by Adrian, Lara
“I’ll prep the UV gear for both of us,” Dante said, zero hesitation.
Chase and Tegan spoke up next, and soon the entire company of warriors—new and old—were volunteering for the patrol. It gave Lucan great pride to see the depth of commitment and courage in the faces that looked to him for leadership.
He only hoped he wouldn’t let any of them down.
Lucan nodded to his team. “Dante and Chase, prep the gear. Tegan and I will get the weapons and the vehicle loaded up. Brock and Kade, you suit up too.” He glanced to the other warriors. “I need the rest of you here. Hunter, you’re in command. Even if we don’t expect any direct hits from Opus, that doesn’t mean I want to risk leaving our base short-handed.”
The stoic warrior had once been a stone-cold killer in his own right. If Lucan trusted anyone to stand between danger and the people he cared about, he could find no better guardian than Hunter.
“What about the lead I dug up in Ireland?” Gideon asked.
Lucan raked a hand over his head. “Shit. I don’t want to let it go cold, but we’ve got several fires to put out here.”
“What lead?” Brynne asked.
Gideon explained. “Just before the situation went all to hell today, I managed to crack through the first layer of encryption on Opus’s secured network. I followed a hunch down a rabbit hole and I found a name, one we haven’t run across before.”
“You mean an Opus member?”
“Possibly. It’s also possible we just got a hit on the woman Crowe had been visiting frequently for the past few years.”
Aric Chase snorted a laugh. “You mean the reputed mistress? If this woman is under thirty, brainless, and full of plastic, odds are pretty good Crowe was banging her.”
“We don’t have a physical description,” Gideon said. “We also don’t have work history, tax records, nada. All we’ve got is a name registered to an IP address, which I then ran down a bit more by hacking into several layers of the ISP’s parent company records. A few more database taps, log file scrubs, and I got a hit on a location in Finglas, County Dublin.”
Dante and Tess’s son, Rafe, smirked. “Anyone with poor enough taste to be spending time with some Atlantean scumbag is suspect in my book.” Rafe shot a glance at Zael. “No offense.”
Zael arched a wry brow. “You’re right. Crowe was a scumbag. What’s the name of this woman?”
“Iona Lynch,” Gideon replied. “Any ties to your people that you know of?”
“None that I’m aware of. Crowe may have been Atlantean, but he had been gone from the realm for a very long time. What he did and who he associated with in the time since is anyone’s guess.”
“I’ve never heard the name either,” Brynne said. “If I could get access to my old JUSTIS records, I might be able to search—”
“Been there, done that.” Gideon’s smile was a little sheepish, but mostly smug. “I’ve had my hands up JUSTIS’s skirts for a long time. Anything in their global databases or secured servers is ours as well. They don’t have anything on this woman. No one does.”
“Except us now,” Rafe said. The warrior had his blonde mother’s looks but his father’s dark tenacity. “If this woman has anything to do with Crowe, she might be the only person we’ve got who can help us unmask the other members of Opus.”
Dante nodded in agreement with his son. “And if Iona Lynch is part of Opus, then we need to get our hands on her and do it yesterday. We sure as fuck don’t want another situation like what happened with that Irish lawyer, Hayden Ivers.”
The men were right. And Lucan was still simmering over the Order’s near miss with Ivers. They’d already had a team on the ground at the human’s house, closing in on the bastard, when Ivers popped some poison then set his own house on fire to avoid capture.
Mathias Rowan looked Lucan’s way. “Shall I put my London team on this?”
“No. You’re spread thin enough, between the panic in the fallout of the JUSTIS attack and now this hit on the GNC. I need you and your team ensuring the security of the council members over there, Mathias.”
The London commander gave a nod. “Nova and I can be ready to return anytime.”
“Within the hour. We’ll have the jet readied for you,” Lucan said. He met the concerned faces of the rest of the Order. “We need to be vigilant in our other cities too. Commanders should head back to your bases as soon as possible and be ready for the worst.”
“Worse than what’s happened these past couple of days?” Aric Chase asked.
“Something can always be worse, son.” Sterling Chase’s grim reply echoed what Lucan and the other warriors surely were thinking.
Aric was new to the business of war, and although he was every bit as lethally skilled as any member of the Order, he was barely tested. He couldn’t be expected to understand what Lucan and the other warriors had learned through centuries of bloodshed and death.
They had charged into too many battles with too many enemies to make the mistake of believing that any crisis was as bad as it could possibly get.
Something could always be, and often was, far worse than you expect.
All you could do was pray you beat the monster before it beat you.
“Rafe and Aric,” Lucan said, his thoughts returning to the other problem they couldn’t afford to ignore. “We do need a stealth team to track down this Lynch woman in Ireland and hold her for questioning. Can the two of you be ready to leave with Mathias and Nova tonight?”
The two warriors exchanged an eager look.
“Hell yeah,” Rafe said. “Let’s go get the bitch.”
CHAPTER 11
After the warriors went off to carry out their orders from Lucan, Zael found himself pulled into a conversation with Dylan and Jenna. As much as he wanted to give both women his full attention, there was another female who was currently driving him to distraction.
