Crave the Night: A Midnight Breed Novel (22 page)

AS THE NIGHT CREPT PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO DAWN, NATHAN REALIZED he had never been further outside of his element.

When he’d shown up at Jordana’s apartment, he hadn’t intended a full-scale seduction.

Nor had he intended to use their time in the shower together as a prelude to still another round of mind-blowing, incredible sex.

He sure as hell had not intended to find himself seated in a chair in her bedroom sometime afterward, watching over her as she slept curled up like a kitten in a nest of fluffy sheets and coverlets.

When he’d crawled out of her bed to get dressed so he could head back to the command center, he told himself it was only reasonable for him to stay awhile to ensure she was safe for the night. Once she was comfortable and resting, he would go back where he belonged.

That was hours ago now.

Night was ending soon, and if his own free will wouldn’t drag him away from her, the coming daybreak would.

Damn, how had he allowed himself to get so entangled with this woman?

When had she slipped through his defenses to become something more than a sexual itch he needed to scratch?

How did he imagine this whole thing would continue—worse, how would it ultimately end—when he had nothing to offer a woman like Jordana?

It hadn’t been empty flattery when he told her she deserved something
more, someone better, than him. It had been a warning. One of many he’d issued that didn’t seem to sway her. His dark look or growled threat had always been enough to cower man and Breed alike, but not her.

Jordana Gates was nowhere near as delicate or conservative as she looked. Nothing like the pampered, fawned-upon Darkhaven female he’d often guessed her to be. Right now, he wished like hell she was.

Instead, he’d found her to be strong, unshakable. There was a roaring warrior inside her, buried deep but clawing to get out. She was unlike any woman he’d ever encountered, with her sharp, curious mind and sensitive artist’s soul. It didn’t help that she also had the face of an angel and the all-too-tempting body of a goddess.

He’d never known a need as consuming as the one he felt for this woman. And if it had been confined to purely physical hunger, that would be bad enough.

No, what Jordana stirred in him was something deeper.

She intrigued him. She confronted him, challenged him.

She gentled him, when his entire existence had been built on violence and cold detachment.

Jordana was, in a word, extraordinary.

Nathan’s veins thrummed in agreement, his blood still running hot for her.

He had no right to be the one she gave herself to for the first time. But looking at her sleep so trustingly under his watch, recalling the fevered way she’d responded to him—the open, accepting way she’d submitted to his every desire and demand—made something possessive and primal churn deep inside him.

For a moment, he let himself imagine what it might be like to be one of the golden, privileged males of her world, not the rough enforcer he was now. Not the assassin whose hands had been stained with death from the time he was a seven-year-old child.

He had never looked back in shame on where he’d come from or on what his past had done to him. But as he considered Jordana and the way he still craved more of her, a cold hollow opened in his chest. Regret for the choices that had been taken from him.

Anger and,
dammit
, a sudden, fierce longing for the future that had been denied him even before he’d been conceived in Dragos’s lab.

Useless feelings
.

Weakness he’d been disciplined never to let manifest.

He’d allowed Jordana more than most tonight. Intimacy he’d never granted anyone. Insight into his bleak beginnings and how they shaped him.

He’d let her past a threshold all her own tonight, but she hadn’t seen everything.

He could never permit that.

There were things no one knew, not even the few of his closest friends and squad members in the Order. Not his tenderhearted Breedmate mother, Corinne, or her devoted warrior mate, a formidable Gen One Breed male who’d been a product of the Hunter program decades before Nathan had been born into it.

Nathan had endured things, done things, that were better left inside him.

Locked away.

Memories best held to the dark, which he managed with the same iron control he employed in every other aspect of his life.

Just thinking on the days and nights—the decade and more—of his enslavement under Dragos’s command and his torture at the hands of the Minion assigned as his keeper made Nathan’s skin go taut.

He could still hear the crack of the lash, the jangle of chains … the sharp, olfactory punch of his own spilled blood and viscera.

Even worse was the recollection of the suffering inflicted on others.

Because of him and, ultimately, by him.

