Read Online Arctic Fire 2 by Erica Stevens - Free Book Online

was extremely volatile, and all his attention was focused on her.
    “You were caught out in the sun. Why didn’t you come back sooner?” she asked when he stopped before her.
    “I had some things to take care of.”
    Despite her misgivings about his current state of mind, she instinctively leaned closer. Yearning slipped through her body, making her stomach clench. Unable to stop herself, she wrapped her hands around his forearms to steady herself.
    Beneath her touch, his powerful muscles rippled. Her hands slid over his skin and the bristly blond hairs covering his arms. She barely managed to suppress a moan from the shivers of delight the contact elicited in her.
    “I wish you’d come back sooner,” she breathed.
    “So do I.” Her head tilted back to take him in. His face was unreadable as he watched her, his full mouth compressed into a thin line. “You somehow make everything better, Quinn. You make me feel like a man and not a monster.”
    “You’re not a monster.” She raised her hand and pressed her fingers against his cheek. He flinched as if her words and touch distressed him. Confusion swirled through her. She had no idea what had happened tonight, but he felt distant from her.
    She went to withdraw her hand, but he clasped hold of it and pressed it against his face. “You have no idea what goes through my mind about you, and what I’d like to do to you. No idea about the cravings for blood and death that are my constant companion. The need I feel to sink into the oblivion the blood can bring me is a temptation that follows me everywhere. You’d run screaming into the night if you knew the half of it.”
    Quinn swallowed heavily, but she kept her hand pressed against his cheek as she rested her other hand on his chest. “I’d never run from you,” she whispered. “There is nothing you could do that would make me turn from you.”
    The circles around his pupils burned with fire. “What if I returned to killing humans?”
    She closed her eyes and rested her head on his chest as she tried to think through his words. “I couldn’t be with you.” A knife pierced her insides and sliced them apart as she spoke the words, but she couldn’t lie to him. “But I wouldn’t turn against you.”
    “You’d try to save me.”
    She lifted her head to look at him. “You don’t need saving, Julian. You will be who you will be, and it will be your choice to make, but no matter what you do, I will love you.”
    She’d been fighting back those last words for weeks. She’d been certain saying them would spell doom for them, as it had for the others she’d loved or gotten close to over the years. Now, she realized her life had always been precarious, it always would be, but he had to know how she felt.
    If something were to happen to either one of them, and she hadn’t told him she loved him, she would never forgive herself. She sensed he needed to hear the words now, more than ever. He may not feel the same way about her, she may have just opened herself up to a world of hurt, but she would never take them back.
    His eyes sparked, and a tremor shook his hands. Anguish flitted across his face before he wrapped his hand around the back of her head and dragged her against his chest. “I’m not sure I deserve that love,” he said in a voice hoarse with emotion.
    “I am.”
    He groaned low in his throat before threading his fingers through her hair and tenderly pulling her head back. His eyes were their beautiful blue color again as he searched her face. “I love you too, Quinn. More than I ever dreamed possible; more than I ever realized I could.”
    Before she could respond, he bent his head and kissed her with a hunger so desperate it caused her knees to give out. The arm he snaked around her waist kept her from going down completely. He lifted her off her feet as his tongue slid between her lips. Hot and heady, his tongue stroked in and out of her mouth in thrusts that she met eagerly.
    No reason, not