Jacob. Jacquelyn Frank
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sky. I investigated and it turned out it was a change in gravitational force. A side effect of…well…Jacob was out of control. He was…I found Jacob…um…” Elijah shifted his weight in discomfort. “He was consorting with this female…or about to. I stopped him just in time.”
“Jacob?” Noah gasped, his shock so resounding that Isabella felt instantly insulted.
“No one asked you to stop him,” she said sharply, her eyes shooting fiery daggers at the one called Elijah. “What the hell business is it of yours if Jacob…uh…consorts with me?”
“That would require a lengthy explanation,” Noah offered in answer.
“I have time,” she shot back.
Noah stepped forward, made eye contact with her, and raised his hand in a graceful sweep of his fingers. “You look tired,” he remarked.
Isabella blinked, was overcome by a wash of exhaustion, and yawned against her will. Her chin lifted stubbornly as she swayed on her feet.
Noah went very still and Elijah’s jaw fell open.
Noah manipulated her personal energy further, literally sucking the strength out of her with such force that Elijah could feel it tingling across his skin. Isabella stepped back hard as if hit physically. Helpless against Noah’s awesome power, she crumpled to the floor, curled up into a fetal position, and promptly fell into an exhausted sleep.
Jacob opened his eyes and instantly regretted it. His head was a gymnasium of jumping, dashing pain. With a groan, he forced himself into an upright position, trying to shake the fog out of his skull. He looked up, focusing on two blurs before him, one darklike shadow, the other decidedly more like gold.
Noah and…
“What in hell are you doing here?” he demanded upon recognizing Elijah, indulging in the knee-jerk reaction of hostility even though he wasn’t at all sure why he wanted to.
“Saving your ass,” Elijah quipped, smiling with a flash of teeth that was a combination of boyishness and outright feral pleasure.
“The hell you are!” Jacob barked, his pride bent at the very idea. He might be in a fog, but he knew he could take care of himself and needed no one to save him from anything.
“I am sorry to say it, my friend, but he is telling the truth.”
Jacob swung his gaze to the Demon King. Noah’s sea green and gray eyes were a serious match to the grim press of his mouth.
“Look, Jacob.” Noah indicated to something lying curled up on the couch next to his hip.
Isabella.
Beautiful Isabella. Curled up like a sweet kitten and breathing so deeply that she made a noise in the back of her throat with every exhale. Sound asleep, looking like an ethereal angel, and…
Bruised.
He stared in horror as he realized those were his fingerprints pressed deeply into her neck and throat, as well as the bare curve of her upper thigh. Everything came rushing back to him, the implications hitting him like a gut punch, stealing his breath away as his face burned in appalled shame.
“Oh, no,” he rasped, his dismay and devastation grinding into those two simple words.
“Easy, Jacob,” Noah said quickly. “Elijah arrived in time to keep you from harming her any further.”
Barely, Jacob recalled. He remembered the lust, the craving for Isabella that had so overwhelmed him. He remembered how close he had come to taking her, mating with her, damn the consequences. In fact, the consequences had never once entered his mind. Even now, though he was full of despair over his lack of control, he couldn’t shake the urge he had to get closer to her, to touch her, to drag that delicate body in a crush against him and taste her again. It rode him heavily, rooted in his gut and groin, and he was filled with the dreadful conviction that he would never be able to remove that need from his soul. Ever.
“I never meant to hurt her,” Jacob said quietly. The irony of speaking the exact words Kane had used gutted him with anger—anger at himself and frustrated outrage that those he highly respected had been witness to his humiliation.
“We know that,” Noah said evenly, hoping to be some kind of comfort to him. “What we do not know is how she came to be in your home.” Noah leaned forward. “What in the world would possess you to bring a temptation such as this onto your territory?” the Demon King demanded of his champion. “You are not infallible, Jacob, even if you are the Enforcer. You are Demon. You too can fall to the madness of the Hallowed moon.”
“I know that!”
“Then why,” Elijah asked, “did you bring her to your home?”
“Because she…because I needed to figure something out about her. She is not usual for a human female.”
“You’re telling me,” Elijah said wryly, gingerly touching his bruised nose.
“What made you think she was unusual?” Noah asked.
Jacob took a deep breath before dropping the bomb. “She killed Saul.”
The two Demons across from him sucked in air as if they were suddenly drowning for it. Jacob instinctively got to his feet and sat on the arm of the couch beside Isabella’s head, crossing an arm to the back of the sofa in a clearly protective gesture.
“That is impossible,” Noah said quietly.
“I saw it with my own eyes. Saul had completely Transformed. I miscalculated his power…his strength. It has been too long since I have fought an altered Demon. He severely injured me, but she stopped him.”
“This little human creature killed one of us? One of the Transformed?” Elijah snorted in disbelief. “He must have been unconscious. Incapacitated.”
“That same little creature broke your nose not twenty minutes ago, Elijah,” Noah reminded him dryly. “Were you unconscious or incapacitated?” The King was frowning, worry lines etching deeply across his broad forehead. “I have never heard of such a thing,” Noah informed them. “You were right to detain her, but it was wrong of you not to be forthcoming about it sooner. I do not understand why you put both of your lives in danger, Jacob. What would have kept her from possibly killing you? And then the way Elijah found you with her…”
“I cannot explain it. Any of it. I just…I just knew she was not a danger to me. Even in spite of knowing how she has affected me, I still do not look at her as a threat or at myself as a threat to her. I cannot explain it, Noah. I have been the Enforcer for four hundred years. Never in all that time have I strayed. Never once have I entertained the slightest craving to do so. And yet, with her, there is no conscience in me. No sense of my cultural mores. She…” Jacob paused to move a wisp of hair off her cheek. “It feels as though there is no wrong in what I did. Everything I have come to believe in my lifetime tells me that it is very wrong, but it does not feel like it.”
“That’s the madness talking,” Elijah scoffed with disgust. “You were like an animal when I arrived, Jacob. You would have torn her to pieces.”
“No!” Jacob’s fury was punctuated as he snarled at Elijah. “The urge to mate with her was not entirely that of a beast who would use any female without discrimination. It was different. I…” He was at a loss, looking away from the stunned expressions of the other two males. “It was primitive, yes, but not just lustful instinct. It was more…deeper…something I could not resist. No, not even I.”
Noah stood up then, suddenly feeling like it would be a good idea not to be sitting so close to this woman who had somehow managed to become the fixation of the unbendable, unshakable Jacob. Jacob’s moral code was what made him the best Enforcer they’d ever had. It was what protected him. If he had succumbed to madness, there had to be something more to it than met the eye.
Who was this woman who could kill a Demon, who had beat down Elijah, the Captain of Noah’s fighting