Read Online Moon Cursed by Lori Handeland - Free Book Online Page B

her bare feet, as well as her nighttime attire of T-shirt and flannel pajama pants, Kris slipped out of the cottage and down to the loch.
    If he heard her coming, he gave no sign, continuing to stare into the water. The mist had disappeared as quickly as it had come, and the night was clear and cool.
    He wore the same thing he’d worn the first time she saw him. Dark jeans, dark short-sleeved shirt—in this climate he should be cold; she was—yet he stood there on the banks of Loch Ness, arms at his sides instead of wrapped around himself like hers were, as if it were the first day of summer in the tropics and not the beginning of autumn in the Highlands.
    Kris paused a few feet away, waiting for him to speak, to offer some sort of explanation, but he didn’t. Eventually she had to ask: “Why did Alan Mac say a boy had come to tell him about the dead girl?”
    He breathed in and out a few times. Kris didn’t like the hesitation. In her experience, hesitation meant lies. Of course, in her experience, a too-quick answer meant the same.
    Hell, be honest. In her experience, damn near everything that came out of people’s mouths was a lie.
    “I couldnae find him,” he said at last. “So I snatched a lad, sent him one way, and I went in the other.”
    It sounded plausible enough; however— “You have an answer for everything.”
    “Shouldn’t I?” He continued to stare at the loch as if transfixed.
    “Alan Mac thinks I imagined you.”
    “Alan Mac thinks many things. ’Tis his job.”
    “Why is it that no one seems to know who you are?”
    “I couldnae say.”
    “Couldnae?” she mocked. “Or wouldnae?”
    He took another deep breath and let it out. “My name is Liam Grant.”
    She waited, but he said no more.
    “That’s it? You kiss me in the moonlight and all you tell me now is your name?”
    “What would ye have me say?”
    What would she have him say? She wanted to know both everything about him and nothing at all. She’d had men tell her things before—both lies and the truth—that she’d wished later they hadn’t. Perhaps it was better to kiss but never tell.
    “You didn’t come back.” She hadn’t meant to say that. She sounded like an abandoned girl. Something she’d been once but had sworn never to be again. Which might be why she had so few dates and even fewer friends. If she didn’t care, she couldn’t hurt.
    “I’m here now.” His voice, low and soft, trilled along her skin like a gentle spring breeze, raising gooseflesh in its wake. She rubbed her hands against her arms, but it didn’t do any good.
    Drawn by that voice on the wind, the moon in his hair, and a promise of warmth, she stepped closer. “ Why are you here now?”
    “D’ ye expect me to say I came to kill ye?”
    “Did you?”
    He laughed, short and sharp. Then he spun, grabbing her shoulders, and she had no choice but to steady herself by reaching for him. Her hands landed on his hips.
    His blue eyes caught the light from above and shone like molten silver. “If I’d wanted t’ kill ye,” he whispered, “I’d have done it before, then tossed both you and the girl back to Nessie.”
    She took a single step forward, surprising him, so his hands at her shoulders slid free, encircling her back and turning what had begun as imprisonment into an embrace.
    “Then why are you here?” she repeated, every breath she took brushing her breasts against his chest in a rhythm as old as the sea.
    He cursed in a language she didn’t understand—Gaelic most likely—and then he was kissing her as if he’d been denied such things for longer than either of them had been alive.
    His mouth was cool, damp, like the loch, like the mist and the night. She opened, drinking him in as he had drunk the bright and shiny moon.
    His tongue was warm when it stroked hers, igniting the heat she had craved. He tasted of desire, a flavor like the darkest chocolate; his hair was as smooth as satin sheets, and the way he smelled … He