Read His Dark Bond Online

Authors: Anne Marsh

His Dark Bond (3 page)

BOOK: His Dark Bond
12.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Hell, yeah.
She stopped speaking when he exploded into the room, her hands moving, gripping the edge of the lectern hard as they slid beneath its lip.
Panic switch
. He’d have bet his last breath that she’d have a panic switch installed under there. Good. A strong instinct for self-preservation would make his job easier.
She stared at him, so he glared right back and wondered if she had any idea just what a turn-on that damp, nervous little stroke of her tongue over her lower lip was.
Christ, she was sexy. And he’d bet that she had no idea.
She’d twisted her chocolate-brown hair into a neat chignon and skewered the heavy mass with a well-aimed pencil. Just as sweet as sugar. Her skin was pale from too much indoor time, and he could just make out her dark eyes as he took inventory. Two arms. Two legs. Two breasts. All the standard accoutrements for her kind and nothing special, so he shouldn’t be so turned on. Then she opened her mouth. She didn’t seem to raise her voice, but he heard her clear in the back of the lecture hall.
“Security has been alerted. I advise you to get the fuck out of my lecture hall. Now.” That liquid voice ran straight down his spine and took up residence in his balls. That voice didn’t match her prim, buttoned-up exterior at all.
Christ, she had no idea who she was baiting. What. That, or she just didn’t give a flying fuck.
Her delicious, icy glare had him hardening, and he so needed to get a grip on his cock. “Down, boy,” he muttered, as he headed down the main aisle. The slower students or the ones unfortunate enough to be trapped behind their companions scrambled out of his way.
He knew what they saw. Coldhearted killer with ice in his veins. They weren’t wrong, and, from the look in his professor’s eyes, she saw it, too. She abandoned her death grip on the lectern, grabbed her laptop, and made a beeline for the nearest exit.
If she’d been dealing with another human, she might have made it.
He didn’t bother with explanations—because there just wasn’t enough fucking time. He could hear the next rogue thundering down the hallway, mowing through the crowd of panicked students despite whatever Nael and Vkhin were throwing at him, and she wouldn’t have listened to him, anyway. Shoving one blade between his teeth, he vaulted over the rows of seats one-handed. He kept the other hand weapons-ready. Three rows. Two. And bingo.
He cut her off, wrapping one leather-clad arm around her chest—yeah, he was a bastard, all right, because he noticed
precisely
how those buttoned-up breasts felt cushioned against his arm—and yanked her off her feet, releasing the blade in his teeth. She let loose with a multilingual barrage of curses that the entire useless U.N. couldn’t have outdone as the laptop slid away from her.
“Shut. The. Fuck. Up.” He hauled her up against him just to prove he could. “I’m on your side.”
She stopped her cursing long enough to bring her fingers up to do her level best to claw his eyes out, while her feet did a number on his shins with her damn pointy heels. Again, too bad for her that he wasn’t human. She had no chance at all.
He took her down to the ground because that was simplest and lowered his full weight onto her. No way that petite frame of hers was bucking off his weight, although she gave it her best shot. Three enjoyable seconds of that—after he shifted his weight just enough to pinion her legs as far apart as the fabric of that pencil skirt would let her move—and she stopped. Fighting for breath, he figured, because most humans prioritized living, and living included breathing.
Her brown eyes glared up at him. “If you’re the good guy,” she said, “who’s playing the villain in this scenario?”
 
Genetics was predictable. The male pinning her to the none-too-clean tiles of her lecture hall was wildly
un
predictable.
The geneticist in her was categorizing, identifying racial lines and possible antecedents. Too dark to be Mediterranean, and the cheekbones were wrong for Middle Eastern. He could have been Israeli; Mossad, based on the arsenal he was packing. Her feminine side, however, purred with unexpected awareness. He was dark, and the hard planes of his face were the perfect foil for an even harder body. His hair was cropped too close to his head for her to tell what the natural texture was, but those cheekbones would have guaranteed him bookings at any Manhattan modeling agency until the booker took a good look at those eyes. Those eyes weren’t human. The dark irises were a rich black color. And they glowed with heat and emotion. Forget the small scars that flirted with the edge of his cheeks as if life had tattooed a warning sign on his face for all to see. This male was dark. Feral. And damned if that wasn’t a possessive gleam in his eyes.
