She moved to the door, hearing Caroline’s fishwife voice screeching at Seth as he pulled her up the back stairs. Dawn followed slowly, stalking, moving with catlike stealth as she followed them. Instinct, honed and sharpened over the years, guided her. The mating heat was blazing inside her, the animal so close to the surface she could taste the wildness in her mouth. And that animal was enraged,
furious that her mate was moving away from her in another woman’s presence. God help her if he took her to his room. If he closed that door to his personal space and took that woman with him. She wouldn’t be able to control the pain or the rage. Even now it was tearing through her with the same gut-wrenching intensity that the arousal had torn through her moments before. She was still wet for him. Her flesh was still screaming in need for his touch and he was opening a door to another room and pushing Caroline into it.
She paused, eyes narrowed as he turned back and saw her. He paused in the doorway, his expression inscrutable, his eyes almost black with hunger.
She could smell his arousal even from the distance that separated them. She could smell it, she could almost taste it, and it was hers. He was hers.
Then he stepped into the room and slammed the door closed behind him as Caroline let out an enraged string of curses.
Dawn walked along the hall, unaware of the predatory movements in her body, the violence that almost shimmered on the air around her.
“Caroline is a bitch, isn’t she?” a male voice responded with amused drollery from a doorway just ahead of her.
Dawn paused as the male stepped out, and barely held back the snarl that pulled at her lips. He smiled, the curve arrogantly placating, holding his hands up as his eyes roved over her with a bit more familiarity than she liked. As though he had the right. He had no right. Dark blond hair was cut close to the scalp, almost hiding the fact that it had begun to gray. Brown eyes, bloodshot and showing the influence of liquor, encouraged amusement, she guessed, in some people. She stood carefully and watched him, like a snake, a rattler poised to strike. Her hand lingered on the butt of her weapon and she growled warningly.
“Yeah, Caroline pisses us all off like that.” He smiled as he leaned a bare shoulder against the wall. He was dressed in slacks and nothing more, his tanned chest and abs flabby and unattractive. “I was getting ready to turn in when I heard her cursing Seth.” He raked his eyes over her again. “She has a reason to be pissed.”
He was flirting. She didn’t belong to him, she belonged to the man who was currently in another woman’s bedroom.
“Would you like a drink?” He indicated his room with a jerk of his head. “My names Jason, Jason Phelps. My old man was a friend of Seth’s father’s. I’m harmless, I promise.”
“And I’m taken,” she told him dangerously, moving slowly to pass him.
“Might want to remind Seth of that pretty soon.” He grinned as though he hadn’t taken offense.
“Caroline can be persuasive.”
Dawn smiled, a baring of her teeth, a flash of the promise of violence. “Don’t worry,” she told him softly.
“He’ll remember.”
The mating hormone was speeding through Seth, just as it was through her. She had felt his discomfort when that bitch had touched him, and again when he had been forced to touch her. No, Caroline wouldn’t be the least bit persuasive. Tonight.
She kept her eyes on the stranger as she passed him, and afterward she kept her senses open, tracking him as she moved to her room.
He wasn’t to be trusted. She couldn’t put her finger on why. Perhaps it was the liquor that he had obviously drank too much of, or the lust he didn’t bother to disguise as he stared at the open edges of her shirt. She didn’t know what it was, but it sent a chill up her spine.
“Hey, wait.”
She turned, pivoting on her heel and almost coming to a crouch as he stepped from his room. Her hand rose hard on the butt of her weapon and she could feel the sense of violence rising inside her now.
“Hey, come on, kid.” He lifted his hands and smiled again, almost laughing at the response as she slowly straightened. “I just wanted to talk. Hell, everyone downstairs is either plastered or talking business. You’re sober. You might not be sane, but hey, none of us are perfect, right?”
“Stay away from me, Jason Phelps,” she told him, rising slowly to her feet. “It’s not a good night.”
“PMS?” He waggled his brows.
“You have no earthly clue,” she drawled coldly before turning again and moving past the room where Seth was obviously trying to placate Caroline.
She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Caroline was raging over his voice. Dawn smiled tightly and moved down the hall, made the turn to the next hallway and moved to her room. As she went to grip the doorknob, she paused. She inhaled slowly then pulled the communicator link from her back pocket and attached the ear bud to her ear.
“We have contact. My room,” she reported into the link as she drew her weapon from her side, locked it in ready and braced it against her side.
“Are you in the room?” Dash’s voice came through the line.
“No.”
“Stay in position. I’m on my way.”