A Taste of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novella - Lara Adrian [15]
“I have a job to do, Dani. Simple as that.”
“Reiver is an animal,” she reminded him. “He’s a beast who trades in human lives. You said yourself he would’ve had me and my child murdered in cold blood.”
“Yes,” Malcolm agreed tightly. “Reiver is all those things. Worse, in fact. A pity you didn’t realize that sooner, before everything went to hell tonight.”
There wasn’t much blame in that accusation. Rather, a stark dread. A fear in his eyes that his anger didn’t quite mask. She searched that haunted gaze, hurting for him, wanting to understand who he’d become. “What happened to you, Malcolm? What happened to your face, to your name … to the man you used to be?”
“He’s gone, as dead as you are now.” His mouth was a grim line, a muscle ticking in the side of his savaged, beard-shadowed jaw. “A hell of a lot can happen in a few hundred years, lass.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess it can. I never thought I’d see the day that Malcolm MacBain tossed away his honor and his good name in order to serve someone like Reiver.”
“We all make choices. And I have my reasons,” he murmured. With that hissed reply, he finally did withdraw from her. Dark lashes shuttering his gaze, he rose to his feet.
She stood with him, nose to nose, refusing to let him shut her out. “Tell me.”
“Let it go, Danika.” The words were a deep rumble, coming from his chest.
But she couldn’t let him walk away. She stared at him harder, pushing her wayward talent in his direction. “You hate him.”
He didn’t answer; but then, he didn’t have to. His big body radiated loathing.
“It’s not loyalty that makes you serve Reiver,” she said. “It’s rage. Isn’t it?”
His thoughts answered her like a reflex: He took something precious from me. Everything I had. I will stop at nothing to make him pay.
Danika closed her eyes as the grief of that pledge sank into her consciousness. “Mal, I’m sorry.”
He roared a dark curse, and then his hand Cthe1C;Mal,s were on her arms, gripping her firmly, hauling her into the shadow of his powerful body. Into the face of his fury. “Goddamn it, woman! Stay out of my thoughts.” His grasp held tighter, his eyes bright and wild now, lips peeled back from his enormous fangs. “Why couldn’t you have stayed the bloody fuck out of my life?”
Danika had never cowered before a man, not Conlan or any other Breed male. Not even Reiver, or the brutal messengers he’d sent to her cottage earlier that night. But Malcolm’s fury was a storm that slammed into her, stripping her of her courage. Buffeting her with a ferocity that left her shaking, breathless.
He was a dangerous man. Even more so because he was wounded, deep down. Festering with a hatred that was eating him alive. She saw that now. And something more in the searing amber fire of his eyes.
Desire.
The interest that had sparked between them before was burned away now. Turned into something far more consuming as Malcolm’s hot gaze bore into her, then slowly settled on her parted lips. Another thought arrowed from his mind into hers, uninvited this time, dark and startling in its carnality.
She could have told him to release her. As formidable as he was, as volatile and strong as she knew him to be, he would have taken his hands off her in an instant if she’d wanted him to.
But that wasn’t what she wanted.
And he knew it as well as she did.
“Danika,” he rasped thickly, eyes flaring hotly. Then his mouth was on hers.
The contact was explosive, staggering. It had been so long since she’d been touched, kissed, desired. Malcolm’s lips seduced, demanded, claiming hers with a passion that stole all the breath from her lungs. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed the feeling, and even though a part of her had not let go of Conlan—might never fully let him go—the part of her that was still vital, still alive and warm and female, could