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glance behind them, then take a long, slow look around. “Reminds me where I want that mouth of yours.”
    She swallowed a whimper. She seriously needed to get control of this conversation, like now, before her bones dissolved and her brain disintegrated. Or her skin started tanning from sexual heat.
    “Look.” She didn’t stop walking, because she didn’t want to have this dialogue face-to-face. Lord knows, the last thing they needed was more face-to-face time. “I’m not interested, okay? I’m already involved with someone.”
    He stopped so abruptly she was in mid-stride when he jerked her back.
    “Too bad.” He caught her chin in an iron grip and forced her gaze up. The face staring back was hard, determined. Lethal. “You can fight what’s between us all you want. It won’t change a thing. You’re mine. And sweetheart, you don’t want to bring another guy into this, not unless you want to watch him bleed. I don’t share.”
    “ Excuse me? ” Beth’s jaw would have dropped if he hadn’t had hold of her chin.
    A wave of intense disorientation swept over her. For a moment she was convinced she was still dreaming. That she’d fallen asleep while reading one of JR Ward’s Brotherhood of The Black Dagger romances and had inserted herself into a dream based on the book. Any moment now he was going to start growling Mine Mine Mine and let loose with some spicy bonding scent. Or flash a massive set of fangs.
    Except… if she was dreaming, wouldn’t he be a jacked-up, massively muscled vampire warrior, rather than the testosterone laden, far-too-alpha—but human—pain-in-the-derriere?
    She concentrated on the hard fingers under her chin, and the sense of disorientation dissipated. Oh no, this was real. And it just went to show that her secret weakness in literary escapism did not translate well into reality. The last thing she needed or wanted in real life was a bonded alpha male. Romantic fiction aside, they were serious jackass material.
    “You’re mine,” he said again, his voice flat, yet in that you-just-need-to-be-reasonable-about-this tone that men had been driving women crazy with throughout history.
    She told herself she shouldn’t even respond to that insane claim, but the words just burst out. “I am not yours. You don’t even know me. I could be married, or a murderer, or a nun for all you know.”
    He snorted and amusement kicked up the edges of that sensual mouth. “We’ll get to know each other soon enough.”
    “I don’t want to get to know you.” She jerked her chin loose. “Crazy, psychotic men are not on my list of possible partners.”
    What in the world was going on with him?
    “Problems, boss?” a dry voice asked from behind them.
    Zane half turned to glance over his shoulder. “Nothing I can’t handle,” he said in that calm way of his. “Anything jump out at you back there?”
    “Nothing. We’re not being followed. Rawls is on his way. You find out what the hell’s going on?”
    “Not here.” Electric green eyes narrowed and swept the corridor, shifted to a shallower hall that branched off the main path and dead-ended a few feet past a steel door marked Authorized Personnel Only . He nodded at the posted door. “There.”
    He dropped his arm back to Beth’s waist and steered her toward their rendezvous point. When he tried the steel doorknob, it didn’t budge. “Cosky?”
    Shifting up, he eased Beth in line beside him until their bodies created a barricade, blocking the main corridor’s view of the door, and whatever Zane’s buddy was doing to it. She heard the whisper of cloth rubbing on cloth, followed by the scratch of steel on steel.
    “We’re in,” Cosky said a second or so later.
    He’d picked the lock much faster than Beth had expected. With the way her luck was running, these three probably weren’t even the good guys; she’d probably accosted a trio of criminals. It suddenly occurred to her that she was about to disappear inside a room