17
AS THE NIGHT CREPT PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO DAWN, NATHAN REALIZED he had never been further outside of his element.
When he’d shown up at Jordana’s apartment, he hadn’t intended a full-scale seduction.
Nor had he intended to use their time in the shower together as a prelude to still another round of mind-blowing, incredible sex.
He sure as hell had not intended to find himself seated in a chair in her bedroom sometime afterward, watching over her as she slept curled up like a kitten in a nest of fluffy sheets and coverlets.
When he’d crawled out of her bed to get dressed so he could head back to the command center, he told himself it was only reasonable for him to stay awhile to ensure she was safe for the night. Once she was comfortable and resting, he would go back where he belonged.
That was hours ago now.
Night was ending soon, and if his own free will wouldn’t drag him away from her, the coming daybreak would.
Damn, how had he allowed himself to get so entangled with this woman?
When had she slipped through his defenses to become something more than a sexual itch he needed to scratch?
How did he imagine this whole thing would continue—worse, how would it ultimately end—when he had nothing to offer a woman like Jordana?
It hadn’t been empty flattery when he told her she deserved something more, someone better, than him. It had been a warning. One of many he’d issued that didn’t seem to sway her. His dark look or growled threat had always been enough to cower man and Breed alike, but not her.
Jordana Gates was nowhere near as delicate or conservative as she looked. Nothing like the pampered, fawned-upon Darkhaven female he’d often guessed her to be. Right now, he wished like hell she was.
Instead, he’d found her to be strong, unshakable. There was a roaring warrior inside her, buried deep but clawing to get out. She was unlike any woman he’d ever encountered, with her sharp, curious mind and sensitive artist’s soul. It didn’t help that she also had the face of an angel and the all-too-tempting body of a goddess.
He’d never known a need as consuming as the one he felt for this woman. And if it had been confined to purely physical hunger, that would be bad enough.
No, what Jordana stirred in him was something deeper.
She intrigued him. She confronted him, challenged him.
She gentled him, when his entire existence had been built on violence and cold detachment.
Jordana was, in a word, extraordinary.
Nathan’s veins thrummed in agreement, his blood still running hot for her.
He had no right to be the one she gave herself to for the first time. But looking at her sleep so trustingly under his watch, recalling the fevered way she’d responded to him—the open, accepting way she’d submitted to his every desire and demand—made something possessive and primal churn deep inside him.
For a moment, he let himself imagine what it might be like to be one of the golden, privileged males of her world, not the rough enforcer he was now. Not the assassin whose hands had been stained with death from the time he was a seven-year-old child.
He had never looked back in shame on where he’d come from or on what his past had done to him. But as he considered Jordana and the way he still craved more of her, a cold hollow opened in his chest. Regret for the choices that had been taken from him.
Anger and, dammit, a sudden, fierce longing for the future that had been denied him even before he’d been conceived in Dragos’s lab.
Useless feelings.
Weakness he’d been disciplined never to let manifest.
He’d allowed Jordana more than most tonight. Intimacy he’d never granted anyone. Insight into his bleak beginnings and how they shaped him.
He’d let her past a threshold all her own tonight, but she hadn’t seen everything.
He could never permit that.
There were things no one knew, not even the few of his closest friends and squad members in the Order. Not his tenderhearted Breedmate mother, Corinne, or her devoted warrior mate, a formidable Gen One Breed male who’d been a product of the Hunter program decades before Nathan had been born into it.
Nathan had endured things, done things, that were better left inside him.
Locked away.
Memories best held to the dark, which he managed with the same iron control he employed in every other aspect of his life.
Just thinking on the days and nights—the decade and more—of his enslavement under Dragos’s command and his torture at the hands of the Minion assigned as his keeper made Nathan’s skin go taut.
He could still hear the crack of the lash, the jangle of chains … the sharp, olfactory punch of his own spilled blood and viscera.
Even worse was the recollection of the suffering inflicted on others.
Because of him and, ultimately, by him.
Absently, his fingers grazed his throat in search of the ultraviolet collar that had been every Hunter’s shackle from the time he was old enough to crawl. It wasn’t there, of course. It had been gone since the night his mother and her mate tracked him down and rescued him at the age of thirteen.
Christ.
Twenty years away from his past, yet it still surprised him to reach up and find his neck bare.
And this was what he’d brought into Jordana’s bed, into her life.
If he were a better man, he’d wake her with an apology and hope she could eventually forgive him for taking the gift of her innocence and her trust. No, if he were a better man, he’d have never let her kiss him those few nights ago. A better man would have never let himself crave her the way he did.
Too late.
True to his born-and-bred nature, he’d lived up to the warning he gave Jordana tonight: He pursued. He conquered. And if he were a better man, he’d carry out the rest of his warning and walk out now, never looking back.