Prince of Twilight Read Online Free PDF Page B

beyond that were uncertain. Without the scroll, the ring was useless.
    Why was Tempest here? Had she come for the ring, as well? Why? How could she know?
    He couldn’t let her obtain it, if that was her goal. For her to possess it would be far too dangerous.
    As he stood there, staring up at the room, Tempest stepped out onto the balcony, leaned on the railing and gazed out into the night.
    He couldn’t take his eyes from her. And his preternatural vision didn’t fail him. He managed to drink in every detail of her face in a way he hadn’t been close enough to do in far, far too long.
    The blush of youth had faded from the body of the woman in which his love lay sleeping. In its place were the angles of a female in the prime of her life. Her face was thinner, her eyes harder, than they had been before. Her hair was still blond but not as pale; still short but less severe. Its softnessframed her face and moved with every touch of the breeze. She still bore a striking resemblance to Elisabeta, her ancestor. He longed to bury his fingers in those sunlight-and-honey strands, to bury himself inside her; to feel her shiver under the power of his touch.
    She wanted him.
    God, he could feel her wanting him. Yearning for him. And she knew he was close. She sensed him, perhaps not as powerfully and clearly as he sensed her, but it was there. And consciously or not, she was calling out to him. She wanted him still.
    He had to school himself to patience. He had to know why she was here, what she was doing. He’d waited sixteen years to be with her again—more than five hundred before that. Surely he could wait one more night. But not much more than that.
    He was hungry. He needed sustenance, blood to satisfy his body and perhaps calm the raging desire in his veins. To keep himself from going to her, for just a little while longer. And then, in the early hours just before dawn, he would go after the ring.
    And that was precisely what he did. But when he got to the museum, it was to find the window broken, the alarms shrieking, sirens blaring and the ring…
    Gone.
    Â 
    Stormy woke to the insistent sun beaming through the hotel room’s windows and searing through her eyelids. She rolled over in the bed and hid her face in the pillows, but the memory of her dreams woke her more thoroughly than the sun ever could have.
    She’d dreamed about Vlad.
    But she hadn’t dreamed about the two of them making love—which was odd, because she’d dreamed of that many times over the past sixteen years, never sure whether it had actually happened, or if it was just part of her senseless yearning for him. Or something more sinister—perhaps the longing of her intruder or one of her memories.
    No. This dream had been more like a memory. Until the end. Then it had become a vision. He’d been standing there on the shores of Endover, where she had first met him. His castle-like mansion hovered on its secret island behind him, and the sea was raging in between. He’d been just standing there, staring at her.
    Wanting her.
    Calling to her.
    The wind had been whipping through his long dark hair, and she’d remembered—yes, remembered!—the way it felt to run her fingers through it.His chest had been bare, probably because, in her mind, that was the way she preferred to remember him. His chest. Next to his eyes, and that hair, and his mouth, it was her favorite part of him. She’d touched that chest in her dreams. She’d run her hands over it and over his belly. Had it ever been real?
    It felt real. More real than anything else in her life.
    She rolled onto her back and pressed her hands to her face. “God,” she moaned. “Am I ever going to get over him?”
    But she already knew the answer. If she hadn’t been able to forget Dracula in sixteen years, it wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. He had a hold on her. Maybe it was deliberate. Maybe it was him messing