“I don’t like the way he’s looking at you.”
The baritone voice, muttered from close beside her, snapped Jordana out of her unwelcome musings like a splash of cold water to the face. She glanced away from dark, unsettling Nathan to blond, familiar Elliott Bentley-Squire, her self-appointed protector and date tonight. His handsome features were pinched into a disapproving frown. “What do you know of that warrior, Jordana?”
“Nothing,” she blurted, flustered by Elliott’s notice and the still-burning sense of Nathan’s eyes on her. Although her answer wasn’t quite a lie, it left a bitter taste on her tongue. She shook her head and gave Elliott a vague shrug. “I don’t know him at all.”>Conversations halted abruptly. Heads turned from all directions, Breed and human alike. Only the string quintet in the gallery overhead seemed capable of ignoring Aric’s intrusion on the private gathering. They played on, Mozart’s spirited Serenade Number 13, an odd accompaniment to the current of alarm now spilling across the main floor of the museum.
With Nathan and his squad of warriors trailing close behind him, Aric stalked past the sculpture and art displays arranged specifically for the wealthy patrons assembled there tonight. “Carys Chase!” he bellowed. “Dammit, where are you?”
Nathan was right at Aric’s heels. Nathan reached for him, his hand coming down hard on Aric’s shoulder to halt him in his tracks. “This is not the time or the place,” he warned his comrade, low under his breath, prepared to yank the young Breed warrior out of there bodily before things got any worse.
He would have. But at that same moment, Nathan’s senses came to a full stop as she emerged from within the shelter of a nearby throng.
Not Aric’s sister, Carys.
Jordana Gates.
Tall, slender, wrapped in a gown of sheer, pale blue fabric that floated around her body like a silken cloud, she stepped away from the throng of society’s most privileged elite and met Nathan’s eyes across the several yards that separated them. Her oceanic blue gaze locked on him in what he guessed to be surprise at first—then confusion—beneath the complicated twists and delicate spirals of her upswept white-blond hair.
The gauzy dress she wore hugged the swell of her breasts and her tiny waist, skimming the gentle flare of her hips. She was stunning, like a vision from an enchanted other world. And she was nervous, not because of Aric’s furious disruption of her swanky society party but because of Nathan.
Because he was standing there in front of her now.
Even at this distance, he could see the way her pulse kicked harder in the hollow at the base of her creamy throat as she looked at him. He could practically feel the acceleration of her heartbeat as he held her in an unapologetic stare, drinking her in from head to toe.
He could almost taste her mouth on his again, soft lips crushed against his in a startling kiss he never would have allowed. A sweet, reckless kiss that never should have happened.
Not with someone like him.
No, Jordana’s anxiety wasn’t misplaced at all.
She’d had no idea what she’d done, kissing him like that. The way his thoughts had been turning in the days since then, she damned well should be nervous around him.
“Carys!” Aric called once more into the crowded reception.
His deep, booming voice made Jordana jump, one delicate hand coming up to her throat in alarm. In the gallery above, the music faded, then halted altogether. The museum patrons began to murmur and shuffle about to gape at Aric’s spectacle, though none of the tuxedoed men seemed eager to play hero and take on the threat of a seething warrior from the Order by themselves.
Aric shouted for his sister again and tried to shake loose of Nathan’s hold.
“Not happening,” Nathan said, digging his grip deeper into the meat of Aric’s shoulder. Rafe, Eli, and Jax were right behind him, waiting for his orders. “Come on,” he said to Aric. “You need to cool down. Let’s take this outside. All you’re going to do is piss her off—”
“Aric?” Carys Chase rushed through the unmoving crowds, panic in her normally calm voice. Dressed as elegantly as Jordana and the other women, she gaped at her brother as she charged forward to meet him on strappy sandals that echoed the geometric cut of her curve-hugging copper silk gown. “What are you doing here? What’s wrong?”
While Jordana’s beauty was diamond bright and icy fair, Carys Chase was earth and fire combined. Her eyes simmered with a fierce intelligence, and her caramel blond mane of hair swung around her face and shoulders like liquid bronze.
Of course, the differences between the two females went beyond the physical.
Where Jordana Gates was a Breedmate, half human in addition to the other, more elusive genetics that made her different from her mundane Homo sapiens cousins, Carys Chase was something rarer still. She was Breed, and a daywalker at that.
The same as her twin brother.
“Aric, are you okay?” she asked him, reaching up to touch his rigid jaw. She glanced at him then, studying him in a quick instant. Her shrewd eyes narrowed. “Where have you been tonight? Why is your shirt torn?”
“We need to talk,” Aric snapped at her.
Carys blinked. “Now? Can’t you see I’m in the middle of some—”
“Now,” he snarled, finally breaking out of Nathan’s grasp to grab hold of his sister’s arm. “This is fucking serious, Car. I’m not gonna let it wait.”
He tried to maneuver her away from the onlookers, but Carys dug in her five-inch heels and stood her ground in front of him. “Have you lost your mind? Let go of my arm.” She wrenched loose, outrage sparking in her eyes. When she spoke, Nathan glimpsed the tips of her emerging fangs. “For God’s sake, Aric. You’re embarrassing me.”