Read Shadow's Edge for Free Online Page A

curled into an amused smile.
Animal Farm
by George Orwell.
    Ah, the exquisite irony.
    He slanted her a look, his gaze lingering over the arc of her lips, her smooth brow, the soft planes of her cheek. Was she more than just this surfeit of sensuality so pleasing to the eye? What of her sense of humor, her intelligence, her passion? Would she fight for her freedom?
    But no, one way or another, her time of freedom was coming to an end. If she could Shift, if she was fully one of their kind, he would take her back to Sommerley. Force her, if necessary. She would join their colony, she would learn their ways, she might even one day be his...
    It came unbidden into his mind, startled him into stillness with his hand hovering over her open book.
    Mine.
    He crouched down next to her bed. A long, curling lock of golden hair hung free over the pillow. He picked it up and pressed it to his nose.
    And if she cannot Shift, if she is Giftless
, he thought, staring hard at her carmine lips half-parted in sleep,
it will fall to the Alpha to kill her. It will fall to me.
    “Jenna,” he whispered, an almost noiseless exhalation of sound from his lips.
    She shifted on the mattress, made a pretty, feminine sound in her throat. Her back arched beneath the sheets, a drowsy, languid movement that pressed her body taut against the fabric.
    The dip of her waist. Her flat belly. Those full, perfect breasts.
    “Yes, please,” she murmured, then settled back down against the mattress with a sigh.
    With a stab of desire so acute it made his mouth water, he realized she was dreaming.
    He felt the ground disappear beneath him, his foundation of law and order and tribe, his entire lifetime of duty and sacrifice, safety and silence. She became—with an abrupt alteration of priority that made all else fall away—the only thing and everything he wanted.
    But he was the Alpha and she was an unproven half-Blood, daughter of an outlaw, her future hanging on the scales of fate, her very existence uncertain.
    She was not his to have.
    The strand of her hair slipped between his fingers and he rose, heart pounding, and turned away.

 
    When Jenna first interviewed for the coveted job of sommelier at Mélisse, she was twenty-two years old, had no college degree, no special training, and no relevant experience.
    What she had was raw talent.
    Her sense of smell was so keen it picked out the single note of lavender, the merest hint of graphite, the faintest rumor of black truffle hidden deep within the aromatic spice and fruit bouquet of a fine wine.
    Though Mélisse was renowned for its wine program—one which had been overseen since their inception by a quick succession of middle-aged, snobbish men and contained over six thousand bottles of the best wine produced throughout the world—they hired Jenna before the conclusionof her first interview, based on her rather remarkable demonstration of this talent.
    The owner of the restaurant, a trim, elderly gentleman named Francois Moreau, set out ten bottles of wine wrapped in plain brown paper bags on the long oak table in the glass-walled private dining room, then poured a single ounce from each into ten unlabeled crystal Riedel wine glasses.
    “Tell me,” he said in a pronounced French accent as he gestured toward the preposterous lineup, “what is the wine in each glass?”
    He adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, folded his blue-veined hands over the second button of his camel pinstripe blazer, and smiled at her, serene and sharp.
    Jenna smiled back and began.
    Not only did she tell him the grape varietal each glass of wine contained, she told him whether it had been grown on hillside or riverbank, in high altitude or at ocean level, and what percentage of varietals contained within each if it was a blend.
    Mrs. Colfax, who counted Monsieur Moreau among her beaux and had arranged the interview, had been very generous in sharing her wine and her knowledge of it, and Jenna never forgot a thing. The sense