Three Days of Dominance Read Free Page A

her hand.
    “Did I imagine that?” she asked Killer, but he only laughed back at her in that laid-back cocker spaniel way, forehead wrinkling, eyes sad but completely clueless. “Jeez, why can’t dogs talk? It would sure help.”
    What a morning . The urgency of the world swept back over her. She was going to be late for work if she didn’t step on it. The real world beckoned, not some strange man who disappeared underwater and who might never have been there at all. But memories simmered in her mind—the touch of his lips and tongue and hands on her mouth and skin, the ache in her swollen cleft. She couldn’t have imagined him, or that kiss. A sigh escaped her lips as she remembered. What a kiss.
    Those last words repeated themselves in her thoughts: Later then, we will continue this . If he was real, and surely he must be, what in the world did he mean by that? She’d not given him her address. Thank God . What had she been thinking?
    Not thinking, no brain cells being used there at all. Dying to get laid, pure and simple.
    She reached her four-wheel drive and clicked the button to open it, then tossed the hat onto the passenger seat. Marie’s car was nowhere in sight, so she must have left already. Having towel-dried herself, then Jugsy, she let the dogs in and slumped back against the sun-warmed metal. A crazy mix of fear and longing made her shudder, and she put a hand to her forehead, splaying her fingers in her hair.
    If he was real, what if he finds me?
    * * *
    Heketoro stood ankle-deep at the sandy edge of the island, remembering the way Danii’s gaze had swept across her surroundings, looking for him. The fae glamour had concealed him, and yet he’d found himself wishing he could have stepped out and shown himself for what he was. That would have been a mistake. He knew this from the past—the last woman, twenty years or more ago, had run wild-eyed and terrified from him.
    But what a soft, sensual mouth and delicious body this one possessed. Something else too, that he couldn’t yet pin down or understand, had always drawn him to her—something beyond mere sexuality. For all the years he’d watched her, he still didn’t know. Every instinct, every thought, every fragment of his body told him she was the key to his escape from this world. Soon he would see if the darker ways of the fae repelled her, or awakened her.
    A green tree frog hopped onto his boot and clung there, moist and goggle-eyed, looking up at him.
    He’d taken the first step on the path to defeating the curse and gained her consent. So many years, he’d waited for the antiquated sexual rules of humans to change. He’d waited through times of corsets and tea gowns, through flappers and miniskirts and power shoulders. He could wait a little longer. No matter how much he wanted to kiss her into submission until she begged him to take her. That would happen soon enough—tonight, it would have to be. So little time was left.
    A black eel swirled up from the water, mouth gaping to swallow the frog. He grinned, plucked the frog from his boot, and let it hop safely onto the dry land behind him. The eel disappeared back into the depths.
    He watched it go, thinking wryly, one of these days his empathy for the little ones would be his undoing. Eels had to eat something too.

Chapter Two
     
    All day Danii battled against an onslaught of visions of Heketoro at the most inconvenient moments. These didn’t seem merely memories, and some were harder to shake off than a burr. The first had happened as she’d gone to get a soft drink from the machine at the station. A nudge and a gruff, “Hey, you gonna stand there all day?” had jarred her back into awareness. Apparently she’d stood there for twenty or thirty seconds. Why this was happening, she had no idea. Maybe she was just going nuts?
    She tucked the thought away, reserving it for later. Here and now, woman, here and now. Get a grip. Burglary suspect first, visions later.
    With the patrol