It didn’t help matters that she was gone.
Brynne left the room as soon as the meeting had ended. Left it as abruptly as if her hair was on fire, to be more precise. No explanation. Not even a glance in his direction before she slipped away and didn’t return.
Was something wrong?
Where the hell was she?
Finally, he couldn’t take not having those answers. With vaguely murmured excuses, he slipped out of the room and headed into the corridor at a determined pace. Maybe she was with Tavia and the other women. Then again, headstrong investigator Brynne might just as likely be in the technology center with Gideon, persuading him to brief her on all of the intel he was gathering on Opus.
“If you’re looking for Brynne, she’s not down here.” Carys came out of another room up ahead in the corridor, accompanied by a dark-haired, hard-looking Breed male. The immense vampire held her hand possessively, yet tenderly, leaving no question that this was Rune, the cage-fighting nightmare she had recently taken as her mate.
“Did you see where she went?” Zael didn’t even attempt to dodge the truth. It wouldn’t have done much good with Carys anyway, considering what she’d walked in on a short while ago.
More accurately, what she had almost walked in on.
She pointed to the elevator that went to the residential areas upstairs.
“Thanks, Carys.”
“Good luck,” she called after him with a giggle as he all but sprinted in that direction.
Zael didn’t bother waiting for the lift. Using the small bit of crystal on the thong at his wrist, he closed his eyes and pictured the third floor corridor. Light flashed behind his closed lids.
When he opened them a moment later, he was standing in front of the door to Brynne’s suite. He knocked on the panel and waited.
And waited some more….
“Brynne?” He knocked harder now, his preternatural hearing picking up the sounds of quiet movement inside. He tried the knob and swore when he found it locked from inside. “Brynne, is everything okay? Open up.”
“Go away, Zael.”
His concern for her well-being lessened somewhat when he registered the note of annoyance in her voice. “Open the door and tell me that. Talk to me.”
“I don’t want to talk you. I’m leaving. I’m going back to London.”
Like hell she was. Zael gave the doorknob a light twist and the lock tumbled open.
Brynne gasped when she glanced up in midstride and saw him enter the room uninvited. Her look of outrage turned to fury as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
“How dare you! How did you—”
He held up his wrist, the one with the Atlantean bracelet on it. “Your kind isn’t the only one with its special skills.”
“What do you want, Zael?” She frowned, folding her arms militantly across her chest. “And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, barging into my private quarters like this?”
At the moment, the only thing he was doing was staring at her, slack-jawed and instantly aroused. She stood in front of him half-dressed in just her white button-down shirt she’d worn that night in London. Her long legs were bare, exposing the delicate swirls and flourishes of her Breed dermaglyphs that tracked down her slender thighs. The silky stems with those pretty, feminine glyphs seemed to go on forever.
Beneath the loose hem of her blouse, he caught a tantalizing glimpse of skimpy black panties and more creamy skin. God, she was beautiful. Exotic and strong and exquisitely female.
She was also visibly pissed off. At him?
“What’s going on here, Brynne?”
She stood her ground, glowering at him. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m getting dressed.”
From where he was standing, it looked like she was getting undressed. And there were certain parts of his anatomy that approved of that idea very enthusiastically.
“You said you’re leaving.”
“Yes. I have to go back to London. That’s where I belong.” She turned away and began buttoning her shirt the rest of the way as she stalked to the bed. The pair of dark navy slacks she’d been wearing the other night lay folded there. Her shoes and purse were gathered nearby as well. “I mean to be on that plane with Mathias Rowan and the others later today.”
Zael frowned at the announcement. “Don’t you think we should talk?”
“About what?”
Was she serious? He didn’t even know where to begin. “About this new Opus attack. About where you and I fit into the equation with the Order. We sure as hell need to talk about what’s happening between us.”
“Nothing’s happening between us, Zael.” Sharp words, delivered with a flare of amber in her dark green eyes as she threw a hard glance at him from over her shoulder. “As for the rest of it, you heard Lucan and the other warriors just now. You saw what’s going on all around us. The whole world is going to hell right now.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “And it’s going there regardless of what takes place between you and me.”
She scoffed. “You’ll say anything to get what you want, won’t you? Is that how all the men of your kind operate? I suppose that explains all of the fatherless offspring you and the rest of your Atlantean brothers have left around the world.”
Zael’s jaw hardened at the jab. It wasn’t completely without merit, but he also saw it for what it was. A defensive strike, meant to push him away.
She pivoted away from him again, as if she was finished with their conversation and finished with him. Maybe that ice-cold shoulder had been enough to shut out all of the other men who tried to get close to Brynne, but not him.
He’d seen the desire in her eyes when they had nearly kissed today. He’d felt her soften in his arms in that moment, not only resigned to the need that they both felt, but consumed by it with the same intensity that it owned him.
She flinched when he came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She stiffened under his touch, but he could feel the heavy spike of her pulse, and the sudden, rapid rhythm of her breathing. “If you’re so hell-bent on running away, at least be honest about it. You’re running away from me.”
“I’m sure you’d like to think so.”
