“Wyatt has his three daughters there, Cayenne. No one is taking chances that someone might try to harm the girls. It isn’t safe for you there. Not until everyone gets to know you. I bought the building where they were holding you and I’m renovating it. I started with the laboratory.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I knew you bought the property and brought all those workmen there so they could tramp through it, making it look…”

“Like a home? Yeah, baby, that’s me. Why? Are you staying there?” He flashed a small smirk at her. “I knew you were there. You give yourself away with all those spiderwebs.” Now they were sparring, doing the dance he knew would come eventually when she tried to push him away.

She pressed her lips together and turned her face away from him. “Stay away from there, Trap.”

“I’m moving in tomorrow. You want to see me, you come there.”

“I’m not playing around,” she hissed at him again. “You take too many chances. You act like you don’t care whether you live or die.”

“Been alone most of my life, baby. It gets fucking lonely. Got a couple of men on my trail who want to kill anything that matters to me, so I don’t let anything matter.” His eyes bored into hers. “Until you. You matter, Cayenne, whether it makes sense or not, so if you want to kill me for giving a damn about you, make your try.”

She sat back in the chair and ducked her head. Clouds of dark hair fell around her face, hiding her expression from his sight. Moodily his gaze drifted over her. Possessively. He felt possessive. He felt rage at what had been done to her simmering just below the surface. He was a man of discipline and control and yet he was close to losing both.

Wyatt, will you get a bottle of cold water for her?

You goin’ to cut me up I come near your woman? Wyatt was already at the bar talking to Delmar and keeping a wary eye on the Comeaux brothers.

Why the hell would you think that?

Because you’ve surrounded the table with shadows and that shimmer shit no one can breathe. I don’ want to choke to death and leave Pepper with our three girls to raise all alone. She might not take kindly to that.

Trap glanced across the bar to see Wyatt grinning as he reached for the bottle of water Delmar handed to him. Wyatt wasn’t wrong. Trap had enclosed them in shadows and a protective ring that would keep anyone else away. He forced himself to relax and breathe. He hadn’t made a mistake like that in years. Hearing what her life had been like, just the small bit she’d revealed, had thrown him.

Wyatt handed him the bottle of water, sent Cayenne a cocky grin and made his way to the table where Mordichai sat with his brother Malichai. Trap twisted off the cap and gave Cayenne the bottle.

“Drink water when you prefer it and the hell with everyone else, baby,” he advised. “Live free. I don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks of me. I care about my team and Wyatt’s family and now you. That’s it. Everyone else can go to hell.”

“Not me.” She shook her head decisively. “You can’t trust me, Trap. Don’t for one minute think you can.”

Her fingers moved on the table, a small drumming pattern, not loud, but definitely hypnotic. He put his hand over hers. She gasped as if he’d burned her and nearly pulled her hand back at the contact.

“Be still. Breathe.”

She left her hand under his, but her green eyes moved over him broodingly. “I can’t breathe. If I do, you’re inside me. I feel you there in my lungs, moving through my body. You’re a liability. You’d better hear me this time. When I get cornered” – she leaned close – “I’m lethal.”

“We all are, baby. Every one of us. Look around you. You see them. You feel them. Every last one of us is enhanced, just like you.”

“You aren’t flawed. You weren’t scheduled for termination.”

“Fuck that reasoning, Cayenne. You’re intelligent. Because you scare the hell out of them doesn’t mean they’re right to terminate you. Why would you accept any judgment they pass on you? Whitney and this man who had you in his lab, Braden, are megalomaniacs, believing they have the right to take children, infants…” For a moment a deep well of rage showed in his eyes, burning blue behind the ice.

He took a breath and flicked a glance at the shimmer surrounding them. It took effort, but he breathed away the evidence of that fury.

“To make his superior soldiers as well as the elite GhostWalkers, Whitney first experimented on little kids. God knows how many children he killed because they weren’t to his liking. He put men like Braden in place, scattering them in various countries in labs to do his dirty work. Wyatt’s brother Gator is a GhostWalker. His woman was repeatedly given cancer by Whitney when she was a child. He had another girl living in a sanitarium, training, running missions from right here in the swamp. She was forced to return here. The tract of land and the building I just bought? Whitney owned that. He had the sanitarium there, and it was burned to the ground because he suddenly decided the girl he’d forced to live there was expendable and he sent a hit squad after her. That’s the kind of man who decided you had to be terminated. Seriously, baby, get that flawed crap out of your head.”

She sat back and slowly pulled her hand out from under his. Her lashes fluttered, and he felt that small movement as if she’d fluttered them against his skin. Up close she was potent. He could see every breath she drew. The creamy swell of her breasts lifted when she drew in air. The temptation to tug at the ribbons of her camisole and open that crisscross of blue was difficult to resist. She was very lucky they were in a public place.

“Tell me about Wyatt’s daughters.”

It didn’t surprise him that she knew all about Wyatt and his daughters. She’d been rescued when their GhostWalker team had gone to rescue the toddlers from termination. When the soldiers had come in an effort to try to reacquire them, Cayenne had aided the GhostWalker team in protecting them. The triplets were not yet two and all three of them injected venom if they bit anyone. Wyatt and Trap had been trying to find a way to prevent that from happening.

“They’re happy. Nonny, Wyatt’s grandmother, is an amazing woman. She’s in her eighties, but she goes out in the swamp and transplants flowers and shrubs to keep her pharmaceutical bed alive and thriving. She adores those girls and treats all of us like family.”