by Lara Adrian
That didn’t stop him from savoring each soft moan that fell from her lips as he pumped into her. Every welcoming arch of her hips to meet his. All of the powerful shudders that swept her strong body as he drove her mercilessly from one orgasm to the next.
He was the worst kind of bastard for being her first, especially when a minefield of half-truths lay between them.
But this was no lie—his desire for her. He hadn’t been able to hide that truth from her. Not from the beginning, and certainly not ever again after tonight.
He couldn’t hold back that need as he rocked into her with intensifying fury, powering into the warm, wet fist of her core.
Her eyes stayed open and fixed on him, no shyness in her fevered gaze as he thrust deeper with every stroke. A jagged sigh sawed from between her parted lips, her fangs gleaming.
Rafe growled, tumbling toward the edge of a steep abyss. He wouldn’t be content to go there alone. Leaning down, he took her mouth in a savage kiss as he sank to the hilt and began a deeper claiming of her body.
“Oh, God,” she moaned into his mouth. “Rafe, I can’t take it.”
He knew she didn’t mean pain. A strangled cry tore from her. Her body jolted beneath him, her hands still clenched like talons on his shoulders.
Rafe kept moving within her, even as her throat erupted with a scream of hard release. He was lost to the erotic pressure of her core wrapped so tightly around him, the rippling contractions milking him. The feel of her was more than he could take too. It wrenched a raw curse from between his teeth and fangs.
Now, his own need demanded to be sated.
Bracing himself on one forearm, he drove deeper and harder into her heat, mesmerized by the look of hunger and ecstasy burning in her eyes.
Her pulse throbbed in the base of her throat, repeatedly drawing his gaze to that hammering beat. Hunger lashed him along with the rolling wave of the release he’d been struggling to prolong.
His blood thirst had been dealt with a couple of nights ago at LaSalle’s party, but the sight of Devony’s vein drumming so near to his mouth was a temptation that rocked him to his marrow.
“Fuck,” he snarled, unprepared for the impulse rising up in him like a tidal wave.
He told himself it was only sex. He’d gone too long without it—not once since he’d been played for a fool by the Opus female who’d mesmerized him like a siren.
He’d denied himself out of punishment, but tonight he was paying the price. Devony was paying an even bigger price. Because as intense as this desire between them was, Rafe couldn’t allow it to be anything more.
His mission was all that mattered to him.
His vengeance against Opus Nostrum, and the redemption he hoped he would finally seize once the smoke was cleared and the battle had been won.
Until then, everything else was simply an obstacle he needed to avoid. Including Devony Winters.
He tried to persuade himself that tonight was a mistake he would need to correct, and what he felt for her now was only a momentary weakness, one that would fade under the harsh light of day. He needed to believe that, because the alternative was unacceptable.
Devony Winters was a temptation he had no time for, and no right to indulge.
But yet he continued to bury himself in the perfect bliss of her body, powerless to stop. He savored every nuance of her response while his own body quickened and a roar exploded from him along with the rush of his staggering release.
And while everything male in him—everything Breed—roared with the need to possess her.
To claim her as his.
CHAPTER 12
Soft footsteps and the faint floral scent of Devony’s shampooed hair alerted Rafe to her presence moments before she came into the open war room of her father’s study the next morning.
Rafe had been awake for hours, already showered and dressed while she slept. As one of the Breed, he didn’t require much sleep. Devony surely didn’t either, but when he left her bedside not long before daybreak, she hadn’t so much as stirred.
He should have left her Darkhaven as soon as he woke.
In truth, what he should have done was pack up her father’s files and her collected intel too, and brought it all directly to the Order. He still should, right after making his overdue call to headquarters to advise them to come and pluck Devony Winters off the dangerous path she was on and place her immediately under the Order’s protection.
Not to mention out of his reach.
Especially after his spectacular dereliction of duty last night.
“Good morning.” She walked up behind where he stood perusing the wall of photos and notes and diagrams. Her breasts pressed against his spine as she wrapped her arms around his waist and rested her chin on his shoulder. “How long have you been down here?”
He gave a slight shrug. “Not that long.”
He pivoted around to face her, if only to extricate himself from the enticing warmth of her embrace. Big mistake. She was even more tempting now that he was looking at her. Evidently fresh from a shower, she wore pink silk pajama shorts and a plain white cotton camisole.
The innocent combination did little to conceal her perky breasts and the sexy dermaglyphs that decorated so much of her gorgeous limbs and curves. Last night he’d tasted nearly every square inch of those limbs and curves.
Today, instead of feeling sated from the hours he’d spent buried deep inside her, he was having a damn hard time pretending he didn’t want to start all over again. Fresh guilt racked him over his disturbing lack of control, then and now.
He scowled. “How are you feeling?”
“Amazing.” Her satisfied smile should have made him feel anything but remorse. “And a little embarrassed, if you want to know the truth. I’ve never thrown myself at a man before. Good thing I didn’t realize what I was missing until last night.”
