Taming the Demon by Durgin Doranna

Author:Durgin, Doranna [Durgin, Doranna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary Romance Paranormal Romance, Contemporary, Paranormal, Fiction
ISBN: 9781460312520
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-05-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

“Not now,” she told him fiercely. As if she didn’t know the signs by now. As if she didn’t know that they came upon him when he pulled away from her. Responding to her story...to her life. Pulling away, and then losing himself.

And oh, he did more than pull away from her—he jerked himself free of the shoulder blanket and rolled up onto his knees, his movement laced with an emotional panic new and ragged.

Except she’d had enough. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and said, “No. You don’t get to do this to me again. Do you hear me? You don’t get to rip me open and turn away!”

“I don’t—” he said, just as dazed as ever. “It can’t—” Upright didn’t quite suit; he lurched down to his hands.

“I’m not kidding!” she told him, tears suddenly stinging at her eyes, unfulfilled in both heart and body. Bereft in both. “Not again! You make your choices, too!”

But when he fumbled forward, it was away from her. Not enough to break her contact, only loosen it—at least not before he suddenly stiffened, and became, again, someone else altogether.

Some thing else altogether.

The disjointed fumbling snapped into focused tension. Her hands, slipped to his upper back, felt a vibration...a body-wide growl. “Where?” he snarled, and his voice didn’t sound like his, either—the knife, suddenly in his hand, couldn’t possibly have been with him all along. Not that full-length hunting knife with a sweet killing sweep to the streamlined belly of the blade, handle shaped perfectly to Devin’s grip and metal gleaming blue-white where the room was too dim for it to gleam at all...

Strobing alley light, blinding her, dazing her—

He lunged to his feet—lunged at her door, all swift deadly movement, but so very focused on whatever lay beyond that he literally flung himself at the door.

Only to cry out in sharp surprise. And this time, when he went down, he stayed down.

For a long moment, she just stared at him. Too hurt—the taste of rejection a bitter thing along her lips—to rush over to check on him. Too wary to get near that blade.

And yet too compassionate to leave him alone.

Slowly, she reached for the blanket he’d rejected; she pulled another from the back of the couch—soft and decorative. She tugged her clothes back into place, and eased over to him...not finding the knife at all.

She covered him, sitting behind him...resting her head on his back. Holding her heart as safely as she could while giving him the only thing that had ever seemed to help.

But the contact did nothing. Not this time. This time, he twitched and trembled and grunted and sometimes cried out—and if she’d never seen him fight his strange fugue, she’d have said he was simply caught in a terrible nightmare. A bad trip. A big mistake.

Sometime before morning, she fell asleep.

Sometime before morning, he left.

He left her home, he left the estate...

And he left the sad, deep part of her that had so stupidly come to love him.

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