A female enforcer crouched before Gypsy and eased the blankets in place around the girl huddling on the makeshift bed. Gypsy’s arms were wrapped around her scratched, bruised legs as her forehead rested on her knees. She was shaking so damned hard he was surprised her teeth weren’t chattering.
He sensed the tears, the screams trapped within her. Sensed the agony burning like a fiery ball of pain that buried itself in her heart the second she was forced to watch the Coyote slice her brother’s throat.
The debt the Breed community owed her brother was too great not to ensure that if his sister ever needed the Bureau or the Breeds, they would be there for her.
For now, though, all he could do was try to make her warm and comfortable and await the family flying out to her. A loving family, he hoped. Parents who would try to help her repair the wounds this night would leave on her gentle heart.
As he watched her, watched the ghostly lion sheltering her, he had a feeling nothing could repair Gypsy’s wounds, and he was afraid of what her parents’ arrival might bring, regarding their acceptance of her.
Son of a bitch, he wished he’d gotten there sooner.
Wished he’d had Mark McQuade’s location ahead of the Coyotes who had killed him.
As he watched Gypsy McQuade, he realized just how heavily the regret that he hadn’t been fast enough lay inside him.
It was a futile wish, because it was now something he couldn’t change. Jonas didn’t dwell on things that couldn’t be changed.
He moved on to things that could be.
And though it was the hardest thing he’d done in his life, he turned his back on her after giving the female enforcer a silent order to stay by her side.
This night was over.
He hadn’t been fast enough, he hadn’t tracked McQuade in time. When he returned to the Bureau, he’d ensure that all their equipment was updated with the best the government and the corporations ordered to provide for the Breeds could pay for.
The next time, he’d be ahead of the Genetics Council’s lapdogs.
The next time, he wouldn’t face the fact that he’d failed in the shattered eyes of a girl who would never forget the nightmare of her brother’s death or her own near rape.
The next time—
Jonas sighed as he walked out of the cavern. God help him, he didn’t want there to be a next time.
CHAPTER 1
NINE YEARS LATER
She was his fix and he’d been long months without his fix.
Too long.
This time, she would know he was there. He’d waited. For six years, since the night she’d shown up at her eighteenth birthday party dressed in leather and dancing like a seductress, he’d waited.
He’d been there every year for her birthday since the night her brother had died nine years before. Actually, he made certain he was there every few months just to check up on her, but the night of her birthday, he made damned sure he was there. Not to bring a present; he never did. Just to make certain she was safe, that she was taken care of and that she wasn’t living on the streets, as it was reported her mother often threatened to send her.
The hell of that night, over nine years before, still haunted her.
Hell, it still haunted everyone who had been there. But Gypsy had paid more than anyone else. And she was still paying.
Staring across the bar, his gaze caressing the gentle lines of her face, he willed her to sense the caress. To sense his presence. To feel the hunger that had begun growing since the night she’d turned eighteen, the night she’d entranced him with the grace and erotic promise in her absorbed face as she’d given herself to the music.
Standing across the large room, the gyrating mass of dancers between them, her head turned slowly, her gaze seeking the sensation of whoever watched her. When her eyes met his, he watched the transformation.
Green eyes darkened, dilated. Arousal flushed her sun-kissed face as a sudden, vulnerable pain flashed across her expression. It was gone just as quickly, to be replaced by a hint of uncertainty, of want and hunger that he knew she believed she could never appease. Not if she intended to continue to pursue the shadowed course her life had followed for the past nine years, since the night she had lost the one person who held her uppermost in his life.
Most young women were raised knowing that their mother, father, even both, were there to protect her. That one or the other would ensure she was cared for. For Gypsy, that one person, that parent who had loved her above all others, had been her older brother. The brother who had died in the desert, drawn there by the Coyotes who had taken his sister, who had threatened to destroy her in ways Mark McQuade couldn’t have imagined unless he took her place.
Surely the brother knew neither of them would escape? What had made him go into that desert believing his sister would return from it unscathed?
Whatever the reason, Mark had died and Gypsy had spent the past nine years trying to atone for a death she hadn’t been the cause of. A death she was told repeatedly had been her fault.
The time for Gypsy to pay for sins that were not her own was over, he decided. Just as it was time to draw free of the past, to save one fragile infant’s life and ease the hell a friend and his mate were enduring.
In that moment, as her gaze touched his, as he watched the heat and the hunger rising inside her, he made her a silent promise.
Soon, very soon, the games of the past nine years would be over and he’d ensure the shadows that lurked about her would come to light. While he was at it, he’d appease a hunger he was entirely certain was not, could not be, Mating Heat.