She resisted the urge to step back and instead squared her shoulders. “I can take care of myself.”

His gaze flickered back to hers and he nodded. One corner of his mouth lifted. “I know you can.” The lopsided smile disappeared and his brows drew together. His next words came out in a fumbling, disjointed rush. “But...if you need...anything...I’m here for you...I’d be happy to...you can always...what I mean to say is that I want...I want...”

He stammered to a halt and she frowned at him, waiting. He flushed even redder, looked away, and blew out a hard breath. Then he cursed and hid his face behind a hand as if he was embarrassed, and that was when several things fell into place at once.

She realized Christian was offering her more than just his assistance.

Her pulse went jagged. She was caught between empathy—she knew the terrible toll loneliness and longing could take—excruciating self-consciousness, and the strong desire to run away into the moonlit night and leave all this insanity behind.

Answers, she reminded herself. I came here for answers, and I’m not leaving until I get them. No matter how weird this gets.

She put on her resolve like armor and remembered what her mother would say when things got especially rough—“Remain calm and carry on.” She groped for the right thing to say, and it wasn’t until she spoke that she knew she really meant it.

“Thank you,” she said.

Christian’s head snapped up and he stared at her, expectant.

“I mean...” She was momentarily distracted by his molten aura, flaring bright as danger between them, and tried to compose herself and say something coherent that wouldn’t make the situation worse. “I mean I hope we can be friends because I need all the friends I can get. And you seem like someone I can trust.”

She was immediately sorry she chose that particular phrase.

His eyes closed for just longer than a blink and an urgent sorrow contorted his face, here then gone. He opened his eyes and his gaze raked over her figure with a naked hunger so palpable she felt it like a hand on her skin.

“You shouldn’t trust me,” he said, his voice rough. “If I were Alpha I’d have already claimed you for my own, regardless of what you wanted. At least my brother is showing some restraint.” He paused, his breathing gone ragged. “I wouldn’t.”

Now she did step back, not just one step but two, thankful suddenly for the servant waiting by the stairs who was looking quite pointedly down at his own shoes.

“I don’t believe that,” she said, startled. “You’re a gentleman.”

He laughed, a dark, ruthless sound, and closed the distance between them in one long stride. He loomed over her, large and male and menacing. “Am I?” He snatched up her hand, pulled open his shirt with one hard yank that sent buttons popping, and pressed her palm flat against his bare, muscled chest. He held it there when she gasped and tried to pull away. “You can read minds, so tell me what you see, Jenna,” he said, eyes searing. “Tell me exactly how much of a gentleman I am.”

She managed to disentangle herself and stumble away, hand to her mouth, both faint and furious, the lightning strike of images still burning in her mind. They were a jumble of carnality and tenderness and vivid color blurred by speed, pictures of her and him locked together in passionate kisses and even more passionate lovemaking, images of children that looked like the two of them combined and a few odd, fuzzy scenes of a great many people bowing down to her over bended knee that were quickly crowded out by the overwhelming flood of pornographic depictions of her lips saying yes as she was astride him, beneath him, arching against him in ecstasy.

Seeing her obvious shock at his split-second metamorphosis from benign to not, Christian’s lips twisted into a joyless smile. “Don’t mistake us for humans, Jenna. The Ikati are animals. And like all animals, we’re concerned with only three things: hierarchy, territory, and procreation.” That searing gaze traveled over her body, lingering, and when he looked into her eyes again her mouth went dry with dread. He opened his mouth and said, “But every time I’m close to you I can only think about one.”

Then he turned on his heel and stalked away, leaving her speechless and shaking in the cold, echoing hall.

“Another body has been found,” came the terse voice of Viscount Weymouth as Leander entered the fire-warmed confines of the East Library. He paused at the door and looked at the gathered men, every one gray-faced with fear, wearing the look of interrupted slumber: bleary eyes, disheveled hair, unshaven faces.

They all had wives and children, homes and livelihoods. They all had something precious to protect.

Leander hadn’t bothered to unpack or eat or even remove his traveling clothes. He’d come directly from the limousine. He knew they would be waiting, most likely been waiting for hours, and it was his duty to make decisions.

Swiftly.

With a shrug of his shoulders he was out of his heavy woolen overcoat. He slung it over a side chair on his way to take his place at the head of the rectangular mahogany table. He didn’t sit but gripped the carved wooden back of the Alpha’s chair, stared at the silent congregation, listened to the crackle of dry wood as it burned and the thumping, frightened heartbeats pounding against the ribs of the men of his tribe.

He nodded to Morgan as she came through the door and took her usual seat, then frowned as Christian, grim and tight-jawed with his blue Oxford unbuttoned halfway down his chest, followed only moments behind. Without glancing in Leander’s direction, Christian went to stand in front of the fireplace, crossed his arms over his chest, and stared down at the flames.

Leander turned his attention to Viscount Weymouth. “Tell me,” he commanded.

“Outside the Quebec colony this time, frozen stiff in a lake just beginning to thaw. They think it may have been there since winter.” The viscount slid a French newspaper to him across the long table. A blurred photograph showed the naked body of a man being pulled from the lake by a team of local officials.

Like the first body discovered in March outside the Bhaktapur colony in Nepal, this one was headless. What he couldn’t tell from the picture was if it had been burned too.

Leander did a quick calculation. Two bodies in a few months, possibly even less depending if they could establish a time of death for this new one. Both found very near an Ikati colony, both headless.

It was the indelible calling card of their ancient enemy, the Expurgari. Torture the victim, burn him alive, cut off his head. What they did with the heads, none of the Ikati knew.

But if they had been discovered, why not more victims? Why not a direct attack?

“Has the body been identified?” Leander asked, pulling the paper toward him, almost dreading to touch it. He squinted at the picture and read the caption beneath: Body of missing activist found in frozen lake near Mt. Tremblant.

“Yes,” Viscount Weymouth replied, frayed nerves ringing in his voice. “It was Simon Bennett.”

Leander felt the blood drain away from his face.

Bennett was a vocal environmental activist, fighting for tougher laws on pollution, championing clean energy and a move toward more earth-friendly life-styles, working to bring man and animals and the planet in harmony with one another. Working to stop overpopulation, stop wasting natural resources, stop the destruction of their mother, planet Earth.

Working, very vocally and in the public eye, to stop the habitat encroachment on the local population of cougars, lynx, and jaguars. Panthers.

Like Viscount Weymouth, both men killed were Keepers of the Bloodlines.

Leander slowly looked around at the faces in the room, faces he had known his entire life, men he had grown up with or looked up to as a young boy, as the son of the Alpha. Men he had sworn to protect once he became the Alpha himself.