Read Mercury's War for Free Online

lover?”
        Her head swung around at the question.
        “Excuse me?” She blinked back at him in shock, and her body nearly sizzled at the look he was giving her.
        His expression was decidedly sensual.
        “Why don’t you have a lover?” he asked again, spacing out the words as though she might have trouble understanding English. “You’re pretty. Single. And you’re alone.”
        “I don’t see a woman hanging on your arm,” she snapped out. “Perhaps I left him at home.”
        He shook his head. “There’s no scent of a man on you. If you had a lover, the scent of his arousal would linger around you for weeks, even if you were separated from him. So you don’t have a lover.”
        “And I don’t consider it your business,” she told him, striving for calm.
        “I do.”
        Her heart slapped in her chest, blood rushed to her head, and she wondered if the reaction was a precursor to a stroke. Because it had never happened to her before.
        “I don’t.” She watched him warily now.
        “Dane shouldn’t have sent you here alone,” he told her, his voice quiet, too soft, dangerous. “You’re tempting, Ms. Rodriquez. And you’re a challenge. Two things a Breed has a hard time ignoring.”
        And she was going to melt into her seat. Tempting and a challenge? She was plain and she knew it. She tried to spice it up with sexy underclothes and the bling Dane brought her. Not always jewels. Sometimes a scarf, sometimes something as simple as an odd piece of art found in an unknown market.
        She liked pretty things around her, because she knew she wasn’t so pretty. She wasn’t tempting. And despite his claim, she wouldn’t be much of a challenge if he decided he wanted into her bed.
        “You needn’t play with me, Mercury,” she told him, aware she couldn’t cover that small hint of sadness that slipped free. “I do my job. No matter the temptation not to.”
        And he could tempt her. He could be her downfall.
        

CHAPTER 3
        
        He watched her. That ridiculous bun her hair had been twisted into at the nape of her neck was trying to unravel. When she glanced at him, her brown eyes, almost the color of dark chocolate, were irritated. Her softly rounded, creamy face and stubborn chin were intriguing. But there were other parts of her making him crazy.
        If she kept twitching her ass like that, he was going to fuck it. So help him God, he was going to take her to her knees, hike that plain brown skirt to her hips, and show her the folly of teasing a fully grown, hungry male Lion Breed.
        Mercury Warrant leaned against the wall of the small office Gloria “please call me Ria” Rodriquez was using, and fought to maintain the same cool facade he’d held over the past month.
        It wasn’t easy. Especially when she moved from the desk to the table set up across from it to go through the files stacked there. She would lean over, sometimes studying each file’s contents before choosing one, and the ugly brown skirt would mold to her ass like a loving hand.
        Like his hand wanted to mold to it, clench it, separate the full globes as he watched his erection slide into the moist, silky heat below.
        He was a walking hard-on, and after four weeks of it, it was starting to piss him off. He jacked off to the thought of her, the image of her face and her naked body straddling him. The days he spent with her only fueled that desire until it was starting to pinch at his balls in hunger.
        He wanted the little plain Jane. He wanted to throw her to the bed and rut in her until the need was obliterated and his mind was free of her.
        “You were the mechanical specialist before you became part of Mr. Wyatt’s team?” She turned her head, gazing at him through sharp, brown eyes. “You were the one who set the specifications of the dirt bikes we shipped