He couldn’t bear to have anything happen to Melena. She’d been through enough pain and loss already.
And so had he.
As Lazaro took his seat at the head of the conference table in the room with his men, Trygg palmed a slip of paper and slid it toward him. “What’s this?”
Trygg nodded his shaved head at the note he’d scrawled. “Located her brother, like you asked.” Lazaro glanced at the Baltimore, Maryland, address. “Derek Walsh is on a plane out of London as we speak. Booked the flight yesterday, after his father’s death aboard Turati’s yacht made international headlines.”
Lazaro nodded gravely. He would’ve rather Melena’s brother—Byron Walsh’s only blood kin—had heard the news another way, but there was no fixing that now. At least her brother would be there for her. She would be home again, with family and familiar things. God knew, she had needed someplace soft to fall these past days, Lazaro thought grimly. And she hadn’t exactly found that with him.
No, she’d found tears and anger and hurt.
She’d found a man ill-prepared to give her what she needed, what an extraordinary, tender-hearted woman like Melena deserved in life...and in love.
Instead of offering her comfort during her most vulnerable state, he’d growled and snapped at her. When he wasn’t busy seducing her, that is.
When he wasn’t selfishly slaking all of his needs on her as if he would ever be worthy of her heart or her blood.
He had no business giving in to those urges when war was still brewing all around him. So long as there were enemies killing innocents, his duty was, and always would be, to the Order. How could he have let himself slip so egregiously when it came to Melena? How could he be letting himself fall in love when he knew all too well how easily it could be ripped from his arms at any moment?
Love...
Fuck. Of all the rash impulses he had been unable to resist when it came to Melena, that would be the most foolish of them all.
Loving her would be even more selfish than the blood bond he had no right to claim and no intention of completing.
CHAPTER 10
Lazaro was gone when she woke up that morning.
He had stayed away most of the day, vanished to his command center until the time came for Melena and him to leave for the flight to D.C. that afternoon. Even on board the Order’s private jet, Lazaro had remained distant, his comm unit to his ear most of the time, or his attention rooted to his work and his computer. She would have called him preoccupied, but his smoky aura had conveyed a deliberate resistance.
Hours later and thousands of miles away from everything they’d shared in Rome, Melena had sat beside him in the debriefing with Lucan Thorne and a few other members of the Order at the Washington, D.C., headquarters, feeling almost as though she were seated next to a polite, detached stranger. He’d introduced her graciously, almost formally, giving no one cause to suspect she was anything more to him than a civilian temporarily placed in his safekeeping following the attack on Turati’s yacht.
He was careful not to touch her, even though heat crackled between them at the slightest brush of contact. He was careful not to let his gaze linger too long, even though his indigo eyes smoldered with awareness every time he glanced her way. He was coolly, determinedly remote.
It had made her want to scream.
She still felt that swamping urge, having since been removed from the meeting to accompany some of the Order’s women in the living room of the headquarters’ elegant mansion while the warriors continued their discussion in private.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink or eat, Melena?” Lucan Thorne’s auburn-haired Breedmate, Gabrielle, offered a warm smile as she indicated a side table laid out with plates of finger sandwiches and tea cakes. Aromatic Darjeeling and chamomile steeped in their pots next to an elegant white china service.
Although her appetite wasn’t there, everything looked and smelled delicious, and Melena was reluctant to reject the woman’s kindness. “Thank you, I think I will have a little something.”
She walked over from the sofa, joined by Gabrielle and two other women of the Order.
All of the Breedmates present tonight at the headquarters had been nothing but kind and welcoming. They were a family. That much was clear. And in the short time she’d been sitting with them, they’d each done their best to make Melena feel at home among friends as well.
Melena had been exhausted from her session with Lucan and the other warriors, to say nothing of the dread she felt every time she looked at Lazaro. Being around other women had helped dissolve some of that anxiety, even if it might only be for a little while.
She couldn’t help watching the hallway outside, waiting for some indication that the meeting had broken so she and Lazaro could finally go somewhere to speak privately. So she could get rid of the awful feeling she had that he was somehow already gone.
Gabrielle handed her a small plate, collecting Melena from her dark thoughts. “If you’d like something more substantial, Savannah made a big pot of jambalaya earlier today. You really can’t go wrong with any of her amazing cooking.”
“I do have my numerous and varied talents,” Savannah said, her doe-brown eyes dancing at the compliment. The beautiful, mocha-skinned Breedmate was bonded to Gideon, another of the warriors present tonight. Where her big blond-haired mate had an intense, slightly mad genius quality about him, Savannah exuded tranquility and smooth confidence.
As Melena put a few cucumber sandwiches and peach tarts on her plate, she found it next to impossible to keep from staring at the third woman in the room with them—the one mated to the warrior named Brock. Jenna looked like neither of her Breedmate companions. In fact, Melena didn’t think she was a Breedmate at all, though she definitely wasn’t fully human either.