Read Online Secrets at Midnight by Nalini Singh - Free Book Online

clasped her hand. Sighing silently at the contact that felt deeply right, she allowed him to tug her toward the wall of glass, and to the door cleverly concealed within it.
    There was a generous balcony beyond, with a view of the Bay, the water sparkling like shattered sapphires under thesunshine. Gripping the railing, the metal digging into her palms, she stared at him. “You’re
rich
. Really, really rich.”
    Leaning back against the railing, arms propped on either side, he shrugged. “I’m good at making money, been investing my own income since I was a juvenile. Does it make a difference to you?” Green eyes glinting at her from beneath half-lowered lashes.
    Kirby fought the urge to bare her teeth at him. What was wrong with her lately? The thought had barely formed when she moved faster than she’d believed she could. Tugging down his head with a hand fisted in his hair, she nipped sharply at his jaw. “Don’t make me even more mad than I am already.”
    His grin creased his cheeks, his arms locking around her waist. “Bite me again.” At her narrow-eyed look, he nuzzled the side of her face before saying, “Truth is, I’d rather be at my aerie.” The leopard paced behind his eyes, its presence so strong that Kirby could almost see it.
    Almost touch the gold and black of its fur.
    â€œThe days I can work from there,” Bastien continued, “I let my brothers, other packmates who want a night in the city, use this place, so we get our worth out of it.”
    It betrayed so much of how he saw the world that he so naturally said “our” for a place that, to many other men, would’ve been a status symbol. For Bastien, she realized, it was his pack, his family, who were important, who mattered. She hurt with wanting the same—never had she fit in, always the constant outsider. And now . . .
    â€œPlease tell me what you know,” she said quietly, fear a metallic taste in the back of her mouth, a shivering rasp over her skin.
    His expression stripped of any hint of humor, Bastien picked up one of her hands, a hand Kirby hadn’t realized she’d clenched by her side. “Open for me, little cat.”
    As the blood rushed back into the strained-white flesh, he ran a single finger across the tips. “Do your fingertips ever tingle?”
    Heart slamming hard against her ribs and mouth dry, she nodded. “Just recently.” She stared at her own fingers. “It’s not painful, but it prickles.”
    Bastien continued to hold her hand, stroking his thumbabsently over her skin. “In the weekend, the pain you felt”—wild green eyes capturing her own—“if I said it felt like something was trying to claw its way out, would I be right?”
    Unable to accept what he was asking her to believe, she shook her head, broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact. “It can’t be. I’m human.”
    Bastien cupped her jaw, turned her face back to him, the brush of his skin over her own almost succeeding in calming the skittering panic within. “Tell me about your parents.”
    â€œI—” Her blood went cold. “My parents died when I was a toddler,” she whispered, the brutality of her history something she preferred to forget . . . a history that led to one inescapable conclusion, but for the impossibility of it. “The care services would hardly mistake a changeling child for human.”
    â€œNot necessarily. Changelings don’t shift till around one year of age.”
    â€œThat’s how old I was when it happened.” She forced herself to recall the small number of facts that had seeped into her memory over the years, in spite of her refusal to access her own records. “My birth date is unknown but, according to one of my social workers, I was examined by a pediatrician and judged to be approximately twelve months old. If I hadn’t