“And you care why?” Her fingers locked around his wrist as she reminded herself that his fingers weren’t tightening on her throat. That she really could breathe.
“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch,” he suddenly whispered, his face coming closer, his lips pulled back from his teeth to reveal the wicked incisors, top and bottom, at each side. “Do you hear me, Scheme? I’m going to gut him with my bare hands.”
“Are you—”
She gasped, the words cut off as his lips suddenly covered hers and an explosion of pleasure began to storm her body.
It was just a kiss. That was all. Lips meeting. His tongue pressing forward, invading, licking…Oh God, he was licking at her mouth, purring into the kiss, and flames were searing her.
This wasn’t just a kiss. This wasn’t just pleasure. It was a claiming. And she was helpless beneath it.
The hell it was. This was a kiss that stole into the soul and stoked flames she had never known existed within her. It was a fiery invasion that had her reaching for more, had her hands moving to his hair, tangling in the silky mass to hold him to her. She heard her own moans slipping past her lips to his and reveled in them. For the moment.
It was the closest thing to ecstasy she had ever known in her life.
“Damn you!” Just as quickly as he had taken the kiss, he broke it off.
Scheme stared back at him in shock as he jerked back from her, surging to his feet with a force that stunned her.
“Get out and dry off,” he snarled, his expression filled with disgust. “And don’t take all day. If I have to come back in here, I’ll bend you over the damned tub and drown your ass while I show you what it’s like to be f**ked by a Breed. Let’s see what you think about pain then.”
She could only stare back at him. For once, her normal glib responses were absent, her brain in chaos. For some reason this kiss was more destructive than the orgasm he had given her in that hotel room.
He turned and stomped from the bathroom, jerking the curtain so hard he nearly ripped it from the heavy rod holding it.
“Oh hell,” she whispered as she stared at the closed curtain, fighting to swallow. To taste something other than the fierce, heated taste of Tanner’s lust. And damn if his lust didn’t taste good.
CHAPTER 6
There had to be a way out of here. Somehow he had managed to drag her into these caverns, and that meant there had to be an entrance. He was a Breed, not a ghost. Well, not the dead kind of ghost, anyway. In the last forty-eight hours he had snuck out of the cavern without her seeing him and disappeared for several hours. And she had yet to even find the damned exit.
There had to be twenty tunnels running around in a maze that led directly back to the main cavern. There were no extra tunnels, at least none that she could find.
She had to get out. She had already been here too long and she knew it. She had to find Jonas, give him the information she had and secure her own safety. Then she could deal with Tanner on her terms rather than his.
This was incredibly bad.
Moving through the narrow tunnel she had been investigating, she reentered the storage cave and made her way back into the cavern and the man waiting on her. He sure as hell hadn’t been there when she began investigating tunnels, so he had to have slipped in while she was searching. Which just pissed her off.
“I’m getting tired of playing this game,” she snapped as she came face-to-face with Tanner’s mocking smile.
Tightening her hold on the large bath towel she used to cover her body, she glared at him, not in the least surprised that her anger wasn’t affecting him in the slightest.
“You won’t find the exit, Schemer; you can stop looking.” He turned his back on her, moving across the room to the bed, where he dropped a large black bag on the mattress.
When he turned back to her, his gaze was considerably hotter, though his lashes drifted over his eyes with drowsy sexuality. He had been giving her those looks for two days now. Sexy, body-licking looks. She could almost feel his tongue stroking over her flesh.
“You can’t keep me here forever, Tanner.” He wasn’t listening now any more than he had listened to her before.
“I brought you some clothes.” He indicated the black bag. “I assumed you were growing tired of running around here naked.”
She glanced at the bag. There were enough clothes there for several weeks if he had any clue at all when it came to packing. She assumed he did. She hoped he did.
“Tanner.” She crossed her arms over her br**sts, holding the towel in place. “There are things at stake here. You have to let me go.”
“What’s at stake, Scheme? Another strike against Sanctuary? Another plan to kill Breeds? Tell you what, tell me what your precious daddy has planned and I’ll think about letting you go. Better yet, tell me what he was willing to kill you for.” His expression was friendly; his eyes were roiling with danger.
“Father hasn’t shared his plans with me in years and I have no idea what Chaz was talking about.”
Tanner’s snort of disbelief assured her of his opinion concerning that one. It wasn’t good. And of course he knew she was lying. Bastard’s sense of smell was off the damned charts.
Then, he really surprised her.
“Your father has two teams after you, both headed by loyal coyote Breeds. The order is dead or alive,” he informed her softly. “I’m going to ask you one more time. What do you know that your father is willing to kill you over?”
She felt the blood drain from her face. Damn, Cyrus was serious about this one. Not that she had expected anything less.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t lived with the threat of her own death hanging over her head for years now. She knew how dangerous Cyrus was, just as she had known that she couldn’t get away with betraying him forever. She couldn’t trust Tanner with that though. She couldn’t trust anyone except Jonas. He and the pride leader, Callan Lyons, were the only two Breeds that were without a doubt not a Tallant spy in Sanctuary. The information she held now was too important, too explosive, to trust to anyone but those two men.
“Who knows why Father does the things he does,” she finally said and sighed. “I’ve outgrown my usefulness to him, one would assume.”
“So he sent an assassin guaranteed to kill you mercifully, just because you had outgrown your usefulness? Because you made some mistakes?”