Rafe grunted, a grin tugging at his mouth against his will. As much as he wanted to regret making love with Devony, it was hard to get there when she was looking at him with a sultry gleam in her eyes. His cock stirred with instant, renewed interest, and his pulse kicked into a stronger tempo.
“I’ve never been someone’s first time before,” he muttered. “I’m sure I could’ve done a lot better by you.”
“That sounds intriguing. What do you have in mind?”
He chuckled. “Don’t ask. You might be shocked to know.”
“Really?” Her bourbon-hued eyes widened in interest. “Try me.”
Fuck. How the hell had they gone from “good morning” to talking about having sex again?
Rafe took a step back and cleared his throat. The document he held in his hand when she came into the room was now crushed in his fist.
Devony noticed it. “Is that one of my activity logs on Cruz’s gang?”
“Yeah.” He’d been combing through her files for the past couple of hours, absorbing every detail he could, and snapping photos of the items that were too extensive to commit to memory.
He learned that she had been embedded with Ricardo Cruz and his gang for nearly two months. Before that, she had infiltrated a different area gang, and still another before that. She had been dogged in her pursuit of information, and during that time had managed to keep a journal of each group’s various criminal jobs, relevant conversations, even minutiae that might otherwise be overlooked.
To say she was thorough was an understatement. And fearless.
He didn’t want to consider how great the loss would be to his mission once he arranged for the Order to come in and remove her from the field.
Rafe set the log down on a worktable in the war room, then strode up to the four walls of intel that reminded him of a general’s plan for a sweeping war campaign. “How long do you believe Cruz has been associating with Judah LaSalle?”
“More than a year, I would say.” She walked up next to him to look at the dossiers and the red strings connecting one individual to another on the wall. “Not long after I met Fish
, he told me about one of the first jobs LaSalle hired them to do. It was a break-in at some energy sciences lab in the Berkshires.”
Rafe nodded without commenting that he likely knew the company in question. He would be willing to wager his right arm that the product being developed there was one of several ultraviolet technologies that fell into Opus Nostrum’s hands earlier this year.
“Did Fish say what they were supposed to steal for LaSalle?”
“No. And they weren’t successful, anyway. Security was too tight, so they had to abort.”
“But LaSalle kept hiring them for other jobs?”
“He needs people like Cruz and his men.”
“Expendable men,” Rafe said.
“Right. Men who will do almost anything—risk almost anything—so long as it comes with a large enough payout. From what I’ve observed, they’re simply boots on the ground for LaSalle, and he’s untouchable so far. Besides, there’s no clear evidence yet that he’s connected to Opus.”
Rafe wasn’t so sure about that. The Berkshires break-in gave him hope that he was on the right track. He was already months ahead in terms of reconnaissance, all thanks to her.
Devony retrieved another one of her logs and handed it to him. “Here’s a list of their most recent jobs for him.”
Rafe scanned the record of random pickups and drops of unstated merchandise, assorted robberies, even a few instances of money laundering.
She pivoted to face him as he reviewed the document, leaning her back against the wall of intel. “I heard Ocho and Axel talking about a big job Cruz has been promising recently. I don’t know what it is yet, but Cruz hasn’t mentioned it to me at all.”
Rafe stared at her, his mind calculating the fastest way to fix that problem. “I need to get one of the guys alone somewhere. I’d only need a few minutes, just long enough to interrogate the son of a bitch under a trance.”
She was shaking her head even before he finished talking. “I’ve done that.”
“You have?” He couldn’t pretend he wasn’t surprised—and impressed. “Which one did you question?”
“All of them, including Cruz.” She arched a brow. “What do you think I’ve been doing with them all these months, just beating them at pool and pretending I don’t despise drinking rot-gut whisky with them?”
He chuckled. “You’re incredible, you know that?”
She smiled. “That’s what you kept telling me last night.”
Yes, it was. He’d meant every word too.
And he had to be some kind of asshole for the way he still craved her, even considering that this time tomorrow she would be in Order custody and wishing she’d never met him.
She was so confident and fearless in normal situations, it was hard for him to reconcile the fact that she had been untouched until a few hours ago.
Until him.
“You are an incredible woman, Devony.” He approached her and gently cupped her face in his hands. “Last night was incredible.”
She nodded, and he couldn’t deny himself the pleasure of one more kiss, even though he cursed himself for taking it from her with a clearer head than he had a few hours ago. And still the feeling of her lips brushing softly against his sent a torrent of jagged desire through his veins.
He groaned and pulled away.
“This isn’t a good idea. I promised myself I wouldn’t do this to you again.”
“Do it to me? I kind of thought we did it together, Rafe. I mean, I may not have a lot of experience in this area, but I thought we did it together really well.”
She came toward him now, her eyes glittering with sparks of amber and the determination he was swiftly finding irresistible.
