Free The Guardian Page B

parts of Europe. For reasons he wouldn’t
    name, he kept her away from her heritage. While he’d schooled her on the gods and her Were-Hunter
    branch, he’d always been insistent that she never try to contact them.
    And since she hadn’t interacted with others of her kind after her family had died …
    She was pretty ignorant of anything other than the major facts.
    “Did you Google it?” she asked him.
    He frowned. “Google?”
    “Yeah, Google. You know, the search engine.”
    He sniffed and jerked his head as if he’d had a pain shoot through his nose. Then he placed the heel of
    his hand over his left eye and held it there. “What’s a search engine?”
    “Are you okay?” Even though he didn’t complain, she had a sneaking suspicion that he was real y hurting
    right now.
    “It’l go away in a minute.” He lowered his hand and blinked his eye open.
    Lydia gasped as she saw that the entire white of his eye was now completely red. Blood red. “Oh my
    God. Does that hurt?”
    Seth had no answer to her question. Every part of him currently hurt. Especial y his inflamed cock that
    kept begging him to take her regardless of her protests.
    But he wasn’t that much of an animal. Having been raped on several occasions, he wasn’t about to do
    that to anyone else. For that matter, he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d had sex that hadn’t raped
    either his body or his soul.
    As she’d noted earlier, after age thirteen, he’d never known a touch that wasn’t angry or bruising.
    Not until her …
    She reached up to touch him.
    For an instant, he was frozen by the desperate need he had to feel her skin on his.
    Don’t. All it will do is remind you of things you can never have.
    She belonged to Solin. Not him.
    He quickly moved away.
    But she didn’t take the hint. Instead, she pursued him across the room.
    What the hel ? Every time he moved, she was there, trying to touch his injured eye. He didn’t even want to
    know how stupid he must look while he dodged her.
    “Stop!” he final y snarled.
    She pul ed back as if he’d slapped her and that made him feel like a total ass. “I just wanted to help you.”
    “Help me do what?” Die of unsated lust? That was his biggest threat in the room at present.
    She shook her head. “Your eye is completely red. It’s like it’s fil ed with blood.”
    That explained the haze over his vision, but the pain he felt was from his eye socket where Noir had
    punched the shit out of him after Seth had given in to the incessant need to question Noir’s parentage. “I
    must have broken a blood vessel. It happens.”
    Lydia felt sick about the nonchalant way he spoke of something so horrible. Broken blood vessels didn’t
    just happen. Anymore than his bruises had just appeared on his face. She took a step toward him.
    He took one back.
    Fine. He wasn’t going to al ow her near him again. And to think, she’d actual y been afraid of him forcing
    himself on her. Yeah …
    “You stil haven’t told me what a search engine is.” He licked, then sucked at his busted lip right before he
    ran his hand across it.
    How could something so ferocious look so vulnerable and uncertain? These smal glimpses of the real
    him were actual y sweet. And even worse, they were charming her a lot more than she was charming him.
    “You real y don’t know what it is? I mean, I realize you live in…” she glanced around the dreary room. “Or
    rather under a rock, but you do have a computer.”
    “I haven’t had it long and I didn’t figure out how to make it connect to the human world until about an hour
    before you arrived. And you know how little time I’ve had to work it since then.”
    That explained a lot. And yet … “You had one before this, right?”
    He shook his head. “I’d never heard of one until a demon told me about them. He said it would help me
    learn things quicker. But I honestly don’t see how. Books are much faster to navigate. I figured out how