Consumed (Dark Protectors) Read Free

headquarters last week.”
    She inhaled deep, her gaze meeting tawny eyes. God, she’d missed him the last ten years. Even now, angry enough to smack him, she’d give almost anything to run her hands through the thick hair falling to his shoulders. Blond, brown, a hint of black, the multitude of raw colors proving beyond doubt his base nature was that of a mountain lion. Like her. “I haven’t followed your orders in a decade. Now you need to leave.”
    She flung her car keys into the merino glass bowl on the table by the door. Next to the glass sat a stack of files—names and faces of known infected shifters. She should file those ... the werewolves had all been found and killed.
    Jordan stood. Long, lean, and rangy. Nearly a foot taller than her own five foot six. Her living room shrank. He’d worn his customary faded jeans, dark T-shirt, and cowboy boots. The outfit was as formal as Jordan ever dressed—if anything, he might have a nicer pair of boots for a special occasion. “Who exactly do you think you and the boys answer to, Kate?”
    The urge to step back pissed her off. He was going to pull rank on her. On all of them. “Listen, I know you’re the leader of the feline clans—”
    “Disobeying me was never an option for you.”
    She swallowed hard and put her hands on her hips. Seeing him in her apartment wasn’t coming close to the fantasies she’d had of the moment. The man would never view her as an adult. As a woman. She shoved the pain down. “Wrong. I understand you’re older than dirt, Jordan, but I’m modern and choose to live my own life.”
    Like the lion hidden just under his human surface, he stalked past the leather sofa, his eyes darkening to topaz, steady on his prey. “Ah, sweetheart. This is an incredibly bad time to mess with me.”
    Her breath caught hard in her chest while desire slammed into her abdomen. Something feral lit his eyes ... something new. Deadly and deep. The wildness made something kick to life inside her. “What the fuck’s going on?”
    He stopped moving a foot away. “I believe I taught you not to swear at me. True?”
    She cleared her throat. “I’m not six years old anymore.”
    His lips tipped in almost a smile. “I know. And I guarantee when I spank you now, the end result will be much different than you throwing a stuffed pig at me and pouting for a week.”
    She forgot how to breathe. What was he saying? No. Just words—he was just using words. Was he teasing her? Flirting? She struggled to focus. “Jordan, the moon will be full in less than a week, and I have work to do.”
    He shook his head. “I’ve given you a decade to work this out of your system. You’re done.”
    Out of her system? True surprise mingled with a rapidly growing anger inside her. “ This, as you so moronically put it, is not exactly a choice in vocation. I was infected with a virus that makes it possible for me to track werewolves.”
    The air changed. His eyes darkened to burnt gold and a tension swirled toward her. “No. You were infected with a virus that makes it impossible, for now, for you to shift from human to cougar.” Danger and fury rode each word. He reached out to manacle one burning hand around her bicep. “Then ... not trusting the scientists enough to cure you, you purposefully infected yourself with the catalyst to speed the virus up.”
    Yeah, she had. The catalyst was supposed to increase the potency of the virus so the illness ran its course sooner ... either killing the subject or dying out. Probably. She’d expected the virus to allow her to shift again, and had gone against all protocol and injected the weapon into her bloodstream.
    Apparently the shifter remained pissed about her attempt, too. “I thought my body would fight the virus so I could shift again,” she whispered. That’s what had happened to her roommate, Maggie ... who now shifted into a wolf once a month during the full moon. Katie would’ve done anything to keep the possibility