Page 27
“Mr. Morley?” Mary poked her head out of the door that led to the patio where they sat.
“Aye, Mary?”
When she startled, Kenton realized his mistake.
“Yes?” he corrected.
Lawrence snickered beside him.
“You have a visitor asking to see you, sir.”
He didn’t spare the Scot a glance. Few knew him in this town. Surely—
“A Miss Alessandra Fiore.”
Though he and Lawrence had both watched her from afar, Kenton had not seen her properly since that night on her porch. Since then, she’d kept mostly to her house and The Witch’s Brew. Nothing out of the ordinary that he could tell.
“Show her back here,” he said, his tone even, his heartbeat unaccountably quickening.
Kenton looked into the green eyes of his nemesis. The shade was a reminder of their differences. Somehow it always reminded him of Scotland. Of Lady Isobel and the bloodline of hunters she’d created, intent on eradicating their kind.
And one of those unwitting hunters was about to step onto his patio.
* * *
Aside from being separatedfrom her mother and brother, life was good in Alessandra’s little corner of the universe. She’d just gotten her dream job and had a whole summer to prepare for it. Maybe she didn’t have a boyfriend, or even a glimmer of a boyfriend, but relationships had never worked out for her anyway. Toni thought she chose unavailable men because her father had run off, but she always joked that she simply had bad taste. Didn’t matter. She was happy.
Or at least she had been until these two good-looking jerks had shown up to ruin everything.
With every step she took closer to them, the awareness that had begun creeping down her spine more than two blocks away intensified. No matter how much she wanted to dismiss Kenton’s words, write him and his pal off as two crazed lunatics, well, that was pretty much impossible now.
Since that night on the porch, Alessandra had vacillated between whether she should call the police or check in to the psych ward of the local hospital. Toni had told her to call her mother, but what exactly would she say? “Hey, Mom. So these two guys showed up in town, each claiming the other wants to kill me. And my body must have been taken over by an alien, because I suddenly feel like I can take on the world with my pinkie finger.”
Toni said she looked the same, which was some comfort, but there was no longer any denying that she didn’t feel the same. She hadn’t the first clue what was happening to her, but she knew someone who did.
Two someones, in fact. And they were both waiting on the patio for her.
They stood, Lawrence in jeans and a T-shirt, Kenton dressed in gray pants and a perfectly tailored sport coat that made him look like a poster child for GQ. But that jaw. Damn, the guy was fucking hot.
“Alessandra,” they said in unison. The glare they shot each other reminded her that these two apparently hated each other. And yet . . .
“Are you friends now?” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Or have you been conspiring behind my back—”
“I can assure you,” the velvety voice of Mr. Polished said, “we are anything but.”
The tick in Lawrence’s jaw confirmed the truth of Kenton’s words.
Mimicking the baddest of badass women from every movie she’d ever watched, her penchant for all forms of entertainment with strong female leads a joke among her friends, Alessandra said, “I want the truth.”
She hated the fact that Lawrence and Kenton looked at each other before answering. Apparently the good ol’ boys club was alive and well within the lunatic murderer community.
“Then I will give it to you—”
“And how, Lawrence, do you propose to do that?” Kenton snapped.
If she were ever to witness a murder, it would be here, in the otherwise idyllic spot on a perfect June day. She had never seen a look quite so menacing as the one Lawrence now leveled at Kenton.
“With half-truths meant to lure her away from the one person who can keep her safe?” Lawrence bandied back.
