Secrets at Midnight Read Online Free PDF

many times as I have.”
    â€œWhen should I start worrying?”
    â€œNot for a few years yet.” Hanging up after a bit more back and forth with his brother, he knuckled down to work again.
    There were three more calls, two from packmates who needed advice about personal financial matters, the third from his father. Michael Smith had obviously been talking to his mate, and was checking up on his son. Happy to answer his father honestly, Bastien told him he was fine. Hell, he was ecstatic.
    That visceral excitement had intensified to fever pitch by the time he left the office.
    Kirby sounded sweetly delighted when she answered the intercom and cleared him into her building, her accent redolent of mint juleps and magnolia trees. Deciding he was going to kiss her on that lush mouth of hers as soon as possible, licking and tasting and indulging, he took the steps to herapartment three at a time, making it there just as she opened the door.
    A slight gasp, followed by a shy smile that made him want to bite, her pretty honey-colored hair in a ponytail that bared the delicate skin of her nape. “That was fast.”
    Leopard stretching under his skin at her proximity, he allowed himself to tug on a curling tendril of hair that had come loose from the tie. “I bring gifts to bribe my way inside.” He held up the bag from a family-run restaurant one block over. “Chicken noodle soup. Good for whatever ails you. And if you’re feeling better . . .” He showed her the frozen yogurt he had fantasies of feeding her spoonful by spoonful, and yeah, maybe he wanted to lick it from her skin for his own dessert, but he
was
a cat. Kirby couldn’t be too surprised if he gave in to temptation.
    â€œSo?” he teased gently when she didn’t step back, her caressing gaze on his shoulders, his chest. It was all he could do not to cup her jaw, claim a hot, deep kiss, tell her she could touch him anytime she wanted.
    Cheeks coloring, she invited him into the tiny space that would’ve normally made his leopard stir-crazy. “I feel fine,” she said. “I had a couple of twinges right after you left, but then nothing.”
    From the scent and look of her, her skin glowing, she didn’t appear ill. Yet once again, he caught a hint of that other scent, wild and inexplicable, that confused his leopard. “Have you been spending a lot of time around another cat lately?” he asked, though the scent was too integrated into her body to be anything other than her own.
    Yet the way she moved, everything else about her, was human.
    Kirby tilted her head to the side, lines forming between the rich, unusual hazel of her eyes, flecks of green intermingled with near yellow. “No, why?”
    â€œI thought I caught a scent.” Except there was nothing in the air now except Kirby’s warm softness overlaid by a peach accent that probably came from her body lotion.
    Of course, thinking about Kirby rubbing lotion over her naked flesh probably wasn’t the best of ideas right now.“Might be one of your neighbors,” he said to put her at ease, while his mind worried over the puzzle of it.
    â€œMaybe.” She bit down on her lower lip, and he wanted to growl that that was his job.
    Yeah, he was having trouble controlling both the animal and the man.
    â€œI haven’t met all my neighbors yet.” Smile holding a quiet shyness again, she smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle on the front of her fitted sea green T-shirt. “I’m not very brave with strangers.” A soft confession.
    Bastien’s need for her segued into a violent tenderness, and right then, all he wanted to do was hold her. Just hold her. “I think you’re braver than you know,” he murmured, folding his arms to leash the instinct. “It’s not every woman who packs up and moves across the country on her own.” She’d come to him, whether she knew it or not, and it