“No, Brynne. I don’t want you to run away from me.” He swore, low under his breath, and he turned her around to face him. Her mouth was set in a firm line, but her glittering eyes softened as he held her. “I should be glad that you want to run away from me, from this. I should want that as badly as you seem determined to go.”
To his astonishment, she trembled as the seconds stretched out between them. Bold, defiant, hard-headed Brynne stared at him in silent trepidation. She licked her lips, and he glimpsed the sharp white points of her fangs.
“I told you earlier that I didn’t want anything to do with you, Zael.” Desperation crept into her voice. “Why can’t you accept that? Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Because every time I look at you, I see the same desire in your eyes that I feel burning me up inside.”
He brought one hand up to stroke the softness of her cheek. Pinkness rose into her face as his thumb flicked across her parted lips. It made her look so fragile, almost innocent. The color spread downward, along the delicate column of her throat, then into the open collar of her shirt and across the pretty swells of her breasts.
Yes, Brynne Kirkland was hard-shelled and stubborn. Yes, she was a lethally powerful creature, born of a race his own had long feared and despised. But beneath her dermaglyph-covered skin, she was a woman. A woman who yearned for a man’s touch.
His touch.
“Wanting you this way is the last thing I should be doing, Brynne. But I’m not going to stand here and lie to you by pretending there’s nothing between us.” He caught her face in his palms. “I’m not going to stand here and let you lie about that either.”
“Zael—” She moaned the instant their mouths met. Her hands flattened against his shoulders, but it wasn’t to push him away. As he took her deeper into his kiss, Brynne’s fingers curled into the loose white linen of his shirt. She clung to him, her body telling him everything her words could not.
He growled low and possessive into her mouth as he pushed his tongue inside to meet hers. Her breath raced hot and heavy. The tips of her fangs grazed his lips as he claimed her hungrily, demanding her surrender. And she gave it to him.
Holy fuck, did she ever.
That kiss they’d been denied a short while ago only made the heat reignite all the hotter now.
Their mouths joined in undeniable need, Zael skimmed his hands over her arms, then traced his fingers along her sides. She shivered as he slid his palms under her blouse and onto the soft, bare skin of her torso.
The intricate lines of her glyphs throbbed beneath his fingertips, warm and pulsing. Unearthly and alive. Their pattern created a tempting, tactile roadmap across her belly and rib cage—one he craved to follow with his tongue.
He wanted to uncover and devour every sweet inch of her body.
But first, he wanted to hear her say the words.
“Now tell me there’s nothing happening between us,” he rasped against her kiss-swollen lips.
As he spoke, Zael reached around her and deftly unfastened her bra. The lacy cups slackened, freeing her naked breasts into his hands. She sighed deeply as he caressed her. Moaned sharply as he rolled the tight beads of her nipples between his fingers.
“Tell me you haven’t been wanting this as much as I have, Brynne.”
Her pleasured gasp tore out of her without resistance, but it wasn’t good enough.
Pushing her shirt and bra out of the way, he bent his head and pulled one rosy nipple into his mouth. Each tug of his tongue and lips made the colors of her dermaglyphs intensify, their patterns churning and transforming in response to her rising desire. Brynne arched against him as he sucked and licked her. Her spine bowed, she plunged her fingers into his hair, her legs trembling beneath her.
The scent of her arousal filled his nostrils. Spicy and sweet. Ethereal and bold. Like earth and heaven combined.
&nb
sp; Damn, she was lovely. Sexy as hell. Although he had bedded many women over his long lifetime, he had never been with a woman who was Breed. He never imagined he could want any woman the way he wanted Brynne.
The cynical part of him tried to dismiss this need he felt for Brynne as nothing more than sexual novelty, just his libido craving a new diversion. But if that had been the case, he never would have denied her back in London. Refusing her had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. And he wasn’t about to let her act as if he was alone in that torment.
“Tell me you want me, Brynne. Tell me what you said to me the other night on that dance floor. Now, when there’s no whisky to hide behind. Nothing but you and me, and the truth between us.”
He skated one hand down the length of her body, into the parted cleft of her thighs. The tiny scrap of black silk that covered her sex was soaked and so hot against Zael’s fingertips he groaned with the need to touch her, to taste her…to brand himself on all of her senses.
He cupped his hand over her mound, one finger slipping beneath her panties to the silken heat of her naked folds. Her sex was slick and lush, her juices coating his fingertips as he caressed her swollen folds and the hardened bud of her clit.
“Tell me now,” he said, “when you can’t take it back later or tell me I’m insane for thinking you feel this need too.”
She whimpered, a tremor shuddering through her as he stroked her wet satin flesh. He teased the tight entrance of her sex, stopping just shy of penetration, despite that her thighs clamped tight around his hand in unspoken demand.
He wanted to hear her admit the truth out loud, once and for all.
“Say it, Brynne. Tell me you haven’t been wanting to feel me inside you from the moment we first saw each other right outside on that terrace last week.”
She made an anguished sound and he glanced up to find her eyes blazing with fiery amber, her Breed pupils narrowed to thin slits. Her fangs gleamed from behind the plush line of her upper lip.
She was beautiful under normal circumstances, but like this, she was primal and otherworldly, so fiercely sexy that she defied any description.