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“Seth, I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself.” But she couldn’t find the source of unease pulling at her. She could feel it, like a lost word on the tip of her tongue.
She looked around again, ignoring Jason Phelps as he tried to get her attention, just as she ignored several other men who tried to catch her eye.
“Dawn, I’m a bigger boy and I’m going to spank your ass if you keep up the silent act.”
Her lips twitched. “I’ll be sure to pretend I don’t like it. I’d hate to spoil all your fun.”
Sizzling, heated lust filled the air then. It swirled around her, flowing from Seth and seeming to sink inside her flesh as his fingers pressed a little tighter against her lower back.
She could still remember his voice, the scent of his need, the expression on his face when h
e told her she didn’t have to return to Sanctuary. As though a part of him had been as hesitant as she was to tip the balance of the tenuous relationship developing between them.
She could feel something else moving within her though. A welling panic that wasn’t pushed aside as easily as it had once been. A feeling of danger that she couldn’t put her finger on.
“Dash, you’re growling.”
Dawn looked up at Dash, to realize he was doing just that as Cassie stepped out on the dance floor with one of the young men who had attended the house party with his parents.
“He’s twenty-five,” Dash snarled. “He drinks too much and he drives too fast. I read his file and he has no business dancing with her.”
Elizabeth snorted and rolled her eyes.
“He’s a good boy feeling his oats,” Seth countered. “I’ve known Benjamin since he was a child. She’s in safe hands.”
“As long as she doesn’t get in a car with him,” Dash snapped.
“It’s a small island, Dash,” Seth chuckled. “We don’t keep cars, only a few ATVs.”
As they talked, Dawn turned and watched the crowd again. She could still feel it, those eyes watching her, malevolent, filled with an evil promise.
She had felt those eyes before. Cowering in a cage, terrified. She was hungry and she was weak. The labs were too cold again. They did that when they wanted to punish the young Breeds. Put them in separate cages, naked, hungry, and let the air grow cold.
She could feel the cold around her. It settled in her bones and she had to force her teeth not to rattle. And she knew the eyes were watching. Watching all of them. The mirrors across the room weren’t mirrors, they were the eyes from hell.
She shuddered at the thought, blinking desperately as she tried to push it back. She didn’t want to remember the labs. She didn’t want to remember that scared, frightened child, and she sure as hell didn’t want to remember the horror of it.
She stared past the guests to the open French doors and the night beyond. She should be there, she thought. Watching for danger, sliding through the shadows, stalking the bastard that waited for her. She could feel the animal side of her wakening, stretching, preparing for battle.
“Dawn. Is everything okay?” She flinched as Elizabeth whispered the words close to her ear.
Dawn turned and met her friend’s concerned blue eyes. Elizabeth, like all Breed mates, seemed frozen in time. She hadn’t aged a day since Dash had mated with her, though she took the effort to fake a few lines here and there in her otherwise creamy, clear complexion.
“I’m fine.” She knew her smile was tight. “Why?”
“You were growling, sweetheart, and it wasn’t a sound I thought you would want Seth to hear.”
In other words, it was primal, angry. A warning to the enemy that she was coming, that he couldn’t avoid her. Her nails bit into her purse, the feel of her gun beneath them a comfort.
“Dawn, what’s out there?” Elizabeth asked as she turned back to the room, staring over the crowd, then back to the doors.
“The past,” she said softly, hoping she was right. “Just the past.”
She turned back to Elizabeth and inhaled deeply, aware of Seth turning to her, as though he had sensed her uneasiness, or the evil stalking them.
“You owe me a dance,” she told him, trying to tamp back the panic.
It was the effect of the memories moving in, she told herself. She had never felt this way, in ten years of training and missions, she had never known such primal, instinctive fear.
