Rule Breaker(24)

            His eyes narrowed.

            He was certain that motor was far more powerful than it should be.

            Just as his attraction to the woman was.

            Narrowing his eyes on the fading taillights of her vehicle, he checked the glands beneath his tongue carefully once more.

            Breathing in, he pushed back his arousal, feeling the loss of stiffness in the eager shaft beneath his mission uniform and giving an imperceptible nod as the once-hard flesh lay dormant once again.

            The beast that had been irritating the crap out of him, courtesy of his genetics, was quiet rather than roaring out in rage that a possible mate was escaping.

            Hell, he halfway felt as though the animal senses inside him couldn’t have cared less where she went or what she did as long as she didn’t represent physical danger.

            That meant no Mating Heat.

            He grinned.

            That meant Miss Gypsy Rum McQuade definitely wasn’t his mate, no matter Dane’s suggestion that his hunger for her indicated it.

            Becoming addicted to her was a definite threat. But he could handle an addiction. He could walk away from it. Just as he had walked away from several of them while being tested in the labs for any weakness.

            And that made her fair game, because he wanted nothing more than to fuck them both into exhaustion.





CHAPTER 3



Pulling into the parking lot behind the store an hour later, Gypsy watched in surprise as her sister’s short-wheelbase four-by-four black pickup pulled in beside her.

            Sliding from the Jeep, she set the roof into operation again, waiting as Kandy slid from her truck, closed the door and locked the vehicle before meeting her at the front of the Jeep.

            “You’re out late.” Gypsy lifted her brows suggestively as she watched her younger sister.

            Kandy was even more delicate than Gypsy. At five four, she sometimes looked far too tiny to even be a McQuade.

            “Look who’s talking,” Kandy laughed back a bit nervously, her turquoise eyes gleaming back at Gypsy as they moved toward the downstairs apartment her sister had moved into the year before.

            “Not so late for me,” Gypsy murmured as Kandy unlocked the door, then followed her sister into the cool interior.

            Flipping on the lights, Kandy instantly dispelled the shadows that filled the roomy, inviting openness of the apartment.

            As in Gypsy’s upstairs apartment, the door opened into a wide entryway that flowed into the open kitchen, dining area and living room. The rooms were divided by a long counter, inset with a chef’s dream of a stove and oven.

            Fall colors and dark wood gave the apartment an inviting warmth that Gypsy’s didn’t have, while the scent of various baked sweets still filled the interior. Her sister could make a cake that would melt in the mouth and send the senses into orgasmic bliss.

            Yet Gypsy knew, despite her parents’ dreams, it wasn’t a life Kandy really wanted for herself.

            Unfortunately, Gypsy didn’t think her sister knew what she did want instead.

            “Did you check in with your guard dogs tonight?” Kandy set her purse on a table just inside the door as she slid her keys into it and glanced back at Gypsy. “Commander Breaker and his sidekick were convinced you’d been kidnapped, had run off to Fiji with a lover or were lying dead in the desert somewhere when they couldn’t find you.”

            Gypsy rolled her eyes as she strode to the bar and sat down on one of the high stools as Kandy moved to the fridge.

            “They finally caught up with me at the Crooked Toe,” she drawled. “What is with those two anyway?”