Read Online The Guardian by Sara Anderson - Free Book Online Page A

as I
take you mate away from you.
    ****
      Cassie sighed
contentedly and stretched. She had the strangest dream and was happy to be
waking up at home. She could smell Grandma cooking breakfast. She thought about
opening her eyes, but she was so snugly warm cuddling with her large Pooh bear.
It was warmer than usual, not that it was a bad thing.
    Gentle fingers brushed her hair out of her face making
her open her eyes. She was not in her room. She looked around, and nothing
looked familiar at all. She blinked and saw a man with dark hair, a couple of
days’ worth of growth on his face and lovely jade green eyes.
    “Good morning, Cassie.” His deep voice rumbled in
greeting.
    Instantly everything crashed back in on her. Marcy’s attack and death, how she had cowardly run away leaving her
to die, and her own attack that led to the awful pain. “ Hi,”she said while she tried to calm her churning stomach.
She looked around and then let out an eeep of
surprise. She had no shirt on at all, and neither did he. She was in bed with a
man, and both of them were nude.
    “How are you feeling this morning, Cassie?” he asked,
as if oblivious of her state of nudity and embarrassment.
    She grabbed the blankets and jerked them to her. They
uncovered him, and she was thankful he was turned so she couldn’t see his
penis. Not that she wasn’t curious, but she didn’t want to be caught gawking at
him. She wrapped the blanket around her torso. “Okay, why are we in bed
together?”
    He smiled at her as if he found her modesty amusing. “Did
you forget last night?”
    Cassie frowned at him. “Forget?   My best friend was murdered, and I—” She
choked on the words that would admit what a horrible friend she was. “I was
attacked after I ran away,” she whispered with her face flaming in shame. “I
will never forget that.”
    Michael looked at her with a serious expression. “Cassie.”
He brushed away a tear that had formed and ran down her temple. “There was
nothing you could do to save your friend. I am unsure how you broke away from
Lucas’s compulsion to obey him. You are very strong and brave.”
    Cassie opened her mouth to disagree, but he placed a
gentle finger over her lips.
    “None of that. Do you
remember everything from the hotel and clinic?”
    Cassie nodded mutely. There was no way she would ever
forget that pain and awful feeling she was dying. She could not imagine
anything hurting worse than that. “I remember. It hurt a lot, until you touched
me.”
    Michael grabbed the blanket and pulled her closer to
him. She held herself stiffen for a moment, but his insistent tugging won and
she half sat and half fell back into the bed. “That was the latent essence in
you awakening and stirring. When a halfling changes
it is very painful.”
    “A—what and essence? You said
it is like magic, like that guy in Las Vegas?”   Cassie would have laughed if she had not lived the horror of that
unbelievable pain.
    “I know it is hard for you to accept, but there is a
whole other world that you have never seen before.”
    Cassie could feel her eyebrows lifting. “Another world? Where?”
    Michael smiled at her patiently. “You have lived your
entire life believing that magic is just in stories. It is real though, and
while some of us are born full of this essence that is already active, others
like you are born with latent essence. If you never receive the trigger to
activate it then you would live your entire life never knowing you carried it.
Last night the essence in you was triggered when Lucas attacked you.”
    “Essence … magic?” she asked again in disbelief. “Like
making people vanish?”
    “Essence like people who shift to an animal form and
can do things you have only read in fantasy books. Beings that you thought only
lived in fairytales are real.”
    Cassie knew he was right. She had seen it with her own
eyes. A man had changed from a wolf to a man and then back to a wolf again. “I
saw it.”