Defy the Dawn (Midnight Breed 14)

Brynne stared at him. He didn’t know the history she and Tavia shared?

The madman’s laboratory. The breeding program that produced genetic anomalies like daywalkers and Breed females that had never been seen in the world before. The brutal experiments and abuse. The decades-deep web of betrayal that was used to keep the progeny of that breeding program under control until they could be utilized as weapons of war.

If Zael didn’t know those pitiful facts about her, Brynne wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.

Haunted by memories she’d kept locked up all of her life, she shook her head. “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

But there was another pitiful fact that she preferred would not come to life anytime soon. One that needed to be discussed, no matter how much she dreaded it.

“Speaking of Tavia and the rest of the Order, I would like to have your word that you won’t mention what happened between us tonight.”

Zael sat back in his seat, his gaze trained on her under the rise of his brows. “You mean the dancing?”

She glowered. “I’m talking about all of it. I’d like you to promise me you’ll keep our indiscretion to yourself.”

“Our indiscretion.” Dark amusement lit his eyes. “If I recall correctly, I wasn’t the one thrusting my tongue down someone’s throat on a crowded dance floor then drunkenly suggesting we needed to tear each other’s clothes off and get horizontal ASAP.”

If she could have wilted into the leather seat, she would have gladly done so. Thank God she didn’t go to bed with him. It was unbearable enough just to think she might have.

Cheeks flaming with outrage, she lifted her chin. “As you so accurately pointed out, I’d had too much whisky and it went to my head. I wasn’t myself. I had no idea what I was saying and I sure as hell didn’t mean any of it.”

Zael grinned. “Don’t get me wrong. I liked who you were on that dance floor, Brynne. I hope I’m going to see that woman again, but preferably when she’s sober.”

She scoffed. “None of that would’ve happened if I’d been sober. Nor will it ever again.”

“You sure about that?”

“Completely.”

Although it hadn’t been purely whisky doing the talking with Zael back in the bar. Or the kissing. Or…the rest of it.

She wanted to think so then. She desperately wanted to believe so now too.

She wanted to reassure herself that what happened with him had been an impulsive mistake. One that would not be repeated.

But she knew better. The one person she couldn’t fool was herself.

And possibly Zael.

She could see that by the way he looked at her as the jet began its descent into D.C. air space. He held her unsettled gaze with unflinching, arrogantly assured intensity, as if he was recalling every second of their encounter the same way she was. As if he still felt the hard drum of desire in his veins too.

Brynne wanted to deny what she saw in him, what she felt.

But the truth sizzled in the air around them, and in those fathomless bright blue eyes that told her in irrefutable terms that what happened between them on that dance floor back in Cheapside was only a beginning, not an end.

CHAPTER 6

Brynne still wasn’t speaking to him, even after they arrived at Order headquarters that morning. As soon as they’d touched down at the airport and were met by Tavia and her hulking warrior son, Aric—both of them daywalkers—Brynne had been swept into the military-grade black SUV amid tight hugs and anxious chatter with her sister.

As for Zael, he’d ridden shotgun up front with Aric, all too conscious of Brynne’s disgust with him and the tension that only seemed to expand for every minute she strived to act like he didn’t exist.

When they were brought into a private meeting room where Lucan Thorne and the rest of the Order’s senior command had already assembled, she stubbornly kept her distance, taking a position as far away from him as she could get. Zael might have been tempted to continue goading her just for the pleasure of it, but the gravity of the situation facing everyone now demanded all of his attention.