crook of her elbow, she yanked, tugged, rattled the door in the frame.
It didn‟t budge.
The cat‟s cries pierced her eardrums. Coughing, she abandoned the door and stumbled toward the dining room. Her eyes
stung with smoke. A chair loomed in her path. Pain cracked across her shins. She shoved it aside, lurched forward on her
knees, still cradling the protesting Tigger against her stomach.
A curtain of fire sprang up like a wall, blocking her escape. Heat blasted her, nearly singeing her hair. She cried out in
terror. Which way? Forward or back? The door? Stuck. Or the fire?
The back door burst open. The fire howled and flung itself at the draft.
A cold, wet blast of air struck back.
Morgan.
Relief swept over her. He filled the doorway, black as a thundercloud, bringing the storm in with him. Rain drove into the
room, slashing, silver. The air trembled with fog and fury as energies collided.
Trembling, she stared as power flashed around him.
“Gau!” he shouted. “I cast you out!”
The fire roared, curled, retreated. In the door to the dining room, the curtain of flame tore like a veil, disappeared in a
shower of diamond drops.
A gust scattered the choking fumes.
The fire on the stove muttered, spat, and died.
Tigger cowered, mute, in her arms.
Morgan stood in the dissipating smoke like a soldier on a battlefield. Liz could feel the energy pumping through his blood
and pouring off his skin. His gold-rimmed eyes blazed.
Striding across the kitchen floor, he hauled her to her feet and yanked her against his iron body. “Are you all right?”
“I . . .” Her lungs weren‟t working properly. Neither was her brain. “Fine,” she managed before his mouth crushed hers.
His kiss was fierce and needy. Hot. His mouth claimed and conquered hers. She clung to him with one arm, her short nails
digging into his muscled shoulder, battered by a storm of sensation, a tempest of relief and desire and need. She couldn‟t get
her breath or her balance. He swept away her control.
She gave herself up to his kiss, grateful simply to touch, taste, be.
The kitten squirmed and clawed between them.
“Ouch.”
With one hand, he plucked the kitten from between them and dropped it on the ground. He gripped her hips to pull her
more firmly against him and then stopped, his mouth compressing in apparent displeasure.
Her heartbeat thundered. Her head hazed with lust. “What?”
He took her arm and turned it over, exposing the long, thin lines of red cat scratches against her pale skin, her bleeding
palm. “You are hurt.”
“It‟s nothing. Thank God you showed up.” She pulled her arm back. “Why did you show up?”
“You needed me,” he said, so simply her heart stuttered.
He didn‟t mean it the way it sounded, she told herself.
“I did,” she said. “I‟ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life, but . . .”
The kitten edged closer to the door, quivering. Morgan snapped a word Liz didn‟t recognize and Tigger ran back under the
table.
Liz regarded the open door, her mind working now, turning, churning. “How did you get in?”
He raised his brows. “In the usual way.”
“The door was locked. Not locked,” she corrected herself. “Jammed.”
“No. Gau used your fears to hold you captive.”
“Excuse me?”
“It was an illusion,” Morgan explained. “Like the fire at the other door. Demons are masters of such deception.”
Fire. Demons. In her house.
She drew an unsteady breath. “I think,” she said carefully, “I need to sit down.”
Before her knees gave out.