Read The Demon's Forbidden Passion for Free Online Page B

chastised himself. Get out of here before it’s too late.
    Careful not to wake her, he slowly bent his knees and twisted his torso until he could plant his feet on the hardwood floor of her bedroom. Then he wiggled his shoulder out from under her, carefully moving her head from his chest to the nearest pillow before he fully sat up. Sitting there on the edge of the bed, he stretched his arms above his head.
    And then it hit him.
    The welt on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel it. A pang of terror stabbed his stomach as frantically padded over to the full-length mirror that hung on the back of her closet door.
    He stood with his back to the mirror and looked over his shoulder, frantically searching for the angry purple welt that had blossomed on his back the night before. When he saw it, he noticed it had faded considerably. And within the light yellow-green pigment of the now rapidly healing bruise were flesh-colored fingerprints. Her fingerprints.
    His worst fear was becoming a reality. The faces of his mother and father—contorted in pain, their eyes widened in desperation as they clung to life—flashed through his head and he heard the laugh, the deep belly laughs of the man who had cursed him, the man who had murdered his parents out of ignorance and fear. Ethan doubled over, gnashing his teeth as waves of nausea washed over his body again and again. Run , run , run , his brain chanted. When he was finally able to stand, he gathered all his clothes and bolted out the door.

Chapter Six
    When Tina woke up to her alarm an hour later, her head was pounding and her bed was cold...and empty. She tapped the clock off and bolted upright, searching the room around her. But the moment she sat up the ache in her head intensified into a sharp pain, as if a butcher knife cleaved the front of her skull in two. She blinked a few times, trying to shake the heaviness of sleep from her eyes, but her vision was blurred.
    “Ethan?” she asked groggily. There was no response, no sounds of the shower running or breakfast cooking to greet her, only her headache pulsing harder in her ears.
    She called his name again. Even the sound of her own speech aggravated her headache further. But her physical pain was quickly replaced with devastation when she realized that Ethan was nowhere to be found. He had slipped out sometime while she was sleeping.
    Tears of embarrassment and mortification stung her eyes. The first time I open myself up to someone , the first time I let my guard down , and this is what it gets me? He said he’d go to the hospital with her in the morning. He’d promised.
    You can mess with me all you like , but don’t jerk around the emotions of a five-year-old kid , she thought resentfully.
    She threw on some clothes, popped double the recommended dose of aspirin and headed to the hospital. She’d gone into work under worse circumstances before; a migraine wasn’t going to make her call in sick. If he wasn’t going to go and see that sweet Danny, she was. Her promise to get Ethan to come with her was out of her hands. She hoped Danny would forgive her; she knew the look of disappointment on his face would be enough to send her over the edge.
    She drove there in silence, replaying the night before in her mind. Did I do something...say something...? But all she could think of was her and Ethan’s naked bodies tangling in the sheets, the way he looked at her with something in his eyes that was more than desire, something deeper. The way he rubbed the small of her back as she fell asleep. What had gone wrong?
    She was still agonizing over the question when she looked at the master chart and saw that Danny wasn’t in a normal room, but the ICU. Confused, she jogged to the east wing of the hospital. When she found his bed, she gasped. Gus was standing over the boy, who was out cold, as he attached an IV into the back of his tiny hand. A bag of what looked like morphine dripped silently nearby.
    Tina’s mind began to spin.