Interview With a Gargoyle (30 page)

About the Author

To learn more about Jennifer Colgan, please visit
www.jennifercolgan.com
. Send an email to Jennifer at
[email protected]
, join her Yahoo! group to join in the fun with other readers
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, or stop by her Two Voices blog at
http://bernadettegardner2.blogspot.com/

Look for these titles by Jennifer Colgan

Now Available:

The Rebound Guy

The Matchmakers

The Soul Jar

The Concubine’s Tale

La Mirage: A Midsummer Night’s Steam Story

Uncross My Heart

Magick made him human. Only love can keep him that way.

Uncross My Heart

© 2011 Jennifer Colgan

After a century of living
la vida muerta
, Julian Devlin’s closest ally casts a de-vamping spell that leaves him defanged and demoted from his hard-won place in Baltimore’s vampire hierarchy. Disoriented by his transformation, he can’t even find his way home.

The indignities don’t end there. Before he can explain to the quirky consignment shop owner why he’s hiding in her basement, she’s punched the newly re-acquired breath out of him and smacked him upside the head with her knock-off purse.

Zoe Boyd’s scream could have peeled paint from the walls—if she could get her heart out of her throat. Common thugs aren’t supposed to have a smile so panty-melting that she finds herself apologizing for scaring
him
.

She’s also too busy managing her friends’ love lives to take on an ex-vampire with revamping and revenge on his mind. Until she guides him home and ends up neck deep in his world of trouble.

As Zoe risks her life to give him back his death, she warms the soul Julian never thought he’d own again. And when he tracks down a devilish witch who can reverse the spell, immortality without Zoe suddenly seems like cold comfort…

Warning: This novel contains sensual love scenes between a fashion-forward hero and a fashion-unconscious heroine, abuse of Italian loafers, and a few love bites. Don’t worry, freshly sharpened fangs don’t hurt. Much…

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Uncross My Heart:

“Don’t scream. I won’t hurt you.” Julian dropped his hand from Zoe’s lips and backed away from her bed, hands up, his movements deliberately slow and non-threatening.

In the blue neon glow of her bedside alarm clock, her pale skin looked like alabaster, and her eyes were huge and terrified. Clutching a thin blanket to her chest, she scrambled to a sitting position amid the tumble of pillows that populated her bed. “How did you get in here? Are you insane? What if I kept a knife under my pillow or something?”

“You don’t. I checked.”

She squeaked in indignation. “You broke into my house.”

“No. I let myself in with your spare key, which you obviously put back right where you got it from after we came in before. You know, you’re asking to be murdered in your sleep, or worse. It amazes me that a girl as trusting as you is still alive.”

“You weren’t supposed to look.”

“I looked. Sue me.” He shrugged. This had all been too easy. He’d probably be doing her a favor by draining her dry as soon as he transformed back. This blonde gypsy belonged in another era, a simpler time when people left their doors unlocked and everyone knew their neighbors. Either that or she needed a body guard twenty-four/seven.

“What are you doing back here? Didn’t you find someone to help you?”

He sighed. A lie would be easy, even if it did little to preserve the mere shred of dignity he had left. “It’s almost dawn. I needed someplace to go before sunrise, and I was kicked out of the bus station. They don’t allow people to sleep there anymore, I discovered.” Truth was, she was the only trustworthy soul he could find at this hour.

She blinked at him. “Sunrise? Um…humans can go out in the daylight. Or have you been revamped already?” One delicate hand slid toward her slender throat. Julian watched the subtle movement with a mixture of amusement and—dear God—arousal.

She’d traded her peasant blouse for a thin-strapped tank top. Clingy and white, it contrasted with her honeyed skin and did little to hide the sumptuous curves of her breasts, now peaked with taut nipples. Gooseflesh stood out on her bare arms. He wondered if she might be considering the possibility that he would lower his lips to her neck and drink…

He blinked away the traitorous thoughts. “No. I’m still human.” He laughed. “I guess I’m so conditioned to avoid sunlight that it never occurred to me. Nevertheless, I need a place to sleep for a little while. I don’t have enough cash to go to a hotel, and if I use my credit cards, I could be leading Lambert right to me.”

