Free Unexpected by Nevea Lane

Chapter One
     
     
    Arnold Edinborough wrote, “Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly.”
    Well, Dinah Jacobs was thinking she was about to be one dead cat. The footsteps were coming closer. Hiding under a desk in her neighbor’s home, she knew she’d ventured into the wrong house. She didn’t even know what had possessed her to scale his seven-foot wooden fence into the man’s yard, let alone slip through the open patio door, through his kitchen, and into his home. She should have stopped at the yard because even his plush Kentucky bluegrass lawn had felt incredibly eerie, the way she sank into it like it was quicksand.
    She kept telling herself she was merely a boring freelance travel writer with a cat that seemed to like the neighbor’s backyard, and that there was nothing strange about the way the mist of the night coiled and hung on the grass. Mentally, she blamed the stray Siamese she’d named Doll for everything that was going on at this moment. The cat showed up on her doorstep about the time Mr. Mysterious moved in. She had fed the cat, but it always seemed to go to his yard at night. During the day, it was at her house. So it was the cat that killed the cat, perhaps?
    The footsteps had stopped. She tried to get her story straight in her head. I came home from shopping and Doll was on my patio. I’d bought a flea collar and was trying to put it on her when she took off running. I got to the fence and she wiggled her way through. I followed in pursuit. Yeah, that sounded like a good alibi in her head. She just hoped the owner would buy it.
    “You can come out from under the desk now.” Light flooded the room. The voice seemed to vibrate off the walls and seep into her skin. It wasn’t husky, and it wasn’t deep—deep was too mundane a word. It was subterranean, and should have been illegal. She gulped and put her hand to her throat. Had her voice left? “I know you’re there, so you might as well come out. I can smell your fear.” She jumped and banged her head on the heavy oak desk.
    “Son of a bitch,” she hissed, sliding out from under the desk and rubbing the back of her head.
    “I didn’t realize you were acquainted with my mother.” The steel-edged voice didn’t seem amused.
    As she crawled from under the desk on her hands and knees, she barely remembered how she even got this far into his house. He wasn’t going to buy her excuse—she looked like a damn thief. She was wearing black slacks, and they showed the grass stains on her bottom from falling off the fence. Luckily her turtleneck was also black and was hiding the scrape she’d gotten shouldering open the heavy wooden door to the den. She hadn’t yet gotten off her hands and knees before she started rambling into her alibi.
    “Look, I am so sorry. I don’t know why I hid under your desk. I was trying to put this flea collar on Doll and she ran in here and I thought…” She finally got herself turned around and faced the source of the voice. She stopped mid-rant.
    What she was staring at was the most surreal-looking human being she’d ever laid eyes on. She’d seen the sculptures at the Louvre in Paris, and this man was nothing near comparable. His skin was pale like the marble of those statues, but the statues didn’t glow like his skin did. She shook her head. That was impossible. People didn’t glow. She looked at his square, firm jaw-line, back to his face and swallowed. No, his flesh was glowing. It reminded her of staring at the moon after a fall rain. His inky black hair shone like wet tar, striking a sinister yet appealing contrast to his porcelain-like skin. It looked soft, and she felt immediately drawn to it, her hands itched to touch it. Yet, it was his eyes that made her lose her knack for babbling. They were a strange shade of blue, a hue stuck somewhere between midnight and dawn. Dinah had a master’s degree in English,