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He shifted in his chair, still not as used to the jeans as he was to the uniform, and restrained the anger still burning inside him.
Damn Ely. What the hell was she trying to do to him? The betrayal stuck in his throat until he couldn’t figure out how to displace it. He had considered her a friend, and perhaps that had been his mistake. Making friends hadn’t been easy, even here in Sanctuary. He reminded the other Breeds too much of where they came from, and most non-Breeds stared at him in fascinated fear, frightened to come too close.
Too often he had felt as though he were on the outside looking in, searching for a warmth that didn’t exist and that he didn’t know how to name. A place to exist perhaps.
He stared at his hands where he gripped the magazine. At the claws his nails invariably grew into. They were thicker than most, with the slightest curve. Keeping them trimmed and honed to a nonlethal appearance was an exacting job. If left alone, they could become claws in the truest sense.
He almost flexed them, almost remembered the feel of how easily those nails and the denser, harder strength of his bones had allowed his hand to punch into a Coyote Breed’s chest and rip out his heart.
It hadn’t been a job. It had been so easy. The rage that had spurred him sometimes caused him to cringe when he thought of it. And now, sitting across from Ria, feeling the wildness that had once been so much a part of him stretching inside him, he felt a moment’s concern.
Once, too long ago, he had been a man comfortable with the creature he was. The animal and the human coexisted, if not in harmony, in a state of truce. Now the animal was gone, but the wildness was building. He could feel it building, stretching out, its attention focused on the woman sitting so silently across the room.
She wasn’t concentrating on those files any more than he was concentrating on the magazine. The tension building between them was thick, heated.
“Are you frightened of me now?” He flipped the page of the magazine as he spoke, pretending to read. Knowing he wasn’t and that he wouldn’t be.
“Do I have a reason to be frightened of you now?” She turned one of the papers she was likely not reading before checking it against something she had pulled up on the computer.
He looked at his hands again, wondering if they could actually harm something so fragile, so sweet as the woman sitting across from him.
“And if I told you I didn’t know?” He looked up from the magazine, meeting her gaze as her head lifted in surprise.
“Then I would say you’re allowing your good doctor to mess with your head a bit much, wouldn’t you?” That little hint of an accent intrigued him more than it should have and made him harder than he had ever been in his life.
Jeans confined his erection. The mission uniform had allowed it room for comfort, even if it didn’t hide it. Of course, he’d never had a problem controlling the surge of lust that engorged his cock and tightened his balls. Until Ria. From the moment he had first drawn her scent into him, he had known she would be a problem to his hard-won sense of control.
He shifted in his chair, hoping to relieve the pressure.
“Why did they take your uniform?” She lowered her head once again, asking the question as though it wasn’t a concern between of the two of them.
“I’m a risk to the community now.” He shrugged. “If I rip someone’s heart from their chest, then they don’t want me doing it while wearing an insignia of the Breed community.” His lips twisted mockingly.
“And this is something you do on a daily basis? Rip out hearts?” Her lips almost twitched, and he could have sworn he sensed amusement in the movement.
“I usually wait for permission to do that,” he told her laconically. “We were taught a few manners in those labs. My trainer always felt it polite to make certain I was ripping out the right heart.”
“Very interesting.” She nodded. “But you’re speaking to me, and distracting me.”
He was going to distract her. He looked at the camera, wondering how long it was going to take the techs in the control room to convince someone to remove that sweater.
He glanced at the watch on his wrist. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be much longer. There wasn’t enough time to give in to the arousal building inside him, and he didn’t know how much longer he could wait to taste her.
She was all buttoned up; the sleeveless top she wore wasn’t as bulky as the clothes she normally worked in, and the soft creamy color was incredibly flattering to the breasts beneath it.
She was wearing another of those damned skirts too. Black this time with a little flare at the knees. A tulip skirt Cassie had once called it when she was trying to convince her mother to buy one. Though that one had been much shorter. For some reason Cassie Sinclair thought Mercury made the perfect escort for their shopping trips.
He had to admit, the longer length on Ria was sexy as hell. The more skin she hid, the more he found himself wanting to see.
The last thing he needed right now was to have an enforcer, or Ely, come into the room while he had her bent over a table again.
He pulled at the shoulder of the T-shirt he wore. Damn, he missed his uniform. And maybe he even missed the sense of acceptance that uniform had given him. A place to belong, no matter how slight.
He didn’t frown, he didn’t allow his expression to shift, but the betrayal he could feel inside him fucking ached to the center of his bones. He’d never hurt anyone that didn’t deserve it. He always controlled his strength, he always controlled his actions, because he knew his appearance was less than comfortable to everyone around him.
He frightened his fellow Breeds, with the exception of a very few. He frightened the humans that came in contact with him, and he was very much aware his missions were most always those that involved a limited presence among the non-Breeds.
As the tabloids reported each time their journalists caught sight of him, he was the vision that followed children and adults alike into their nightmares.
