His Forbidden Desire
Page 21
Evil was real. It stalked through the world in a thousand different forms, all carrying the same selfish desire that cared little for who it hurt in the process. Most people simply didn’t act it on the scale of the Bookkeeper and the people who paid her.
Amarante cleaned her hands and forearms with steady motions. Her hands didn’t shake. She mourned that loss of human reaction silently, another thing the people in Camp Bueller had taken from her.
Another thing she’d never reclaim.
Ryu moved to stand beside her. “I can handle the rest.”
“You don’t have to shield me.” Neither Kenzie nor Luca would have even thought to offer. They saw her strength as unparalleled, without the slightest weakness. They would simply take her words at face value.
Not Ryu, though.
But then, he had a lifetime of knowing her to fall back, and there was a time when Amarante wasn’t Death. When she was just a girl with a little brother who thought the sun rose and set with her.
It was so long ago.
Ryu shook his head. “I can handle the rest,” he repeated.
She bit back her instinctive response to power through simply because that’s what she’d always done. Not this time. She wasn’t alone. She wasn’t even the glue keeping their foursome together anymore. The foundations were too strong to be held by a single person. Amarante simply said, “Thank you.”
Three names.
Not as much as she’d hoped for, but it would be enough.
It had to be enough.
She pushed through the door and found Kenzie leaning against the wall. She looked up. “It’s done?”
“Yes.” Amarante carefully closed the door behind her, standing between Kenzie and the scene in the room she’d just left. “It’s time to go hunting.”
Thank you so much for reading Luca and Cami’s story! This was a departure for me in a number of ways, I enjoyed the hell out of writing it. I hope the wild ride was a great one for you!
The Horsemen’s story isn’t over! The series picks up directly after the end of HIS FORBIDDEN DESIRE with HER RIVAL’S TOUCH. Kenzie is going to have to deal with the fact that Liam is on the island—and he’s there for HER. What’s a woman to do in that situation? A bet sounds about right…
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Want to know more about how Cami’s older brother, Theo, found his two Consorts and retook the throne after he was exiled? You can pick up THEIRS FOR THE NIGHT, my FREE novella that goes back to where the Royal Triad first began. An exiled prince, his bodyguard, and the bartender they can’t quite manage to leave alone.
Read a sneak peek of HER RIVAL’S TOUCH now!
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Liam had known the truth even before he saw it reflected in Kenzie’s hazel eyes. She had no memory of him. None. The night eight years ago might have been imprinted beneath his skin, but she’d walked and never spared him a second thought. Fuck, he was an idiot.
It didn’t change his reason for being here.
He might have entered the Wild Hunt with the intention of securing Death’s favor to find the woman who haunted his dreams all these years, but he honestly hadn’t expected to arrive on the island and see her. What were the odds? Too impossible to put a number to.
And yet here she was.
She flipped her blond hair off her shoulder and glared up at him. “What are you on about?”
“Boston. Eight years ago. We shared a bottle of top shelf whiskey in a little hole in the wall bar and then fucked on every surface of your hotel room. And then you robbed me.”
She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time, and he found himself holding his breath while he waited. That flicker of recognition in her hazel eyes died. “Sorry, you’ve got the wrong girl.”
She does remember me.
He fucking knew it.
“No, I don’t.” He leaned forward. He couldn’t help himself. The siren call of her was too much to deny. Liam lowered his voice and delivered his knockout punch. “Kenzie.”
She jerked as if he’d hooked her up to a live wire. “How do you know that name?”
It proved his theory that she didn’t just randomly give out her name to people—publicly she was known as War and only that—which, in turn, supported the fact that that night had meant as much to her as it had to him. “You told me.” He should have left it there, but frustration boiled beneath his skin, a product of too many days spent inactive, within touching distance of his goal but unable to close the distance. “While you were riding my cock for the third time.”
She paled, but recovered almost instantly and cast a look at the front of his slacks. “Maybe if I saw your cock, I’d actually remember you.”
Stupid to let the cut land. He’d known that it wouldn’t be easy to find the mystery woman, let alone to convince her to give him a shot. She had all the information she needed in the wallet she’d stolen from him. If she wanted to find him after that, she could have.
“A conversation, Kenzie.”
“Stop saying that name,” she hissed.
“A conversation,” he repeated. “Surely that’s not too much to ask.”
She frowned. “A conversation and then you leave.”
“Sure,” he lied easily. Now that he’d found her, he wasn’t leaving until he saw this through one way or another. His best friend, Aiden, had called him an idiot for hunting the idea of a woman he’d met once, but that night was a fever in his blood that he couldn’t ease. He needed to know if there was something there, or at least get some fucking closure so he could move on with his life. There had never been time for selfish pursuits, not when the O’Malley family teetered on the verge of war and needed every solider on alert. Now there was finally peace, which meant now he was free to pursue his dream.
To pursue Kenzie.
She finally shrugged. “Fine. I can spare five minutes.”
Fuck, but this woman was harder to pin down than smoke. Even when he’d failed to win the Wild Hunt, he hadn’t lost hope because now he knew where she was. Except he couldn’t get to her. Every time he caught sight of her blond wave of hair, or the red she seemed to wear like a banner of war, she’d disappear just as fast. This place had to be riddled with back doors and hallways the public didn’t know about, because he’d never had someone slip his grasp so many times. The frustration had him going out of his skin.
He followed her through the cascade of sound the slot machines emitted. It was wasn’t smoky in here like in some casinos, and the air had the faintest tinge of salt as a reminder that they weren’t far from the water. A temptation to leave the four walls of this place and walk outside. Liam shook it off. He wasn’t there for the same reason the other patrons were.
He was there for Kenzie.
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Pre-order HER RIVAL’S TOUCH now!
Acknowledgments
Huge thanks to all my readers for taking this leap with me. The Island of Ys has been kicking around in the back of my brain for a long time, and it’s really satisfying to be able to bring some of those wayward side characters forward to get their own HEAs!
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Big thank you to Eagle and Lynda for helping me make this book the best version of itself.
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Thank you, as always, to my ladies. Piper and Asa and Lauren for always being there to help talk me through snags and share in the ups and downs and unexpected pivots!
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Last, but never least, thank you to Tim. It’s been a wild ride and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down anytime soon. I love you like a love song, babe!
About the Author
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Katee Robert learned to tell her stories at her grandpa’s knee. Her 2015 title, The Marriage Contract, was a RITA finalist, and RT Book Reviews name
d it 'a compulsively readable book with just the right amount of suspense and tension." When not writing sexy contemporary and romantic suspense, she spends her time playing imaginary games with her children, driving her husband batty with what-if questions, and planning for the inevitable zombie apocalypse.
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www.kateerobert.com
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