She stifled a groan.
The Commander was hot as hell. He did things to her libido that should be outlawed. That didn’t mean she had time for this. No matter how eager certain other parties were for her to establish a closer, though nonsexual, relationship with him.
This was just uncalled for, though. She was tired. She wanted to sleep.
“Cullen . . .”
“Don’t Cullen me.” As he jackknifed in his seat, his glare took on a whole new meaning as pure fury glittered in his eyes and deepened his voice. “Get it done. Tonight. Or kiss this little side job of yours good-bye. You’ll definitely be relegated to the damned phones, on midnight shift, for the next year if it’s not taken care of. Now.”
Fuck.
She really wanted to sleep tonight.
But she really, really liked her little side job too, dammit.
“Fine, tonight,” she muttered, wondering what the hell had happened to her little world while she was gone. “But I don’t see how any of this is my damned fault. I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re not five,” he pointed out sarcastically.
“Then stop reminding me of what it felt like to be blamed when I didn’t do it,” she informed him pointedly. “I was hoping to sleep tonight.”
“Sleep after you get that damned Breed off your ass.”
“I didn’t invite him to get on it, Cullen,” she protested, heading to the door.
“You did something,” he grumbled. “Whatever you did, fix it. Reject him, kiss him, fuck him, I don’t give a shit and don’t want to know about it. But make him go away.”
She slammed the door on the last order.
Dammit, she really wanted to sleep.
...
Sometimes, it just didn’t pay a man or a Breed to make a decision, Rule decided as he lounged against the bar at yet another honky-tonk on the list of known clubs Gypsy often found herself at.
Knowing he’d finally caught up with her hadn’t helped his mood, or his irritation. She’d eluded him for a week and he was growing tired of waiting for her to get her ass back to town.
Rule was beginning to think he was going to have to actually chase her down if he was ever going to see her again.
A week between sightings was too damned long a wait, especially once he’d made up his mind to have her.
After going without the sight of her the past week, he was as antsy as an addict needing a fix and wondering if he should worry about that reaction.
And that just pissed him off.
Maybe he just had an addictive personality, he thought as he watched her and several of her friends stroll purposely onto the dance floor.
She was preparing to dance, and God bless her heart but she could turn grown men into slavering animals hungry to fuck whenever she danced.
The smell of their lust never failed to cause him to glower at any male unlucky enough to catch his gaze.
Maybe he was just too damned used to finding her whenever he wanted to.
Hell, he’d watched her practically grow up.
He couldn’t count the times he’d slipped to Window Rock in the past nine years to check on the broken, traumatized child who had fought so valiantly against those Coyotes so long ago.
And he had to say, she’d grown into a hell of a woman.
She was wary and secretive, and the effects of the night her brother died were often apparent in her too-serious gaze.
But she’d turned into a hell of a beauty.
And he was a sucker for a woman in black leather too.
Miss Gypsy Rum McQuade had adopted a penchant for black leather just after her eighteenth birthday.
And she’d been driving him crazy just as long too.
Watching the dainty form, leather boots over her knees, short black leather skirt clinging to her hips and luscious ass, a black leather vest that flashed her bronzed belly and the upper curves of her full breasts, he couldn’t help but grin.
He might have been drooling a little, and damn he hoped Dane Vanderale hadn’t caught him.
But hell, that woman was built to tempt, seduce and deliver, all in one package.
Rule decided he was the Breed to collect on it too.
He was damned sure tired of all that lush, pretty body going unclaimed by him.
Jaw clenching, his cock throbbing, he watched as she moved.
Lifting her arms and moving her hips, her legs shifting gracefully in four-inch heels, her expression becoming exotic, erotic. Sexy enough to make a Breed have to force himself not to pant.
Long, long straight hair, so dark it was almost black and framing a dusky face so delicate he couldn’t stop the hard-on straining the black mission pants he wore. Graceful and witchy, sensual and burning with a hidden fire, she made him want to burn with her, burn in her.
Fluid and graceful, hips and shoulders swaying, jade green eyes gleamed teasingly, long thick lashes at half-mast. Those eyes glittered with wicked promise—and cool distance.
A distance she’d used against him more than once in the past two months since Jonas had brought his investigation to Window Rock.
Tonight, she was just flat avoiding him, and her explanation for her disappearance was causing more than a few raised brows since she’d arrived less than an hour ago.
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.