He also wasn’t human, and he was way out of her league, even if she did have one extra chromosome.
She ran her eyes over that face again. Yeah, that coloring, that bone structure, told her all she really needed to know. His genetics were right there on display.
“Goblin,” she identified. “Fallen angel.” So, he clearly wasn’t here to listen to her lecture on introductory genetics or to discuss her recent paper on the Book of Numbers. Lines and patterns. Relationships. All neat and tidy on paper. Probably messier than hell in real life, not to mention vaguely incestuous. Of course, if you went by the glazed-over look of her students, not too many people found it interesting. At all. So, she was a freak in more ways than one. It still didn’t explain why
he
was here or why he had an interest in manhandling her.
Her fingers curled around his wrists, tugging. He let her—probably because it amused him, the bastard. Her futile efforts only managed to dislodge the sleeves of his leather duster, revealing dark bands of ink around both those thick wrists. When a Goblin and a human bonded, that bond was literally imprinted on the skin of both, dark swirls of ink-like black markings on their wrists and forearms. Rumor claimed that the larger the favor, the thicker and darker those markings were. She didn’t think Zer’s marks were natural, which meant he wasn’t bonded. He’d gotten the art for his own reasons.
He shifted on top of her, and she sucked in a much-needed breath before the weight returned. “Yeah. Like what you see, doc?”
She did, but she wasn’t stupid, just having a really, really bad day. He’d traumatized her entire undergraduate seminar, pinned her to the floor, and, from the sounds coming from outside her hall, he wasn’t alone. Still, the distant crackle and pop of gunfire indicated that campus security might finally be riding to the rescue.
Oh, God. Maybe she’d never woken up at all this morning. Maybe the nightmare of the dean’s office and this unthinkable disruption of her lecture were all part of the same nightmare. Maybe, if she concentrated hard enough, she’d wake up. Unfortunately, she was desperate, not crazy, and the two hundred-plus pounds of male atop her was no dream.
“Get off me.” She didn’t think he’d budge, but that wasn’t going to stop her from registering a protest. He had no right to just stride in here and manhandle her. He didn’t own her soul and never would.
She refused to focus on the frisson of fear the sounds outside her lecture hall provoked. First, she needed to get free. Then, she could panic.
“You are the doc, aren’t you?” His eyes examined her face, as if he expected to find a name and number stamped there for his convenience.
She considered refusing to answer his questions—after all, wasn’t that what members of the military were trained to do? Provide only rank and number when they fell into hostile hands?—but one large thumb was now stroking slowly over her exposed collarbone in a little absentminded motion that could have been unconscious on his part. Except she didn’t think so. His eyes didn’t budge from her face.
He knew exactly what he was doing, and that unwilling little trickle of heat that shot straight to her groin was a warning. God, was she
stupid
? He’d chased her, pinned her. And yet she couldn’t help noticing the delicious heat and weight of his too-large body.
“Tell me your name,” he demanded, giving her more of his weight. Breathing became a concern again, as the air whooshed from her lungs. He wasn’t hurting her, not yet, but the message was loud and clear. Her assailant was in charge here, and he planned to have her dancing to his tune.
Her eyes narrowed. Not if she had anything to say about it.
When he reached over her for her dropped laptop, however, she fought back panic. Had she backed up? What if the automatic software hadn’t done its job? This bastard wasn’t taking her data.
“Nessa St. James,” she said quickly, breathing more easily when the large hand retreated from the titanium casing of her laptop. The backup software had a 99 percent accuracy rate, but she wasn’t chancing that 1 percent. Outliers were a bitch.
“Nessa St. James.”
“That’s what I said,” she snapped, because she wasn’t going to let him know that she was scared. She was tired of being scared. Tired of running from her problems, even if today’s current problem outweighed her at least two to one. From the feel of him, he was six-foot plus and a good two hundred pounds. “You want to let me up now, I’ll get my purse. Show you some ID.”
