RAVEN'S HOLLOW Read Online Free PDF Page A

skin tingled everywhere, and her breathing—well, maybe she’d stopped breathing, because her head was alive with sensations she couldn’t hope to untangle.
    The next thunderbolt vibrated the body of Eli’s truck and shot straight up into her bones. Prying her mouth free, Sadie raised uncertain eyes. “Why do I feel like someone just reached down and gave us a really hard shake?”
    “I thought it was my brain trying to shake some time-and-place sense into us.”
    Or sense in general, Sadie reflected. A sigh escaped as she forced her spinning emotions to disengage.
    Did it surprise her that his kiss would be off the scale? Hardly. After one dance in Boston, she’d expected that scale to blow eventually.
    It was an effort to separate herself from him and keep her voice steady. “This shouldn’t have happened, Eli. We shouldn’t have let it happen.”
    Skimming his knuckles over her cheekbone, he held her gaze. “I won’t argue with you, but only because I know what I can and can’t give a woman. More than sex is more than I’ve got inside me right now.”
    She laughed out a breath. “When I unscramble that remark, I’ll probably agree. In the meantime...” She leaned forward just far enough to whisper a teasing “Your kisses rock, Lieutenant, with or without the drama of a full-blown storm beneath them.”
    Sadie knew he was considering tossing caution aside and diving in again, but he went with the wiser, if somewhat disappointing, alternative and reached behind them for his backpack. “It’s time we put some distance between us and these trees. Where’s your—” he raised a humorous brow “—car?”
    “Cars are neither bad words nor bad vehicles. I spent half my teenage life wanting to own a Maserati.”
    “You own a Maserati?”
    “No, I own a Land Rover, because I’m not in my teens, and I knew when I came back to the Hollow that the roads, in a pothole-to-pavement ratio, strongly favor the potholes. My mother had a man friend once who leased a Maserati, but I was thirteen when she left him, so I waved goodbye to that wish and switched to boys instead.”
    “I didn’t know your parents had broken up, Sadie. I’m sorry.”
    She twitched away any residual sadness. “They were barely together when we lived in the Hollow. Molly says it’s the Bellam curse.”
    “What is?”
    “The inability of Nola Bellam’s female descendants—my mother in this case—to commit to people, places and/or things. An inability she believes is supplemented by the fact that those female descendants insist on passing the Bellam surname on to their own female children.”
    “Would this be your cousin Molly who only left Raven’s Hollow long enough to go to college?”
    “That’s the one.”
    “Making her the notable exception commitment-wise.”
    “So it would seem.”
    With a smile grazing his lips, Eli indicated the outside storm. “You ready?”
    “Would saying no change the situation?”
    His smile deepened. “Between lightning bolts, then.”
    He would be gorgeous, Sadie thought with a sigh. A hot, gorgeous cop. A loner, with a reputation for getting the job done—however distasteful that job might be.
    As homicides went, Eli did it all. He’d go undercover for weeks, often months at a time, if going under meant bringing down a New York crime lord. During his tenure on the force, he’d worked countless night shifts while investigating gang-related murders. He’d hunted down serial killers, sunk his teeth into a dozen or more cold cases and, in at least one instance that she knew of, apprehended a man who made Hannibal Lecter appear well adjusted.
    Of course, it also didn’t hurt that he wore his dark hair long, always looked a little dangerous and somehow kept his truly superior six-foot-two-inch body totally cut.
    “There’s less than five seconds between thunderbolts,” he said now. “We’ll need to move fast and stay low.”
    “My way’s better.” Dragging her eyes from his profile,