"I want to see you," she gasped in between his hungry kisses. "I need to see you, Rio..."

She didn't wait for his permission.

Casting her hand about, she found the lamp beside the sofa and clicked it on. Soft yellow light bathed the room in illumination. Rio was poised above her, straddling her hips with his knees as he stared down at her in what looked to be pure misery.

His eyes were glowing fiery amber. His features were drawn taut, his jaw held locked but not quite able to mask the astonishing length or sharpness of his fangs. The dermaglyphs on his shoulders and arms were churning with color - beautiful, deep saturations in a range of burgundy, indigo, and gold.

And his scars...well, she saw them too. Couldn't really ignore them, and she didn't try to.

Dylan came up onto one elbow and reached up to him with her other hand. He flinched, turning his face to the left like he meant to hide his ruined cheek. But Dylan wasn't about to let him hide. Not now. Not from her. She reached out again, tenderly placing her palm against the hard line of his jaw.

"Don't," he said thickly.

"It's okay." She gently turned him to face her full-on. With the utmost care, she lightly caressed the scarred skin. She followed the damage to his body, smoothing her fingers down the side of his neck, to his shoulder and biceps, over the skin that had once been as smooth and flawless as the rest of him. "Does it hurt for me to touch you like this?"

He said something, but it came out strangled, unintelligible.

Dylan sat up fully, lifting herself until her face was level with his. She held his gaze, making sure those thin, catlike pupils stayed rooted on her eyes as she softly stroked his cheek, his jaw, his wonderfully sensual mouth.

"Don't look at me, Dylan," he croaked, the very thing he'd said before, she realized now. "Fuck...how can you look at me so closely - how can you put your hands on me - and not be revolted?"

Dylan's heart squeezed up like a fist in her breast. "I'm looking at you, Rio. I see you. I'm touching you. You, " she said with emphasis.

"These scars - "

"Are incidental," she finished for him. She smiled as she glanced down at his mouth and at the perfectly white, perfectly incredible pair of fangs that had sprouted from his gums. "Your scars are the most ordinary thing about you, if you want to know the truth."

His lip curled back as if he were going to push her away with more talk of his perceived defects, but Dylan didn't give him the chance. She held his face in her hands and leaned in close, giving him a deep, unhurried, passionate kiss.

She moaned as his hands wove into her hair and he kissed her back.

Dylan wanted him so fiercely, she could hardly stand it. God, the whole thing made no sense - this craving she had for a man she hardly knew and for so many reasons should be terrified of, not kissing like there was no tomorrow.

But she didn't want to stop kissing Rio. She put her arms around his shoulders and drew him down with her, back onto the sofa. His hair was silky against her palm, his mouth hot and questing on hers. His hand was strong but gentle as he slipped beneath the hem of her tee-shirt and smoothed his palm up her stomach and then over her bare breasts. Dylan writhed as he caressed her, his fingers teasing her nipples into hard, aching buds while his tongue played along the seam of her mouth.

"Oh, God," she gasped, burning for him already.

He wedged himself deeper between her thighs, spreading her wide with his knees and grinding his stiff erection against her through their clothes. She nearly came from the delicious friction of their bodies. Good Christ, she was going to climax for sure if he kept up that fluid rhythm that left no doubt as to what kind of lover he would be once they had their clothes off.

Dylan lifted her feet and locked her ankles around his hips, letting him know that she was willing to go wherever he wanted to take this. She wasn't used to throwing herself at a man's feet - could hardly remember the last time she'd had sex at all, let alone good sex - but she could think of nothing she wanted more than to be making love with Rio. Right here. Right now.

He sucked her lower lip between his teeth as he rolled his hips against hers. She reveled in the graze of his fangs, in the hard, driving thrust of his body and the flex of his muscles under her palms. He slid his hand between her legs, his fingers cleaving her wet, hot flesh, and Dylan could not hold back the cry that curled up from her throat.

"Yes," she hissed sharply as an orgasm rolled up on her out of nowhere. "Oh, God...Rio..."

