Fighting Fate: Book 2 of the Warrior Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page B

of Mari in Red’s aunt’s cottage made Shay smile with real mirth. Knowing Finn, she’d have Mari stripped to her skivvies and tied down with velvet rope until Mari was well and truly convinced Shay was the love of her life.
    Red was wrong about one thing though. He’d loved two women in his lifetime. He was watching one walk away. That one he now called friend and wanted to strangle so badly his palms itched, mostly because she was right. The other one still haunted his dreams. He wanted Mari so badly another part of him itched and no amount of time or distance seemed to assuage his pain.
    Shay couldn’t change who or what he was when he left Mari, but he was a different man now, a better one in most ways, more stubborn in others. Life had taught him humility and patience. He was no longer a cock-sure twenty year old with more dick than sense.
    The man he’d become now could give Mari the things the boy he’d been could not have. It was well past time he did something about it. Dreams didn’t come indiscriminately or to the unworthy. His unconscious, the gods of his ancestors, or perhaps both, were trying to tell him something.
    Unfortunately, before Shannon O’Shay could interpret exactly what the gods were trying to tell him, the very temporal manifestation of foreboding he dreamed about landed on his doorstep.
     
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    After his morning dance with Red’s fists, Shay showered and dressed. He was just about to eat something that looked like dense coffee cake with flax seed, carob, and what Finn termed other roughage , when his cell phone rang.
    It was Jesse calling from his bike. Shay knew he was traveling well above the speed limit because he could hear the wind in Jesse’s ear-bud, something that that particular high-tech piece of equipment shouldn’t have picked up under sixty-five miles per hour.
    Jesse said four words: Firestorm. ETA, nine minutes before he disconnected.
    Shay ran from the house he shared with Jesse, abutting Potter’s Woods, to the big house where the rest of the family lived, taking care to arm himself before grabbing his shoes on his way out the door.
    “Firestorm, my ass. Shit-storm is more like it.”
     
    …
     
    Why she had gotten on the back of a complete stranger’s bike? For that matter, why had she bothered getting out of bed? It was her birthday. She could have skipped the office, not answered when the delivery man rang and simply rolled over and allowed herself to spend the day wrapped in a dream with her mystery lover. A lover who looked a lot like the man she was now holding onto for dear life.
    Never one for recriminations or engaging in self doubt for longer than it took her to blink, Taryn decided to focus on the positive. She had her arms around a strong man, who smelled like wind and rosemary, mint shampoo. An unlikely and wonderful combination. She’d been attracted enough to banter with him instead of calling the campus police, who would have asked him to leave had she insisted. Even a gun to the head hadn’t changed that attraction, and if the rest of the world found something wrong with that, she didn’t much care. Taryn didn’t climb mountains, cave dive underwater, or freefall out of perfectly performing airplanes because the rest of the world thought it was right.
    It would have been nice if she’d known his name before deciding to flee with him, but at least that was fixable.
    Taryn shivered in the morning sun. He’d wrapped her in his leather jacket, with instructions to shoot anyone who seemed to get too close. The former she was thankful for, the latter made her want to scream. She didn’t shoot people. She shot film, but if anyone ever made her feel that vulnerable again, she’d make an exception. Maybe he could teach her how. It was a skill she was more than happy to learn as of about twenty minutes ago.
    The bike pulled into an underground garage at a speed that defined how well the man on it maneuvered. He pulled into a