“I think you and I do a lot of things really well. Too well to keep doing them on our own.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This.” She gestured to the walls around her, all of her work over the past five months. All of the heartache and loss she had channeled into her pursuit of the ones who hurt her. “We want the same thing, don’t we? To see the end of Opus Nostrum. Neither one of us is going to rest until those bastards are no more. So, why don’t we do it together?”
He glanced between them, where she now extended her hand to him. “Together?”
“As a team. As partners. What do you say, Rafe?”
He knew damn well what he should say. That his loyalty was already spoken for. He had a team of partners counting on him back in D.C., as well as the brethren he hoped to rejoin as soon as possible at the Boston Command Center. Until his mission was completed, he didn’t have room for anything, or anyone, else.
He should have told her all of that last night, before he let the situation with her get so far out of his control.
As much as she deserved to know the truth, until he spoke to Lucan Thorne and Sterling Chase, he couldn’t breach the Order’s faith in him by divulging his continued role as a warrior.
And there was a selfish part of him that didn’t want Devony to hate him.
Not last night, and not right now, when she was looking at him with such open trust and affection.
“I’ll have your back and you have mine,” she said, still waiting for his answer. “Do we have a deal?”
Rafe looked at her, swamped by respect and admiration, and something deeper that he didn’t want to name. Of all the things he owed her in the short time since they’d met, this was the one promise he could give her. That regardless of his obligation to the Order, he would do whatever it took to keep her safe. That much he could commit to without reservation, and with full honesty.
“Okay,” he said, the word like sandpaper in his throat as he took her hand in his. “We have a deal, Devony.”
The Order wasn’t going to like it.
He wasn’t convinced that he did, either.
CHAPTER 13
They spent the majority of the day reviewing every piece of information Devony and her father had collected. She loved seeing the way Rafe’s sharp mind worked, his indefatigable thirst for knowledge. He was focused and methodical, and she marveled at his keen ability to spot patterns and connections among even the most obscure bit of data.
He was a gorgeous male, to be sure, but his sexy brain was wreaking havoc on her senses too.
If she thought poring over her work together would help take her mind off all of the other things she wanted to be doing with him, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Every time he reached past her to pick up a photo or arranged a set of documents on their shared worktable, she struggled to resist the urge to lick the tangle of glyphs that tracked down his muscled forearm.
When he asked questions or shared his theories about Opus and the individuals who might have ties to them, she hung on every word, captivated by the sensual cut of his lips and her very vivid memories of all the wicked things his mouth had done to her body.
It was nearly impossible to ignore the steady drum of his pulse when he was seated so close to her. Her Breed senses locked on to that strong beat and the liquid rush of his blood pounding through his veins. Her fangs prickled in her gums, and she couldn’t decide what she wanted more, to have Rafe inside her again, or to sink her sharp canines into the side of his neck.
That latter craving was the last thing she should be thinking about.
Blood bonds were sacred. They were eternal, and not to be entered into on impulse. She could feed all she wanted on human Hosts, but one sip of Rafe’s blood would irrevocably seal her to him for as long as either of them lived.
Why that notion didn’t freeze her in her tracks, she didn’t want to know.
She had never been some starry-eyed girl mooning over the idea of happily-ever-after. God, was that what she was doing now with Rafe? She couldn’t possibly be that foolish. Apparently, losing her virginity had also robbed her of some good sense.
“Where’d we put your father’s cargo traffic log for Conley Terminal?” Rafe asked, jarring her out of her troubled thoughts.
Frowning, he sifted through an open file of handwritten notes.
Since it appeared she was alone in her distraction around him, she really needed to find something else to focus on. Especially since he seemed to have no trouble keeping a professional line drawn between them today.
“This one?” She slid one of the dozens of entries toward him.
He glanced at it only briefly, then shook his head. “I’m looking for the logs from February.”
“Here you go.” Devony retrieved the document in question and handed it to him, watching as he intently studied it.
Her fascination with him unsettled her, especially when it seemed markedly one-sided today. She was getting in over her head with him; she realized that. It wasn’t just the incredible sex that had her stomach doing flips and her veins feeling as if they had absorbed a prolonged jolt of electricity.
It was simply being with Rafe that did that to her. Talking with him. Strategizing with him. Being close enough to feel the warmth and strength of his body, and to see the kindling embers in his aquamarine eyes when he looked at her.
She couldn’t believe she had let herself get entangled so quickly and deeply with a male she knew so precious little about. He was dangerous; she’d seen that firsthand. He could be kind and caring; she had experienced that in the park when he healed her, and again last night when he had treated her with such gentleness—right before he had shown her the true meaning of passion.
But Rafe was also a tormented and angry man, fixated on vengeance against Opus.
Not that she could blame him.
As for the Order turning him out, their loss had become her gain. She had set out on her quest alone after losing her family, never imagining she’d find an ally along the way. There was a part of her that wanted to think she may have found something even more than that in Rafe.
As she watched him, she realized there was so much she wanted to know about him, so much she wanted to understand. She didn’t even know his last name.
Propping her elbow on the table, she watched him leaf through the records. “I just realized there’s something very important you haven’t told me yet.”