Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [209]
Panic swam like acid up the back of his throat, but then Ben realized that at almost three in the morning, it was a little goddamn late for a police or DEA interview. No, whatever the guy was selling Tess, it wasn’t on any sort of official basis.
Ben tapped his steering wheel impatiently as the traffic light kept blaring red in front of him. Not that he was afraid of losing the Porsche. He knew where it was heading. But he wanted to see for himself. Needed to see for himself that it really was Tess.
Finally the light changed, and Ben gunned the gas. The van lurched up the street just as the car rolled to a stop outside Tess’s building. Ben pulled over to the curb a few yards back and cut his lights. He waited, watching in slow simmering fury as the guy leaned over from the driver’s side and pulled Tess into a long kiss.
Son of a bitch.
The embrace lasted for a long time. Too damn long, Ben thought, seething now. He threw the van into drive and turned the wheel into the street. He drove by the car at a leisurely pace, refusing to look as he passed, and then slowly continued on his way.
Dante navigated his way back to the compound in a state of distraction, so much so that he’d actually taken a wrong turn coming out of the North End and had to backtrack a few blocks just to resume course. His head was filled with the scent of Tess, the taste of her. She lingered on his skin and on his tongue, and all it took was the remembered feel of her gorgeous body clinging to him, sheathing him, to give him a massive hard-on.
Damn it.
What he’d done tonight with Tess was unplanned and straight-up stupid. Not that he could muster a lot of remorse for the way he’d spent the last few hours. He’d never been so on fire with a woman, and it wasn’t as if he was lacking for comparisons. He wanted to blame the fact that Tess was a Breedmate and that her blood was alive inside him, but the truth was slightly worse than that.
The woman simply did something to him that he couldn’t explain, let alone deny. And after she had eased him out of the tailspin of his death vision, all he wanted—all he needed—was to lose himself even deeper in whatever spell it was that she was casting. Except having Tess naked beneath him only cranked him up tighter. Now that he’d had her, he just wanted more.
At the least, the visit to her clinic had netted some good news.
As Dante wheeled onto the compound’s property, he pulled a crumpled sticky note out of his coat pocket and smacked it down onto the smooth surface of the dashboard. In the dim glow of the gauge lights, he read the handwritten message of a couple days ago, which he’d retrieved from Tess’s appointment book on her desk.
Ben called—museum dinner tomorrow night, 7 pm. Don’t forget!
Ben. The name rolled through Dante’s mind like battery acid. Ben, the guy Tess had been with at the fancy art reception. The human scum who was dealing Crimson, probably at the direction of the Rogues.
There was a call-back number on the message, a Southie exchange. With that bit of information in hand, Dante was betting that it would take all of two seconds to locate the human via Internet or utility records.
Dante gunned the Porsche up the gated drive toward the Order’s mansion, then rolled into the large, secured fleet garage. He cut the lights and engine, grabbed the piece of paper off the dash, then pulled one of his malebranche blades out of the center console beside him.
The bowed length of metal felt cold and unforgiving in his hand—just like it was going to feel against good old Ben’s naked throat. He could hardly wait for the sun to set again so he could go and make a formal introduction.
CHAPTER Eighteen
Tess slept well for the first time in what felt like a week and in spite of the fact that her head was spinning with thoughts of Dante. He’d been in and out of her dreams all night and was the first thing on her mind when she awoke early that next morning,