Reawakening Eden (10 page)

She threaded her fingers through his hair, kissing up the line of his jaw. “We’ll find a place where that isn’t necessary. Someplace safe. We’ll make our own if we have to. This is our new world too. It doesn’t just belong to the Jonahs out there.”

He kissed her again, and they were both swallowed up by feeling until Eden bumped the horn and a muted beep broke them apart. Laughing quietly, she glanced back to see the kids still sleeping soundly, though Precious’s head popped over the backseat and she gave a soft
woof
.

“What kind of world will ours be?” Connor asked, settling her comfortably in his lap.

“It’s going to be safe, and happy,” Eden said, the words a promise to the children, to Connor and to herself. “And full of love.” Starting with the two of them. And Lucas, Hannah Rose and Precious.

Connor kissed her, a sweet hello of a kiss. “I like that world. As long as you’re in it.”

About the Author

Vivi Andrews lives in Alaska when she isn’t indulging her travel addiction. She’s currently hard at work on her next paranormal romance. For more about her books or the exploits of a nomadic author, please visit her website at
www.viviandrews.com
or stop by her blog at
viviandrews.blogspot.com
. Vivi also loves to hear from readers and invites you to email her at
[email protected]
.

Look for these titles by Vivi Andrews

Now Available:

Karmic Consultants

The Ghost Shrink, the Accidental Gigolo & the Poltergeist Accountant

The Ghost Exterminator: A Love Story

The Sexorcist

The Naked Detective

A Cop and a Feel

Serengeti Shifters

Serengeti Heat

Serengeti Storm

Serengeti Lightning

Serengeti Sunrise

Coming Soon:

Ghosts of Boyfriends Past

He’s going to be the love of her life…if they survive the night.

A Cop and a Feel

© 2011 Vivi Andrews

Karmic Consultants, Book 5

With a single touch, Ronna Mitchell can catch stolen glimpses of the future and separate truth from lies. But life as a human polygraph machine can be lonely. Craving human contact, she moonlights as a palm reader whenever a carnival comes to town.

Officer Matt Holloway is intent on trailing a hit man when he ducks into a palm reader’s booth to avoid being spotted by his quarry. The beguiling Jamaican fortune teller is definitely intriguing, but she’ll have to wait. He’s close on the assassin’s tail.

When Ronna takes his hand, a startling vision of the future flashes in her mind’s eye. Matt isn’t a typical client, he’s The One. Before she has the chance to introduce herself as the mother of his unborn children, he’s gone, leaving her with a terrifying vision of her soul mate covered in blood. And dead certain she’s the only one who can save her happily ever after.

Warning: This book contains carnies, cops, chases, chance encounters and love at first touch.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
A Cop and a Feel:

Ronna’s panic level reached a new high when Matt’s sandy head disappeared around the back of the Ferris wheel. The image of the gears of the Ferris wheel splattered with blood replayed vividly in her mind’s eye. The crowds swarmed around her, and her heart thudded loudly in her ears. He was going to be killed, and
she couldn’t get to him.

Why were there so many people at the damn carnival? And why were they all moving at an excruciating shuffle pace? Didn’t they realize while they plodded along forming the impenetrable mass of a human herd, the man she was meant to spend the rest of her life with, who was going to give her adorable green-eyed babies and make her laugh until she was ninety-two and too senile to get his jokes anymore, was in peril at this very moment behind the Ferris wheel?
So why they the hell weren’t they moving faster?

Ronna pushed her way through the wall of bodies, too afraid of what might be happening to Matt to toss off apologies as people around her protested her shoving and stomping on feet.

She had to get to him.

Not that she’d be much help if she did. Touch-reading was hardly a super-power capable of stopping a speeding bullet, but she was
sure
she could save him if she was just there with him. He was the love of her life, or at least he would be, and she wasn’t about to let some carnie thug off him behind the Ferris wheel.

