Nine Inches of Snow and the Ebony Princess (13 page)

“Hey! Hey…you!” What exactly was he going to say? ‘Put me down’ didn’t seem like such a good idea when she was soaring over rooftops as if she had a hang glider attached to her back.

“Silence, human. We will be at our destination shortly.”

What the hell was that? A line out of a Shakespearean play he hadn’t read? She certainly spoke in the same stilted accent.

Christ, he hated heights!

Here’s a hint, Matt. Don’t look down.

He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth to try to make the sick feeling in his stomach go away.

Mateo opened his eyes, couldn’t help himself, as they glided over a deserted area of the city in Lower Manhattan. From what he could make out by the light of the moon, it looked like some place in TriBeCa with converted lofts and narrow streets dominating the immediate area.

She aimed for the roof of one of the warehouses and smoothly landed.

As soon as his feet touched the rooftop pavement, Mateo tried to make a run for it but was stopped in his tracks by a green force field that completely encircled him after he’d taken only two steps forward.

He scowled at his kidnapper through the bubble prison as she circled him, hands clasped behind her back. He thought there was something oddly familiar about her, about the way she looked at him.

He pummeled the capsule with his fists, and she smiled at him like an indulgent parent watching her baby throw a fit of temper in his crib.

“Let me out of here!”

She raised a fist in front of her as if in a Black Panther salute and twisted it back and forth a couple of times, her movements unhurried and strangely erotic. “You will sleep now,” she murmured.

They were the last words Mateo heard before he passed out.

ADULT EXCERPT

PREDATOR’S SALVATION

Sisters of Emsharra, Book 2

By Gracie C. McKeever

Copyright © 2006

Mateo stared at her back as she walked away from him to the stainless steel kitchen in the distance. He tried to see if he could spot the wings she had used to fly away with him, but there was nothing except the mahogany smoothness of her well-muscled back.

His fingers itched with the memory of how that smooth skin felt beneath them, as if he had been with her before, inside her, too many times to count, and craved to do it all again.

He let his gaze lazily drift down her six-foot tall, hour-glass figure from the gentle slope of her bare back to the slim curve of her waist and finally to her endless legs encased in painted-on burgundy leather pants and matching knee-high boots.

Despite his precarious state, Mateo felt his cock hardening in his boxer briefs, fantasized about putting his dick in her slick, hot cunt. What was
wrong
with him?

She turned back to him then, hazel eyes glinting with insight, leering as she stalked across the burnished parquet floor.

She sat at his bedside. “I am LaMia Enlil, and there is nothing at all wrong with you except that you are a healthy, red-blooded male.”

What was this? Formal introductions before she killed him?

And damn, he wished she would stop dipping inside his head like that!

He used to think it was cute as well as advantageous to know other people’s feelings, especially girls he was involved with as a late teen. He had, however, gotten over his psychic voyeurism years ago when, at twenty, he’d experienced his then girlfriend’s severe menstrual cramps. He’d snooped because they’d argued earlier in the day and he had thought she was just using her period as an excuse to get out of having sex with him. He had been sorry for his mistrust ever since.

LaMia was more outright and rude with her snooping than he had ever been though, and he didn’t like it one bit. He didn’t like someone like her tooling around in his brain and knowing every little thing he was thinking.

“Contrary to your assumptions, I am not rude. I am merely availing myself of any and all opportunities to get to know my submissive better. And you will call me Mistress or Mistress LaMia, by the way,” she said then firmly placed her hand on his forehead.

Mateo grimaced.

Who the hell is this woman?

He closed his eyes and braced himself as her subtle, yet heady, cinnamon-and-female scent washed over him. He felt the tug on his brain as if she had reached inside his head to gently peel back the layers of his past.

Mateo’s heart pounded a vicious beat in his chest, obliterating all miniscule sounds in the loft as he wondered if his heart would explode.

She held her palm against his forehead for several long moments, ransacking his mind, melding with his memories until she became a part of them.

