Rush of Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

hungers.
    Jarred by her unsettling thoughts, she stopped to prop her shoulder against a darkened storefront so that she could close her eyes for a moment. She felt raw inside, and it was obvious his presence had put a chink in her carefully constructed armor. If she wasn’t careful, he could take her apart, piece by piece, and she’d find herself in that chilling suck of pain again. Consumed by guilt and regret. Living in agony with nothing but that stark, tearing cold filling her up inside.
    Only her anger could make her burn.
    Anger…or McConnell.
    Damn it, she would not think about it…about him. She couldn’t. Not if she wanted to keep what little sanity she still had left. She’d been doing her best to put him out of her mind for weeks now, so God only knew she should be getting good at it. In fact, she’d been trying so hard not to think about him, she hadn’t even realized he was in the club until he’d gotten right on her. Of course, he had a lot of natural mental guards for a human and they were difficult for her to get through. It’d been that way ever since Kellan Scott, the Lycan she’d been imprisoned with at Westmore’s compound, had explained to the soldier exactly how her powers worked. Powers that were weakening every day…and Raine had to face the factthat she might never be at full strength again. The deep trances she’d gone into whenever the Casus had raped her had left severe wounds within her mind—ones she knew damn well might never be fully healed.
    As it was, she was left in a strange state of limbo, able to lust…and yet, burdened by shame for taking what she knew the Deschanel would have seen as the coward’s way out.
    Coward or not, she was already able to feel desire. Hell, who was she trying to fool? She might be wary of having a man’s weight crushing her down, unsure of exactly how she would react—but there was no doubt that she wanted Seth McConnell with a hunger none of her past attractions had ever come anywhere close to matching. She’d been fighting hard not to admit it, but she wanted him in ways that didn’t make sense. In ways she couldn’t even explain.
    Despite how she felt about his past, about the man that he’d been and the things that he’d done, for some inexplicable reason, McConnell had been her only point of light in the days following her rescue. A fact that her battered, unstable emotions hadn’t been able to handle, and so she’d cut that connection, doing her best to avoid him once they’d reached the safety of Harrow House. And by doing so, she’d left herself with no other choice but to sink deeper into the darkness that had taken root in her soul, until she no longer knew herself. Until only her hatred and her quest for revenge had been the things that could save her.
    But just because she couldn’t allow herself to get closeto him, didn’t mean that he didn’t fascinate her. The guy might have been a trained killer, but he’d always been gentle with her. He was also dangerously easy on the eyes, with a slow, sexy smile and a rumbling, husky kind of laugh that could have melted metal. And no matter how badly she might have wanted to, she couldn’t deny that his strength, as well as his intellect, impressed her. He had no supernatural powers, and yet, she’d seen him spar with the shifters back at Harrow House, knocking them on their asses more than once. And he’d been able to find her. She didn’t believe in fate. No, she laid the credit at McConnell’s feet, though she would never admit it to his face. But he had incredible instincts for a human, and he’d honed them to a fine point during all his years as a hunter. Somehow, he’d tracked her down in a city of millions, and she knew she was going to have to be careful if she was going to keep away from him.
    Speaking of careful…
    As she cast a wary eye over her silent surroundings, it occurred to her that she was crazy to have let her guard down. And the chilling words that