A pocket opened up in the crowd between her and the Ferris wheel, and Ronna sprinted forward, running full tilt around the side of the ride and into the heavy shadows behind it, half expecting to stumble over Matt’s lifeless form. In the moment it took for her eyes to adjust to the relative darkness after the spinning strobes of the carnival, she tried to remember how to breathe, gulping in oxygen. She squinted into the dark, one hand pressed over her drumming heart as a figure materialized out of the shadows in front of her.

“Matt!”

Thank God.
Ronna took two running steps forward.

The man in front of her turned toward her. Something was wrong. Ronna slammed on the brakes, her sandals skidding on the sticky asphalt. The form in front of her was too heavyset to be the tall, lean Officer Holloway.

“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I thought I saw someone come back here.”

As soon as the words left her lips, Ronna could have kicked herself. He was probably a Ferris wheel operator. If he found Matt skulking back here, the future love of her life would get in trouble with the carnival operators. Which was better than his blood splashing all over the gears, but still…

“You know, I didn’t see anyone,” Ronna said quickly. A second figure shifted in the shadows to her left. She knew him as soon as he moved.
Matt
. He was okay. Hiding, which, yeah, was kinda weird, but totally okay. She’d been panicking over nothing. “Nobody here!” she sing-songed to the shadow man, bypassing subtle and going straight to obnoxiously Cinderella-cheerful. “Nobody at all.”

She tossed the shadowy Ferris wheel operator a loopy smile. He didn’t say much for a carnie. She still couldn’t make him out, but he didn’t seem familiar. She spent most of her time at the carnival in her booth, but she knew most of the regular operators at least on sight.

He reached toward her, waving something metallic, and Ronna’s vision from Matt’s touch replayed in her mind.

Oh crap, is that a gun?

“Get down!”

The shout came from her left. Matt surged into the open, a gun of his own braced between his hands. Ronna didn’t think. And she didn’t obey. In that split second in the shadow of the Ferris wheel with two armed-and-dangerous men, she couldn’t see anything past the nightmare vision in her mind of Matt’s gorgeous eyes, wide with horror and shock, in a face sprayed with blood. She dove toward him, slamming him to the ground in a tackle worthy of an NFL All Star. The spit of a silencer and the answering deafening report of an unsilenced gun split the shadows.

Matt grunted as he hit the ground and her weight hit him. Footsteps pounded the dirt nearby, and he rolled, pinning her protectively beneath his body as he twisted to scan the darkness around them, his gun trained on the spot where the gunman had stood.

The shadows were empty of crazy gun-wielding Ferris wheel operators now, but Matt’s body didn’t relax. He stayed tense above her.

Tense and whole.
He’s alive.

There wasn’t any moisture where her front was pressed against his, no gushing fluids to indicate excessive bleeding from a mortal wound, but she ran her hands over his torso just to be safe, checking for bullet holes. When her hands hampered his range of movement with the gun he was still pointing into the darker shadows, he knocked them out of his way.

“Lie still,” he snapped, clearly not appreciating her life-saving tackle or her continued concern for his well-being. He dug into his pocket, shifting his weight so he wasn’t pressing her down into the filthy ground, but still shielding her as he lifted his cell phone, punched a number in with his thumb and pressed it to his ear, never taking his eyes off the shadows or lowering his gun.

She was close enough to hear the bleeping tone of a dropped call.

Matt swore and dialed again, snarling another obscenity when the call failed a second time. “Is it too much to ask for a fucking signal?”

Ronna couldn’t make herself care about crappy cell providers. “You’re
alive
.”

“Of course I’m alive.
You
could have gotten yourself killed. What the hell were you thinking?”

“I saved your life,” Ronna explained patiently. “I ruined his shot.”

“You ruined
my
shot.” Matt shoved his phone back into his pocket. “Not to mention my chances of getting a permanent spot on the task force. Damn it.” He rose to a crouch, still alertly surveying the area.

Ronna sat up as well, taking stock of her now-filthy Madame Ramona getup. There was no fabric on earth capable of withstanding being ground into popcorn, cotton-candy residue and Ferris wheel grease and coming out unscathed. Her entire outfit would have to be burned when she got home to avoid contaminating the rest of her closet.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing back here?” Matt straightened and helped her—none too gently—to her feet.

