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It could smell her. The scent of her arousal, the scent of her soul. It called to the animal, it made the animal ache, made it hurt. It wanted her. It wanted to hold her, to touch her, to mark her before she was jerked away from it, before anything or anyone could jerk her from its grip and take her from it forever.
But it waited. Waiting was killing it. It had waited so long, forced itself to patience for so many years. Just a little longer. It couldn’t push the man much harder or awareness would cause the man to restrain it once again.
It would not be restrained. While the man slept, the animal awakened. It prowled through the man’s mind then, laid to waste whatever remained of the rusted shackles that had once held it. And it protected the woman. Its woman.
Soon, the man would have no choice but to allow it freedom. Sweet, precious freedom.
How the hell had he ended up sleeping beside Ria’s bedroom door rather than the guest room where he had laid down? Mercury couldn’t make sense of waking there, knowing he had gone to sleep elsewhere. Hell, he never walked in his sleep. Wasn’t it impossible for a Breed to walk in his sleep? Some unwritten law or something? There had to be.
Yet, that was the only explanation. It didn’t matter that the explanation sucked. The fact was, when he awoke, that was where he sat, beside her door. And he felt as though he hadn’t slept a wink. Weariness tugged at him, leaving him frustrated and fraying the edges of his control. Mercury prided himself on his control at all times.
But as he stood in the office Ria insisted on returning to several hours later, he found himself frowning more often, and found the scent of her tempting him further.
He checked his tongue again. He couldn’t stop doing that. There was no sensitivity, no swelling of the glands, none of the signs of mating heat except the inability to think of anything but fucking her.
“You don’t have to stand in here glowering at me all morning,” she informed him as she kept her gaze on the file she had opened before her. “I’m perfectly capable of working alone, you know.”
“I assumed you were.” He wasn’t going anywhere without her.
She lifted her eyes, staring at him without raising her head, her expression less than friendly.
“If you don’t stop glaring, Mercury, I’m going to kick you outside.”
“You can try.” He would actually have preferred it if she had. He was dying to find a reason to get his hands on her.
She blew out an exasperated breath before turning her attention back to the file she was going through. She was too intent on it. He could literally feel her mind working as she read, feel her searching for something.
A frown furrowed her brow and her fingers rubbed at the corner of a page. As though she were working through a puzzle, stroking the paper in an attempt to coax it into giving her the secrets she needed.
Mercury glanced down at the paper, seeing one of the new reports that had been faxed to the Bureau in Washington the week before concerning an attempt to hack into the communications equipment the previous month. It was pretty straightforward, if detailed.
The hacker had managed to infiltrate the government-backed satellite the Breeds used. Sanctuary’s communications experts had traced the link as far as Germany before the hacker ended the connection and disappeared.
“This would have never happened with a Vanderale satellite,” she sighed as she ran her fingers over the first lines of the report. “You would think your government would have a few protocols that actually work.”
Her voice was disparaging.
“The satellite’s an older one. We hadn’t had problems until the hacker managed to get past the first defense by inputting the correct pass code on the first try.”
She shook her head slowly. “That shouldn’t have been possible unless someone gave them the code.”
She continued to stare at the paper as she bit her lip thoughtfully.
“The pass code changes daily,” she murmured.
Her finger ran over another line of printed words.
“Odd,” she said before shaking her head and turning to the next page. “You need a more advanced program.”
“We need funding to pay for it.”
He met her gaze as her eyes lifted slowly, her expression pensive as she watched him.
“You need to update your systems,” she pointed out. “You have millions of dollars’ worth of Vanderale equipment that isn’t even on the market yet. That makes you a security risk. Therefore, a financial risk to the company. Unless there’s something in these files to convince me otherwise, then I can’t in all good conscience suggest a reversal of the decision to halt funding, Mercury.”
Jonas was going to love hearing that.
“Keep looking then,” he grunted. “We’ve managed to counter every attempt at breaking into our files. We’ll catch them soon.”
