Devil's Gate

Giddy with happiness, he kissed her in a soft lingering caress. They lived in a crowded and dangerous world, but somehow she had become the only person in it. Right here and now, they were the only two people in the world, the only two.

 

“Duncan, do you by any chance play the piano?” she murmured.

 

He chuckled. “Why on earth would you ask me that?”

 

She stroked his face. “You just gave me a certain look.”

 

Amused, he asked, “A look that said I play the piano?”

 

She tapped his nose with one finger. “Tell me you have a Bogart suit. Oh forget it, you have lots of suits, and they’re all more beautiful than any of the clothes I own. Do you by any chance believe in precognition?”

 

He announced, “I am completely at sea in this conversation.”

 

“Then we should probably stop talking,” she whispered. She rolled her hips at him.

 

“I’m okay with that,” he said.

 

He proceeded to make love to her again on their most excellent first date, and neither one said anything coherent for a long time.

 

 

 

 

 

About the Author Thea Harrison resides in northern California. She wrote her first book, a romance, when she was nineteen and had sixteen romances published under the name Amanda Carpenter.

 

She took a break from writing to collect a couple of graduate degrees and a grown child. Her graduate degrees are in Philanthropic Studies and Library Information Science, but her first love has always been writing fiction. She's back with her paranormal Elder Races series. You can check out her website at: www.theaharrison.com, and also follow her on Twitter @TheaHarrison and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TheaHarrison.

 

 

 

 

 

Look for these titles by Thea Harrison

 

 

Now Available:

 

 

 

Novellas of the Elder Races

 

True Colors

 

Natural Evil

 

Devil’s Gate

 

 

 

Coming Soon:

 

 

 

Hunting Season

 

 

 

 

 

Meeting your soulmate? Great. Preventing your possible murder? Even better.

 

 

 

True Colors

 

? 2011 Thea Harrison

 

 

 

Alice Clark, a Wyr and schoolteacher, has had two friends murdered in as many days, and she’s just found the body of a third. She arrives at the scene only minutes before Gideon Riehl, a wolf Wyr and current detective in the Wyr Division of Violent Crime—and, as Alice oh-so-inconveniently recognizes at first sight, her mate.

 

But the sudden connection Riehl and Alice feel is complicated when the murders are linked to a serial killer who last struck seven years ago, killing seven people in seven days. They have just one night before the killer strikes again. And every sign points to Alice as the next victim.

 

 

 

Enjoy the following excerpt for True Colors

 

Don’t move. Stay perfectly still.

 

The enormous monster plunged through the apartment with the lethal speed of a stealth bomber. A Molotov cocktail of pheromones and Power spewed through the blood-tainted air, the classic signs of a strong male Wyr in a rage. Alice clung to her perch, her heart knocking so hard she thought it was going to burst out of her chest. Had the murderer returned?

 

Then the monster slowed. Alice heard him utter vicious curses under his breath as he came upon Haley’s still-warm body. Alice took the New York subway daily to work. She thought she had heard it all but she learned a few things as she listened to him. Did he curse because he saw the murdered woman for the first time, or because he realized he had made some kind of mistake?

 

Alice had only just arrived at Haley’s apartment herself. She had found the door open and rushed inside to discover that her friend’s body had been laid out on her bed. Haley’s torso had been cut open, organs strewn across the flowered bedspread like a child’s abandoned toys.

 

Alice had gone numb at the sight, the normal cool gentle logic of her mind seizing in shock. Then she had heard someone running up the stairs. She had barely gotten to her hiding place before the monster appeared. If he was the murderer and he had returned to clean up some clue he had left behind, neither Alice nor the police would know what it was now.

 

He prowled through Haley’s home in complete silence. Alice couldn’t even hear the soft pad of footsteps. Her awareness of him was excruciating, as though someone had stroked the flat of a razor blade along her bare skin with the smiling promise of a cut. His presence was a violation of Haley’s private space. He paused not two feet away from Alice, so close she could see the pocket of his worn leather jacket out of the corner of her eye and hear the almost imperceptible sound of his steady breathing.