He would probably react badly if she told him she had envisioned his death and followed him out of her booth to protect him from a horrific Ferris wheel-related death. He didn’t seem to be in a very receptive mood.

Armed and dangerous…

Zero Factor

© 2011 Stacy Gail

A
Cybershock
Story

Born a psionic—a rare human prized by the government for her gifts—agridome worker Via Brede lives by two simple rules: slip into stealth mode whenever the cybernetic-enhanced militia is near. And never remove the gloves that block her psychic ability.

During a routine delivery, a tear in her glove connects her with what should be her worst nightmare. A meched-out soldier with bulging muscles and a scarred face that makes her heart pound like a pneumatic drill. She also envisions his death in an attack that happens…
now
.

Locke’s typically ho-hum mission goes sideways when the stunning, green-eyed bubble farmer plants a sensual kiss that sets fire to every one of his remaining man-nerves. He also sees her vision. His own commander is about to kill him.

He needs Via to find out why. First step is to get her to Old Las Vegas without succumbing to a raw, sexual need that burns in him like fever. Getting there will be a snap. Getting out alive—and winning her trust—might be a little tougher.

Warning: This title contains mild violence, blow-your-mind Psionic sex, buns of steel (literally) and the usual hanky-panky at a bordello. Author is not responsible for side effects, including locked-and-loaded hunks taking your dreams by force.

Enjoy the following excerpt for
Zero Factor:

Via knew her life was over. If she were honest with herself, part of her had known it the moment she had left the safety of the agridome. People like her could never put themselves in a position where they would be within spitting distance of the militia, much less work hand in hand with them. To do so was akin to bathing in jet fuel, then playing with a lighter.

And yet she had gone. Like a lamb to slaughter, she had gone.

It was okay, though. As long as she could save the others, she could be at peace with what had to be done now. Not that she was some kind of freaky saint or anything. It was just that as she’d sat in the transport drowning in images of what was to come, she had reached a very basic conclusion—she would rather die than live with the knowledge that she could have done something, but didn’t.

So she wasn’t a saint, and she sure as hell wasn’t even nodding acquaintances with that thing called bravery. If anything, she was too much of a coward to live with the guilt of surviving while everyone else got blown into unrecognizable bits.

“Via? What the
hell
—?”

She heard Weddo’s shocked voice, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was focusing on what she
knew
, what she
saw
, and
pushing
it with all her might into Locke. She wasn’t sure if she was doing it right. Hell, she didn’t even know if she was doing anything more than simply kissing a stranger and making a ginormous ass of herself. She had only done this sort of thing once before when she was fifteen, and it had been a total accident back then.

By degrees, the frenzied panic boiling through her blood eased like a tight fist unfurling, and new, thoroughly unexpected sensations began to seep in through the smothering veil of fear. For just a heartbeat the universe seemed to pause, a collective holding of breath while even the sound of the bustling city’s daily life came to a gentle stop. For Via, there was only this fragile moment as her mouth molded to his, and a shocking thrill of pleasure bloomed like fireworks in her brain when his lips softened and returned the pressure with interest. Her booted feet barely touched the ground as she kept her arms wrapped tightly around his strong neck, and delight mingled with relief when his free arm curled about her waist to bring her fully against the rock-solid length of his battle-hardened warrior’s body. His breath was warm, his taste tantalizing. The seductive nuzzling of his silk-over-steel lips against hers invited her untutored mouth to explore deeper, and she saw no reason why she should resist when she knew they were living on borrowed time.

A tremulous note of discord whispered from her psyche into his, a never-ending ricochet rippling noiselessly between them. The pleasure bounced back and forth as well, doubling and trebling as it went, but threaded through it was what the vision had shown her. But that was okay too. If this was to be her last moment of life, she was determined to pour every ounce of joy, vitality and pleasure she could into this kiss. If anything, she was happy for this final opportunity to go out with a bang.