Shades of Midnight by Lara Adrián Page A

he said, pinning her with that shrewd, steady, silver gaze. He reached out and offered his hand, but Alex hadn’t quite decided if she could trust him that far yet. He hesitated for a moment, then let his arm fall back down to his side. “I gather from what I heard last night that you were close to the victims. I’m sorry for your loss, Alex.”
    It unnerved her, the way he said her name with such easy familiarity. She didn’t like the way his voice, and his uninvited, unexpected compassion seemed to reach inside her chest and wrap itself around her senses. She didn’t know him, and she definitely didn’t need his sympathy.
    “You’re not from around here,” she said abruptly, needing to maintain some sense of distance as the walls seemed to crowd in on her the longer she was in his presence. “But you’re not from Outside, either. Are you?”
    He gave a vague shake of his head. “I was born in Alaska, grew up north of Fairbanks.”
    “Oh? Who’s your family?” she asked, trying to sound conversational rather than interrogatory.
    He blinked, just once, a slow shuttering of his remarkable eyes. “You wouldn’t know my family.”
    “You might be surprised. I know a lot of people,” she said, pressing all the harder for his evasiveness. “Try me.”
    His broad lips curved at the corners. “Is that an invitation, Alex?”
    She cleared her throat, caught off guard by the innuendo, but even more so by the sharp kick of her pulse as he let the question hang between them. He walked toward her then, an easy, long-legged stride that brought him to within arms’ reach of her.
    God, he was gorgeous. All the more so up close. His lean face was sharp angles and strong bones, his black brows and lashes setting off the wintry color and keen intelligence of his eyes, which tilted ever so slightly at the corners. Wolfish eyes. A hunter’s eyes.
    Alex felt snared in them as he came even closer. She felt the heat of his hand on hers, then a firm but gentle pressure as he carefully extracted the pistol from her fingers.
    He offered it back to her in the open palm of his hand. “You won’t need to use this, I promise.”
    When she mutely accepted the gun and returned it to its holster behind her back, he strode over to the sofa and sheathed the wicked blade that had been resting at the top of his open duffel.
    “You must have been shaken up pretty badly, being one of the first to see what had happened here.”
    “It wasn’t a good day,” she said, the understatement of the year. “The Tomses were decent people. They didn’t deserve to die like this. No one does.”
    “No,” he replied soberly. “Nobody deserves this kind of death. Except the beasts responsible for what happened to your friends.”
    Alex looked at him as he closed the lid on his lethal rounds and put the case back into his bag. “Is that what brought you here—you and all these weapons? Did someone from Harmony hire you to come in and slaughter an innocent pack of wolves? Or are you here to collect on your own instead?”
    He cocked his head in her direction. “No one hired me. I’m a problem solver. That’s all you need to know.”
    “Bounty hunter,” she muttered, with more venom than probably was wise. “What happened out here had nothing to do with wolves.”
    “So you said last night in that meeting.” His voice was more level than she’d heard it thus far. And when he looked at her, it was with a probing intensity that made her take a step backward on the boot heels of her Sorels. “Nobody believed you.”
    “Do you?”
    If possible, that hard silver gaze mined deeper. As though he could see right through her, all the way down to the memories she could not bear to relive. “Tell me what you know, Alex.”
    “You mean, tell you more about the footprint I found outside?”
    He gave the barest shake of his head. “I mean the rest of it. How is it that you can be so certain these killings weren’t done by animals? Did you see the