She was spiraling inside, lost in pleasure, and clutching Rio as her core pulsed with her release. She heard his wild sounding growl, registered dimly that he had broken their kiss to let his lips wander down along the column of her throat. She wrapped her arms around him as he nuzzled her neck, his tongue playing hotly against her tender skin.

The rough stroke of his teeth in that spot startled her.

She tensed, even though she didn't want to be afraid of what might come next. But she couldn't call back the automatic reaction, and Rio drew away from her as if she'd screamed at the top of her lungs.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, reaching for him but he was already gone, moving off her and taking himself more than an arm's length from the sofa. Dylan sat up, feeling oddly bereft. "I'm sorry, Rio. I just wasn't sure..."

"Don't apologize," he muttered sullenly. "Madre de Dios, do not apologize to me, please. This was my fault, Dylan."

"No," she said, desperate that he stay with her. "I want this, Rio."

"You shouldn't," he said. "And I would not have been able to stop."

He raked his hand through his dark hair, staring at her with those blazing amber eyes. "This would have been a terrible mistake for both of us," he said after a long moment. "Ah, fuck. It already is a terrible mistake."

Before she could say anything, Rio simply turned around and left. As the apartment door closed behind him, Dylan pulled her tee-shirt back down and adjusted her skewed boxers. In the quiet he left her with, she pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shins, then reached over and clicked off the lamp.

Chapter Nineteen

Rio lifted a 9mm pistol and aimed it toward a target at the end of the compound's firing range. The gun felt foreign as hell in his hand despite that it was his own weapon, one he'd carried on him for years and had been lethally proficient with...before.

Before the warehouse explosion.

Before the injuries that had taken him out of combat and dropped him into a sickbed, broken in mind and body.

Before his blindness to Eva's duplicity had made him question everything he was and ever could be again.

A sheen of sweat broke out on Rio's lip as he held his target in his sights. His trigger finger was shaky, and it took all his concentration to focus in on the small head-and-shoulders silhouette printed on the paper target some twenty yards down the range.

But that was exactly the point of his coming here.

After what had happened with Dylan a few minutes ago, Rio needed a distraction in a major way. Something that would command all of his focus, cool him out. Hopefully dull the edge of the carnal hunger that gnawed at him even now. He wanted Dylan with a need that was still pounding through his veins in a deep, primal beat.

He could still feel her body moving beneath his, so soft and welcoming. So passionately responsive. So accepting of him, even though he was fit only to play Beast to her Beauty.

It was a fantasy he'd let himself indulge in as he'd kissed Dylan, as he pressed her down beneath him and wondered if the intense attraction he felt for her might actually be mutual. No one was that good an actor. Eva had claimed to love him once. The depth of her betrayal had been a shock, but in the back of his mind, he'd known she wasn't happy with him the way he was, in the life he'd chosen as a warrior.

She hadn't wanted him to join in the first place. She'd never understood his need to do some good, his need to be useful. More than once, she'd asked him why she wasn't enough for him. Why loving her, making her happy, couldn't be enough. He had wanted both, but even she had been able to see that he wanted the Order more.

Rio could still recall one night, strolling in a city park with Eva, taking pictures of her on a little bridge over the river. She'd told him that night how she wanted him to leave the Order and give her a baby. Demands he couldn't - or, rather, wouldn't - comply with.

Give it time, he'd told her. The warriors had been putting out fires with a small surge in Rogue activity in the region, so he'd told her to be patient. Once things settled down, maybe they could think about a family.

Looking back, he wasn't sure he'd meant it. Eva hadn't believed him; he'd seen that in her eyes, even then. Hell, maybe it had been at that very moment she'd decided to take matters into her own hands.

He had let Eva down and he knew it. But she had paid him back in spades. Her betrayal had rattled him on a soul-deep level. It had made him question everything, including why the hell he should be taking up precious space in this world.

