was diffused completely by her dancing aqua eyes and sunny smile. She stuck out her mitten-covered hand. "Hi, I'm Tess."
Corinne briefly clasped the handful of warm wool and gave a small nod of greeting. "Nice to meet you."
"Alex," said the other Breedmate, offering her hand and a welcoming smile as well. "I can't even tell you what a relief it is to know that you and the others Dragos had taken are safe now, Corinne."
She nodded in response. "I am grateful to you all, much more than words can ever say."
"And tomorrow night Corinne is going home," Gabrielle added.
"Tomorrow?" Alex glanced over in question. "Does that mean Brock and Jenna are on their way back from Alaska now?"
"They're still delayed by the snowstorms," Gabrielle replied. "But Hunter has volunteered to escort Corinne to Detroit in Brock's place."
In the lengthening silence that seemed to fall over the women of the Order, Corinne relived the moment that the immense, eerily unreadable warrior had blurted his offer to take her home. She hadn't expected it from him, certainly. He hadn't seemed the charitable sort, not even on the night of her rescue, when he and a few other warriors from the Order had driven Dragos's freed captives to the Darkhaven in Rhode Island.
Hunter had been hard to miss that night. With his chiseled, forbidding features and sixand-a-half-foot frame of bulky muscle, he was the kind of male who dominated any room he entered without even trying. While the hours after the rescue had been ripe with emotion for everyone involved, Hunter had been the quiet one, the one who kept to the periphery and merely carried out his tasks in stoic efficiency.
Later that night, one of the other women had whispered that she'd overheard Andreas and Claire talking privately about Hunter. She'd said it sounded as though he had once - not long ago - been allied in some way with Dragos. Corinne could hardly pretend that she hadn't recognized the air of danger that surrounded the mysterious warrior. She couldn't deny that the thought of being near him unnerved her, then and now.
It didn't take much to picture him as he had been in the compound a short while ago, with his bloodstained combat clothing and the arsenal of terrible weapons that he wore circled around his slim waist. It took far less effort to recall the striking golden color of his eyes and the way his hawklike stare had locked on her the instant he saw her.
Why she had caught his attention so thoroughly, she couldn't begin to guess. All she knew was she'd felt trapped by his penetrating gaze, scrutinized in a way that had made her feel both enlivened and exposed.
Even now her skin tingled with the remembered awareness of him.
She shivered with the feeling, though her body was nothing close to cold within the insulating folds of her coat. Nevertheless, she tried to rub away the sensation, running her hands up and down her arms to dispel the peculiar, heated prickle of her nerve endings.
"Hunter!" Without warning, little Mira leapt up from her game in the snow and launched into a headlong run toward the terrace patio. "Hunter, come out with us!"
Corinne pivoted her head along with the other women, following Mira's excited dash right past and up to the set of open French doors that looked out over the grounds from the mansion behind them.
Hunter stood just inside those framed glass doors.
He was no longer dressed in gore-covered head-to-toe black, but recently showered, wearing loose-fitting denim jeans and an untucked white button-down shirt that hinted at the elaborate pattern of the dermaglyphs that covered his chest and torso. His big feet were bare despite the time of year, and the short damp spikes of his blond hair hung limply over his brow. And he was studying her again ... studying her still. How long had he been standing there?
Corinne tried to look away from him, but his piercing golden eyes would not release her. His gaze didn't move from Corinne to acknowledge the approaching child until the last moment, as Mira giddily threw herself into his strong arms.
He lifted her effortlessly and held her aloft in the crook of his left elbow, listening as the little girl chattered animatedly about all of her day's adventures. Corinne could hardly hear what he said, but it was obvious that he favored the child, holding his voice to low, indulgent tones. In the few moments that he conversed with her,