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I’ve never even wanted to… until now.
The monster starts to rise up inside me, either sensing my weakness or recognizing the danger, but I beat it back down.
It can’t have her.
A chime sounds, and Riley jumps back, her cheeks flooding with color as she drops my hand and looks back toward the monitors. “Is that, um, something important?”
Both grateful and resentful for the interruption, I tell her, “It’s an alert I set up.”
I sidestep around her, careful not to touch her again, and focus all of my attention on the commands I need to type into the keyboard, chasing the information my spyware just coughed up.
Riley slips into the chair next to me, and I don’t notice that compelling, enticing scent she has or the soft feel of her long, wavy hair as the bold colors brush my arm. Instead, I fall back on what’s familiar. I block out the disruptive…feelingsand point out what I’m looking for on the monitors in front of us, quickly zooming through the city maps as Riley gives her input.
She leans in close, focusing on the task at hand, and we get back to work.
18
RILEY
My mind is spinningwhen I finally leave Logan’s room. The man takes scary-smart to a whole new level, and I’m beyond grateful to have his help finding my sister.
We spent hours together pouring over the data he’d dug up about the city, and even though nothing’s panned out yet, I’ve got real hope that we’ve narrowed down some ideas of where Chloe might be hiding.
But unfortunately, he made it very clear that we have to wait for daylight before we follow up on any of the ideas we’ve cobbled together. Maddoc’s orders.
“Dammit,” I huff, punching my pillow into a fluffier position before flopping back onto it again. I’m wired and restless and exhausted, all at the same time. And it’s not just the progress we made searching for Chloe that has me feeling this way. Being so close to Logan for so long, having the tantalizing scent in my nostrils and the constant, subtle brush of his body against mine all day, has left me with a whole bunch of frustrated energy that I’ve got no way to handle.
Well, notnoway, but no satisfying way.
I’m not planning on going there though, so I keep my hands folded under my head and ignore the hum of awareness, ofwant, in my body, determined to shove it aside and get some sleep.
It takes nearly an hour of tossing and turning, but eventually, my eyelids droop and then stay closed.
* * *
When I wake up,I’m not alone.
I roll over and rub at my eyes, that distinct scent of Logan’s—some heady combination of his crisp body wash and his own enticing, masculine scent—telling me even before my eyes find him that he was thinking of me too.
I look toward the door and see him, our gazes locking in the darkness. Something is brewing between us. It has been all day. And as Logan strides toward me across the room, I stay still, frozen in place as I wait for him.
But not from fear this time.
He drags the covers off my body the moment he reaches me, letting them slide off the bed and pool at his feet as those pale eyes burn into me with the intensity of the white-hot center of a flame. I can’t look away as he bares me to his gaze, and it’s only once I’m fully exposed to him that I notice the moonlight glinting off the knife in his hand.
I should be scared.
We’ve been here before, and it was terrifying.
But this time, it’s not.
He doesn’t say a word, he doesn’t even blink, and my pulse starts to race as he climbs up onto the bed, prowling toward me like a jungle cat. He straddles my hips, and heat floods through me. Heat andwant.
Logan has his own agenda, though. He doesn’t lower his weight onto me. Doesn’t pin me down or grind against me. He holds himself aloof even though I can see damn well that I’m not the only one affected here, hovering over me as his fingers drag down the center of my chest, like déjà vu of the intense moment of connection I felt with him in his room earlier.
That’s not the thing he seems intent on repeating.
I fell asleep in a thin white camisole and silky matching sleep shorts. Logan slips the cold blade of his knife under one of the thin straps of my top and slices it away, then repeats the motion on the other side.