He knew this woman! Knew her too intimately to deny her or forget what he had been doing with her for the last several months—but more importantly, he knew her too intimately to deny what she had done to his family so many years ago.

One woman he implicitly trusted with his body and soul. The other had taken too much from him for Mateo to trust her at all.

How could they be one in the same?

Her touch was insidious, seductive, seeping into him like the mist in his dreams, and then he realized she
was
the mist in his dreams.

He could see how his brother and father had succumb to her allure, how his father had allowed her to come between him and Mom and how his brother had allowed her to drain the life right out of him. The promise of the ultimate climax and release was too powerful to resist.

But resist he would…this time.

Suddenly, LaMia jerked back her hand and gasped.

Good! He wasn’t the only one so overwhelmed by what she’d just done.

“It
is
you! At first I was not certain, did not believe it was possible that fate would actually send you to me...” She reached for a corner of the tape and viciously stripped it off his mouth.

“Shit!”

“Do not make me regret doing that.”

Like he wasn’t regretting it already, Mateo thought as he flexed his jaws in concert with his fists clenching and unclenching in the cuffs above his head.

“Speak!”

“I’m not a dog!” Mateo shot back and silently gauged her reaction. He noticed the slight upward tilt of her lips, an expression of admiration and amusement that just barely reached her hazel eyes.

So, she was enjoying this, enjoying him. Hell, he’d give her something to really admire and smile about once he was free.

“What do you want me to say, Mia?” he asked, thinking two could play the game as he let the moniker slide off his tongue and saw her blink at his audacity. “You accuse me as if I tried to defraud you.
You
abducted
me
.
I thought you knew who I w—”

“Silence!” She slashed the air with her hand as she leaped from the bed.

Mateo had a flash of her in Julian’s bedroom the last time he had seen his brother alive.

He saw the woman’s glowing yellow gaze when she glared at him over a shoulder, bared her teeth and hissed.

Mateo had a second to react as she finished draining Julian of his life-force—or whatever the phosphorescent red light that was arcing from his brother’s body into the woman’s was called—

before she turned on him.

He charged across the threshold and hurled his body through the air, intending to knock her off Julian. He got within a couple of feet of the bed before she raised her arms in front of her and rasped,
“Kundalini”
right before zapping him with a green bolt of lightning from her fingers.

His body heated now with the memory. Lust raged through him, making his cock jut upward like a repugnant invitation.

Get a grip, Matt. Forget how much you want to drive your dick
into her and make her scream like she made your brother scream.

Just concentrate on now. Here and
now.

“You killed him.”

“Julian’s death was an unfortunate consequence of our coupling.”

He reacted without thinking, violently kicking out with his shackled legs.

She drew back and stared at him as if he were a dangerous animal that had to be watched carefully.

Her reaction was instant and infinitesimal, just enough to let him know that he wasn’t the only one affected by their encounter.

Mateo closed his eyes, tuned into her body’s responses, felt the shimmering fire inside her, felt her vaginal muscles spasming and…was that regret hovering just on the outside of her consciousness? Regret for what had happened to his brother?

Good, he would take these and run with them.

He opened his eyes and smiled. “Why did you take me?”

“I took you for the same reasons I took your brother. I took you because…” She slashed the air with her hand again and sat back down on the bed, a tightly wound ball of energy.

Mateo’s body immediately reacted to her closeness, that energy. If he had been free, there were all sorts of ways he could have helped her unleash that energy but she wasn’t giving him a choice. Not yet. “Why?” he demanded.

“It matters not why I did it, and beginning now you will learn it is unwise to question my actions or my motives. As of this moment, you are a human with no rights and no say over what I do to you here.”

The hell he was. Human, yeah, but with no rights and no say?

Where the hell did she come off? This was still America, wasn’t it?

“The quicker you learn to deal with that, Mateo, the better.”

He didn’t know what angered him more, the familiarity with which she addressed him or the fact that hearing his Christian name flow from her lips made him hotter than had she put her hand on his cock and caressed him. In fact, the more she spoke, the angrier and hotter he got.

