Текст книги "Marked by Midnight"
Автор книги: Lara Adrian
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CHAPTER 5
At barely five a.m. the next morning, Nova stood outside the green doors of the Southwark coroner’s office employee entrance in a baggy gray sweatshirt and jeans, her hair concealed under a knit cap. She rapped twice, her breath steaming as she waited in the pre-dawn chill.
The door creaked open, revealing a reed-thin man in a white lab coat. His graying, dishwater blond hair was caught up in an elasticized plastic cap, baring his neck and the edges of the extensive tattoos that weren’t quite concealed by the collar of his coat.
“Thanks for doing this, Stan.”
“No worries,” her long-time client said. “I’m the only one on shift right now, so come on in.”
She’d called him last night, immediately after Mathias Rowan left the shop. Stan hadn’t asked any questions about why she was interested in the recent arrivals at the area morgue. That she wanted to come down and have a look had been explanation enough for one of Ozzy’s regulars.
Even better, Stan wasn’t going to require her to present ID and sign in, the way she’d have to if her visit had been anything but covert.
“This way,” he said, leading her inside to a cold room of white tile and stainless steel. The place reeked of antiseptic and death. “All of the John Does are in those coolers on the far wall, Nova. Take as much time as you need.”
She gave him a nod, then waited until she was alone in the room.
She walked over to one of the latched cabinet compartments and opened it. The drawer clicked as she pulled it out, the only sound in the place, now that it was just her and the dead.
The body on the refrigerated stainless steel slab emerged feet-first, a toe tag proclaiming him Unidentified Caucasian Male. Nova tugged the drawer out the rest of the way, and in moments she was looking over the face of the thug from the other night at Ozzy’s.
Orin Doyle.
The name tasted like acid to her senses, the memory of his ugly sneer and terrifying threats chilling her even more than the cold air in the morgue.
She wasn’t interested in him now. He wasn’t the reason she hadn’t been able to sleep last night. He wasn’t the reason she had come to the coroner’s office on an investigative mission of her own.
She had to know more about the others.
Why were men with scarab tattoos suddenly turning up in London?
Had they known she was there?
Doyle had stumbled upon her by accident, but what if there were others in the city now too? Others who might come looking for her, if they weren’t already...
Nova had a thousand questions, but there was only one she could resolve here.
It was someplace to start, at least. If she were lucky, she might learn if her secret was safe, or if she needed to run again.
She could hardly bear the thought of leaving Ozzy after all he’d done for her. The old man had been her only family for almost half her life now. And Eddie, the kid brother she never had.
Her heart hurt to remember another brother, one she knew a long time ago. Older than her by a lifetime, it seemed, Aedan had been the sole kindness in a beautiful, glittering house full of hideous, private brutality and unspeakable abuse.
A Breed male born to the monster who’d adopted Nova when she was a young child, Aedan never knew what she’d been going through. She’d been forced to smile and act her part, keep all of her toxic secrets bottled up inside. And then Aedan left their Darkhaven home, never to return, and from then on she’d been truly alone.
Ozzy and Eddie were the family she made for herself in the time since, and after last night, she’d dragged Oz into the violence and ugliness of her past too.
Not that he hadn’t known the worst of it before then.
She looked down at the tattoos he’d skillfully made on the backs of her hands when she turned seventeen. She’d begged him for the ink–her first–and he’d reluctantly agreed only because he understood what it meant to her.
The mark on the back of her right hand, the tattoo she’d pleaded with Oz to conceal, was barely visible anymore, obscured by his beautiful art.
Nova rubbed her thumb over the exotic Egyptian eye and artful flourishes that had once been an entirely different image–one she hated with every fiber of her being.
A black scarab, identical to the one on Orin Doyle’s right hand.
The ones she knew she was going to find on the hands of the other dead men in this room.
Nova shoved Doyle’s body back into its cabinet and closed the door. She opened the compartment next to him and pulled out the drawer. The man’s face was unfamiliar, but he had the scarab mark on his hand, just as Mathias had told her.
Nova opened two more coolers and found two more scarab tattoos. All of the thugs had been in service to her adoptive father.
She shook off a chill that went deep into her marrow. She didn’t want to know more, but she couldn’t stop now. For her own safety, she had to understand what was going on.
And for that, she would have to call upon the dark ability she’d been born with as a Breedmate.
