Noah. Jacquelyn Frank
Читать онлайн книгу.
the end it meant that neither of them could pretend not to see the indications of a Demon who was pressing at the edges of sanity, their sense of civilization and moral sagacity rubbed raw with the growing phase of the moon. It was little details, ones that made an aura vibrate with high-strung tension, or the occurrence of aberrant behaviors that were ever so slight but that warned them that the Demon in question was struggling with his own volatile nature. These were the sparks that indicated a fuse was lit and growing ever closer to a deadly moment of explosion.
Apparently Isabella was seeing those signs in the Demon King. If he were going to be honest, Jacob would have to agree, although the very idea of it made his stomach churn. If they were forced to battle so respected and powerful a man, so beloved a friend…
Isabella looked up at him with sad, understanding eyes. She was his spiritual mate, and as such had telepathic access to all of his thoughts, but even if she hadn’t been able to hear his wishes, she would know what Jacob was praying for.
That Noah would find his destined mate as soon as possible.
It was the only thing that would prevent the inevitable juncture of confrontation the King and his Enforcers were heading toward. Destiny, whom all Demons revered for both Her diligent forward motion as well as Her capricious sense of humor and irony, intended the Imprinting to be the Demon race’s salvation. Jacob would never fear the potential of his own madness during the Hallowed moons again. That potential had been whisked away when Bella and the Demon prophecy about Druids like her had fallen into his lap. That was when they had all learned that it was possible to find soul mates in the Druids lying dormant and hidden in human society. It promised to rescue an ancient species trembling on the brink of madness.
It also had the potential to diminish the need for the Enforcers. One day, home and hearth would take up more of their time than hunting and being harbingers of punishment. However, there had been very few matches in the past three years, which certainly didn’t make up for centuries of the nearly absolute absence of the Imprinting. Bella and Jacob’s relationship was a small drop of fortune in the vast bucket of turmoil that the Demons swam in each Hallowed season.
Jacob bent over his petite wife and pressed gentle lips to the inside of her slightly damaged wrist. As a Druid, she would heal quickly enough from the injury to allow her to forget it by morning; as her Imprinted mate, Jacob felt even the slightest of her pains far too keenly to ever forget them that easily. And though he knew she saw his thoughts clearly, he sought to soothe her troubled heart.
“I think you fret overmuch,” he chided her gently, smiling when she absently curled her fingertips over the contours of his cheek in reflex to his kiss. “Noah is tense, I agree, but you can clearly see he understands what needs to be done to divert himself. He has survived six and a half centuries of Hallowed moons without ever stepping out of line. Noah hardly needs a little snippet like you, hardly three decades old, trying to mother him.”
Her violet eyes widened at the insult, her mouth opening slightly before she recovered, her gaze lighting with understanding.
“You are trying to get my back up on purpose so I won’t worry,” she countered. Dark lashes fell to shadow her gaze and she leaned into him to press her cheek over the beat of his heart. “I love you for that,” she said, sighing deeply and softly.
Jacob’s hand came to the black curtain of her hair, stroking it top to bottom, knowing the caress soothed and contented her. She relaxed against him, making a small sound of pleasure. “We both see the straining at Noah’s spirit, little flower,” he told her with infinite gentleness, “but we will trade our friendship with the King away if we spend it watching and waiting for him to self-destruct.”
Isabella nodded gravely once and then reached for her husband’s mouth with her own parting lips as she buried comforting fingers into the charcoal-and-chocolate hair sweeping over the nape of his strong neck.
“You are right,” she sighed, kissing him tenderly again. “You are absolutely right.”
The scent was sweet, like spun sugar that flew in threads through the air of a successful carnival. The innocence of it belied the overwhelmingly mature sensation of heat and pure animal hunger that washed over him. It was a craving he knew, and yet had never known its equal in depth. He was blinded by it, clenched tight as if his entire body were a single flexed muscle of awareness and anticipation.
She had fought him every step of the way. She always did. Sometimes he thought she did it just to vex him, but mostly he could sense her hostility was all a part of a power struggle she felt she needed to win, whatever the cost. He suspected she was too young a creature to be so jaded, yet it rang true in the antagonism with which his arrival was always greeted. This was the one thing he could be certain of, if nothing else besides her cotton candy scent and long, pristine white hair.
But she was meant for him, chosen by Destiny whether she wanted to be or not. All of this emotional static of resistance was eventually pushed aside as she was overwhelmed with other feelings that spoke to her soul, bypassing her learned behaviors and well-enforced mental barriers. He ruthlessly used this to his advantage, countermanding her enthusiasm for jockeying for power until she was made to realize that the Imprinting was a force which neither of them could ever hope to do battle against.
His fingers and hands curved around firm, feminine flesh that was of a supernatural texture. She felt like the petals of a flower, but so much silkier, so very much more vital. She exceeded the simplistic adjective “soft” in hundreds of ways. Yet there was no mistaking the strength beneath her silken skin. What would she do, he wondered, to make herself so strong? What would she look like when his sensual and emotional war on her forced the inevitable surrender?
He craved answers to all of this as he heard her breath, close and frustrated, rolling thick and slow over his nerves and skin like a mist-laden Louisiana breeze in high summer. He felt her hair, a heavy mass of whitewater silk that poured haphazardly over his too-hot skin in such a way that he felt bound by the tangle of it.
Hard as he tried, powerful as he could be, he could not see her face. He tried to ask her name, but was speechless. The paralysis of his vocal cords extended at times to every extremity. He could feel, but not touch. Then he could touch, but only hear her response. He could look and not truly see. There was nothing but the gleaming white blond of that endless hair. He gritted his teeth with unfathomable frustration, fighting the mystical binding that held his dominant will a prisoner.
All he wanted in the world was to see her face.
Noah woke with a jerk and a staggering intake of breath.
He sat up with the sudden violence of the freedom of reality, his long, strong fingers entwining around covers that were already tangled around his bare hips and legs. As he tried to feed himself with sharp intakes of oxygen, sweat skied down the aristocratic slope of his nose, beading and dripping off it, accompanying those skimming nearly every other surface on his skin. His dark hair was drenched. The pattering sound of the droplets coming off slightly curled ends and dropping onto stiff sheets was identical to that of rain on a rooftop.
As he gathered his bearings, the Demon King brought the sheet up to his face to swipe at the moisture that nearly blinded him. That was when he realized the fabric was scorched stiff, as if someone had left an iron on it for too long.
And that, in spite of its burnt state, it still carried the scent of sweetly spun sugar.
Chapter 2
Corrine looked up when she heard the polite knock on the front door of the home she shared with her husband, Kane. Her russet brows drew together and she tilted her head. She put aside the book she had been reading, uncrossed her long, slim legs, and stood up slowly.
It was unusual for the people she associated with to bother with such a commonplace courtesy as knocking. The Demon society her husband came from didn’t have the same sense of privacy that humans did. Considering that her husband’s friends and family were just about the only people she associated with nowadays, the knock was more than just perplexing.
It was worrisome.
There