A Touch of Crimson Read Online Free PDF Page A

any sign that they were being manipulated, because the time was fast approaching when he would have to pay for his hubris. He had committed the transgression he’d censured others for: he had fallen in love with Shadoe—a naphil, the child of a mortal woman and the angel her father had once been—and he’d succumbed, countless times, to the decadent sins of her flesh.
    He had personally punished her father for the same offense. He’d severed the wings from the fallen angel, an act that took Syre’s soul and made him the first of the vampires.
    The consequences of Adrian’s hypocrisy would eventually catch up with him; it was an inevitability he’d accepted long ago. If Raguel was the means the Creator intended to use to rebuke him, Adrian needed to know and be prepared. He had to ensure that Shadoe would be taken care of when his time came.
    His gaze met those of his lycan guards, who were sitting a few rows away on either side. They were observant, curious. They couldn’t help but see that he was reacting differently to Lindsay than he did to other women. The last time Shadoe’s soul had been with him, neither of the two lycans had been born yet, but they knew his personal life. They knew how little attention he paid to the opposite sex.
    He would need more than two guards now that he could resume his hunt for Syre, and Lindsay would need her own dedicated protection. Adrian knew he’d have to manipulate that carefully. She was young—twenty-five at most—and starting out on her own in a new place. Now was the time for her to broaden her horizons, not find out that her new lover was micromanaging her life.
    Lindsay rolled her straw between her fingers, her soft pink lips hovering momentarily before parting for a sip.
    A wash of heat swept over him. Even the knowledge that he would lose her again, that he was forsaking his duty once again, couldn’t dampen the rush of desire quickening his blood. He wanted those lips on his skin, needed to feel them sliding across his flesh, whispering both raw and tender words as they teased him mercilessly. Although the Sentinels had been forbidden to love and mate with mortals, nothing could convince Adrian that Shadoe hadn’t been born to belong to him.
    She talked to her dad on the phone . . .
    He grew very still.
    Adrian kept his face impassive, but he was intensely alert. Shadoe’s various incarnations had always been raised by a single-parent mother, never by a father. It was as if Syre had marked her soul when he’d begun the Change that would have transformed her into a vampire, ensuring that no other man would ever take his paternal role in her life. “Are your parents in Raleigh?”
    A shadow passed over her features. “My dad is. My mother died when I was five.”
    His fingers flexed restlessly. The order of her parents’ deaths had never been mutable.
    His long-stable world had canted that morning, and Lindsay Gibson continued to challenge his balance, causing the objects around him to begin a slow slide away from their predetermined place. The lycans had been growing more agitated by the day, the vampires had crossed a precipitous line with the death of Phineas and the attack in the helicopter, and now Shadoe had returned after an interminable absence with the most basic pattern of her reincarnations altered.
    “I’m sorry for your loss,” he murmured, adopting the customary remark offered to grieving mortals who so often viewed death as a sorrowful ending.
    “Thank you. How about your family? Big or small?”
    “Big. Lots of siblings.”
    “I envy you. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My dad didn’t remarry. He never got over my mom.”
    Adrian had become adept at winning over her mothers. Men, however, tended to give him a wide berth regardless of any efforts he made to put them at ease. They instinctively sensed the power in him; there could be only one Alpha in a designated space, and he was it. Gaining acceptance from her father might take