Free Shades of Midnight by Lara Adrián Page B

parka at the small of her back. She drew the weapon and held it in a two-fisted grip in front of her, just as Luna came trotting nonchalantly out to greet Alex at the bottom of the stairs.
    And behind her, farther inside Pop’s house, was a man—the dark-haired stranger from the back of the church last night. Despite the cold, he was dressed in nothing but a pair of loose blue jeans, which he was casually fastening as if he’d just rolled out of bed.
    He held Alex’s incredulous gaze with a calmness she could hardly fathom, looking for all the world like staring down the barrel of a loaded .45 was something he did every day.
    “You,” Alex murmured, her breath clouding in front of her. “Who are you? What the hell are you doing out here?”
    He stood unmoving, unfazed, inside the main room of the house. Instead of answering her questions, he tipped his strong, squared chin to indicate her pistol. “You mind pointing that somewhere else?”
    “Yeah, maybe I do,” she said, her pulse still pounding and not entirely from fear now.
    The guy was intimidating, nearly six-and-a-half-feet tall, with broad, muscled shoulders and powerful biceps that looked capable of dead-lifting a bull moose. Beneath an unusual pattern of hennalike tattoos that danced artfully over his chest, torso, and arms in some kind of intricate tribal design, his skin had the smooth, golden color of a Native. His hair seemed to indicate the same lineage, jet black and straight, the close-chopped spikes looking as silky as a raven’s wing.
    Only his eyes gave him away as something other than pure Alaskan. Pale silver, piercing against the thick, inky lashes that fringed them, they held Alex in a grip that felt almost physical.
    “I need to ask you to step outside where I can see you,” she said, not comfortable with this situation—or this unnerving man—in the least. Even though she was certain she was no match for him, with or without bullets to back her up, she made her best attempt at affecting Jenna’s no-bullshit police officer tone. “Right now. Out of the house.”
    He cocked his head to the side and glanced past her to the soft overcast haze of the thin afternoon daylight outside. “I’d rather not.”
    He’d rather not? Was he serious?
    Alex flexed her fingers to get a better grip on the pistol, and he slowly lifted his hands in a show of nonforce.
    “It’s about ten below out there. A man could freeze off something vital,” he said, having the nerve to quirk his lips into an amused half smile. “My clothes are inside. As you can see, I wasn’t dressed for company. Or for a shoot-out on the tundra.”
    His wry, easy humor deflated most of her trepidation. Without waiting for her to reply—without any regard at all for the loaded firearm still aimed dead-center on him—he pivoted around and walked deeper inside Pop’s house.
    Good lord, those fascinatingly odd tattoos wrapped all the way around to his back, too. They seemed to move with him, accentuating the lean, hard muscle that bunched and flexed with his every step.
    “No need for you to stand out there in the cold, either,” he said, his deep voice doing something crazy to her pulse as he disappeared from her sight. “Stow the gun and come inside if you want to talk.”
    “Shit,” Alex breathed on a huff.
    She let her arms relax, not quite sure what just happened. The guy was unbelievable. Was he that arrogant or just plain crazy?
    She had half a mind to squeeze off a warning shot, just to let him know she was serious, but at that same moment, Luna gave a short whine and loped back up the steps and into the house behind him. Disloyal mutt.
    With a low-muttered curse, Alex lowered the pistol and cautiously walked up to the porch and the open door of what had been almost a second home to her for the past several years. As she entered Pop’s place now, it couldn’t have felt more foreign to her. Wrong in every way.
    Without Pop Toms’s booming voice to greet her as