Page 15 of A Velvet Kiss After Dark

She stumbled a step forward at the loss of his weight holding her upright.

Kane turned and headed for the door. Before he finished the kiss like he wanted—with their clothes off and his hands buried in her hair.

"Wait!" she cried out.

He already had his palm around the doorknob, his crusted bloody shirt over head. His heart pounded against his ribs from a mixture of anger and arousal. He turned around. Unable to help himself.

She was smiling. A beguiling temptress's smile.

"I thought you were washing dishes?"

"Do your down dishes, little female."

He purposely used the one barb he knew that would rankle her. It's what she deserved for teasing him. For making him feel so maddened. Kane closed the door behind him with resounding force.

Yet leaving her only left him feeling bereft, not justified.

Damn. Why did he care about her so much? He needed answers. Now.

3

The Mad Were, Zeke Hunter, scribbled hastily across a piece of parchment with a quill that he dipped into a Japanese inkwell bowl. His fingers were stained black. Smudges had marred his bearded face but were nothing compared to the dark circles that lingered beneath his eyelids. The alpha did not seem to notice Kane standing beside his desk. He never once even bothered to lift his scraggy head.

The Mad Were wrote backwards, Kane noted, almost like a semitic language. Or, perhaps a dyslexic? As his chicken scratch scrawl moved from the right hand of the paper to the left instead of the traditional format.

An unusual skill, certainly, but Kane didn't know if he the alpha could surprise him anymore. The man seemed to lose more and more of himself each and every day. It didn't seem to matter that his Fated One had been returned to him after decades of denial.

Perhaps once sanity fled, it couldn't return?

The same desk he scratched his ink-dripped quill against also harbored a cup of perfectly good pens and pads of paper. Not to mention a computer. Why the old-fashioned stationary, then? Why wasn't Zeke typing up his notes, or whatever the hell he was doing, instead of scratching a damned feather against some thick-ass paper?

Kane didn't want to find out badly enough to ask.

You'd need a mirror to read whatever Ezekial Hunter found important enough to jot down, anyway.

Zeke, as most people called him, had recently been rejoined with his mate, an incredibly powerful white witch. Interspecies matings were forbidden of the pure blooded white clan his mate Olivia had hailed from. It's why their kind were so powerful. They only mated in-house, so to speak. So, when Olivia fell in love with a werewolf, her family had brusquely forbade their romance.

Forbidden or not, she'd risked all when she'd run away with Ezekiel Hunter when they were but younglings. They'd struggled to survive. And when a man by the name of Lesther had provided shelter and assistance to the couple out of kindness, Zeke had accepted; never realizing the man was actually a powerful sorcerer who wanted Olivia's magic for his own. He'd kidnapped Olivia and had kept her for hundreds of years. Each year that passed, each day, each minute had increased the Alpha's insanity bit by bit. But he'd never quit searching for her. Never stopped hunting for his beloved.

And finally she was returned.

In fact, it was she who Kane heard screaming obscenities from the tops of her lungs from her makeshift prison down below the floorboards where he rocked in his brown mud-caked boots. Kane peered downward and cast a questioning glance at his friend and alpha, Zeke.

Zeke had a hidden mechanical lift beneath the floorboards that led to his personal bedroom. One of many. Zeke's pack was large and it covered an extensive acreage. This outdoor tent where he'd shacked up in was but one of many arabian-style fixtures the alpha preferred.

Most of the pack kept underground using a vast array of tunnels to travel.

Olivia roared up at the rafters, "I'll kill you all! I'll summon the scourge and decimate your very souls, cretins! FREE ME NOW OR DIE TERRIBLY!"

Her voice held the plague of a thousand locust swarms in it. Kane shuddered

"Pardon my mate," Zeke drawled, never looking away from his scribbling. "I took off her muzzle to give her some fresh air."

During an epic battle with Lesther, the Blackmoore brothers, Dominic, Grayson, Vasilius, and Lucas had teamed up with Zeke to fight the sorcerer who was trying to become a god. They were the only vampires Kane could tolerate—and even that was a stretch.

And then what—was everyone's question. And could he do it?

Kane knew he personally didn't want to sit around to find out. Men like that were better off sent back to their maker.

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