Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [781]
As she and her two companions sought shelter to wait for the warriors to come and meet them, Claire couldn’t help thinking that the night ahead of her might be only the beginning of an even greater darkness yet to come.
CHAPTER
Twenty-eight
Reichen sat beside Tegan in the backseat of a black Range Rover for what seemed an interminable drive to the northwestern corner of Connecticut. Rio was at the wheel, Nikolai riding shotgun, maintaining constant cell phone contact with Renata since the warriors left Boston some three hours past. Behind them in another SUV was the rest of the team accompanying them on the mission: Kade, Brock, and Hunter.
About forty-five minutes ago, they’d turned off the interstate and begun a meandering jog along one rural route after another, following both the coordinates the women had provided and the strength of the blood bonds that would have led Niko and Rio to their mates even without the use of maps and GPS systems. Likewise, Reichen’s sensory pull toward Claire was intensifying the farther they drove along the winding stretch of moonlit, two-lane blacktop.
“We just passed the mom-and-pop gas station you mentioned,” Niko said into his cell phone as the closed establishment fell behind them in the darkness. “We’re coming around the bend now. You should see the Rover’s headlights any second. We’ll blink them so you know it’s us.”
Up ahead of the vehicle, the road flared brighter as Rio flashed the high beams a couple of times.
“Yep, we see you,” Niko said when a dark-clothed figure came out of the woods up ahead some hundred yards and waved a signal of her location.
Watching from behind Nikolai, Reichen hardly drew breath until Rio had navigated the Rover off the road and onto the wooded access lane where the three Breedmates waited. His gaze searched out and settled hard on Claire. She looked so vulnerable and out of place surrounded by so much night and dark forest, to say nothing of the fact that Wilhelm Roth could not be far from the very spot where she now stood.
But Reichen read only the faintest bit of fear in her. Claire’s pulse beat steady and strong in his heart, and her gait was sure as she and her two companions came to meet the vehicle.
No sooner had Rio parked the SUV did he and Niko both jump out to pull their mates into relieved, unhurried embraces. Reichen and Tegan climbed out, as well. Tegan walking around back to greet the second vehicle as it rolled to stop behind them on the wooded dirt lane. Conversations buzzed quietly talk of tactics and strategy, and quick reviews of the established plans for combing the area where Dylan had seen the ghostly Breedmates in the hopes of launching an offensive attack on Dragos’s possible hideout.
Reichen, meanwhile, couldn’t take his eyes off Claire. He drifted over to her, crossing his arms when the urge to wrap them around her felt too strong to deny. He wasn’t sure she’d welcome his concern after the way they’d left things at the compound.
“Are you all right?” he asked, noticing that she, too, had kept her hands close to herself as he approached. “My God, Claire. I heard what happened today. You have no idea how worried I’ve been…”
She gave him an unreadable look, taking in his black combat gear and the many weapons supplied him by the Order and holstered on the belt around his hips. Then she met his eyes once more and nodded her head. “I’m fine,” she said tonelessly “Thank you for the concern.”
God, he hated this forced politeness, just as he hated the fact that the scant arm’s length that separated them now might as well be a mile. Claire gave him that perfected expression of placidity that had once belonged to Wilhelm Roth—the shuttered, pleasant mask from the photographs Reichen had seen of her. Now she was turning that look on him. Shutting him out with the same kind of cordial distance she’d once reserved for strangers and other individuals she didn’t quite trust.