Lord of Lightning Read Online Free PDF Page B

transformed from a lion to a man. A man she knew ...
    The Viking god of her mother’s stories.
    Stephen Gage towered above her, his eyes tranced as he gazed at something in the distance. The room’s thin light poured silver over his burnished gold hair, and his face was sheened, as though he’d walked through a drenching mist.
    Lise rolled her head slightly and saw that he was staring at his own reflection in the mirror. The image was oddly distorted, almost surreal from her angle, and as she tried to bring it into focus, she began to remember what had happened ... the turquoise inferno, the black apparition.
    “Did you see it?” she asked, her words a barely intelligible whisper.
    “Yes,” he said.
    She turned from the mirror to look at him. “What was it?”
    He shook his head, still staring at the glass, lost in some shadowed dream. Gradually he seemed to realize that she was watching him, and he bowed his head, wiping the dampness from his brow, raking his shaggy hair back on his head and holding it there, as though the gesture brought him some kind of comfort.
    “Are you all right?” she asked.
    He looked at her then, the haunted expression gradually becoming recognition. “How are you feeling?” he asked. The silvery distance in his eyes receded swiftly to the blue she remembered, and within seconds he seemed almost normal again.
    “Woozy ... I fell.”
    “A bad fall. You may have cracked some ribs.”
    Again Lise became aware of the throbbing pulse just below her breast. She glanced at herself there, and realized several things ... she was lying on a bed, covered with a soft cotton blanket. The room was small, dimly lit, and by the look of it, a bedroom in the Cooper cabin. Stephen must have found her by the quarry and brought her here. She had to tell him what had happened. The police should be notified—
    Somehow in all that flurry of information, there was one puzzling concern that overrode everything else. Something felt wrong with her body. She brought her hand to her ribs and gingerly touched a bandage. And then she came into contact with something warm and soft. Her own breast.
    It took her another moment to register exactly what was missing. Her clothes? Her bra? She was naked! She looked up at him, a soft gasp in her throat. “What have you done?”
    “I had to ... clean the injury. It was a bad cut.”
    Lise couldn’t summon a response. She was trying to cope with the explosion of sensory signals flooding her groggy brain. She ran her hand down her side and felt the cotton panties. No, not totally naked, she thought, only slightly relieved at the discovery. But he’d undressed her? Dear Lord. A flurry of emotions hit her—disbelief, anger, acute embarrassment. She felt exposed and violated. She felt as wretchedly self-conscious as a twelve-year-old. He’d seen her breasts? She wanted to crawl under the blanket and die!
    For another woman it might have been an overreaction. For Lise, it was the perfectly natural response of a woman who had never been seen naked by a man in her entire adult life, while unconscious or otherwise. What was more, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, she was still uninitiated in the ways of physical love. Probably one of the oldest living virgins on the planet, she often thought privately.
    “You took my clothes off? My br—” She couldn’t say the word. As he nodded, the mortification hit her again. And then another emotion crept in. Fear. What kind of man was he? What else might he have done?
    She tried to sit up, but the pain that stabbed at her was too intense. It ripped the breath from her lungs, and she sank back down, exhausted. Cracked ribs? Was that what he’d said? Her head swam dizzily as she imagined him doing whatever he’d done, touching her ...
    “Lise—” He covered her shoulder with his large hand, gently holding her down as he knelt beside her. “There wasn’t any choice. You might have been seriously hurt. I had to find out. The cuts