Free Midnight Shadows by Lisa Marie Rice

Chapter One
    Kratior
    Southernmost island in the Greek Cyclades archipelago
    Hagios Nikolaus Luxury Resort
    She saw shadows that weren’t there.
    So. The shadows were back.
    Allegra Kowalski, née Ennis, had spent the past four months fighting shadows, fighting her weakness, fighting gravity, even. All in the quest to regain her sight. A brutal beating had left her with a hematoma right on the vision centers of her brain and she’d had risky surgery to dissipate the hematoma. It had been a long haul back to normality after the six-hour-long surgery, and she wasn’t there yet.
    There had been a lot of shadows along the way.
    For an instant, as she sat by the infinity pool looking out over the Mediterranean, with a straight view to the Turkish coast if she could see that far, she thought she’d seen a huge shadow which might be her husband, Douglas Kowalski. Or rather Senior Chief, or Senior, as his men still called him, though he’d been out of the Navy and out of the SEALs for years now.
    But no, it was an ordinary shadow, the kind that flitted across her sight occasionally. The kind no one else saw.
    Maybe she thought she’d seen Douglas’s shadow because she missed him so much. Though he’d fought it tooth and nail, Allegra had insisted that while they were in Greece on a much-needed vacation, he go conduct talks with potential clients in Istanbul, as his partner wanted. Douglas wanted to stay by her side, but already he’d lost lots of work, staying by her side during the long painful months of rehab.
    She was better now, much better! And of course he must go visit potential clients for a few days. She was fine, fine.
    Well…
    Sometimes not so fine. But she’d learn to mask everything because with her newfound sight she didn’t want to watch the worry lines grow on Douglases’ face any more than they already had.
    It had been a very rough four months. But it had been worth it, every excruciating second, because she could see .
    Even though she sometimes saw shadows where there were none, like now.
    “Everything okay, Allegra?” Now that was a shadow for real. A big one, too. Not tall, but immensely broad and the real reason Douglas was willing to leave her side for a few days. Yannis Latsis, former SEAL teammate. He’d been blown up by an IED, retired on disability and had chosen to help his Greek cousins create and run the Hagios Nikolaus resort on the beautiful island of Kratior.
    Yannis was always around, which was why no one tried to hit on her. The male clientele of the Hagios Nikolaus tended to be on the rich and the idle side, willing to hit on anything female that wasn’t a dog and wasn’t accompanied. But one look from Yannis and they stopped asking her for an autograph or to join them for a drink poolside before dinner.
    “I’m fine, Yannis.” She sat up from the chaise longue and smiled at him. Yannis was definitely one of the good guys and he had a boxful of medals to prove it. And, like her, he’d been wounded. She’d lost her sight and he’d lost a leg. You couldn’t see it right now because Yannis was wearing chinos, but his right leg from the knee down was a state-of-the-art miracle of space-age material and robotics. It worked so well that Yannis joked that he should lop off his other leg below the knee and become Bionic Man.
    Yannis took a quick quelling look around the pool and every male there averted his gaze. Yannis was like her husband. The alpha male in any setting. He sat down on one of the luxurious pale pink cane lounge chairs with the silk cushions Allegra didn’t dare use when wet from the pool.
    “How you doing?” Yannis’s voice was casual but his eyes were sharp. Well, he was a former Special Forces soldier and a good one, according to Douglas. All of the former military men she’d met at her husband’s company were sharp, her husband top of the list.
    “Fine,” she replied, and gave a dazzling smile. It was Allegra’s patented smile that she gave while