It was different. What she felt now wasn’t a child’s love and adoration. What she’d felt the night before was a hunger she’d never felt before. Hunger for a man she could feel seeping inside her, becoming a part of her. No, he’d always been a part of her. But she could feel him taking more of her now, and she couldn’t deal with that.
Running through the chill of the desert morning, the wind racing over her face, she tried to tell herself she could fight it, she could deny it. That the sensitivity of her flesh could be ignored, that the hunger for his touch could be denied. That she wasn’t his mate.
She belonged to herself.
Didn’t she?
As she ran, the need to escape the chaos her life was becoming rose inside her with a fury that left her at a loss for how to deal with it. For thirteen years she’d allowed her life to be dictated by the need to hide from those searching for her. Always aware that if she was captured, if she allowed that to happen, then Judd and even Honor were at risk as well. The weight of that responsibility had always been with her whenever she’d longed to escape the hatred and malevolence of the Martinez household.
How had Claire, the somber, far too serious young woman whose life she’d stepped into, borne it for the fifteen years she’d been raised in that house?
What had caused Claire to drive the car she’d stolen from her father that night over a cliff with her best friend beside her, resulting in a tragic, near fatal accident for both Claire and Liza, Cat had never really known. Even Claire hadn’t remembered why she’d done so. Before she’d disappeared entirely, her essence absorbed completely into Cat as part of that ritual twelve years ago, Claire had remembered very little from her life before that wreck.
What Cat was certain of, was Raymond Martinez had something to do with it.
As the sun burned the chill from the morning, Cat watched from a vantage point at the base of one of the stone towers that rose from the desert floor as the Bureau’s heli-jet landed outside the grounds of the house Lobo Reever had allowed her the use of.
Graeme would know she wasn’t there. Thankfully, he hadn’t followed her. Not that she knew of. She hadn’t sensed him behind her, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had followed her, he was leaving her alone for the moment at least.
He was the only one leaving her alone though. No more than minutes after sitting back to enjoy the view she sensed the advance of two Breeds. It wasn’t their scent that alerted her first so much as the sense of invasion, and manipulation.
“Nice place.” It didn’t take long for them for step into view and to disturb the beauty of the morning. Jonas Wyatt and Rule Breaker. She just didn’t need this right now.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Dressed in dark silk slacks, a white silk shirt, sleeves rolled up and barely wrinkled, he didn’t look as though he’d been carefully following her since she’d left the enclosed grounds of the guesthouse.
He was a fucking magician or something.
A smile quirked at his lips as he moved into the shelter created by the boulders before easing down to sit at the base of the tower. Leaning back against the cool stone he looked out between the boulders, obviously enjoying the same view she’d claimed as her own.
“I knew you wouldn’t be at the house this morning,” he told her, snagging her pack before she could stop him.
Digging inside, he pulled out a bottle of water and one of her apples. Taking a bite of the crisp fruit, he glanced at her in appreciation before seeming to relax as he made his way through the fruit.
She waited.
She’d learned in the research center that pressing for explanations and answers made her seem weak. She wasn’t begging him for a damned thing, and she didn’t owe him a damned thing.
Finishing the apple and tossing the core outside the shelter for scavengers, he opened the water, took a long drink then capped it. Holding it loosely between his fingers and bending one knee to rest his arm, his gaze narrowed on the desert below the boulders.
Cat just watched him.
Not enough people spent enough time watching this man’s face and eyes, she thought. Not that he often gave anything away, but watch him long enough, pay enough attention, and sometimes hints of what he felt or knew would flash in his eyes or his expression. A time or two, she might have caught a scent of emotion, of regret.
“I don’t feel superior to your genetics because of my creation versus your additions. What you sensed at that meeting is something difficult to explain, and your accusation of prejudice may not have been entirely unfounded. For that, I sincerely apologize,” he said softly, still staring out at the desert. “I would like to mark it down as a moment of human weakness that has since been eradicated.”
He turned his eyes back to her and the ice that normally filled them, that emotionally blank gaze he normally gave the world, was absent. Jonas had lowered his defenses, allowing the Breed and the man to be revealed to her uniquely strong sense of smell.