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  “Trinity!” a man’s voice shouted from the forest surrounding them.

  The beast’s head jerked upward and away from stalking her with its blazing and vulturous gold eyes, to look up over her head.

  “Stop, Brother! Don’t bite her, Trinity!” the voice from the distance shouted.

  Beth felt the air she held in suspension in her lungs leave her as her hands flattened on the chest above her. Bite her? She cringed.

  “Virgin’s blood,” the beast-man above her snarled viciously. “So potent, you can smell it,” he growled, making her whimper and squirm against him with the intense need to run.

  “Trinity! Brother!”

  “I will fight it, Church,” her beast-man vowed with a snarled half shout as his chest heaved into her chest. “Move away,” he yelled.

  “For our mother!” the voice call Church returned.

  Beth did not understand anything that had happened that night. How she could end up nearly naked beneath a primal man-beast. So many things were beyond the comprehension of her innocent life. However, she did understand or perhaps she wanted it so badly to be true that the man called, Trinity, imprisoning her, was trying to fight the urge to kill her. Moreover, he could not be the one that had chased her through the night forest, because that presence held a livid malevolence toward her that she could feel.

  “I will rise upward and give you my jacket,” the creature called Trinity said. His voice held strange inflections through the large fangs extending from his mouth. It also seemed he promised the action as though to convince himself.

  Beth tensed more, trying to slow her panting breath, halfway certain he would not win the battle as he began to rise upward. Then, with his arms locked on either side of her, he stopped moving, but his other worldly eyes did not stop moving. He looked over her face, and then he looked downward toward her bare chest. She gasped a squeal of embarrassment chasing her fear, as caution be damned, she jerked her arms between them to cover her breasts.

  “You are very beautiful,” his tense voice emitted lowly. Then, his hand rose and she would have flinched away, but his gaze held her immobile. His fingers touched her cheek and they felt cold as he curled them and he stroked over the curve of her cheek with the back of his knuckles.

  “Please,” she begged him for her life. And the red glints in his eyes seemed to dull within the gold. Then his hand lifted to her temple and he did the most extraordinary thing. He wrote a cross upon her temple with his fingers.

  “For my mother,’ he growled lowly.

  Beth could feel the incredible tautness in his body above her. He nearly quivered with tenseness, and then he continued to rise off her lower body, until the cold night air flashed across her nakedness.

  It was the most unheard of position she’d ever been in. She’d never so much as shown her ankle to a gentlemen. To be nude was horrifying as she laid there shaking in mortification. Then a warm jacket fell on top of her and she snatched it against her body . . . overwhelmed.

  “Put it on,” the man’s hoarse voice ordered from the darkness above her.

  “I-I,” she mewled, her body quaking.

  “Don’t make me touch your skin again!” his voice demanded.

  Her Captain's Command published by Allure Books,

  copyrighted 2004 © Christina Stoke.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Allure Books. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.