bastien and Melanie entered, laughing and holding hands like teenagers.
    Dawn must be approaching.
    Many of the immortals in the area congregated here at David’s after each night’s hunt. Some spent the days there, too.
    Frowning at the bay window, Cat wondered how the two Russian immortals she had followed earlier had fared in their battle.
    For a moment, when she had knelt down to address the stray cat, the taller one—Yuri—had seemed to look right at her.
    Excitement had skittered through her.
    Then she had heard the vampires coming.
    After spending two hundred years with Bastien and his psychotic vampire friends, Cat could no longer abide being near the fiends. And when the immortals inevitably defeated the vampires in battle, setting their spirits free . . .
    Cat shuddered.
    No. She’d had to leave.
    The front door opened once more and, as though conjured by her thoughts, Yuri and Stanislav entered.
    A little thrill darted through her as it always did in Yuri’s presence. She wasn’t sure why. There was just something about him that drew her to him and always compelled her to single him out with her gaze, even when a host of other warriors surrounded him.
    She didn’t think it was because he was handsome. They were all handsome.
    Although Yuri did seem to be even easier on the eye , as she’d heard one of the female Seconds say, than the others.
    He stood about six foot four, just under a foot taller than her own five foot five. He kept his black hair short in back and on the sides, but long enough on top to reveal a tendency to wave. Dark brows hovered over piercing brown eyes that seemed to miss nothing. She’d once heard him tell Bastien that his patrician nose used to be crooked from being broken in a brawl in his youth, but had straightened when he had transformed. His lips were a little fuller than most men’s, but were by no means feminine. A perpetual five o’clock shadow hugged his strong jaw.
    Broad shoulders. A slender, yet muscular build. A smooth stroll that did odd things to her insides.
    Cat drifted into a corner and watched the other immortals call greetings and trade gibes with him before Yuri headed down the hallway toward the basement stairs. No doubt he intended to wash the night’s hunt off him in the bedroom he’d claimed when Seth had transferred him to North Carolina a couple of years ago. Just before he turned into the basement stairwell, Yuri glanced over his shoulder and looked in her direction.
    Perhaps, Cat thought, her attraction to him simply resulted from times like this when he almost seemed to acknowledge her presence.
    The others never did. Except for Marcus, who had only done so once. He had bellowed at her to get out when he had been arguing with Ami and Cat had inadvertently intruded.
    Speaking of whom . . .
    Marcus and Ami passed Yuri in the hallway and joined the others in the living room. Ami was about a foot shorter than her husband, with slender arms and legs and a huge protruding belly that turned her walk into a waddle.
    The couple sank onto a cushy sofa and began to chat with Roland and Sarah.
    Cat eased forward, her eyes on the petite redhead.
    Ami shifted, as though the babe in her belly wouldn’t allow her to get comfortable.
    Cat claimed the empty space beside Ami and lowered her eyes to Ami’s round tummy.
    A few minutes later, her careful scrutiny was rewarded when the babe shifted. What appeared to be the faint shape of a knee slid across the knit shirt that molded itself to Ami’s torso.
    Ami absently placed a hand over the knee and gave it a pat.
    Pleasure and pain warred within Cat.
    She remembered how that had felt. Her married friends had expounded upon the beauty of feeling a child move within them when they were breeding. But in the privacy of her bedchamber, when Cat had lowered the bedcovers and raised her nightgown to watch this limb or that shift and slide and