Noah's Boy-eARC Read Online Free PDF

who’d discovered her that Christmas Eve: Kyrie Grace Smith.
    God’s Grace. To Tom she’d been all that and more, the one person to whom his actions and his well-being mattered. Sometimes he thought she kept him sane and strong and, in the end, human…even when he shape-shifted into a dragon.
    His hand reached out, as though of its own accord, and ran along her smooth, golden thigh.
    Kyrie mumbled something against the pillow, then turned her head, throwing back the curtain of her brown hair—the fringe dyed to resemble a tapestry in Earth tones—and blinked foggily at him.
    “Hello, sunshine,” he said half ironically. He knew that she, like him, was not a morning person. Or maybe not an afternoon person, because they usually went to bed around seven in the morning, and woke up around four or five to start work at the diner they co-owned in time to take the later part of the dinner shift at six.
    She growled at him, and gave him a dirty look, in mock exasperation. Then she reached out a hand and patted at his shoulder, as if not sure it was really there. Reassured, she mumbled between clenched teeth, “Time?”
    He turned his head to look at the alarm clock on his bedside table, in reality a little bookshelf they’d bought at the thrift shop to serve the duty. “Four,” he said.
    She sighed a deep sigh and turned on her side to face him. “I suppose,” she said, “we have to get up.” And leaned towards him for a kiss, he didn’t at all begrudge. He never understood complaints of morning breath.
    “We could take a few minutes,” he said hopefully.
    She kissed him again, and he tried to turn on his side. Tried to, because as he started to turn, several sharp points inserted themselves into his calves and something gave a good impression of a demonic scream. “Ah,” he yelled. “Not Dinner.” The utterance would have seemed cryptic to anyone who didn’t know them, but not to any of the clients of their diner, or even their neighbors, who were used to the unusual name of their orange tabby tomcat.
    More out of habit than thought, Tom returned his legs to the position they’d been in, and after a while the pain of claws on his calves waned. “I don’t think Not Dinner approves of the program,” he said.
    “So?” Kyrie said. “Let him not approve. I will—”
    She had just started to rise, when one of their cell phones rang. Kyrie’s. Had to be because the tune, playing muffled and distant from somewhere in the house, was “She Only Comes Out at Night.”
    “Shit,” Kyrie said, slipping out of bed and opening the door of the bedroom before dashing off into the house in search of the phone.
    Fortunately, Tom thought, the house wasn’t very big, so it wasn’t like she could look in a lot of places. He sat up, leaned down and, carefully, removed Not Dinner from his legs. The cat bristled and yowled, but let him do it.
    Just as Tom set his feet on the floor, Kyrie’s phone switched off, and his own—“I Need a Hero”—started ringing.
    It was somewhere in the room. He was almost sure of it. He stumbled to the armchair in the corner, which was in fact never used as a chair, but as a repository of clothes worn once but not dirty enough to wash yet. He picked up the jeans he’d worn the night before and patted at both pockets, then found his black leather jacket and patted those pockets, before he woke enough to realize the sound was in fact coming from behind the chair.
    He’d bent over the back of the chair and was trying to reach his phone on the floor, aware that Kyrie had come back and stood at the door to the room, when his phone stopped ringing and the house phone started.
    There was only one house phone, and it was attached to the wall in the kitchen. The house was small enough that the coiled cord could extend to almost the whole place.
    Tom straightened and turned and ran out of the room, across the living room and down the hall to the kitchen, two steps behind Kyrie.
    Someone was