Steadying herself for what was to come, she reached out with her right hand and took hold of the waxy fingers of the dead man closest to her.
A jolt of memory hit her the instant she touched him.
Not her memory, but his.
The awful talent she despised had lost none of its power. It rose up swiftly, vividly, giving her a crystal-clear picture of the dead man’s final moments.
Images flooded her mind as if she was living them herself: she saw the dark water of the Thames under a night sky, a large steel shipping container being unloaded onto a dock.
Someone spoke to her–to the man who would be dead before long–Russian words she couldn’t comprehend. More men stood nearby, speaking urgently, making some kind of deal, from what she could discern from their body language and gestures.
Then the sharp report of gunshots nearby.
Anxious shouts went up, and Nova’s line of vision swung around abruptly as the man whose gaze she was seeing through suddenly turned his head. Orin Doyle stood there, a pistol raised at forehead level in front of Nova’s eyes.
Doyle grinned, then fired.
Nova’s connection cut short as the man dropped to the ground, shot dead at point-blank range by someone he knew and trusted.
“What the hell?”
Sick from the power of her gift and what it showed her, she let go and moved to another of the bodies to repeat the process. Doyle killed him too, another shot ringing out elsewhere at the same time, dropping one of the Russians just before Nova’s connection to Doyle’s victim severed.
She moaned, unable to continue.
Using her ability always left her nauseated and weak. After so many years away from it, and after the grisly visions she’d just witnessed, it was all Nova could do to return all of the dead back to their coolers and close everything up.
She staggered into a vacant restroom down the hallway, her head pounding ferociously, stomach rebelling with each step.
She hit the first stall and retched into the toilet.
As she slumped against the cold metal wall, her mind spun with even more questions than when she’d first arrived at the morgue.
What were Doyle and the other men up to at that dock?
Why had he turned on his own?
And most troubling of all, how could Nova answer any of her questions without risking herself and everyone she cared for?
~ ~ ~
Fresh out of the shower, Mathias pivoted his head over his shoulder to get another look in the mirror at Nova’s handiwork on his back.
A sword, for fuck’s sake.
A gleaming, perfectly rendered, realistic-looking blade that extended tip-down along the length of his spine.
The kind of sword a knight would carry.
Mathias chuckled wryly to himself. She’d called him Galahad, after all. Apparently the joke was on him–literally.
Whatever her intent, he actually liked the tattoo.
He like her too, and that was a fact that had been eating him up ever since he’d returned to Order headquarters the night before.
His interest in her was a problem he didn’t want to acknowledge, but it was rather hard to deny the way she’d stirred his interest last night. Feeling her warmth leaning over him for two hours while she worked on him had been torture.
Her gloved hands all over his naked back, sure and steady, as she’d created a work of art on his skin had made him long to feel her touch in other places.
The subtle, fleeting graze of her lovely little breasts, so precariously contained within the zippered black leather vest she seemed to think passed for clothing, had given him a hard-on he had barely managed to rein in.
He’d wanted to kiss her, and no doubt would have, if she’d been anything but prickly and evasive with him. He might have done more than kiss her, had she not been the wiser of them and all but tossed him out on his ass and slammed the door behind him.
So, instead, he’d gone back to base with an uncharacteristically bad attitude and a need to be left alone to lick his damaged male pride and reassure himself that fiery, enigmatic Nova was a problem he damned well didn’t need.
He was still trying to convince himself of that today. Not a good potential, considering it was going on sundown and just the thought of her had his cock rising to attention all over again.
What would his old friends back in Boston tell him to do about Nova?
He had half a mind to call and find out.
Then again, he could predict most of their reactions without consultation.
Leave the female alone.
Mind on duty, not your dick.
Find another distraction–one that wasn’t a person of interest in a homicide.
Of course, there were no less than ten of the most seasoned Order members who wouldn’t have been able to follow their own sage advice. Mated warriors, each with their own blood-bonded Breedmate that they loved more than life itself. Some of the Order had even fathered children in the twenty years Mathias had known them.
All things he’d never aspired to, never paused long enough to consider he might want.
Not that he wanted any of that now.
And certainly not with a difficult, secretive woman like Nova.
What kind of name was that, anyway?
Who was her family?
She’d been living with Ozzy at least since she was seventeen, according to what little she’d divulged. Mathias guessed she’d been under the old man’s wing for longer than that. He just didn’t know the how or why of it.
