Free The Fallen One (Sons of the Dark Mother, Book One) by Lenore Wolfe Page A

those
hateful thoughts—about him being a murderer; she continued to judge
him for what had taken place that day.
    It didn’t help at all that he could
usually read her mind—not as often as she seemed to think, but most
of the time.
    But it still hadn’t helped
him.
    He didn’t understand women—even when he knew what they
were thinking.
     
    It was more than a thousand miles
to Colorado, and he had driven her half-way there without saying a
single word to her. She watched him. She didn’t try to hide the
fact that she was doing so.
    It wouldn’t have done any good to
pretend otherwise.
    He would have known—no matter how
hard she tried to hide it.
    She didn’t try to hide her thoughts
from him either. She didn’t have the faintest clue how to do so
anyway. She watched him now, half leaning against the pickup door
to do so. He finally stopped staring straight ahead at the road, as
if he was ignoring her, and actually looked at her.
    She frowned. “When, exactly, did
your parents disappear?”
    It was his turn to frown. “They
didn’t come to the hospital. And they were gone when I got out.
They had changed—a lot—but not so much that they wouldn’t have come
to the hospital to see me—so I always assumed they didn’t
come—because they couldn’t come. Not that it made much difference.
They were gone long before then. That was just the day that they
left physically.”
    She chewed on her lip, absorbing
that. “What do you mean they left long before that?”
    He half-shrugged. “I meant that
something happened long before that day,” he muttered. “Something
took them away from me and my sisters long before that day. One day
we were a family—close—doing things that all families do. And then
the next… suddenly they just weren’t there anymore—didn’t pay
attention anymore. It was as if they had become a shell of who they
had been before.”
    She cocked her head to one side,
thinking about what he’d just revealed. “When, exactly, did they
change?”
    He did look at her then, and he
frowned again. “I suppose a few years before. They’d had a
business. We were all doing really well. Then, one day, it was all
gone. Along with it went the loving parents we had always known.”
He stared ahead at the road. “It was like, in their place, was a
replica of the people they had been. They looked the same—but
nothing about them was the same. I was too young to really
understand what was happening to them—heck, I still don’t. By the
time I would have started to figure it all out, all hell broke
loose—then, on top of it, they disappeared.”
    Jes frowned—again—at this. “I don’t
believe in coincidences.”
    He nodded. “I never thought too
much about it—but neither do I.”
    Then she abruptly changed the
subject. “Why midnight?”
    He actually grinned at her at
this.
    She glared at him.
    He turned and gave her a quick look
of appraisal before returning his gaze to the road. “Because it
would make your head churn around with ideas of what it could
possibly mean.”
    She gasped. “You set me
up?”
    He grinned openly.
    “ Okay,” she gave him a reluctant
smile. “I asked for that—with all my high-and-mighty judgments. But
watch your back.”
    He seemed surprised at her
honesty—her frank appraisal of her judgments against him. Some kind
of hidden tension seemed to leave him then.
    After a moment, she asked. “How do
you do it?” She turned and looked at him. “Get into my apartment, I
mean?”
    He grinned. “I’ve been waiting for
you to ask that.”
    She glared at him.
    It only made him give her a
playfully lecherous look. After a moment, he sobered. “I’ve had
years of experience breaking into places where people don’t want me
to be, Jes.”
    She dropped her gaze to her lap,
fidgeting with her fingertips. She took a deep breath, scared to
hear the answer to her next question. “What happened to you that
day?”
    He turned his head, but looked
right through her