He tried to tell himself he didn’t like the feeling. He’d kept such a merciless grip on his needs and desires for so long, it should chafe more to realize he was losing his hold so easily where she was concerned.
Jordana was magnetic, her blond hair and flame-colored dress a beacon across the sea of darkly attired men and women. Watching her smooth command of the room and everyone in it filled Nathan with a possessive, selfish pride.
How had such an extraordinary woman become part of his life? Why choose him, when she had her pick of a hundred other more worthy males in this room alone?
But she had chosen.
The private glance she sent him through the thick crowd as she delivered her welcome would have erased any doubt. The instant their eyes connected, Nathan’s blood simmered with added fire. His veins throbbed, and the erection he’d been sporting when she left him a minute ago now worsened to near agony.
He felt his glyphs surge with heat and knew his desire would be plain in the deepening colors that were blooming at his collar and up the sides of his neck. His fangs pricked his tongue, sent saliva surging into his mouth.
Jordana belonged to him.
And whether he wanted to admit it or not, he belonged to her too.
A throat cleared pointedly from beside him. “Remarkable, isn’t she?”
Nathan swung a hard look over his shoulder at the Breed male who’d moved in from the surrounding crowd without his notice.
Son of a bitch.
“Yes, she is,” he replied stiffly, then extended his hand to the Darkhaven leader. “Mr. Gates. I’m Nathan—”
“I know who you are.” Gates kept his arms folded over his tuxedoed chest, his gaze trained on the podium across the wide hall. “What I don’t know is what interest you have in my daughter.” Now he turned his head in pointed observation of Nathan’s ember-flecked eyes and churning dermaglyphs. “Aside from the obvious, that is.”
Nathan bristled but could hardly take offense at her father’s disapproval. “My interests are no different than yours, sir.”
Gates scoffed. “I’m sure they couldn’t be any more different.” His cutting stare narrowed. “I suppose you’re the reason she cast Elliott aside?”
Nathan glanced toward the dais, where Jordana had just finished her speech to a round of enthusiastic applause, and was now being swamped by adoring party guests. “Maybe you should ask her that question instead.”
“There’s no need,” Gates replied. “I saw the way she looks at you, the way she’s acting … the way she’s dressed tonight. It’s all because of you, isn’t it?”
Nathan met the elder vampire’s accusing gaze. There was something more than suspicion or disapproval in the male’s eyes. A protectiveness that verged on desperation.
“Jordana has her own mind,” Nathan said. “She has her own will. How she acts or thinks or behaves is up to her.”
Gates grunted. “Well, I don’t like it. I want this to stop. Immediately, do you understand?”
“I’m not sure I do,” Nathan challenged. He had no wish to make an enemy out of her father, but if Gates thought he had anything to say about Nathan’s relationship with Jordana, he was sorely mistaken.
“Jordana means the world to me,” Gates said. “She’s a very special young woman. I don’t expect someone like you to comprehend that, or to care—”
“Someone like me.” Nathan all but growled the words.
“Stay away from her,” Gates ordered tightly. “As a man—as a fellow Breed male—I am asking you to leave my daughter alone.”
Nathan thought back to a mere week ago, to who he was before the night Jordana crashed into his life with one impulsive, unforgettable kiss.
That man—the street warrior whose nights were filled with ugliness and violence—would have never imagined himself standing in the middle of a glittering society event in a borrowed suit, waiting to be reunited with the most exquisite, extraordinary woman in the room.
He would have never imagined a time or place where he would want to belong to that kind of world, or wish that he had all along, if only to be part of it with her.
To be worthy of her.
To have some kind of future to offer her that didn’t consist of darkness and war and bloodshed.
As the Hunter bred and trained for destruction, he never would have dared permit himself to care for someone as he did for Jordana.