Just as he didn’t know who had been responsible for the hurt she’d shown him–however briefly–when she’d admitted to him that nothing could be done to her that she hadn’t already endured.
Who the fuck had wounded her so deeply?
Christ, every time he thought about her, it raised new questions. Stirred more curiosity in him to peel back the endless layers of secrets and camouflage she seemed to hide behind.
Mathias didn’t want to think about what he would need to do if peeling back any of those layers proved her guilt in the killing of the man who confronted her in Ozzy’s shop.
He would be duty-bound to surrender her to JUSTIS and let the system decide her fate.
Somehow, he didn’t think she’d stand by and wait for that to happen.
Nova’s headstrong, defiant gaze in the shop last night had told him that much. No, she would run before she’d let herself be shackled. But would she do anything more desperate?
Mathias dreaded being the one to find out.
His head was still churning on that troubling scenario when his comm unit buzzed with an incoming call. He grabbed it off the counter, recognizing his friend Gavin Sloane’s number.
“Don’t tell me you fished another scarab out of the Thames,” he murmured by way of greeting.
“No,” Sloane said. “But we may have a lead on the seven on ice down at the morgue.”
Mathias’s senses went taut with attention. “How so?”
“They had a visitor early this morning. Coroner’s got surveillance video of a woman being admitted into the morgue by one of the graveyard shift employees. She seemed to know at least a few of the victims, held their hands for a couple of minutes before rushing out of the room like she was going to lose her shit.”
The blood in Mathias’s veins started hammering hard with warning. He’d told Nova about the bodies in the morgue. She had seemed shocked, even troubled. But could she have known those men? Could she be mixed up in not just one slaying, but all seven of them?
Ah, fuck. Everything Mathias stood for demanded that he voice his suspicions to his friend, here and now. Yet there was a part of him that wanted to shield Nova from that kind of trouble.
He wanted to be certain before he tossed her into the fray.
“Do you have a description of this woman?” he asked, his voice sounding wooden, even to his own ears.
“It’s not great footage to work with, unfortunately,” Sloane said. “She was wearing a hat and baggy clothing, no doubt to conceal her appearance.”
Mathias gripped his comm like a life line, despising himself for the relief that coursed through him. “Damn, that’s too bad. It might’ve been helpful to find this woman and bring her in for questioning, see if she can give us any IDs on the dead.”
Sloane chuckled. “We’ll find her. The employee who let her in isn’t cooperating, but we saw the woman’s hands on the feed. She’s got tats all over her. Won’t take long to ID the bitch just based on the markings we recovered from the video. Already got some of my men working on that. I’ll be joining up with them as soon as the sun sets. You and your team care to lend a hand on this tonight?”
“Can’t,” he blurted. “We’ve got a...got a lead on another Rogue’s nest down in Lambeth that bears looking into. Once my squad wraps up, I can send them your way.”
“Nah, don’t worry about it. We’ve got this one covered.” Sloane chuckled. “I can think of worse things than conducting body scans of the females working the area tattoo shops. You go have fun with your Rogue hunt. I’ll be in touch if we shake anything loose tonight.”
Sloane hung up, and Mathias stood there for a long moment, staring at the reflection of his scowling face in the mirror.
The face of a man who had just lied to an old friend, and who was about to defy his pledge to the Order by sending his team of warriors on a wild goose chase down in Lambeth, if only to give Mathias time enough to warn Nova that whatever her secrets were, they were about to catch up with her.
CHAPTER 6
He wasted no time in seeking her out.
With mission directives given to his team to flush out a warehouse he knew would yield nothing, Mathias himself took off for Southwark the moment the sun dipped below the horizon.
When his street side surveillance of Ozzy’s shop showed Nova’s absence in the studio that evening, Mathias took a chance that he might find her in the apartment she lived in on the third floor.
He entered through the back of the old brick building, mentally flipping the lock with an ease all of the Breed possessed. A rear stairwell climbed up from the ground level. Mathias ascended to the top in the time it would take a mortal to blink.
Once he was standing in front of what had to be Nova’s apartment, he cooled his heels and let his knuckles fall against the unmarked door. He heard faint movement inside, bare feet padding over hardwood floors.
