Breaking Danger Read Online Free PDF Page B

perfect. Ice blue eyes, sharp high cheekbones, straight, narrow nose, sculpted jaw, firm full mouth. That gorgeous face framed by longish sun-streaked blond hair. If not for the lines of stress bracketing his mouth, the weather-beaten skin, and the crow’s feet around his eyes, he could have been a Calvin Klein model. But beautiful couldn’t be used to describe a man whose face wore that expression of grim awareness, of unspeakable weariness.
    Beautiful also didn’t cover his extreme . . . maleness. Few men nowadays didn’t color their hair, shape their eyebrows, laser away wrinkles, use moisturizer. The usual enhancements. That was what was considered male beauty—someone who worked at his appearance. That wasn’t this man at all. He looked like he’d time-jumped directly from a Viking boat in AD 1100.
    He was beautiful. And hard and dangerous.
    And he’d come through hell to find her.
    She couldn’t even imagine how he’d gotten here from somewhere in Northern California. She’d been at her window on and off all day and hadn’t seen one healthy man or woman. The healthy had deserted the world and left it to the infected. She couldn’t imagine how a noninfected had been able to walk for more than a minute with all the monsters out on the streets, let alone make his way here from far away.
    And yet, here he was.
    The despair that had gripped her heart eased, just a fraction.
    â€œI thought you were dead,” she whispered, eyes locked onto his. Dead, or worse. The thought had been tearing at her all day. That the man coming to her rescue would fall, and turn. Another tear slipped down her cheek, completely against her will. She wasn’t crying. The stress of the past two days was seeping out of her eyes, that was all. “I thought you would never come, and that I would die here alone.”
    Those strong arms tightened around her. What with his weight and his arms crushing her to him, she could barely breathe. She didn’t care. Who cared about breathing when she held life itself in her arms? She thought she’d go out alone, but now she had this amazing man, alive down to his fingertips, strong and vibrant, and she wasn’t alone anymore.
    â€œNo,” he whispered back. “I wouldn’t let that happen. I was coming for you. Nothing could stop me.”
    Their eyes met and held. His eyes blazed with light and purpose. Beyond the vivid coloring and movie-star good looks, there was something deeper there. Strength, power, determination. Her gaze drifted over his face, the tight features holding back some strong emotion she couldn’t identify.
    She was so intent on his face that his words penetrated moments later. Nothing could stop me.
    And nothing had.
    Sophie knew what was out there. She’d spent the past day watching the streets. What was out there was chaos and danger on a level so outrageous it would have been safer to walk down the streets of Baghdad during the Iraq War twenty years earlier than along pretty touristy Beach Street in downtown San Francisco.
    How had he arrived here? However it was, he’d undertaken a monumental task, an impossible one. As far as she had been able to tell, no normal survived out there, could survive out there.
    And yet here he was and . . . she might not die today.
    More water leaked out of her eyes. “Oh God,” she whispered and tightened her arms around his neck again. Was she touching the last human left? Was she holding the last sane man in the world?
    Sophie shuddered, an uncontrollable shiver raking her body, and he tightened his arms even more, as if in taking her shudders into him, he could absorb her fear and panic and despair.
    His hold spoke of comfort. What was between his thighs spoke of desire.
    Desire.
    Desire. Heat. Life.
    Heat was bubbling under her skin. She’d spent the past twenty-four hours encased in ice, cold down to her bones— scared and huddled