Free Shadow's Edge by J. T. Geissinger Page A

Morgan
—made it all the more satisfying. It appeared his little black card had no purchase limit.
    Morgan stood barefoot in the middle of the plush butter crème carpet, surveying the damage, feeling rather proud of herself. She’d ordered breakfast again from the fabulous French café just down the street—another luxury thanks to the wonderful little black card—and the remains of what was once a fat, smoked bacon, gruyere, and apple omelet lay on the dining table in the master suite, next to a pot of steaming hot coffee and pastries.
    She probably couldn’t get out onto the balcony if she wanted to: the glass sliding door was hidden behind a chin-high stack of Ralph Lauren boxes. She briefly wondered how she was going to get it all back to Sommerley, but then shrugged her shoulders and put her hands on her hips. Leander would figure something out for her, he always did.
    He was the Alpha. That was his job.
    A delighted smile lit up her face.
    It was in exactly this posture Leander found her when he came crashing through the door.
    “I need you,” he growled, curt and tense. A stack of parcels on the glass console table in the foyer toppled over as he shouldered past them, spilling a four-thousand-dollar Hermès crocodile-skin handbag to the white marble floor.
    “Don’t you
knock
?” Morgan complained, turning to shoot him a flinty stare.
    “My suite. Now.”
    His body was tense in a way she had never seen. He normally moved with a dark grace, stealthy, all poise and menace and feral-eyed vigilance. But now he was visibly distracted—taut as a bowstring, grim-faced, and unshaven—so Morgan only pursed her lips and swallowed the retort on her tongue.
    “What is it?”
    Without another word, he yanked the door open in one swift, hard motion and disappeared through it. His hair swung in a loose, handsome ruff around his shoulders, black as midnight against the rumpled white silk of his shirt.
    Morgan sighed and turned to gaze again, with more than a hint of melancholy, on the piles of expensive plunder. It looked as if her plan for the morning had been derailed.
    Trying everything on again would have to wait.
    Leander had watched Jenna all night, crouching silent and still in the gloom of her bedroom as she slept, tensed to vanish as vapor into the air if she awoke, waiting for any sign she might not be as fine as she repeatedly told the EMT she was.
    They’d been called to Mélisse because of the injuries. Paramedics and firemen and police had been dispatchedall over the city to care for the wounded. They were mostly minor things: cuts from shattered glass, scrapes from falling down, contusions, a few cases of shock in the elderly.
    No major damage had been reported to any structures, though many buildings—like the one Mélisse was located in—suffered a few broken windows, some cracked plaster, damage to the façade. He’d been told it was one of the milder earthquakes to hit Los Angeles in recent years.
    No matter how mild the quake, it caused a major upheaval for him.
    At the first ripple in the bedrock, as Jenna sagged against him in that half-faint that made his heart climb into his throat, his animal instincts went into overdrive.
    He lifted her up against him—her knees crooked over his left arm, her head lolling against his right—and swept her out the back door of the restaurant to the middle of the wide, brick-paved patio. It was a deserted place, a safe place, cloaked in darkness, free from anything that could fall on them from above.
    Amid the dark enclosure of the cypress and oak trees that encircled them like an open-air cathedral, the sky above them smoke and ebony-blue, Leander stood braced against the shaking, his legs open wide, his arms wrapped around her hard.
    The boughs of the trees swayed and thrashed above while the eerie groans and creaks of the buildings around them—stressed to their foundations with the earth bucking like a creature alive—tightened his stomach into a