Nova’s voice sounded weary on the other side of the wood panel as she freed the deadbolt. “Eddie, you were just up here five minutes ago. Now, I told you, I’m not feeling well tonight, so, please, just let me–”
Her words cut short the instant she opened the door and saw Mathias standing there. What little color she had in her face in that moment drained away. She was dressed for a quiet night in, loose-fitting black sweats and a strappy black tank. Mathias didn’t know what was more appealing–her perky breasts zipped into last night’s tight black leather vest, or braless beneath the scrap of cotton that was all to prevent him now from taking them into his hands.
He cleared his throat, but couldn’t quite mask the emerging presence of his fangs. “I hope you don’t mind if I come in.”
Her chin hiked up. “Yes, actually, I bloody well do mi–hey!”
He stepped forward, taking hold of her upper arms as he strode inside. He steered her into the living area and closed the door behind him with a stern mental command.
When the deadbolt clicked back into place, Nova’s indigo-ringed, light blue eyes went from shock to outrage. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“That’s what I came to ask you,” he growled back at her. “Where were you this morning?”
She glared, but there was a guilty glint in her gaze. “I don’t answer to you.”
“Tonight you do, Nova. If you’re smart–and I know you are–you’ll tell me everything now. What happened the other night in Ozzy’s shop, why you went to the morgue this morning and why...all of it.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Damn it, woman. Don’t lie to me. I’m not your enemy.”
“Yet,” she finished quietly. “I don’t even know you.”
He swore roundly. “Yes, you do, Nova. Do you think if I wanted to hurt you, or if I didn’t care what happens to you, I’d be standing here right now, asking you to trust me?”
“Why?” Her voice was so thin, he hardly heard it over the drumming of his pulse.
“Why, what?”
“Why do you care, Mathias?”
For a moment, he wasn’t sure how to answer that. He couldn’t point to any one reason that made sense to him, and yet there were a hundred things about this damaged, but resilient, woman that he wanted to understand. He only wanted her to give him that chance.
“I care, because I see a beautiful, strong young woman who’s hurting–badly–and I want to take some of that hurt away, if I can. I see a scared little girl behind all of your ink and metal and claws, and I want her to know that she can be safe.”
Tenderness shone in the soft blue of her eyes. Her answering scoff, however, was bitter. “I don’t need some goddamned white knight riding to my rescue, Mathias. I thought we already covered that.”
“Yeah, we did,” he said. “And now I’ve got the tattoo to prove it.”
She dipped her head, not quite in time to hide the sudden, slight curve of her lips. “I suppose you hate it.”
“Not at all.” He lifted her chin on the tips of his fingers. “If you didn’t want me playing gallant knight to your obstinate lady, then you shouldn’t have put Sir Galahad’s sword on my back.”
He expected her to smile, maybe even laugh. But instead a pained look crossed her lovely face. “I can’t do this.”
She reached up to draw his hand away from her, and that’s when he saw–really saw–the colorful design that covered the back of her right hand. The blue eye surrounded by elaborate swirls and flourishes had looked like some kind of hex symbol to him on first glance. Now, he saw something else hidden within the mark.
“Jesus Christ.” He grabbed her wrist to hold her steady while he took a closer look. “You have the same mark as the dead men. I can see the scarab. Holy fuck, you tried to bury it under this other design, but it’s there.”
Fury and confusion sparked in him like a match struck against dry tinder. Mathias felt his gaze heat as the amber light of his anger ignited in the green of his irises. “Are you one of them, Nova?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Did you kill them?”
“God, no!” She moaned then, a terrified sound. The sound of an animal caught in a snare. “Mathias, please...”
He held fast to her wrist, refusing to let her evade him now. “There is video of you at the coroner’s office this morning, Nova. After I told you about the dead men with scarab tattoos, you went to the morgue to see them. You touched them, held their hands. Do you know who they were, or where they came from? Were you mourning any of them?”
“No,” she answered thickly. She struggled against his grasp, but he didn’t release her. Right now, he needed the answer to that last question more than any of the others. “It was nothing like that.”
“Then what was it like? Tell me, Nova. Talk to me. I’m not the only one who’s going to make you explain what you’ve done.”
When she looked up at him in question, in panic, he said, “The video was shown to JUSTIS officers today. They haven’t identified you yet. Since the employee who let you inside isn’t talking, I assume he’s a friend. All he’s done is delay law enforcement from finding you. But they will, and you’ll not only have to answer for the killing I’m certain happened here in the shop, but the other victims you seem to have some connection to as well.”
