According to her, she had been at a spa in Broken Butte, New Mexico.
The local sheriff who had mated Jonas’s sister, and a deputy, the sheriff’s cousin who had mated another Breed, had checked into the story and reported back to Rule, mere minutes ago, that Gypsy had never been to that spa in Broken Butte. They knew, because it was no more than a front for the Bureau of Breed Affairs and every customer that came through its doors was completely vetted.
But who said she came in as a customer?
Rule refrained from shaking his head in frustrated disgust.
Gypsy was going to have to be more careful if she intended to keep doing these little odd jobs for one of her bosses, Cullen Maverick.
She was going to end up getting her ass burned at this rate. And if her ass got blistered, then his would be fried.
That thought and any other fled his brain, though, as her eyes met his and locked for heated seconds, and he swore the hunger that raged inside her began to burn him hotter.
Amid a floor filled with seductive, graceful women, sexual invitation gleaming in their eyes—eyes without the distance, without the reserve that shimmered in the very air around her, she stood apart with inexplicable awareness.
She gave herself to the music and that was all she was giving herself to, her gaze seemed to warn.
She didn’t give herself to the men who attempted to draw her to them. She didn’t give herself to the women who would have rubbed against her in sensual abandon. Nor did she give herself to the drunkenness or the drugs that flowed so freely.
She might be as secretive as hell, but purity flowed from her, even as he felt the dark, rich desire trapped within her—like a living flame.
She burned inside.
Rule swore he could see the flame burning there in the center of her eyes. Not the same flame easily glimpsed in a Breed’s or animal’s eyes in a certain light. This was a flame barely contained, burning from the center of the soul, trapped, aching to be released.
A woman aching to be touched.
“See what I see?” Dane Vanderale, the legitimate hybrid son to the first Leo and Rule’s biggest headache, drawled through the comm link, the South African accent mocking. “She’s avoiding you, Breaker.”
“I see her,” Rule stated into the mic that curled from the communications link set in his ear. “Find out where she’s been yet?”
“She says the spa, but your sources say she wasn’t there,” Dane reminded him.
“Dammit, Dane, that’s not what I want to hear,” Rule growled.
Dane chuckled, the low, knowing sound grating on Rule’s nerves.
“Best watch the hormones, old friend. What’s that first rule? Run, don’t walk, stumble or hesitate. Run hell for leather at first sign of Mating Heat? What else would you call such infatuation for one woman? If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was your drug.”
The accented drawl of amusement had Rule’s teeth gritting in irritation.
“I think I’d know by now,” he grunted.
He’d been close enough to her in the past years that her scent was as familiar to him as his own. And it had never changed since it had shifted from girl to woman the year she turned eighteen.
“So that’s why you just keep watching the hell out of each other, huh?” Dane chuckled. “Tell me there, fraidy cat, when are you going to get up the nerve to tell the pretty girl hello tonight instead of stalking her like some perv as you have the past weeks?”
He’d told her hello several times in the past weeks. She’d pretended to ignore him as often as possible, though he was well aware she knew exactly where he was every second that he was in her vicinity.
She was damned wary around him, watching him carefully, almost suspiciously, and making his dick harder for the very fact that she was keeping herself so damned aloof.
Letting Dane rile him would be foolish at this point, though. The other man lived to piss off other Breeds.
Rule often thought he might even have a death wish.
“Let’s not be a smart-ass tonight, Junior,” Rule growled, using the insulting nickname Dane’s father, the Leo, used whenever he became pissed with his son. “Now, answer the f**king question before I have to send your pelt to Daddy with my apologies for finally growing sick of your ignorance.”
Dane growled, the sound far too close to the sound of the animal rather than the hybrid Rule knew him to be.