“Vampires have credit cards?”

“We’re undead, not Amish. How else would one purchase Gucci loafers?”

Warm yellow light illuminated her skeptical gaze when she switched on the bedside lamp. “Okay, silly question. I admit it, but give me a break. It’s four fifty-nine a.m., and I just woke up with a man’s hand over my mouth. You’re lucky I didn’t bite you.”

He let his gaze roam her half-hidden curves again. She’d be lucky if he didn’t bite
her
one way or another. “I apologize for sneaking in… Something I would
not
have been able to do if you had an ounce of common sense.” He tossed the spare key to her, and just as he’d hoped, she let go of her death grip on the blanket to catch it.

Delicious. He’d have climbed into the bed with her if he hadn’t been so desperate to keep her trust for just a little longer. He needed this girl. And he hated needing her. “Do yourself a favor and hide that somewhere else. Better yet, give it to your boyfriend for safe keeping.”

“I told you, he’s
not
my boyfriend.”

Good
. The thought crossed his mind unbidden, and he squashed it. “Can I borrow your couch? Just for a few hours?”

Her lips quivered a bit before she responded. “Sure. I’ll get you a pillow and a blanket.”

“No need to treat me like a guest.”

“But you are one.” She rose, and Julian’s gaze traveled up and down her bare legs, pausing only briefly at the still red scrapes on her knees. She’d hurt herself running from him and, for some inexplicable reason, he regretted that. He shook off the unproductive thought and took inventory of the rest of her outfit.

Tiny panties rode low on her hips, leaving a band of naked skin beneath the hem of her skimpy top. Ah. The twenty-first century had so many advantages over the nineteenth. Each decade, it seemed women became less inhibited about their bodies. It made being immortal so much fun.

She moved unselfconsciously now, and Julian followed her into the living room. When she bent over to retrieve a blanket and pillow from within the square hassock, he stifled an appreciative sigh.

She tossed the items at him while he debated sinking his very human teeth into one creamy inner thigh. “Put your eyes back in your head, Romeo. I already told you, I’m nobody’s entrée. Now, go. Sleep. I’m going back to bed in my room behind a door that locks, and there’s no spare key above the frame, so don’t get any ideas. If you’re still here in the morning—the
actual
morning—I’ll think about cooking you breakfast, and we’ll talk about getting you a decent place to stay until your house is fixed, okay?”

He stared for a full second, dumbfounded by her. One bite. Just one bite was all he wanted. “Okay.”

She disappeared into the bedroom then, shutting the door firmly on any further comment or fantasy on his part.

Disappointed but still oddly amused, Julian made himself comfortable on her couch.

Zoe’s heart thundered in her shamelessly exposed chest. She’d just been parading around in her underwear in front of a lunatic—a drop-dead gorgeous lunatic—who’d stolen into her bedroom in the middle of the night.

Her face burned with shame and something else. He’d been looking, and she’d enjoyed letting him look.

Was she insane? It was not okay to pretend that Julian Devlin was a normal guy. He thought he was a vampire, for heaven’s sake, and he certainly hadn’t tried very hard to disguise his desire to bite her.

She leaned against the locked bedroom door, breathing deeply to calm herself. What would she do if he was still there in the morning—
later
in the morning? What if he didn’t leave?

Thank God he was all right. That thought came out of nowhere and pushed all the other ones aside. Her guilt at letting him wander off into the night evaporated and was replaced by complete shock that he’d come back.

He trusts me.
That notion frightened her a little. That made it her responsibility to help him. But how?

Certainly not by giving him an eyeful of her ladies’ Fruit of the Looms. Though he had definitely liked what he saw.

Cool it. Get a grip
.

The sound of his rhythmic breathing reached her through the door. She chanced opening it a crack to peer at him. He was asleep already, one arm flung across his eyes as if shielding himself from something.

He’d taken off her father’s sweatshirt. It now lay folded neatly on the arm of the sofa. His naked chest rose and fell, and his muscles still looked rock solid even in sleep.

Gorgeous.

What am I going to do with you, Julian Devlin?