Her breath leaked out of her, taking some of her fight along with it. “I didn’t kill the man who came in here last night. I wanted to. But he was stronger than me. He clamped his hand around mine and he made...threats. Then he grabbed my hair with his other hand. He wouldn’t let go.” She exhaled a heavy sigh. “Ozzy only wanted to protect me. He did what anyone would do, what I couldn’t do at that moment. After he was dead, Oz and I dumped the body in the river. We tried to weight it down, but there was a storm overnight...”
Mathias listened to her in silence, watched her confess an account he hadn’t quite guessed on his own. And there was a detail that still troubled him. “You said the man made threats. What kind of threats, Nova?” When she didn’t answer after a moment, he freed her hand in order to brush his fingers along the taut line of her jaw. “You knew him, didn’t you.”
She nodded once. “From...before. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, but I would’ve recognized him anywhere. I tried to pretend I didn’t–that’s why I started to give him the tattoo he demanded. But then, after I started working on him, he recognized me too, even though I look very different now. I amvery different now.”
“Was he the one who hurt you...before?”
“One of them,” she said. “His name was Orin Doyle.”
Mathias would dig into that name the first chance he got. He only wished he had the opportunity to deliver some pain to the bastard personally before Ozzy stabbed him. “And the others in the morgue?”
Nova shook her head. “I didn’t know them at all. They were associates of Doyle’s, but he betrayed them. He executed them in cold blood down on a dock at the river. There were others with them. They were speaking Russian, I think, making some sort of deal with Doyle’s men. But it all seemed to go wrong. At least one of them was shot too, killed, but not by Doyle.”
Mathias scowled, skeptical. “How can you know all of this?”
“Because that’s what I saw when I touched the bodies. I saw the last few minutes of their lives. I saw how they died. I saw who did it.”
At first, he wasn’t sure what she was saying, then realization dawned. “Your Breedmate gift is a dark one. It can’t be easy for you, having that kind of ability.”
She shrugged, but her voice was quiet, haunted. “I don’t think about it. I don’t use it. Not unless I have to.”
He nodded, solemn with understanding. For all the times he cursed his own grim ability, it was nothing compared to what Nova must experience when she called upon hers. And yet she bore her burden–all of them–with stalwart courage. An extraordinary woman, in so many ways.
As for what she’d revealed just now, Mathias had suspected some kind of massacre, but the news of Russians being part of whatever went down was valuable intel the Order and JUSTIS didn’t have. Still, it only raised more questions.
“Do you know what brought Doyle and those other men to London? You said it seemed like some kind of deal was taking place,” he said, trying to put the pieces together. “Do you know what that deal was about? Do you know why the killings happened?”
“No. That’s not something I could detect with my gift.” She met his gaze solemnly. “I don’t know any of those answers, I swear to you.”
“And the scarab, Nova?”
“What about it?”
“What does the mark mean? There’s no gang known to law enforcement that uses that symbol, so who does it belong to?”
She shook her head mutely, pivoting from him to pace a few steps away. “It’s not a gang. It’s a family symbol. My family.”
He walked up behind her. Gently rested his palms on her shoulders. “Tell me their name, Nova.”
“Now, you ask too much,” she murmured. “I ran away from them a long time ago, for good reason. I won’t speak the name and let that evil touch me again.”
Mathias wanted to press the issue, persuade her to give up the rest of her secrets. But she was trembling under his light touch. The tough-talking, hard-looking woman was shaking like a fragile leaf.
He coaxed her around to face him. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
“I’d like to believe that,” she whispered. “But I just don’t see how.”
Mathias brushed his thumb over her lips, silencing her worries. For now, at least–for a moment–he didn’t want her to be afraid. She stared up into his eyes, and he knew there was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep this woman safe.
“We’ll figure it out,” he told her again, softer this time.
Then he bent his head down to hers and kissed her.
She didn’t resist him, didn’t push him away with defensive words or protesting hands. No, she wrapped her arms around him as he drew her deeper into his embrace. She kissed him back, with the same heat and need that was coursing through his own veins.
Mathias stroked his hand up the inked sleeve of her arm, then caught her nape in his palm while his tongue tested the giving seam of her lips. She parted for him, took him in on a quiet gasp.
He didn’t know how he’d managed to let the moment go from one of confrontation and mistrust to one of fierce, undeniable desire.
