Oh, God, she was so much smaller than he was, but as her breasts came up to him and her weight shifted so she was leaning against him …

He knew that she was the one in control.

They kissed for the longest time, and it was not nearly enough—but some inner alarm clock went off and was loud enough to cut through the roar of his need for her sex.

Pulling back, he felt a serious shot of male satisfaction as he saw that her face was flushed, and her mouth open, and her breathing rough.

He tried to think of when he could get her alone, how they could find some privacy, where it could be.

“What’s your telephone number?” he asked in a guttural voice.

After she told him, she glanced around. “Do you need to write that down?”

As if. The seven numbers were tattooed on his brain.

“I’ll call you.” Another reason, aside from that whole pesky incinerated-by-the-sun thing, to be glad he was moving in here—he didn’t have a phone of his own. “At seven a.m.”

“To make arrangements to meet? I can’t go out during the day. My father would kill me—and I can’t sneak out. He’d know immediately.”

Yeah, he could remember what it was like living with family in a small house.

Craeg kissed her mouth once. Twice. “Just answer your phone.”

“I’m glad you want to talk.”

“I’m not after the conversation.” He let his eyes drift down over her throat to her breasts. “I’m going to teach you a couple of things.”

“Like what?”

Bending at the waist, he nuzzled her throat. “You know that ache you’ve got right now? The one between your legs?”

“Yes…” she whispered.

“I’m going to show you how to take care of that by yourself. And you’re going to make me come when I listen to what it sounds like.” He straightened and stepped back, nodding to the exit. “Go. Before anyone finds you in here.”

No reason to have her candidacy affected by this. There wasn’t a no-fraternizing rule that he’d seen on the application, but come on. This was best kept under wraps.

“Go on,” he repeated when she didn’t move.

She just stared up at him with wide, hot eyes.

Shit, all he could think of was taking her right then and there, standing up, her legs split wide around his hips, his cock buried so far in her, he had struggle not to black out.

“Go, Paradise.”

Finally, she turned away. Just before she cut around the concrete partition to the door, he growled, “Answer your goddamn phone.”

“I will,” she said. “Right away.”

Left alone, Craeg shut his lids. And wondered how in the hell he was going to make it ’til then.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Three hours later, Craeg was in the front passenger seat of a Hummer. Or nearly leaning out of it was more apt: As Butch drove him and Axe away from the training center’s underground parking garage, Craeg was bent toward the windshield, trying to make sense of the strangely blurry landscape.

“We got bad weather?” Axe asked from the back.

“Nope,” the Brother replied as they came up to an enormous, elaborate gate system that was like something out of Jurassic Park, all twenty-foot-tall concrete with huge metal bars and barricades that had to have electricity running through them.

Yeah, cuz the Brothers had already proved how they loved to play with that shocking shit.

Craeg shook his head. “You guys don’t fool around with the security, do you.”

“Nope.”

As they progressed through the thickly wooded territory, they came up to a series of stop points that grew gradually less and less fancy and obstructive. The last one was little more than something you’d find on an abandoned farm, a rickety “old” thing that turned out to be deliberately constructed to appear that way.

So smart.

When Butch finally emerged from a clearing and took a left onto a paved road, the bizarre blurring of the landscape magically resolved itself. But it was weird, Craeg’s eyes adjusted easily; his bearings did not. Were they heading west? East?

“You know where I live, of course,” Axe muttered.

Butch shot a dry look into the rearview. “No, not at all.”

The drive to wherever it was took about forty-five minutes, and all Craeg got out of the trip was a sense of how little he knew about Caldwell. Having spent his pretrans life at home with his mother, he hadn’t had the chance to get out all that much after his transition—because the raids had happened a mere six months later. And then following the carnage, after he had watched his mother and sister die and proceeded to learn firsthand about his father’s death, he’d gone through a period of intense crazy … then settled into a numb working schedule that had paid the bills and allowed him to find some shelter away from his parents’ house.

He hadn’t been back there since he’d cleaned everything up and buried the females of his bloodline along with the remains of his father—which he’d brought back from the aristocrats’ house.

God, his father. He’d loved the guy—and to find out that a male of such worth had died because a bunch of glymera types had locked him and every other servant and worker on the premises out of the safe room?

And people wondered why he hated those rich bastards.

“You want us to wait here, Axe?” Butch asked.

Craeg shook himself and saw that they’d pulled up in front of …