And he had remained there as she silently folded herself onto her side, tugged the blanket over her shoulders and cried silently until she went to sleep.
She hadn’t sobbed again. She hadn’t cursed him or railed at him. She had retreated into herself, and he had no idea how to pull her back.
He lowered his hands and stared at them. Large hands. The hands of a warrior. A killer. These hands had held her beneath him. His teeth had held her in place. His c**k had knotted hard and deep inside her.
He had never done that. In his entire sexual life, he had never done that to a woman. Why this woman?
He rose to his feet and fixed his jeans before jerking his T-shirt on. He could hear Brim, his second-in-command moving up the steps to the second-floor bedroom. Del-Rey opened the door as the other man reached it.
Concerned light blue eyes stared back at him.
“Vehicles are here,” Brim reported. “Those women downstairs are pissed off though. Watch your back.”
He didn’t blame them. Hell, someone should shoot him.
“Have you contacted Haven?”
“Messages have gone out; no answer,” Brim reported before inhaling with narrowed eyes. “Something isn’t right here, Del-Rey. You took the girl?”
Del-Rey growled. Anya was none of his business.
Brim shook his head. “Her scent has changed, shifted, and yours as well. Something whacked is going on here.”
That was the understatement of the century. He looked back at Anya.
“Get ready to move out,” he told his second-in-command. “Have them send Haven another message. I need their doctor. Now. This can’t happen again, Brim. I don’t know what the hell happened in here, but it can’t happen again.”
He closed the door and moved back to the bed.
“Anya.” He whispered her name and she flinched.
Was it so horrendous, his touch? The greatest pleasure he had known in his life, and now she flinched from him.
“Get dressed. The vehicles are here and we’re moving out. Now. I don’t think you want to risk any attempt I would make to try to dress you myself.”
He tried to make her angry. It didn’t work. She pushed the blankets from her as though the exhaustion that gripped her was painful. He watched as she found her clothes and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
He didn’t hear her sobbing, didn’t hear her crying. But he could smell her, and what he scented clawed at his chest. Somehow, he had managed to douse that fiery flame that was so much a part of her. At this moment, his Anya smelled of defeat. And Del-Rey felt it. For the first time in his life, he knew the taste of defeat.
CHAPTER 2
THREE WEEKS LATER
If there was one thing in Del-Rey’s life that he knew with all certainty, it was himself. He was a Coyote Breed, and as he informed the Breed Ruling Cabinet weeks later, he admitted to some of that Breed’s worst traits. Calculation, manipulation. The ability to look at a situation and instantly size up the roadblocks and dangers inherent in it and find a way over them. He wasn’t a charge-into-the-fray type of guy. He was a slice-their-throat-in-the-dark animal, and he fully admitted to it.
For ten years he had connived to ensure that he and his people were part of the recognized Breed society. He was, after all, a man who liked to be on the winning side. Breed freedom was the winning side. But now, the stakes had been raised. Because of his mate.
Hell, he’d never caught so much as a whiff of information about mating heat between Breeds and their lovers. Who could have imagined that the Breed genetics would turn against them in such a way and would torture their females as it did?
Of course, how else did a Breed have a hope of holding his woman once she learned the animalistic nature that came out with mating heat?
He considered it a trade-off. Rather like the flesh wounds he had ordered for Anya’s family in retaliation for the risks she had taken for six years. If he had walked away and left those men unwounded, then the Genetics Council would have had them killed. It was that simple when a man came right down to it. The Coyote Ghost wasn’t a man of mercy when it came to the enemy. If the Council had suspected he had shown mercy to anyone except the woman he had kidnapped, then they would have instantly suspected those men of having been involved in the plot to free the Breeds from that facility.
Not that Anya had wanted to hear that explanation. She refused to speak to him. Once the Breed doctor Nikki Armani had taken her from the caves, he’d been denied any private contact with her, at her request.
He better understood now why his fury had risen at the thought of the risks she had taken. Why he had put two men on watch at that facility at all times, ensuring that should the Council send soldiers to collect her, she could be rescued.
He’d been too protective of her, and he had known it. His men had known it. They had tread a fine line around him where that girl was concerned for too many years. And the knowledge of the mating heat explained those impulses that Del-Rey would have never risked at any other time. It also explained his awareness, from the first time he had seen her, that in some way, he would betray her.