She was thinking of her father because she had seen his face in Leander’s mind.

The first time Leander touched her last night—that light pressure on her arm as he’d explained in his low, attractive voice how he ordered the Latour in memory of his parents—she’d felt a singular tremor course over her skin. The same current of heated electricity that she’d felt so deeply in the store—and again when he met her eyes in the restaurant—passed from his fingertips.

But she was still in denial. She’d dismissed it as nerves.

The next time, it was heat and static and a sudden blur of smeared color that swam before her eyes as his hand rested on hers over the stem of the wineglass. Her heartbeat surged as she tried to concentrate on it, to make the colors coalesce into something coherent.

Jenna forgot all that when the sound of the earth rending a mile below their feet hit her ears minutes before the shaking even began. Then she could only concentrate on standing upright as the vertigo hit with the first shockwaves of pressure, as the acrid smell of heated, fissuring bedrock stung her nose.

But once Leander picked her up in his arms and ran with her through the restaurant to the back patio, she remembered. As her hand rested against his chest, she’d felt the beating of his heart, felt the heat of his skin under her palm, and the smeared blurs of color came again. But this time they cleared into visions of things she’d never seen before.

Memories, though not her own.

His.

So many things at once. So many people and places and a crush of sensation and strange power and throbbing desire but always this:

An elegant manor house, set back on wide, sweeping green lawns, vast and mysterious inside with columns of alabaster and huge gilt-framed paintings of unsmiling people and priceless antiques scattered throughout. A dark forest, dense undergrowth, ancient trees so tall the tops were lost in shrouds of mist with moss draped over the low-hanging boughs, swinging in a night breeze, ethereal. Fangs and claws and muscled sleek bodies, creatures on four legs undulating silently over the forest floor, creatures that growled and roared and disappeared into smoke when they heard an unknown noise.

A wild, faraway land of lush green vales that led to the ancient forest, a surging river with water so clear you saw the mirror flash of trout far below against its rocky bed, a low range of smoke-purple mountains darkening the far horizon. A land filled with people so beautiful they didn’t seem real.

People who all looked just like her father.

After the earth stilled, after Leander called the authorities, when he came striding back through the unstrung chaos of the restaurant like some ancient god of war—lean and muscled, body hammered like a blade, face glorious and beautiful and terrifying all at once—he kneeled down in front of her and grasped her arms in his hands.

“Everything is going to be all right,” he said, velvet smooth and calm. In spite of his reassuring tone, his expression was hard and severe like a winter-cold beast. His ferocious green eyes stared out of that chiseled face like the eyes of a wild, starving wolf.

But she knew it wouldn’t be all right. Because now his palms were burning hot on her bare skin and she saw his memories and his thoughts and his fantasies all at once, flashing before her eyes in a panoramic and terrifying display of movement and color and light, as if she were seeing a three-dimensional movie, as if she were somehow inside his mind, at the point of origin.

Jenna had to run away to stop the onslaught of visions. She thought she might never stop running.

But stop she had. And now she was here, waiting for him in the elegant, bustling lobby bar of his hotel.

Her calm suddenly vanished, her heart began to hammer in her chest, her mouth went dry, and her face blazed with heat as Leander came into view around the corner of the room.

She saw him brush past the artfully arranged potted palms as if in slow motion, moving with grace and stealth, exuding a current of raw power and danger, turning heads as he came. His eyes met hers across the empty space between them, and she clenched her hands into fists in her lap to keep them from shaking.

He was alone. He looked as if he’d had a bad night.

“Jenna,” he said, coming to a graceful stop at the side of her table. He slanted a cool green look down at her. “The lovely sommelier from Mélisse. What a pleasant surprise.”

She looked up at him.

He appeared totally at ease and in control, as if he’d happened upon a casual acquaintance while out for a stroll. But under the elegant and restrained exterior, the suggestion of aggressive action held just barely in check. He carried with him the fresh scent of night.

“Are you feeling better today? I’m afraid you gave me a bit of a scare when you ran off like that. I hope you didn’t—”

“I know what you are,” Jenna said, soft and very still, staring up at his face.

He froze for one long moment, his cool detachment undisturbed but for a tiny twitch in a muscle of his jaw.

“Do you?” he murmured. The chandelier above threw sparks of blue off his black hair as it caught the flow of warm air. The light in the room seemed to grow even brighter and everything smelled of blooming jasmine and relentless heat.

Jenna could not read his expression. It was utterly neutral.

“Yes. You’re what I’m supposed to be running away from.”

This seemed to startle him as he stood blinking down at her, his lips parted.

He gathered himself and motioned to the chair opposite her. “May I?”

She nodded. He sat down and crossed his legs, letting his gaze fall to the cut glass bowl of mixed nuts on the table-top between them. He was casually dressed today, in fitted beige trousers and a white silk shirt, sleeves rolled up over his tanned and muscled forearms. A shadow darkened his jaw; he hadn’t shaved.

He plucked a walnut from the bowl and began rolling it between his fingers.

Jenna was abstractly aware of the sunlight slicing through the massive glass doors of the lobby behind him, the muffled din of conversation and high heels clicking over marble tiles, the heat that crawled down her back until she could barely breathe, but every molecule of her body, every atom, was focused on him.

“I’m not quite sure how to respond to that,” Leander said carefully. He raised piercing eyes to her face, his tone still so neutral. “Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?”

Jenna kept her lasered focus when she answered. “If you’re going to play games with me,” she said quietly, staring right into his eyes, “I won’t go back to Sommerley with you.”

His expression still blank, his gaze sharp and frozen green on her face, Leander crushed the walnut to dust between his fingers.

“Excuse me?” he whispered.

She smiled in grim triumph. Not so cool after all.

“Did you think I’d be totally unprepared? Did you overlook the fact that I might have thought about how this moment would play out—that I might have even been expecting you, or someone like you, for years? Do you take me for a complete fool?”

She raised her eyebrows at him, waiting, but he only gaped at her in silence, utterly astonished.

“My mother warned me this day would come, though I’m not sure I ever really believed her,” she said, her heart hammering against her ribs. “She told me to run, she showed me how to live a life in hiding, but quite frankly, I got tired of running a long time ago.” She paused. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped an octave. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to hide, from you or anyone else.”

Jenna was finished with hiding. Finished with secrets.

Since she was an infant, her father had moved the family every few months, never staying anywhere long enough to set down roots. Her childhood was a constant blur of strang-ers. A succession of transient faces—neighbors, teachers, classmates—materialized in and out of her life as if they were apparitions on a merry-go-round. They made one quick turn then vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard from again.