When Dylan kissed him - when she looked at him full in the face and her eyes reflected back only honesty - Rio could believe, at least for a moment, that he wasn't just a pitiful waste of air and space. When he'd looked into Dylan's eyes and felt her hand cradling his scars, he could believe life might actually be worth living after all.

And he was a selfish bastard for thinking that he had anything to offer a woman like her. He'd already destroyed one woman's life, and nearly his own; he wasn't about to take a second chance with Dylan's life.

Rio narrowed his gaze on the target down the way and forced an iron steadiness into his hold on the gun. He pulled the trigger, felt the familiar kick of his weapon as the Beretta discharged and a bullet went blasting into the smallest center ring of the target's bull's-eye.

"Good to see you haven't lost a bit of your aim. Still dead-on like always."

Rio set the weapon down on the shelf in front of him. When he turned around it was to find Nikolai standing behind him, his broad back leaned up against the wall. Rio had known he wasn't alone here; he'd heard Niko and the three other unmated warriors talking on the far end of the facility as they cleaned their weapons and rehashed their late-night prowl of the human after-hours club.

"How was the hunting topside?"

Niko shrugged. "A lot of the usual."

"Hot babes without enough sense to run when they see you coming?" Rio asked, a tentative stab at breaking the ice that was present between them since his arrival at the compound.

To his relief, Niko chuckled. "Nothing wrong with loose and easy when it comes to women, my man. Maybe next time you should hang with us. I can hook you up with something sweet and nasty." Twin dimples notched his lean cheeks. "You know, if you're not planning to off yourself or anything in the meantime. You dumb bastard."

It was said without venom, only the solemn knowledge of a friend concerned about one of his own.

"I'll let you know," Rio said, and he could tell by Nikolai's narrowed look that the warrior understood he wasn't talking about the prospect of getting a little action topside.

Niko's voice dropped to a confidential tone. "You can't let her win, you know? 'Cause that's what giving up is. Yeah, she screwed you over, and I'm not saying you need to forgive and forget because frankly I don't think I could if I were you. But you're still here. So fuck her ," Niko said harshly. "Fuck Eva. And fuck the bomb that went off in that warehouse. Because you, my friend, are still here."

Rio scoffed, but it was a weak sound in his tight throat. He tried to clear the obstruction, feeling awkward as hell for caring that someone cared about him. "Damn, amigo. Just how much Oprah have you been watching since I've been gone? Because coming from you, that was really touching."

Niko chortled. "On second thought, forget all that shit I just said. Fuck you too."

Rio laughed, the first real laugh to come out of his mouth...Jesus, in about a full year's time.

"Hey, Niko." Kade came strolling up from the other end of the facility, the Alaskan's black spiky hair and sharp silver eyes giving him a wild, wolflike look. "I'm turning in. Tonight if we run into that other Rogue out of the Darkhavens, don't forget you promised he was mine."

"If I don't get to the suckhead first," Brock put in, coming up behind the other warrior and smiling as he artfully placed the edge of a huge dagger under Kade's chin.

Brock's rich chuckle boomed out of him good-naturedly enough, but it was plain to see that the warrior the Order had recruited from Detroit would be as grim and thorough as the Reaper himself in combat. He let Kade go, and the two of them continued to argue over dibs on the Rogue as they headed out of the weapons room to their own separate corners of the compound.

Chase was the last to come around from the back of the facility. His black tee-shirt had a long rip down the front, like someone had tried to get a piece of him. Judging by the sated color of the vampire's glyphs and the chilled-out look in his normally hard-ass eyes, it appeared he'd taken his fill of everything the club girls were offering topside tonight.

He gave Rio a slight incline of his head in greeting, then spoke to Nikolai. "If you hear anything more out of Seattle, let me know. I'm curious why a killing of this nature hasn't been acknowledged by the Agency yet."

"Yeah," Niko said. "I'd like to know that myself."

Rio frowned. "Who turned up dead in Seattle?"

"One of the longest-standing members of the Darkhaven out there," Niko said. "The guy was Gen One, in fact."