Page 47 of Breaking the Code

A growl rolls through him, and my belly quivers. I cannot help the way this man makes me feel. I’ve never felt this way before. Samuel Nicholson is a hard, unfeeling man. Everything that happen between us was cold and clinical.

Draven is different. So very different.

I know he wants everyone to believe he’s cold and calculating and unfeeling. I know he can be all those things, but he’s not completely unfeeling and unemotional. He feels things differently. That’s all.

He’s searched for years for his sister. He loves her dearly, and he has put himself at risk to find her. Only it wasn’t him they went after. Not directly. They killed his husband instead.

I know he feels responsible for what led to his husband’s death. Simon died a violent, gruesome death. I know because I watched it. It made me want to help him even more than I already had.

So, I enticed him with info on finding her in the hope he’d come here so I could help him. Now, here we are. He’s with me, and watching him and helping him all this time has endeared him to me. Hopefully, it’s endeared me to him as well.

He lifts his hand. It hovers next to my face, not touching me, but close enough that the heat from his skin warms my cheek.

His eyes dance across my face, and I can’t wait any longer. I lean forward. His gaze drops to my mouth. His breath whispers over me…

“Crivvens,” he growls. His hands wrap around my upper arms, squeezing as he stands, pushing me away from him.

“Draven?” I ask.

He stares down at me and then storms out of the room, leaving me alone and confused.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DRAVEN

“Tavish,” I call as I enter his rooms.

Looking around the command center, as Tavish calls it, he’s nowhere to be seen. I expected to see him at the desk, his fingers flying over the keys, but he’s nae there.

The forgotten comms unit I left here a week ago is lying on his desk. I pick it up and a notification from the encrypted app Tavish created for the Society flashes on the screen.

SECURE: T

You have a job. Here’s the link.

Just a message from him stirs something within me. I’ve been drawn to the boy since I glimpsed him in that warehouse so verra long ago. I want him. Want bordering on need. And I dinnae ken how long I’ll be able to keep from taking him.

Last week was a near thing. He crawled into my lap and rubbed that delectable little ass on my cock, and I nearly came in my pants. Just the remembrance o’ what he felt like has my dick thickening.

Simon and I searched for someone like him all those years ago. But we found nothing or anyone like what I felt the first time I laid eyes on Tavish—and definitely not what I felt a week ago.

I drop to the couch. My head falls into my hand as my ass hits the cushion. I scroll through the info on the job. The information disnae penetrate. A second and third reading disnae help.

Looking around, I worry about Tavish, wondering where the hell he is. Hell, I’ve worried about him since I first laid eyes on him. I cannae seem to help myself.

It’s worse now.

Tavish crawling into my lap was a dream come true and solidified something inside me. There’s no doubt—I’ll never be able to walk away from him. I know I dinnae deserve the boy. I orphaned him at sixteen, leaving him in the clutches o’ the Order o’ Death to horrors I can only imagine. But imagine them I did. Do.

Last week, he asked me to kill the man who hurt him. I despised myself for my lack o’ thought given to Graeme Buchanan’s child when I killed the man.

I kenned Buchanan had a son. It was in the information I had on the man. Looking back on that night, I even saw Tavish as I made my way through the house. I’d been dead set on killing Buchanan that night. The sight o’ a child—because at sixteen, Tavish had been even smaller than he is now—hadnae registered in the bloodlust that had taken over my mind.

Guilt stayed my hand last week. I wanted nothing more than to take what Tavish offered. When he sat on my lap, my cock surged to life, but Simon and Graeme Buchanan kept me from taking what was being served up so prettily.

Simon’s voice and the memory o’ Buchanan’s blood coating my hands fought with the feel o’ Tavish in my lap. And they won. I pushed him away.

I still dinnae ken how I did it. He’s all I’ve thought about for a week. My cock refused to allow my thoughts to venture elsewhere. The feel o’ him on my lap, the favor he wants o’ me, and the hurt in his eyes as I pushed him away have spun through my mind like a movie set on repeat.

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