Absently, his fingers grazed his throat in search of the ultraviolet collar that had been every Hunter’s shackle from the time he was old enough to crawl. It wasn’t there, of course. It had been gone since the night his mother and her mate tracked him down and rescued him at the age of thirteen.

Christ
.

Twenty years away from his past, yet it still surprised him to reach up and find his neck bare.

And this was what he’d brought into Jordana’s bed, into her life.

If he were a better man, he’d wake her with an apology and hope she could eventually forgive him for taking the gift of her innocence and her trust. No, if he were a better man, he’d have never let her kiss him those few nights ago. A better man would have never let himself crave her the way he did.

Too late.

True to his born-and-bred nature, he’d lived up to the warning he gave Jordana tonight: He pursued. He conquered. And if he were a better man, he’d carry out the rest of his warning and walk out now, never looking back.

Nathan stood up on a low curse, bewildered that his discipline had failed him so badly when it came to Jordana.

The sight of her drew him toward the bed when he tried to command his feet to leave the room. The scent of her pulled a ragged moan out of him, the intoxicating combination of warm skin and soft, sensual woman proving almost too much for him to bear.

Jordana’s bloodscent lingered faintly on the air as well. Nathan’s Breed senses seized upon the elusive fragrance, which called to both the man in him and the beast.

Every Breedmate’s veins carried a unique scent, but Jordana’s natural perfume was beyond unique. It was unearthly, addictive. He found it impossible to describe the mix of exotic spice and crisp, delicate citrus that tickled the back of his throat and made his gums tingle with the presence of his emerging fangs.

All he knew was that he wanted her.

Again.

Still.

Nathan leaned over her in the dark, watching as the banked but burning embers of his transforming eyes illuminated her face. She must have sensed him in her sleep, just enough to coax a quiet little sigh from between her parted lips.

Nathan wanted to taste those lips again. He couldn’t resist sweeping aside an errant tangle of her platinum hair that snaked across the smooth column of her throat. He wanted to press his mouth to the fluttering pulse point below her ear.

He wanted to do more … much more.

He likely would have, if a faint noise outside the bedroom hadn’t jolted him to full attention.

Someone was entering the apartment.

In an instant, desire was doused with concern for Jordana’s safety. Nathan moved with lightning speed, battle instincts switched on and lethal as he flashed out of the bedroom.

He rushed the opening elevator doors, total stealth and menace, prepared to kill.

Carys Chase stood in the center of the lift. She gaped, her eyes going wide.

“Shit,” Nathan hissed. “What the fuck are you doing here at this hour?”

Her brows hiked upward. “I live here. Rune just dropped me off. What the fuck are
you
doing here at this hour, Nathan?”

Damned good question. He backed off on a snarl and raked a hand over his scalp. “I came to check in on Jordana earlier tonight. I had questions about what she and Cassian Gray discussed before he was killed.”

Questions he’d all but neglected to ask, because he was too busy getting naked with her.

Carys’s narrowed look said she suspected as much.

She stepped off the elevator to jab a finger in his chest, her voice a sharp whisper. “You asshole. I can’t believe you would come back here like this. I can’t believe she even let you in, after what you did to her the other night.”

“After what I—”
Fuck. Of course
. Carys had almost certainly been with Jordana at La Notte when he’d come out of the private room with the human female.

Jordana had probably confided the evening’s entire chain of events to her best friend, starting with his near seduction of her in the elevator. A seduction that would have been a certainty if running into Bentley-Squire hadn’t put a damper on Nathan’s plans.

And Jordana hadn’t exactly let Nathan in tonight, but somehow he didn’t think Carys needed to hear that. The Breed female was furious enough with him already. She glared, her blue eyes crackling with sparks of amber outrage.

“We’ve worked things out,” he said, all the explanation he intended to give. What happened between Jordana and him tonight was their business. Not that Carys didn’t have a pretty good idea anyway. “It’s not what you think. I don’t want to see her get hurt. Not by anyone.” He paused, trying to find the words to summarize all the things he felt where Jordana was concerned. “She’s become … important to me. I care about her.”

