The Dark-Hunters by Sherrilyn Kenyon Page A

wanted that kind of love, too. But for some reason, she’d never found a man who made her breathless. One who made her heart pound and her senses reel.
    A man she couldn’t live without.
    “Oh, Mama,” she breathed, wishing her parents hadn’t died that night.
    Wishing for …
    She didn’t know. She just wanted something in her life that made her look forward to the future. Something that made her happy the way her father had always made her mother so happy.
    Biting her lip, Grace balled her father’s dark blue and white plaid pajama pants in her arms and ran from the room.
    “Here,” she said, tossing them to Julian before she left him and ran to the bathroom in the middle of the hallway. She didn’t want him to see her tears. She would never again show her vulnerability to a man.
    Julian exchanged the cloth around his hips for the pants, then followed after Grace. She’d rushed to the next door down the hall and slammed it shut.
    “Grace,” he said, gently nudging the door open.
    He froze as he saw her weeping. She stood in a lavatory of some sort with two built-in sinks, and a white counter in front of her while she held a cloth to her mouth in an effort to muffle her wracking sobs.
    In spite of his severe upbringing and aeons of control, a wave of pity washed over him. She cried as if her heart had been broken.
    It made him uncomfortable. Uncertain.
    Clenching his teeth, Julian forced his strange feelings away. One thing he’d learned early in his childhood, it didn’t do any good to learn about people. To care for them. Every time he had made that mistake, he’d paid dearly for it.
    Besides, his time here was short—way too short.
    The less he entangled himself with her emotions and life, the easier it would be to tolerate his next confinement.
    It was then that her earlier words hit him square in the chest. She’d pegged him perfectly. He was nothing more than a tomcat who took his pleasure and left.
    Julian clenched the cold doorknob at the thought. He wasn’t an animal. He had feelings, too.
    At least he used to.
    Before he could reconsider his actions, he stepped into the room and drew her into a hug. Her arms encircled his waist and she held on to him like a lifeline as she buried her face into his bare chest and wept. Her entire body shook against his.
    Something strange inside him unfurled. A deep longing for something he couldn’t name.
    Never in his life had he comforted a weeping woman. He’d had sex more times than he could count, but never once had he just held a woman like this. Not even after sex. Once he wore out his partner, he would get up and clean himself off, then go find something to occupy himself with until he was called again.
    Even before the curse, he’d never shown anyone tenderness. Not even his wife.
    As a soldier, he’d been trained from his first memory to be fierce, cold. Harsh.
    “Return with your shield, or upon it.” That was what his stepmother had told him as she grabbed him by his hair and slung him out of her home to begin training for war at the tender age of seven.
    His father had been even worse. A legendary Spartan commander, his father had tolerated no weakness. No emotion. The man had doled out Julian’s childhood at the end of a braided leather whip, teaching him to hide his pain. To let no one see him suffer.
    To this day Julian could feel the bite of the whip against his bare back, hear the sound it made as it cut through the air toward his skin. See the mocking sneer of contempt on his father’s face.
    “I’m sorry,” Grace whispered against his shoulder, dragging his thoughts back to the present.
    She tilted her head to look up at him. Her gray eyes were bright and shiny, and they chipped at the edges of a heart frozen centuries before by necessity and by design.
    Uncomfortable, he moved away from her. “Feeling better?”
    Grace wiped her tears away and cleared her throat. She didn’t know what had made Julian come after her, but it had