Midnight Medusa Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’ll happily strip naked and step into the sea.”
    Renata shivered. The sun-warmed patio stones were toasty beneath her feet and the day was warm, but still, Renata shivered. Whether it was the way he spoke to her, the hungry look on his face, or the words he spoke, she couldn’t say. But neither could she help wondering what it would be like to swim naked, to no longer be self-conscious about the scars on her back, to be unafraid to let a man see her completely and utterly exposed.
    Still, Renata was confused. “You said you and your brother instilled panic and terror…”
    Damon leaned forward over the table until his face was inches from hers. Then with great deliberation, he pursed his lips as if he might kiss her. Instead, he blew a soft breath upon her face and it stirred happier memories inside her. She smelled jasmine, the scent of her mother’s perfume, and she felt the tension loosen in her shoulders. The thought that she was being held captive against her will seemed far away, unimportant. Instead she felt she was only the guest of an impossibly handsome man at his beach house retreat.
    “I can terrify,” Damon told her with sad eyes. “But I can also take some of it away.”
    His face was still inches from hers, and she wondered what he had done to her that she so wanted to kiss him. More than that, she wanted to reach out with the fingers of a sculptress and trace the lines of his mouth. Would his lips feel smooth like marble, rough as granite, or soft like her own? “But why would a Son of Ares want anything to do with me?”
    Too late, Renata realized she’d spoken the question aloud. But Damon didn’t look surprised by it. “Because, Renata,” he said, simply. “You’re a gorgon.”

Chapter Five
    A gorgon ? Renata didn’t know whether to laugh or be deeply insulted. She’d studied ancient art in school. She knew that gorgons were monstrous harpies with metal claws, snakes for hair, and faces so hideous they turned anyone who looked at them to stone.
    Not her disfiguring burns, nor the scars left after plastic surgery, nor even a single bad-hair day had ever made Renata feel so ugly that she’d have called herself a gorgon. Not even in jest.
    “What? Literally a gorgon?” Furious, Renata shot up out of her chair and stalked to the edge of the little patio, wondering if she should leap into the sand and just start running away from Damon as far and as fast as she could. But something made her stay. “What are you saying? I remember being a child—I remember my father and my brother and my mother. You’re saying I’m Medusa in disguise?”
    “Medusa is dead,” Damon said, very seriously. “A vigilante named Perseus cut off her head.”
    A flash of her little brother’s severed hand passed through Renata’s mind and deep tremors shook her. She was so overcome with revulsion she couldn’t speak.
    “You see, Renata, not all gorgons are immortal. Some gorgons are not born—they are made.”
    “How? How are they made?” Renata demanded to know.
    “They’re forged of righteous rage against a horror they were helpless to stop. That’s what happened to Medusa. That’s what happened to you.”
    Renata turned back to him, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. “And so what does it mean? I have no scales, no claws, and my only snake is an escaped pet python.”
    “Your monstrosity is on the inside,” Damon replied.
    It was, quite possibly, the most hurtful thing anyone had ever said to her. It wounded her so deeply her muscles all tightened, like she’d been struck, like she’d been shot.
    Damon’s shoulders sagged as if he realized he was hurting her, but felt he must continue. “Some might say that all the rage you feel, all that ugliness, is coiling around your heart.”
    Some might say that. Like all the men who had ever tried to love her. Is that why she’d driven them all away with her remoteness and secrecy? Had she been afraid they would see her ugly inner