Carys stared at him for a long moment. “My God. I believe you actually mean that.”

He stepped around the daywalker without further comment. “It’ll be morning soon. I have to go. Look out for her today,” he added. “I’m not convinced she’s safe so long as whoever killed Cass is out there.”

“You think his death could be linked to Reginald Crowe and Opus Nostrum?”

“Could be,” Nathan replied, unable to keep the gravity from his tone.

In his gut, he dreaded that the truth might prove to be something even worse. Until further word came in from the Order in D.C. about Crowe’s apparent mistress and any useful intel she might provide, Nathan wasn’t ruling out anything.

“I will protect Jordana with my life, Carys. No one will do her harm so long as I’m able to keep her safe. But during the daylight hours—”

“Of course.” Her gaze softened with understanding now. “She’s important to me too, Nathan. I’ll make sure she’s all right.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Tell her I’ll be back tonight at sundown to look in on her again. We’ll talk more about Cassian Gray then.”

Carys shook her head. “She won’t be home. The exhibit opens this evening,” she reminded him. “We’ll both be at the museum reception tonight, along with a couple hundred invited guests and visitors.”

Shit
. He didn’t want Jordana out of his sight tonight, let alone out of reach entirely and surrounded by a museum packed to the gills with the general public.

“You could always come as her date,” Carys suggested, a teasing glimmer in her eyes. “Might do you some good to take a night off for once. You might even have fun.”

Fun?
He scoffed at the idea. Even if he did decide to attend the event, fun would be the last thing on his mind. He’d be there for the sole purpose of ensuring Jordana’s safety, making certain every person in the vicinity understood that if they intended harm toward her, they would have to come through him first.

Not that Jordana needed him showing up to disrupt everyone else’s good time. He’d already done that once this week with his team and Carys’s brother. None of the Darkhaven and human elite of Jordana’s social circle would appreciate having the Order present in the room—no doubt that sentiment would be doubled for the soulless killer Nathan’s past had branded him in the public’s eye.

Not gonna happen.

Jordana didn’t need him barging into every aspect of her life, least of all an event she’d obviously poured her heart into for weeks or months. It was her moment to shine; he owed it to her to let her have it without him distracting from her accomplishment.

“Keep your eye on her, Carys. Let me know if you have any cause for concern. Anything seems off, you call me at once. Agreed?”

She gave him a nod. “Yes, of course. But I still say you should come to the museum tonight and look after her yourself.”

Nathan dismissed the idea with a curse as he strode for the waiting elevator car.

At the Order’s global headquarters in Washington, D.C., Lucan Thorne leaned back in his chair in the war room, listening in displeased silence as Sterling Chase briefed him via video feed early that morning on the night’s patrol report out of Boston.

It wasn’t good news.

Then again, good news was something the Order had been coming up short on for too many months to count now. Years, in fact. Hell, more than a couple of decades, if he really wanted to do the math.

Lucan felt a dark rage building in him as he received the details of Cassian Gray’s slaying. A crucial lead lost. Possibly their only viable lead on the race of immortals reputed to be plotting war against the Order and the rest of the planet.

And now that lead had been severed on the edge of a hidden enemy’s blade. An enemy with unknown motives, and still at large.

Damn it all to bloody hell
.

Before his fury had a chance to explode out of him in a roar that would bring his mate, Gabrielle, flying into the room in alarm, Lucan vaulted out of his seat.

He began an agitated pace behind the conference table where Gideon and two of the Order’s district commanders had assembled with Lucan to review current missions and organize further operations. Tegan, chief of the New York City operation, and Hunter, who oversaw the Order’s presence in New Orleans, had remained in D.C. with their mates since the Global Nations Council summit last week.

A peace summit that had nearly resulted in catastrophe.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this was not what I wanted to hear right now,” Lucan said, glancing at Chase’s grim expression on the screen. “We had slim prospects to begin with—just two potential sources of intel on this operation—and now we’re down one before we even get out of the gate. As for the other, the way things are going in
Ireland with Mathias Rowan and his team, we may end up holding nothing but our dicks before this whole thing is over.”