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"Do you always run away when you get scared?"
That brought her up short. She pivoted around, an odd look on her face, as though his comment hit too close to home. But then she blinked and the look was gone, replaced with a narrowed gaze and a stubborn tilt of her hooded head. "Do you never give up, even when you know you're not going to win?"
"Never," he said, zero hesitation.
She muttered a particularly vivid curse and kept on walking, headed in the direction of the street. Kade caught up to her in a few long strides.
"You were going to tell me something back there in the tavern, Alex. Something important that I really need to know. What was it?"
"God!" She spun toward him, anger flashing in her brown doe eyes. "You're impossible, you know that?"
"And you're beautiful."
He didn't know why he said it, other than that he found it too hard to keep the thought inside his head when she was standing there looking windblown and wild, her cheeks carrying the pink kiss of the Arctic chill, her blond hair framing her face in tousled waves beneath the fur ruff of her parka's hood. If Brock or any of the other warriors in Boston had heard him just now, they'd guess that he was just playing this female, plying her with flattery to get what he wanted from her. Kade himself wanted to believe that was the cause of his ham-handed blurt. But as he looked at Alexandra Maguire, her simple beauty lit up by the thin moonlight overhead and the multicolored glow of the neon bar signs in the windows behind him, Kade knew that he wasn't playing any kind of game here. He was attracted to her--fiercely attracted--and he wanted her to understand that he wasn't the enemy.
Not precisely, at any rate.
Her outrage cooled to something resembling confusion as she started to take a backward step away from him. "I really have to go now."
Kade lifted his hand but stopped short of physically holding her back. "Alex, whatever secret you're keeping, you can tell me. Let me share some of the burden with you. Let me protect you from whatever it is that's got you so scared."
She shook her head, her light brown brows knitting together. "I don't need you. I don't even know you. And if I felt the need to share, I have friends I can talk to instead."
"But you haven't told any of them, have you." It wasn't a question, and she knew it as well as he did.
"There isn't another single person in your life who knows what you're keeping bottled inside you. Tell me if I'm wrong."
"Shut up," she murmured, her breath steaming on the chill air, her voice cracking softly. "Just ... shut up. Leave me alone. You don't know anything about me."
"Does anyone really know you, Alex?"
She went so still and quiet, Kade thought for sure he'd crossed yet another line that would drive her farther away from him. But she didn't spin around and leave him eating her wake. She didn't curse him out, or strike him, or scream for anyone to come out of Pete's and do it for her. She stood there, looking up into his eyes in a silence that felt so lost, so broken.
His warrior's duty to collect vital intel and erase a potential security risk for the Order collided with the sudden urge he had to offer comfort, to protect this female who professed so strongly to have no need for either.
Kade stepped closer to her, and then he did touch her again. Just the lightest brush of his fingertips over one golden strand of her hair as it caught on the wintry breeze. She didn't move. Her breath had stopped puffing through her parted lips, and this close, Kade could hear the rush of blood pulsing through her veins as her heart rate kicked into a faster beat.
"You asked me in the bar if I was a good guy or a bad guy," he reminded her, his voice low and rough for the awareness of her body's heat mingling with his as he inched tighter into her space. He shook his head slowly. "That's not my call to make, Alex. Maybe you'll find I'm some of both. The way I look at the world, everything is just a different shade of gray."
"No ... I can't live like that," she said, the tone of her voice naked with sincerity. "It would make it all too complicated, too hard to know what's true or not. Too hard to know what's real."
"I'm real," Kade said, holding her gaze as he stroked his fingers along the curve of her jaw. "And you feel very real to me, too."
She drew in a soft breath at his touch, and as her lips parted, Kade swept his mouth against hers in an impulsive--instantly electric--kiss.
He held her face tenderly in his palm as he brushed his lips over hers and savored the soft, wet heat of her mouth. Alex's kiss was sweet and open and giving ... so damned good. The feel of her body pressing against his sent a jolt of fire swimming through him, searing every nerve ending with the stamp of her lean curves and the warm, wind-and-woods scent of her.
He wasn't thinking about gathering intel or finding a quiet place to scrub her mind once he had the information he needed. The feeling he had right now had nothing to do with offering her comfort or protection, either.
All he felt was need for this woman, his desire for her startlingly intense. And a hunger that was growing more consuming the longer Alex remained in his arms. With a simple, unplanned kiss, she drowned him in a swamping tide of lust and bloodthirst. He hadn't fed since he arrived in Alaska, a careless oversight that now sank sharp talons into him, demanding to be slaked every bit as urgently as the throb that beat hard and hot between his legs. From somewhere in the hunger-drenched fog of his consciousness, Kade heard the rumbling approach of a vehicle nearing the parking lot. He wanted to ignore the low growl of the truck's engine, but then a male voice called out from the shadows.
"Alex? Everything all right out here?"
"Shit," she hissed, pulling back now. "This was a mistake." Kade said nothing as she retreated several more steps, but then speech would have proved a bit difficult, given the fact that his fangs now filled his mouth. She wouldn't look at him, which suited Kade just fine, since one glimpse of his eyes right now--transformed from the pale gray they normally were, to the bright amber glow that betrayed him as one of the Breed--would have turned the ill-conceived impulse of kissing her into a catastrophe of huge proportions.
"I never should have let you do that," she whispered, then ducked around him. Kade slanted a cautious look over his shoulder at the idling Blazer bearing Alaska State Trooper colors, watching as Alex walked up to it. "Hey, Zach. What's going on? I thought Jenna was at your house."
"She just left. Said you were at Pete's, so I thought I'd swing by and have a beer with you." Tucker's voice carried on the chill wind. "What the hell are you doing out here? Were you with someone?" voice carried on the chill wind. "What the hell are you doing out here? Were you with someone?"
