Crave The Night (Midnight Breed 12)

If he’d thought the beautiful Breedmate an unwanted distraction before, crossing paths with her this morning had only confirmed what he’d been striving so hard to deny.

Jordana Gates was going to be a problem for him.

She already was. After one brief kiss and a couple of chance encounters—all told, only a few minutes’ time in her presence—she had aroused a fierce desire in him. She was impacting his focus, diminishing his concentration.

Making him burn with the need to seek her out and take what he craved.

Nathan cursed under his breath and cut off the water.

With his squad and Aric trading insults and banter along with their punches and body checks on the other side of the showers, Nathan stalked out to dry off and dress in the other room alone.

Rafe came out as Nathan was pulling on a fresh black T-shirt. The blond vampire grabbed a white towel from a folded stack and wrapped it around his lean hips. “Something going on with you that I should know about?”

“No.” Without looking over at his comrade, Nathan rubbed his towel over the damp black spikes of his hair.

“You sure about that?” Rafe walked over to the lockers next to Nathan and leaned one beefy shoulder against the metal. “Something’s bugging you. I noticed it in the meeting this morning. Your head is somewhere else.”

Christ. Nathan wasn’t accustomed to being read by someone, let alone getting called on it. He bristled at the weakness in himself but shot his cold glare at Rafe as he slammed his locker shut. “You got issues with my leadership, take it up with Commander Chase.”

Rafe blew out a curse and scowled, studying him closer. “This isn’t about the team, you asshole. I’m asking as your friend. You’ve been wound tighter than usual all day. Actually, ever since that night we went looking for Carys and ended up at Jordana Gates’s place.”

Nathan froze, a muscle ticking in his jaw as he faced Rafe’s steady, knowing blue gaze.

“You do know she’s to be mated soon, don’t you?” Rafe pressed. “Some good ol’ boy Darkhaven lawyer who’s been sniffing around her skirts practically since she came of age, according to Carys.”

Nathan growled at the reminder. “Like I said, there’s nothing going on that you need to know about. Nothing I can’t handle. And as your friend, I’m asking you to trust me on that.”

It took a long moment before Rafe finally nodded his agreement. He turned away and started getting dressed. “Any further word from D.C. today?”

“Nothing yet,” Nathan replied, glad for the change in subjects. “They’re still arranging the meetings with Crowe’s widow and exes. When I spoke with Gideon at Headquarters today, he said they expect to have the interrogations completed within a couple of days. Which is better than I can say about our mission to bring in Cassian Gray. I’ve been digging into the bastard’s records all day and coming up empty. No personal records, no past, no kin. The man’s a fucking ghost.”

Rafe grunted. “He’s got property. La Notte.”

Nathan gave a dubious shrug. “Maybe, maybe not. I hit a wall trying to chase down the title holder of the club. Records are private, sealed. Far as I could tell, there’s about half a dozen layers of lawyers and holding companies in the way.”

“That’s a lot of anonymity and subterfuge for a nightclub,” Rafe remarked. “Cage fighting is illegal, but it sure as hell doesn’t warrant that kind of paranoia.”

Nathan nodded. “That’s what Gideon said when I told him what I’d found. He’s running some hacks now, said he’ll report back as soon as he turns up any leads.”

As the Order’s longtime chief intelligence officer and resident genius, Gideon in D.C. hadn’t run field missions in many years, but the vampire was an absolute killer behind the keyboard.

“Gonna take a hell of a lot more than lawyers and corporate shields to keep Gideon from exposing Cass and whoever he’s hiding behind,” Rafe said. “There’s never been a database in existence that he couldn’t crack.”

Nathan agreed, but time spent waiting was time wasted. While Headquarters was hacking into Cass’s life from D.C., Nathan and his team needed to keep up the pressure locally.

“Tell Eli and Jax we’ll meet in fifteen for a review of tonight’s patrol. We may not know everything about Cassian Gray yet, but there’s one obvious constant in his life and that’s La Notte.” Nathan headed for the exit. “We need to start disrupting his business, rattle the hive, and see what it stirs up. And we start tonight.”

Jordana walked the exhibit floor at the museum, taking a slow measure of the entire collection and jotting notes on her tablet. Last night’s patron preview had been a means of thanking the various donors and community supporters, but it had also been a dry run for the exhibit in preparation for its public opening in just a few nights.

She perused the pieces and their placement, making minute adjustments to temperature and humidity settings, double-checking text cards and lighting levels for each of the displays.

Anything to keep her mind from straying to her unsettling encounter with Nathan earlier that morning.

He’d been crude and confrontational. Impolite and far too bold. He was terrifying, not because of his profession or his past but because of the way he seemed to see straight into her soul and lay her bare.

He was dangerous for so many reasons.

And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about the things he said to her. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way he made her feel. Her pulse quickened at the memory of being alone with Nathan in close quarters.