The comfort he’d meant to offer had incinerated, melted into something powerful. Something he wasn’t noble enough to resist.
He only knew that he wanted her.
And if he didn’t find the will to put the brakes on soon, there would be no turning back.
~ ~ ~
She wanted to push him away.
She wanted to tear her mouth from his, retreat to the other side of the room, out of his arms.
She wanted to scream, but it wasn’t terror or panic making her senses explode with the need to escape. It was desire.
Raw, hungry, impossible desire.
Something she had never known, had never expected to feel so powerfully. She could hardly contain it, the need Mathias’s kiss stirred inside her.
She could hardly breathe, hardly think straight, for the way it coiled around her, stripping away her defenses. Removing each carefully placed brick in the wall she’d built around herself ages ago.
If she let it fall, there would be no building those defensive walls again–not with him.
She would be at Mathias’s mercy, and he already knew too much.
He’d seen too much.
Nova moaned, forcing herself to break away from the pleasure of his kiss.
“Mathias, I don’t...I can’t,” she stammered, not even sure what she was trying to deny anymore. She only knew that if she let him continue touching her, kissing her, wanting her, she would be lost to him completely. “Don’t do this to me.”
“Don’t do what?” His deep voice was a growl against her cheek, then down along the side of her neck. “Don’t kiss you? Don’t want you? What shouldn’t I do, Nova?”
“Everything.” She drew back from him then, crossing her arms over herself when his body heat was gone and a chill settled into her bones. She put more distance between them, needing it in order to convince herself that she could do this–that she could push him away when it was the last thing she wanted in that moment. “I’m scared, Mathias.”
He took a step toward her. “Don’t be. Not of me.”
She bit her lip, trying to conjure the words she needed to save herself from giving in to him, from falling any further. But her heart wouldn’t cooperate with her head. Words lodged in her throat.
Then a knock on the door did the hard work for her. Eddie’s voice sounded on the other side. “Nova, you there? Let me in, will ya?”
God, she couldn’t let the kid see that she had someone in her apartment. Especially not a Breed male, whose glowing amber eyes and sharp white fangs were liable to send Eddie screaming back to Ozzy downstairs in the studio.
She’d begged off her shift tonight and cancelled all of her appointments, claiming she was sick. That lie would hurt even worse, if they knew she was up there thinking about getting naked with Mathias.
Which she wasn’t, she told herself. Not thinking about it, or doing it.
She closed her eyes, exhaling a heavy sigh. “Another time, Eddie, okay?”
“Oz sent me to check on you, make sure you’re not pukin’ your guts out or something.”
“I’m not,” she said, casting Mathias a pointed look. “I’ll be fine, I promise. I just need some time alone, that’s all. Tell Oz not to worry about me.”
“Sure, but you know he’s gonna worry ‘til he sees you for himself. He says you’ve never called in sick once, Nova.”
“I’ll come down later, promise.”
“All right, then,” he agreed after a moment. “I’ll let him know.”
When Eddie’s footsteps faded into silence, Nova released a pent-up breath. “I can’t do this. You should leave, Mathias.”
He moved in closer. “I don’t want to leave.”
“You heard Eddie. He and Oz are worried about me. They’re going to wonder what I’m doing up here.” She dropped her gaze to avoid Mathias’s smoldering eyes. “We need to stop this now. You need to leave, and I should go–”
“You don’t want to go.” He guided her face back to him, refusing to let her hide. His irises blazed bright with amber light, pupils so thin they were almost swallowed by the heat of his desire. The tips of his fangs gleamed behind the sensual line of his lip as he spoke. “You don’t want to stop what’s happening between us. You can’t deny it, Nova. No more than I can.”
She stared up at him, miserable with need. She saw that same need written in the intensity of his gaze, in the iron firmness of his square jaw as he parted his lips and descended on her once more.
He claimed her mouth this time, and she sank into it willingly, wantonly.
His kiss was both tender and hungry now, coaxing and demanding. Her tongue found his and he moaned, a low, tormented sound.
He tasted so good. Hot and powerful, primal. Yet his arms were protective, careful as they wrapped around her and held her close.
Nova leaned into his strength, into the warmth he offered within the circle of his arms.
She should be afraid. All of her old defenses fired like warning shots, cautioning her that this passion was a dangerous thing. He was a dangerous man–the worst kind, a Breed male, like the one who had violated her so brutally long ago.
