Isabelle stood there stunned, too passion-slackened to think clearly. Then his arrogance hit her full force and annoyance bloomed. Pissed off once again, she peeled herself from the railing and headed after him, but someone yanked her back…hard.

Isabelle turned, half expecting to see the man who’d been staring at her before…but it was Boyle. Adrenaline spiked, sending a jolt of shock and primal fear shooting through her veins. How the hell had he appeared right there all of a sudden?

She heard Thomas call her name in the crush of people up ahead. Through the crowd, she saw the top of his head as he headed back for her. Ironically, he’d kept his distance after all, for about two seconds.

Apparently, that’s all the demon had needed.

She opened her mouth to scream Thomas’s name out of pure involuntary reaction, but Boyle clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her to the left, toward the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY

TWENTY

ISABELLE BIT HIS PALM AND BROUGHT HER BOOTED heel back hard into his shin. Boyle reacted as expected—hardly at all. He just jerked a little.

“She’s had too much to drink,” he said to the curious onlookers with an unnatural lopsided grin pasted on his face. “She always gets rowdy when we go out.” His accent when he said this was almost nonexistent and his speech was in the vernacular. No scent of demon magick clung to him either. Boyle was acting human this evening.

The people around them just stared, clearly not sure what to think. Obviously the club was short on heroic types tonight.

Instead of taking her out the door, as she’d expected him to do, he picked her up and carried her to the back, where he found another door that led out into the alley behind the building.

The demon pushed her through the doorway. She stumbled face forward into a dank smelling puddle. Water splashed and the pavement bit into her palms and scraped her knees. Behind them the metallic chunk of the door closing muffled the pounding music of the club. Not wasting any time, she glanced up at the mouth of the alley, looking for an escape. Finding one, she launched herself up like a track runner. It was reflex. Every molecule in her body screamed flee.

Boyle had her in an instant, wrapping his huge arms around her waist and whirling her around to land in the puddle on her hands and knees once more. The position was too much like begging for her taste, but this time she stayed there, motionless and breathing in the trashy, damp air of the alley in big gulpfuls. Her whole body hurt from being hurled to the pavement. Her hands and knees were scraped raw.