He had time and energy to indulge his desires. He was, as she had just put it, a healthy red-blooded male, after all. He didn’t, however, like to waste his time or energy on anger and a past he could not change. Life was too short. For Ms. Arrogant Nubian Queen though, he thought he might make an exception. “I’m not afraid of you,” he said and as he peered at her, she returned his glare tenfold. He didn’t flinch, would die before letting this woman intimidate him.

“Oh, you are a spirited one, so worth the effort of taking you. I am going to enjoy breaking you in, Mateo.”

He just bet she would enjoy breaking him in if he allowed her to, but he had no intentions on allowing her to break him in.

All this time he had thought she was a figment of his traumatized, juvenile imagination, something he had conjured up to help him deal with the bizarre nature of his brother’s death. He thought she was something he had created to help him deal with the horrendous circumstances surrounding his parents’

murder/suicide.

She was real, however, and before him now, the woman at the root of all three losses, a being he had grown to despise.

Mateo pulled against his manacles. “Undo these cuffs,” he commanded, sudden rage fueling his bravado. He knew very well what she was capable of, how powerful and lethal she could be. He didn’t care.

“You are giving me, LaMia Enlil, an order?”

“I’m giving you an order, yes,” he bit out.

She laughed, reached out a hand to smooth a stray lock of light-brown hair from his face, and his dick twitched in his boxer briefs at the unexpected gentleness of the contact. “You are absolutely precious,” she murmured.

She said it like he was a cute poodle or kitten who had just done a neat trick.

Mateo snarled and jerked his wrists against the cuffs again.

“Bitch. Let me out of here, now!”

REVIEWS for
Predator's Salvation (Book 2)

"Ms. McKeever has a sharp, sexy book with
Predator’s
Salvation
...Mateo is a complex character. He reeks of heartbreak and seems fragile but my first impression of him was that he is an aggressive alpha male waiting to break out of a civilized form.

LaMia appears to be, quite frankly, the bitch from hell. At first I was appalled at what she intended to do to Mateo and how she went about it. Yet, through Mateo and his connection to her I began to understand her heartbreak and vulnerability. Their passionate, boiling sex made my toes curl and I was panting. The switch from each of them taking dominant and submissive roles had me running for my significant other and even then a cold shower. I was particularly impressed with LaMia’s physical dominance of Mateo and the heat that poured off of both of them from the pages. The plot moved at a very good pace but I felt Mara’s appearance was unnecessary. Whereas, the reappearance of Genesis and Alex will make those fans of Ms. McKeever’s first book in this series very happy. Overall, I loved the world Ms.

McKeever and look forward to going back to read
Guardian
Seductress
and any future works involving this world.
4.5

Stars/Orgasmic
" —
Julie Esparza,
Just Erotic Romance Reviews

"The Sisters of Emsharra, Book 2,
Predator's Salvation
was exceptional. I loved this book. There was not only love, life, explosive sexual tension, friendship, political intrigue, mystery, forgiveness and a plot that will keep you involved from the start to the finish. I recommend you read The Sisters of Emsharra, Book 1,
Guardian Seductress
, so as to fully understand everything going on in this book and why the characters are where they are, but this book does stand alone just fine. Gracie C. McKeever creates an interesting world with characters that must work hard to find the balance that will let them co-exist together. I highly recommend this book to anyone.
4.5 Kisses
" —
Tara,
Two Lips Reviews

"This is one hot tamale of a good story! At first, I thought it would not be realistic, for how could he love the murderess of his family, but I was pleasantly surprised. The author did an excellent job of portraying Mia in a realistic fashion so that the reader is able to understand and even relate to her motives. The love scenes are scorching, yet sensual and loving at the same time. The world building is creative and easy to grasp, which made the book that much more enjoyable. This is the first book of Ms. McKeever's I've had the pleasure to read; it will certainly not be the last!
4