A hard, mean smile creased those sexy lips of his. “I’m not ready to let you
up,
baby,” he said, making the innocuous words sound like the dirtiest of promises. Shamefully, she felt an unexpected dampness slick her sex. She couldn’t possibly be attracted to this Neanderthal.
“The hell you’re not.” She focused on the noise outside. The snap-crackle-and-pop was louder now, but she didn’t know if campus security was up to this job.
He rolled, taking her with him, tucking her into the protective shadow of his body as he rose smoothly to his feet in a half crouch. One large hand reached down toward her and stopped.
“Zer.” That grunt must have counted as an introduction in his book. No one had ever accused the Fallen of having manners. She didn’t like lying flat on her back, staring up at him, so she sat up. He was watching her, and the look in his eye said she was prey.
“So, Zer, why are you here?” She waved a hand around the carnage of her lecture hall. “If you’d wanted to audit my course, you’d have come to my office hours.” And she would have made him ask nicely. No. Scratch that. She would have made him beg. She suspected no one had the upper hand around this Zer, but she’d take whatever opportunities life handed her.
His eyes assessed the smashed-in door. “We need to get out of here.”
For once, they were in agreement. She thought of her ruined lecture, the screaming students, and decided that she’d had enough of his alpha-male crap for one afternoon. He could kill her and get it over with, or he could damn well let her go.
“I agree,” she said, ignoring his hand and shoving to her feet. “I’m done here. You’re done here. I suggest you head on out that door you stove in and explain to campus security what was undoubtedly a very good reason for acting like a complete Neanderthal. In the meantime, I’m going to leave through the other door and see if there’s anything salvageable of this day.”
“No,” he said in that low, raspy growl of a voice. “I can’t let you do that, baby.”
She’d play his game. “Why not?”
Explanations were clearly killing him. Not a big one for talking, she decided, or he just couldn’t be bothered wasting words on her.
“Come with me,” he demanded.
She ran through a list of possible reasons to walk out of there with him and came up blank. “No.”
When he reached for her again, she scrambled backward.
“Listen to me,” he said, and she got the impression that he would only explain once. He didn’t strike her as the negotiating type of guy. No, he’d
take
what he wanted, and if she couldn’t stop him, he’d figure he was right. “I need you to come with me. Right now.”
Damn it, where was campus security? They were supposed to keep her
safe
. When she was finished here, she’d be having words with the dean about this situation.
When she flinched, the Fallen pulled back his hand, crossing his arms over that broad chest of his. The soft cotton of his black T-shirt pulled over impossibly large muscles. Her unwanted companion was seriously built.
“You know what I am, right?” the male asked her.
“Besides an unwelcome intrusion breaking up my afternoon lecture?” When he gave her that cold-eyed stare of his, she decided it might be wiser to humor him. “You’re a Goblin.” She shrugged and assessed the distance to the door. She wouldn’t make it before he’d be on her. Unfortunately. “You’re one of the Fallen.”
He nodded, as if she was a particularly gifted student. Straining her senses, she listened intently. The sounds of panicked, fleeing students had faded, but she should have been hearing the heavy thud of booted feet as campus security came through the lobby.
Instead, she got dead silence, and that couldn’t possibly be good.
“You know what the Goblin bond is?” He eyed her like a stranger offering candy. “You heard of the favor?”
Goblin favors were legend. One favor, any favor at all. The catch was, though, you had to be willing to rent your soul out to the bastard doing the favor. Nothing in this life was free. “You ever thought about it?” His voice was a dark, liquid rasp that promised straight-up sex and pleasure, and she had to remind herself that she had no interest in a Goblin bond. Ever. She’d worked damn hard to get where she was, without owing anyone. “What you might ask for if you had the chance?”
BOOK: His Dark Bond
12.71Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Los vigilantes del faro by Camilla Läckberg
Destined to Play by Indigo Bloome
Mountain Moonlight by Jaci Burton
Till the Cows Come Home by Judy Clemens
A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa
Otherwise Engaged by Suzanne Finnamore