Zoe shut the door to the bedroom and locked it again. The real question was, what was
he
going to do with
her
?

Their desire could be their destruction…or their greatest strength.

Cipher

© 2011 Moira Rogers

Southern Arcana
,
Book 4

Fourteen months ago, Kat Gabriel learned a brutal truth. Under the wrong circumstances, her empathic ability is no gift. It’s a deadly weapon. Now her soul bears the inescapable weight of those deaths—and it aches for the loss of the easy relationship she once shared with Andrew Callaghan. Unleashing her power saved his life, but she couldn’t save his humanity.

Since the attack that turned him into a werewolf, Andrew’s sole focus has been to make himself stronger. Pushing her away hurt like hell, but Kat doesn’t need a friend. She needs a protector strong enough to shield her from the supernatural world that forced her to kill. Strong enough to resist their volatile connection.

As Kat’s quest to understand the violent legacy of her past leads her into the darkest underbelly of the psychic world, Andrew is at her side. Yet every step forward rips open old emotional wounds and shakes their control. Where they’re headed, distractions of any kind can be fatal—especially when the greatest threat they pose is to each other.

Warning: This book contains a dangerous shapeshifter who could kill you with his bare hands, an empathic hacker who could kill you with her mind, a psychic cult determined to kill everyone, a lot of violence, a little bit of hope, and a happily-ever-after seven years in the making.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Cipher:

She did what he’d done. Reached up and framed his face with her hands, and shivered at the texture of his beard against her palms. “I will never be afraid of you, Andrew Callaghan.”

His chest heaved with shaking breaths, and he groaned as he grabbed her wrists. “It’s dangerous, Kat.
I’m
dangerous.”

“So am I.” She swiped her thumbs over his cheeks and willed him to believe the same words he’d told her the day before. “Andrew, I’m still mostly burned out, and you’ve got strong shields for someone who’s not a psychic. But I couldn’t just hurt you—I could destroy you. I could drive you to your knees and make you crawl for me. I could take away everything you are.”

He closed his eyes, but he didn’t release her. “Then that makes this a doubly bad idea.”

Andrew was going to walk away from her again, and the tense parts of her that had started to unwind over the last few days would shatter. The only way to save anything was to let him go before he came up with a polite, stilted reason. “I understand.”

“No. No, you really don’t.”

He bent his head and kissed her.

The world stopped.

His lips were warm. Firm. As firm as the fingers locked around her wrists, holding her hands to his face. She’d played out this moment in a thousand girlish daydreams and more than one guilty adult fantasy, and imagination hadn’t provided the little details. The heat of his body, the strength of his grip, the way she melted, like chocolate left in the July sun, and from nothing but that innocent contact.

His lips, on hers. Parting, and oh
God
, he knew how to kiss, like he was hungry, like he loved the taste of her, and Kat became mortally certain that her knees were going to give out if he got his tongue in on the action. Her body throbbed with the rhythm of his mouth moving on hers, until she was one exposed nerve, and she would have begged him to touch her anywhere—everywhere—if she wouldn’t have had to stop kissing him.

When he released her wrists, it was only to grip her hips and lift her, mold her to his body, and she moaned her gratitude. He was harder than he looked, an unforgiving wall of muscle and smooth skin, so distracting and arousing that she didn’t realize they were moving until he stepped over the threshold.

Into the bedroom.

“Open,” he rasped, and lowered her to the bed.

Her back touched the mattress—gentle, so damn gentle—and Andrew stretched out over her, shirtless and beautiful, and her brain fritzed out like a fried circuit board as she obeyed and parted her lips.

He touched them with his tongue, a soft sweep of one lip and then the other, and kissed her again, deeper, one hand winding in her hair. That stirred old memories, brought to life every unacceptable fantasy she’d had of their anger and hurt and longing all coalescing into a dark passion that would satisfy her body even as it cut her heart to pieces.

But there was no darkness in the grip of his hand, just a gentle control, a sweet hint of dominance that barely deserved the description, but thrilled her anyway. The throbbing was back, magnified into an ache that pulsed in time with the stroke of his tongue. Every time she tried to catch a breath it escaped in tiny, helpless noises that would have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been burning alive.