Break the Day - Lara Adrian Page 0,27
she could trust him to keep this secret too. She had already given him one weapon to use against her. She couldn’t hand him another.
Most certainly not this one.
“I said I want you to leave. Now.” She punctuated the demand with a mental shove against his muscular bulk. He skated backward a pace on his heels.
At twice her size and girded in masculine sinew, Rafe was a formidable Breed male. But as a daywalking female, she was nearly an equal match for him. If he thought he could come in here and make her cower, he was going to be in for a fight.
One dark blond brow arched and he stepped forward, closing even more distance between them. “Devony, all you have to do is talk to me. Trust me.”
She pushed him back again, less gently this time.
Her heart hammered, and not only from the anger that was coursing through her veins. It was all she could do not to lick her lips as he calmly, boldly, took a step closer, unfazed by her attack.
“It doesn’t have to be like this between us,” he said, his deep voice vibrating through her and making the rapid beat of her pulse throb with a heavy anticipation. “We’re not enemies, remember?”
“We’re sure as hell not friends,” she shot back.
Her breast heaved as the air between her and this dangerous Breed male seemed to electrify. That unbearable tension only mounted as he closed the distance even more.
“We’re not anything else, either. Isn’t that what you said tonight, Rafe? Isn’t that what you want?”
He exhaled a short breath. A look of regret swept over his handsome face, and something even more unsettling to her.
Desire.
There was no mistaking it, even with her limited experience.
And what terrified her now was just how intensely he aroused her too.
In a wave of stark panic, she tried to shove him back again, this time with her hands.
He caught them in his grasp, his reflexes lightning-fast, unerring. His hold on her was impossibly strong.
Infinitely tender.
His gaze pierced her, intense and smoldering. Slowly, he lowered her fisted hands between them. Then he reached up and caressed her cheek.
Before she took another breath, he bent his head toward hers and kissed her. Not the swift, aggressive claiming of his first kiss back at Ocho’s garage, but a gentle coaxing that wrung a helpless moan from somewhere deep inside her. She couldn’t fight the sweet onslaught of arousal that spiraled through her. She didn’t want to fight it.
His tongue slid along the seam of her mouth and she opened to him, inhaling his spice-and-leather scent and melting into the blaze of heat that was igniting between them.
She wanted more.
She wanted it so badly she trembled with need for him.
He drew back on a muttered curse. “Christ. You’re right, I shouldn’t be here. This was a mistake. I should’ve known that and yet—”
He stopped mid-sentence, his molten gaze drawn to a point somewhere over her shoulder. To something inside her father’s old study.
Rafe’s brow furrowed. “That family photograph on the desk. The man in the picture with you . . . that’s Roland Winters.” He swung a hard look at her now, suspicious. “I was introduced to him at a peace summit in D.C. with the Order earlier this year. He was an administrative director with JUSTIS in the London office going on two decades, as I recall.”
Devony shrank back, shifting so that she blocked the open entrance to the room. But it was too late to prevent Rafe from seeing more than he should have. Too late to keep him from understanding her pain and loss now too.
His frown deepened as his gaze returned to her. “Roland Winters died in that city five months ago. He, along with upwards of a hundred other JUSTIS agents and officials who were in the London headquarters when it was attacked. Jesus, Devony. You lost your father in that bombing?”
“I lost everyone.” She could hardly swallow past the grief that had maintained a stranglehold on her ever since that awful night. “My father. My mother. My brother. They all worked for JUSTIS. My mom and Harrison were both in the undercover units. Everyone had been called in for a meeting at the London office when it was leveled by the explosion.”
His breath left him on a slow, heavy sigh. “Shit. And where were you?” he asked gently.
“Here in Boston. I had been attending arts university for the last two years. When the news broke, I was in the