“I usually shower first.” Actually, she usually ate a sandwich as she hunched over her computer and fought with the files she had stolen through the day. Did she even have anything for dinner? She thought fast.
“Why don’t you order something from the pizza place in town while I shower? I’ll watch for the delivery guy while you shower.”
Well, of course that couldn’t work; she knew it the minute his brows lowered.
“I’ll hurry and shower before he gets here,” he said a second later. “Pizza sounds good. What do you want on yours?” He headed for the phone.
“Everything and the kitchen sink.” She shrugged. “Just get what you like; I’ll eat pizza just about any way it comes.”
He nodded as he picked up the phone and punched in the numbers efficiently.
Damn, she was such a sucker. Turning on her heel, she stalked to the bedroom, wondering if she could have possibly made a bigger mistake. She had work to do; she didn’t have time to entertain a Breed grieving for a mate he would never have.
Who cared how lonely he was-it wasn’t as though she could do anything about it. The man was lonely for something that didn’t exist, for a mate that had died long ago. That wasn’t her problem and she couldn’t fix it. She would have if she could, but she couldn’t bring back the dead, as Dane often reminded her.
But she could wish..
She was fucked.
Mercury made the vow the minute she stepped from her bedroom with all those nut brown waves of silky hair falling to the middle of her back. She was dressed in light gray cotton pants, pajama bottoms perhaps, or lounging pants, he thought he might have heard Merinus call them. Wide-legged and damned near shapeless. He hated them.
With it, she wore a thigh-long gray jersey, just as damned shapeless as the pants. God, he hoped she at least had sexy underwear. If she didn’t, he was going to buy her some. Lots of it. Red and black, sinful silk and lace.
“Would you please stop looking at me like that.” A flush covered her face again. It was almost innocent.
“Like what?” He actually hadn’t been aware that he was staring at her in any way unusual.
“As though you’re undressing me,” she retorted, stalking to the kitchen and pulling two beers from the fridge. “A month in your company and it’s a wonder I have any semblance of modesty at all.”
He grinned at her. “What color is your underwear?”
She stared back at him, her eyes rounded in shock, her expression outraged. “That is none of your business. Do I ask you about your underwear?”
He glanced down at the jeans he had changed into.
“No underwear. Sorry. We didn’t get into the habit of wearing those at the labs.”
She paused in the process of setting the beers on the table, as he crossed his arms over his chest and waited.
“TMI,” she finally muttered. “That’s just TMI.”
Too much information. He nodded. Okay, he understood that, Cassie Sinclair was always throwing that one out.
“Just in case you were wondering.” He grinned.
“Well, I wasn’t.”
The soft scent of a lie was easy to detect. His grin widened. Sometimes, he just loved being a Breed.
“Drink your beer and leave me alone. You’re really aggravating, do you know that? Didn’t Jonas tell me you were the quiet Breed?”
He arched his brow as he took the beer and deftly twisted the cap off.
“Well, I don’t exactly wonder about Jonas’s underwear,” he chuckled. “So there’s not a lot to talk about there.”
“Well, you can stop wondering about mine.” If her face could have gotten pinker, it did.
He sat down at the table, leaned back in his chair and stared back at her thoughtfully.
“You want me. I can smell it. Why deny it?”
“And you think wanting is all that matters?” she asked as she turned and moved to the cabinets for plates. “There’s more to life than just wanting, Mercury.”
She sat the plates on the table before facing him again, her expression earnest.
“Is wanting you so bad?”
No, wanting him was so bad, Ria thought to herself as she stared at him, amazed at the relaxed, sensual animal he had become, as though changing from the enforcer’s uniform into jeans and a T-shirt had somehow altered his entire personality.
“It depends on what the want is,” she sighed, then stared back at him intently. “Let’s be honest here. There’s not a chance of anything between us besides a one-night stand or a fly-by-night affair. I don’t want either of those.”
“You want love.” He nodded slowly, as though he could possibly understand that. “A commitment.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” She opened her own beer and took a quick drink. She needed something to settle her nerves.
“There’s nothing wrong with it, Ria,” he answered softly. “But what makes you automatically think I’m not capable of caring for you? Not that I’m saying I do.” He suddenly frowned. “But I’m not incapable of it just because I’m a Breed.”
“No, because you’ve already mated. I’ve read your file, Mercury. Any other woman will always be second best,” Ria answered, keeping her voice soft, quiet. “I don’t do second best real well.”
As she met his gaze, his eyes darkened and narrowed, chilling in their appraisal.
“Mating is a chemical reaction,” he snapped. “It doesn’t mean I’m dead or that my emotions were lobotomized.”
“No, it means sex will always be just that, sex.”
“And there’s something wrong with that?” he growled. He really growled. It wasn’t just a deeper tone as it was with some men, it was an actual rumble of sound, a rough, graveled scraping of his voice.
“It’s all according to your point of view.” She sipped at the beer again, using it to distract herself from the fierce frown on his face. “For me, sex has to mean more. I have to feel more than just arousal.” And she had been feeling more than just that, for this Breed, for far too many weeks now.
“You’ve never had a one-night stand?”
“Not by choice,” she retorted. “Look, this isn’t a debate. It’s my choice. I choose not to have sex with you. See why I didn’t want you here? Why I preferred a woman to stay with me rather than you? I knew you would harass me over this.”
“Harass you?” He came out of his seat, the relaxed facade dropping in the blink of an eye. “I have yet to harass you. I simply want answers.”
“Tell it to someone who will believe you.” She rolled her eyes at the declaration. “Come on, Merc. You want sex. And you don’t care what you have to do to get me in bed, you’ll do it. Forget how it might hurt me, or how it will affect how I do my job.” She stopped then, her eyes narrowing. “Or is that the point? Are you trying to influence my decision where the Breed funding is concerned?”
Anger snapped in his eyes and it wasn’t a comfortable sight. But neither was the heartache awaiting her. She needed to belong. She could never belong to this man because he had already lost that part of himself that could belong to a woman.
“Do I look like Jonas’s fucking gigolo?” he snarled.
Ria propped her hand on her hip as she set the beer down with a thump and faced him.
“Oh, just go ahead and pretend he’s not above it,” she charged. “It wouldn’t be the first time one of his enforcers has seduced a mark to get what Jonas wanted. He’s cold, calculating and manipulative. And he lets nothing and no one stand in the way of what he wants. Go ahead and deny it.”
Jonas is his father’s son, Dane liked to drawl in amusement. Jonas Wyatt was created from sperm collected from Leo before his escape from the labs a century before. From the reports she had read on the director of Breed affairs, he possibly had all of Leo’s worst traits. He was damned scary.