Edge of Dawn Page 0,30

but you know as well as I do that you’re on the wrong side of this war.”

“I’m trying to prevent a war, Mira.”

“Bullshit!” She gave him a hard shove, hands flat against his chest. “What you’ve done might spark a war.”

Kellan seized her by the wrists, trying not to notice the heat of her skin, the frantic beat of her pulse, ticking against his fingertips. He should have released his grasp on her, he knew that. But now that he had her, now that the staccato tempo of her heartbeat was echoing through him—a rhythm that stirred his own blood and sent it coursing through him at a more rapid pace—there was no letting Mira go.

She looked up at him, her purple eyes intense. “What do you think will happen if word gets out that an important human scientist was abducted while under the Order’s protection? By a former member of our own ranks.”

“No one will know that I was once a warrior,” he insisted. “No one but my team back at the camp is even aware that I—that the man they know as Bowman—is Breed. They’ve kept my secret all this time. They won’t betray my trust.”

She scoffed. “How nice for you, to have that kind of confidence in the people you care about.”

Kellan’s answering curse was low and coarse and furious. Before he could stop himself, he hauled Mira up against him and slashed his mouth across hers in an unforgiving kiss.

At first, she resisted. Her lips were tense beneath his, sealed tight against his assault. The fine muscles in her wrists were taut as cables, delicate, skilled hands fisted where he held them between their pressed bodies. She was still angry with him, still rigid with loathing for everything he’d done to her, everything he’d admitted after so many years of deception.

But Kellan couldn’t release her. And as he deepened his kiss, teasing his tongue along the stubborn seam of her lush mouth, some of the fight finally leached out of her. She parted her lips on a strangled moan, and he pushed inside, drawing her body closer to his, drowning in the taste of her after such a long time without.

His blood was on fire, scorching his veins. His fangs had erupted from his gums, filling his mouth as desire for this female sent heat and hunger into lower parts of his anatomy.

He told himself the kiss meant nothing. That in a few minutes she would remember none of it anyway. As for him, he was doomed. Because, holy Christ, this moment was going to stay with him for the rest of his days.

Doomed, to be sure.

Because in that moment, Kellan understood that scrubbing Mira was only going to postpone greater problems now that Ackmeyer was in his custody. What she’d said earlier tonight was the truth: If human law enforcement didn’t catch up to him soon enough, the Order certainly would.

He should have known.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen it coming a long time ago.

Kellan broke away from her kiss with a savage, inhuman growl. When he spoke, his voice was gravel in his throat, rough from wanting and the sharp-edged reality of just how badly he’d screwed both their lives. “Come with me.”

Mira rubbed her damp, reddened lips. Her eyes looked equally bruised, impossibly large, regarding him with a mix of longing and regret. “Time to be rid of me already again, is it?”

“Change of plans,” he snarled. He took a firmer hold on her hand and led her back to the Jeep. “You won’t be going anywhere after all.”

7

AN HOUR LATER, MIRA’S LIPS WERE STILL TINGLING AND alive from Kellan’s uninvited kiss. Her blood was still thrumming in her veins, hot from anger and something equally heated that she refused to acknowledge. She tried to rub away the lingering memory of his mouth on hers as Kellan drove her south of Boston, through the city of New Bedford, continuing toward a flat, lightless promontory that jutted into the Atlantic on three sides.

“I know this place,” she murmured as the Jeep rolled over the cracked, untended asphalt.

The road led to the entrance of what had once been a park in the days before First Dawn and the wars that followed. Long before that, during another war, the broad expanse of overgrown land and the squatty, elongated D-shape structure at the far end of it had served as a human military facility. Mira peered at the battered, bullet-scarred sign that had once welcomed visitors to