Jenna thought about all the nice people she’d known in her life, albeit none of them for very long. “I find that hard to believe.”

Morgan slanted her a look, gently scornful and sad. “You’ll just have to take my word on this one.”

A jolt as the plane touched down. Morgan’s hand flew to her throat.

Jenna frowned over at her. “What is it?”

She shook her head a little and swallowed, then waved her hand in the air, a dismissive gesture. “I hate flying. I feel so out of control—you can’t see anything.”

“Really? God, I love it,” Jenna replied. “We moved around so much as a kid I used to think we owned our own airplane. I’d always ask for the seat next to the window so I could look out at the clouds and pretend I was alone, flying free on the wind. My father used to tell me I had the soul of a bird.”

She paused, the memory of her father triggering the bitter taste of salt in her mouth. The taste of tears. “I always wanted to be a falcon,” she murmured. “Then I could just fly away and leave the world behind, all its secrets and misery.”

From the corner of her eye, Jenna saw Leander’s head come up and tilt in their direction.

“Well, it’s only my second time on an airplane,” Morgan said, leaning over to grab a small bag at her feet. “I’ll be glad when I can get my feet back on the ground.” She sat up and kept her eyes averted. Jenna sensed it was deliberate.

“Let me guess. Your first time was the flight out to L.A.”

Morgan’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I don’t really get out much,” she said, her voice shaded with quiet sarcasm.

The plane shuddered to a stop. In one swift movement, Leander unbuckled his seat belt and leapt to his feet. He moved silently through the airy corridor of the cabin toward the front of the plane and disappeared behind the galley wall.

“You can stop boring holes into the fuselage with your eyes now, Christian.” Morgan looked toward where he lay stretched out at the front of the cabin. She stood and gathered her coat and handbag. “We’re here.”

He turned his head and gave Jenna a long, searching look before standing. It was the same look she often saw Leander give her, and it made her flush in exactly the same way. She looked away quickly and concentrated on unfastening her seat belt and gathering her things.

She needn’t have worried about the car. By the time she, Morgan, and Christian made their way down the jet’s lowered steps to the wet tarmac below under enormous black umbrellas held aloft by the butler and one of the crew, Leander had been whisked away in one of the two sleek black limousines that waited just steps away.

“Ass,” Morgan muttered under her breath as she watched the smudged red taillights of his car disappear into the night. Tires slicked back rain in a spray that caught the light and turned it to a shower of rainbow crystals.

Jenna pretended to ignore the compression she felt within her chest as she watched his car speed away. She drew a deep breath, letting the dark, unfamiliar scent of wet peat, heather, and moss settle over her skin, permeate her nose. It was at once cool and inviting, familiar and alien.

“Well,” Christian said, standing just behind her. “All the more room for the three of us.”

He snapped his fingers and flashed a quick, hesitant smile at Jenna as a uniformed driver jumped out of the car. The driver rushed around to their side and opened the heavy black door of the limousine, then stood at attention, stoic and unblinking, not meeting any of their eyes.

Christian gestured to the open door, his eyes penetrating. “My dear lady,” he murmured. “After you.”

Leander had called ahead to make sure he would have a car to himself. He guessed he would need a quick escape after eleven hours confined in a small space—luxurious though it was—wrapped in her scent and the quiet, pleasing sound of her voice.

He’d been absolutely right.

He rubbed a tired hand over his face and let his head fall back against the cushioned headrest of the sedan. God, his head ached. Staying in one place for that length of time, willing himself to remain motionless against every instinct that raged within him had produced a throbbing vise around his skull that inched very near a migraine.

He wasn’t used to sitting still. He wasn’t used to being denied what he wanted.

He watched the night flash by in patches of muted color and light, blurred with the sheen of rain and the speed at which the driver was taking the narrow roads, and wondered what it was about Jenna he found so compelling. So intoxicating.

Naturally there had been other women. Scores of them, if truth be told. His youth had been spent in study and sports and the rubric of the tribe’s tradition, but there had been plenty of time to steal away into the woods with some fetching young thing, plenty of time to explore.

And explore he did.

For the son of the Alpha, one day to be named Alpha himself, there was no shortage of willing partners. Beautiful creatures with burnished skin and brazen eyes, beckoning him shamelessly with mouthed invitations across candlelit rooms, propositioning him with words and eyes and slender-limbed bodies. He knew all the best pockets of the woods, all the darkest corners with the softest grass in which to roll.

But for all their wiles and beauty, none of those lusty panther girls of his youth had ever moved him beyond a youthful excitation. He had yet to fall in love.

He’d watched his parents for clues. Theirs had been a happy union. After thirty-five years of marriage, they still held hands, still kissed and gave each other warm and lingering looks.

It was the way with their kind. They were monogamous. They mated for life. Once wedding vows were exchanged in the tiny red-brick chapel at Sommerley, nothing could separate man and wife. No affairs, no divorce, no midlife crisis plagued the Ikati.

Only death separated them.

In a way, his parents had been lucky. Horrible though the accident was, they’d gone together. He thought his father would have had the worst of it, if he’d been the one to survive the crash without his mother. Leander pictured him wandering the empty halls of Sommerley, lost as a child, sobbing into his teacup.

They’d been inseparable in life. Somehow it seemed fitting they were inseparable in death.

He passed a hand over his throbbing head and urged the driver to go faster. He wanted to be back in his own bed tonight. He needed sleep, a good sleep. He was wrung dry from the constant ache of desire Jenna aroused in him, an ache that grew sharp as a blade when she was near and dulled to a chronic buzz of discontent when she was not.

She was lithe and rash and strong, lovely beyond description, reckless and valiant yet full of a vulnerability that moved him. She was obstinate and clever, she was heat and fire and cool, feminine mystery, she tasted of wild roses and rain, but she was not his.

Nor, as she had so clearly demonstrated, did she want to be.

His head dropped back against the headrest once more. He pressed his fingertips into the hollows of his eyes and let out a long breath.

When they finally pulled to a smooth stop before the massive, scrolled iron gates at the bottom of the long drive that led up to Sommerley, Leander’s hopes for a good night’s sleep were dashed.

A small square of fabric was posted above the stone pillar on the left, whipping hard in the wind.

It was a red flag. The Assembly’s sign for danger.

Jenna found the button on the armrest that operated the tinted black window. The smell of sodden grass and rain-cleansed country night invaded the warm, dimly lit interior of the limousine as the window silently retracted. She leaned out to stare in wonder at the ten-foot hewn stone walls, the bank of security cameras, the razor-sharp barbed wire artfully concealed beyond the gates by the grove of ficus trees, their gleaming dark foliage trimmed to precisely the right height.