Page 25 of The Dragon's Warlock

Holy shit.Her words sent a new wave of protectiveness through him.

“Yes.” He stood from the bench and pulled her up.

His tug was a little harder than he expected, and she flew into his arms. Her small hands pressed against his chest. He could feel the heat from them. The need to capture her lips was at the front of his brain. When he was about to lower his head, her stomach growled, reminding him that he needed to take care of her.

Instead of pressing his lips to hers, he stepped back, and he heard a faint whine come from her.

“There’s a restaurant in the hotel on the main street. We can stop there for a bite and then head to the executive airport near downtown Orlando.”

He shifted to get more comfortable as they walked to the car. His dick was still painfully hard. But he couldn’t cave in to his needs. Yet.

“What did Garth want to talk to you about?” she asked.

“He wanted to tell me it wasn’t my fault.” Gideon had dodged the alpha for years. It wasn’t too hard since the guy hated technology and hadn’t had a phone. “Garth needs to learn to mind his own business.”

“When we first came to the door, he looked mad.”

Garth always looked mad, except during their conversation when he’d talked about Emma, and a rare smile had brushed his lips. Those two deserved each other, and he couldn’t be happier for them.

“I think his surprised face and mad face look about the same.” Gideon laughed.

“Are you going to tell me the story?”

It wasn’t pretty. Hell, it still haunted him at night. The cry for help before…

He shook his head, trying to get the image out of his mind. “It’s a long story.” He wished she would drop it, but she had a right to know what kind of man he was.

“We have a long plane ride. Maybe the story would keep my mind busy.”

“Or make you wish you weren’t in the same room as me,” he replied.

“I’m not sure that could happen. Most of the time, when we do something wrong, we think it’s ten times worse than what others might think.”

They reached the car, and he opened the side passenger door for her to get in. He wasn’t sure he could ever sit in the passenger seat again. The woman drove like a maniac. She’d somehow sped through Georgia without getting a ticket. That never happened. Georgia was known for handing out tickets like candy.

Once she was inside, he got in and headed to the restaurant. It was a weekday, and the place wasn’t bustling. On the weekends, Cassadaga was flooded with tourists wanting to get their palms read.

The waitress seated them by the front windows. Diem ordered half the menu. He didn’t care as long as she was hungry. Garth was the alpha of the local wolf pack, and Gideon figured they came into town often and ate. They would have an appetite like Diem’s.

He wanted to know more about Diem. Once the waitress walked away, he asked, “Before all of this happened, did you live in West Virginia?”

“No, I lived near Fairfax, Virginia, and worked out of the Dulles airport.”

“Did you get kidnapped from a bar in West Virginia?”

“Nope. My sister worked at the pentagon. We went out one night to a bar in DC.”

He hadn’t looked into Diem’s sister much. After Diem had left the bar, asking for his help, he’d looked at the basics of her file. There wasn’t much in it. The data Kael had was erased before Kirin and his brothers could get to the other labs. Now Gideon was worried about what kind of information people could get out of Diem’s sister.

“She said she worked for the Department of Defense.”

“What did she go to school for? And it doesn’t sound like you think she worked for the DOD.”

“Kayda has a degree in biomedical engineering. She got the job straight out of college, but it seems like she traveled more than I did, and I was a pilot.”

There could be a chance the people who’d taken Diem and her sister had actually been after Kayda. He’d seen over the years how the government worked to make super soldiers. A select few high office government officials knew about shifters. She might have been traced from the fertility clinic.

“Maybe you weren’t the target. It could’ve been your sister all along.”

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