Because a part of her believed so strongly in him that it was willing to give him anything, everything he asked for, and to trust him. Everything inside her wanted that but that shadow of realism that kept reminding her of her child. Kept reminding her that the one person who should have been willing to die for it was its father. The man who had helped destroy it.
She could afford to wait, she told herself. She could afford to trust that if Tanner loved her now, then he would love her later. First, she had to get to Jonas. And time was running out. She had only a few weeks left before everything would be in place to kidnap Callan Lyons’s son. Such a small amount of time to save a child.
CHAPTER 13
He was a good cook.
Scheme laid her fork on her plate and breathed in deeply before picking up her coffee cup and finishing the last of the rich brew he had placed in front of her with the ham, eggs, homemade biscuits and surprisingly good grits.
She had never eaten grits in her life, had turned her nose up at them and laughed if anyone suggested she would eat such a thing. If she managed to survive this little venture, then she would have to learn to make them.
“More coffee?” He lifted the pot suggestively.
“Please.” He filled her cup, and she ignored his gaze as she lifted it and sipped, hiding her pleasure in the taste. His lips curved knowingly though. His damned sense of smell. He could probably smell her pleasure as easily as he could smell her lies.
She inhaled slowly, trying to ignore other things as well as his amusement. Her arousal, her knowledge that he could smell it. The longer she sat there across from him the stronger it was growing. Her ni**les were pressing into the dark violet velvet of her top, her br**sts so swollen they were sensitive.
Between her thighs, her cl*t was engorged, throbbing, and her panties were damp.
She ached for him. Needed him. Never, not even in those first tempestuous months with Chaz, had she been so aroused.
If she survived, doing without Tanner’s touch would be hell. She needed to feel his hands stroking over her body, his lips against her flesh.
She flicked him a look, watching as he leaned back in his chair and drank his coffee silently. He hadn’t said much since she came out of the shower; his lazy tiger personality was fully in effect though. The gleam of amusement in his eyes, the quirk of a smile on his sensual lips. His long, black-and-gold striped hair fell to his shoulders, framing the fallen angel features perfectly.
He really was too good-looking for any woman’s peace of mind.
Her emotions, her attraction to him and this unexplained hunger were getting the best of her. She had to escape. Now. Before he broke her. Before his promises and his insistence that she trust him broke through her woman’s heart.
Today, she had to escape.
“So where’s your brother?” She lifted the cup and sipped again, staring at him over the rim as she attempted to distract his attention from her.
“My brother?” His brow arched perfectly. Damn, she wished she could do that.
“Cabal,” she intoned mockingly. “You two are normally shadows of one another.”
“And what makes you think we’re brothers?” he asked curiously, setting the cup back on the table.
Scheme breathed in deeply. “You forget, the Council had your full file, Tanner, not just the remnants that survived the lab’s explosion. I know you and Cabal are identical twins. You don’t have to lie to me.”
He crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward slowly. “And how extensive are your files?” he asked.
She shrugged easily. “Somehow, the files in the Council’s database were destroyed. Most of what Father has is from memory only, which isn’t extensive. But I remember reading the file when I first took over the job as his assistant.”
His eyes narrowed. “The files were destroyed?”
“You didn’t know?” She arched her brows in question. “I assumed the Breeds had found a way to get a spy into the main headquarters of the Council databases. Most of the files on the Breeds were destroyed several years ago when a virus was implanted into the network. The Council is still trying to recover from that one. I applaud whoever managed it.”
She had managed it, along with Jonas’s help. The headquarters in Sweden were considered impenetrable, their computer and backup networks impossible to infiltrate. But they had done it.
His eyes narrowed. “We had no idea how extensive the damage was.”
“It was catastrophic.” She sighed. “Somehow, someone implanted a virus that corrupted every file with the Breed extension. An explosion at the secondary facility that housed the disc backups took care of those as well. We assumed it was a Breed assault.”
Jonas was even more closemouthed than she had given him credit for. Once he had managed transferring the Council file databases, he had implanted a virus so insidious that it had taken the Council computer geeks months to catch it. By then, every Breed file they possessed, as well as backups, had been corrupted. The explosion at the secondary facility had been a stroke of genius as well.
“So there’s nothing left?” he asked softly.