As she watched first his T-shirt, then his own joggers hit the floor, Mirabeau traced the outline of his body with hungry eyes and knew it would be a long time before they had that talk…a very long time. Perhaps after their first child…or the second, she thought, as he came down on top of her, his body firm and hard. And then his mouth covered hers and his hands began to move over her and she stopped thinking altogether and put her trust in the nanos.
About Lynsay Sands
LYNSAY SANDS is the national bestselling author of the Argeneau vampire series as well as more than thirty historical novels and anthologies known for their humorous edge. Visit her official website at www.lynsaysands.net.
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Hearts Untamed
PAMELA PALMER
Chapter One
Julianne dropped to her hands and knees on the red throw rug, heart racing, perspiration damp on the back of her neck as she yanked boxes from beneath Serenity’s bed. She hated this. Hated sneaking from one room to the next, a thief in her own home.
Above all, she hated the one who’d put her up to it. Melisande. Melisande, with her cruel eyes and terrible truths, who’d appeared a month ago and turned Julianne’s world upside down.
Again.
She lifted the wooden lid of a small, flat chest and rifled through the contents with guilty, shaking fingers. Serenity was like a mother to her. She didn’t deserve to have her things torn through like this, but Julianne had no choice.
Melisande had demanded that Julianne find and steal a necklace, a rare bloodred moonstone on a silver chain. A necklace hidden somewhere within the mansion that housed the Alexandria Therian enclave. Julianne’s home.
And if Julianne failed? Or if anyone learned what she was up to? She and whomever she spilled her secrets to would forever disappear from this world, just as her parents had twenty-one years ago.
They would die. It didn’t matter that the Therians were essentially immortal. With the right power, any life could be destroyed.
And Julianne had no doubt Melisande possessed that power. With a flick of her hand, she’d driven Julianne to her knees in pain. With the blink of an eye, she’d appeared and disappeared. With the ease of a wraith, she’d infected Julianne’s dreams and stolen her thoughts.
Her threats were all too real.
Julianne’s only hope of saving those she loved was to find that necklace before Melisande lost the last of her patience. And to hope that once Melisande had what she’d come for, she’d leave Julianne in peace.
A hope she feared was all too slim.
Voices sounded on the stairs. Julianne’s pulse skittered. Serenity.
She couldn’t get caught because she couldn’t explain. Her heart began to thud in her chest. In about thirty seconds Serenity would walk in the room.
Julianne tore through the boxes with badly shaking fingers, pushing things this way and that. Serenity’s treasures were simple things. A miniature portrait from hundreds of years ago. A leather wristlet. Yellowed, disintegrating letters. For the most part, Therians were simple people, little different from humans anymore, other than the fact that they didn’t age.
They hadn’t always been like this. Long ago, the Therians had been the shape-shifters—each possessing the power of an animal, each capable of changing into that animal at will. There had been dozens, maybe even hundreds of different Therian animal lines at one time—wolves, bears, snakes, horses, and any number of predatory cats.
But that way of life had come crashing down millennia ago, when they’d been forced to mortgage their power to save the world. Only nine shape-shifters remained. Nine who still possessed the raw, potent power of their animals. The Feral Warriors. The other Therians lived and worked among the humans, hiding from the deadly draden at night, but otherwise living their long, long lives much as the humans did their far shorter ones.
As Julianne had expected to live her own life. Though all Therians looked thirty, Julianne actually was. She’d graduated from George Washington University seven years ago and taken a job as a physician’s assistant to an Alexandria allergist. A fairly normal existence.
For a normal Therian.
Until a month ago, when Melisande arrived carrying the devastating news that she wasn’t normal at all.
Footsteps sounded in the hallway, the soft click of Serenity’s heels. She was out of time. A bead of perspiration rolled between her breasts as she shoved the boxes back under the bed and sprang to her feet, running for the closet. She wrenched open the closet doors just as the bedroom door opened behind her. Her breathing was harsh and uneven.
If only there were someone she could share her awful burden with. Zeeland. Once upon a time, Zeeland had been the keeper of all her secrets.