Touching her was like a drug. Hell, it pumped a drug straight into his system, if one wanted to consider the mating hormone. She kept him hard and ready for her. She stayed in his thoughts, and lingered around him like a dream he couldn’t escape. One he didn’t want to escape unless he escaped in her arms.
Damn, he should have stolen that last kiss, he thought.
“You’re not going to believe this.”
His eyes opened as Brim stalked into the room, his expression a mask of disbelief but not of danger.
“Bet me,” Del-Rey said and yawned.
Brim moved to the monitor on the wall, picked up the remote and flipped it on.
“Security recordings,” he announced. “Watch this.”
Del-Rey leveled himself up and watched. And watched. A sense of triumph, of satisfaction, sizzled within him at the knowledge that the coya had taken her place.
From the moment she was rushed into Base, she took over like a little general. He could see her in the circle of Breeds, their backs turned to her as she quickly shed her dress and dressed in jeans.
She handled Communications and Security as though she had been born to it. Which, in essence, perhaps she had been. Her father had been a whiz at the labs. Rumor was, Petrov Kobrin as well as his deceased wife were geniuses in their field. One of the reasons Del-Rey had planned their escape so exactingly. And still he had been surprised that so many of them had escaped. Petrov almost had a sixth sense for escape attempts.
As he watched, he saw echoes of her father, saw the intelligence in her eyes, the composed features and the confidence she had seemed to have lost in the weeks after he kidnapped her.
She wasn’t a woman-child any longer. She was a full-grown woman and taking her place. Her voice snapped and Coyote Breeds came to attention. She didn’t harass or harangue; rather, her tone was filled with command.
That added to the fact that she was the coya, the alpha in charge when he was away, and she had done what even Brim had been unable to do—instilled a sense of discipline in them while he was away.
She wasn’t bitchy, she wasn’t confrontational; she was confident, assured. She knew what the hell was needed and she was putting it into effect.
And it made him hard. He was as stiff as a board, and he could feel the fever working inside him, the need that crashed into his system and came close to stealing his breath as he watched her. Those brilliant eyes cool and focused, her expression composed, an aura of command settling on her shoulders as it had in those labs when she ran the administration wing like a young general.
“Son of a bitch,” Del-Rey muttered.
“She knows Sofia’s here too. She has her barred from Command, Security and proprietary areas.”
Del-Rey lifted his head with a sense of foreboding.
“She knows Sofia was given asylum?”
“She knows.”
Did she throw her out? Had Emma or Ashley killed Sofia?
Admittedly, the woman he had once considered a friend was becoming an irritant with her determination to get back into his bed.
“Hell.” He leaned his head back on the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. “Where is Anya now?”
Hopefully far away from him, because if he saw her, if he smelled her, he was going to f**k her. It was that simple.
“Looks like she’s in Communications at the moment.” Something in Brim’s voice warned him.
Del-Rey lifted his head again.
“She seems to have several of your pack leaders in attendance over that issue we’ve trying to resolve with team participation.” Amusement filled his tone. “Our teams, one and two, are working like the good little puppies they are. The rest, it would appear, are being shifted and sorted as any good little general would shift and sort them. So, you going to go play with her?”
Del-Rey snorted. “I’m going to sleep. Let her play. She’s damned good at it while I’m on mission. Maybe I’ll get some rest this time.”
If she was running Base as he knew she could, then he could tell Jonas to shove mission status, and Del-Rey and Brim could take their place in training the Coyote Breed soldiers more effectively and getting them into enforcer status.
That was a priority he had left the other pack leaders in charge of. Unfortunately, they weren’t as well trained themselves as they could have been. They were killers, not investigators or interrogators. Making that switch wasn’t as easy as it could have been if Del-Rey and Brim had been on base to train them.