Navarro's Promise - Lora Leigh [42]
When Phillip Brandenmore died, Jonas’s hope for learning what his daughter had been injected with would die as well. That had to be hell, never knowing, always fearing from one day to the next that he could lose the child he and his wife Rachel loved so dearly, and had risked so much to save.
“That child means everything to them, Navarro,” she reminded him, incensed that he could be so cool. “As long as Brandenmore is alive, then there’s a chance. You can’t even let them have that without trying to destroy it, can you?”
Mica could hear the doctor working in the background, but she couldn’t see her. All she could see was Navarro and the blazing fury burning in his black eyes as she had never seen it before in any other Breed’s.
The Breed least likely to feel more than lust, she thought in disbelief. Had she truly once believed that?
“Do you think the fact that it hurts makes it any less the truth?” Furious, rife with the promise of violence, his tone had a dangerous sharp edge of sarcasm now. “Do you think Jonas isn’t well aware of that? Or that I should simply stand back and allow him to risk your life, or the lives of anyone else who gets in that bastard’s path?”
“And that of course is all that should matter, isn’t it?” Mica snapped back. “For God’s sake, Navarro, there is such a thing as holding out for that last, great hope. And you’re a fine one to let just such a high principle have your back up now, when you lied to me in the worst possible way last night.”
“And don’t all Breeds know the value of that last, great hope?” Heavy mockery filled his voice. “We lived it daily in those fucking labs, Mica. Tell me, did that last, great hope ever give a damn about us then?”
The pain and the cynicism in that single question had Mica’s heart constricting in the knowledge of what the Breeds had suffered there. She knew it, she understood their nightmares, she’d lived with the knowledge of the horror they’d suffered. But still, that was no excuse for his actions, or his threats.
“That doesn’t give you the right to ever make such a threat.” Knowing that pain, and those nightmares, didn’t mean he could make her understand why he had lashed out at Jonas as he had. “You and I both know you’ll never lay a hand on Phillip Brandenmore unless you simply have no other choice.”
“Oh, there you are wrong.” He lowered his head, his palms braced on the gurney as he came over her, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a furious snarl. “Trust me, Mica, if you trust nothing else. If I see him but one more time outside the cell he’s to be locked within, without a full team of Breed guards restraining him, then yes, I will kill him, before he has the chance to harm anyone else. Especially a woman. And most especially.” He leaned closer. “My woman.”
His woman?
“Your woman?” Mica was incensed. Livid. The sheer arrogance in the words, the dominance and utter, contemptible confidence he displayed raked over her pride like nails on a chalkboard. “Not in this lifetime, Wolf,” she sneered back at him. “The last I checked, you weren’t spilling a mating hormone, and I wasn’t on my knees begging for your cock, and Dr. Morrey wasn’t being forced to create that vile concoction of hormones for me. Three strikes, Breed. You’re out of the running to ever claim me.”
For a second. One dangerous, heart-stopping second, the image of Mica on her knees, lips parted and swollen, face flushed as he sank his dick inside the sweet depths of her mouth nearly shattered his control.
He almost reached for her.
His fingers curled into fists as he felt his chest tighten with another of those rumbling little growls he wasn’t used to displaying.
Hard, thick, so fully engorged and throbbing in desperation, his cock ached to fuck her lips, to slide in slow and easy, filling her mouth and stretching her lips erotically.
“Navarro!” It was Ely’s voice that brought him back from the brink.
The hard, cold command in her voice was pure steel. This room, for examination and testing, was her territory. It was where she ruled. The cavernous