Dragonfury 01 - Fury of Fire

look at in the small, upscale apartment.
    He walked past a galley kitchen on his left and into the small living room. Long couch, two rattan chairs, a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall. No area rug, no pictures hanging on the washed-out walls, nothing but hard surfaces and floor-to-ceiling, steel-framed windows with industrial blinds on them. Nothing that would tell him who she was or what she liked to do in her off-hours. Then again, maybe she didn’t have any. Cops were notorious workaholics, spending more time on the job than in their real lives.
    The place was blissfully cool, though, like she’d cranked the heat way down. Score another point for Angela Keen. Her tally was now somewhere in the range of plus bazillion on his sliding frosty scale.
    Glancing right, he found a narrow hallway. The bedroom was somewhere down there. He glanced at the couch. No way he’d leave her there. She’d wake up with a chill and…
    Yeah. He soooo needed to get the hell out of here.
    A death grip on his urges, he hit the hallway, turning sideways so her feet didn’t bump the wall. Two doors faced each other across the corridor. A quick check through doorway number one and he located the bathroom. He went right, shouldering the door open, heart picking up pace, pissing him off as he crossed into her personal domain.
    Her scent was stronger here, as though she spent all of her time in the small twelve-by-twelve-foot box. Rikar swallowed, breathed in through his nose, out his mouth, and rounded the foot of her bed. The thing was compact, just like her. A steel-frame double with silky-looking sheets and no other embellishments. No throw pillows. No fancy quilts or embroidered anything. No nonsense…just like her.
    Man, he liked that about her. Clean, simple, straightforward on the outside, beautifully complex on the inside.
    Okay. Enough of that bullshit.
    This was an in-and-out mission. And not the sexual kind.
    She sighed as he set her down. He watched her snuggle in, the muscles across his abdomen pulling at his hipbones, fisting his balls up tight. Yup. No doubt about it. Time to get the hell out of Dodge, but…
    With a curse, he grabbed the heel of her boot and pulled it off her small foot. He attacked the second, dropping it beside its mate on the floor, and went to work on the duvet. Drawing the covers down, he tugged them from beneath her and then brought it up, wrapping her in the warmth of silk and feather down.
    Her eyes drifted open.
    Rikar froze, his hands in the covers beneath her chin as he got nailed by her hazel gaze. The impact almost floored him.
    “Hey,” she said, the greeting slurred by sleep and the aftereffects of the feeding. She blinked once, a slow up and down. “You staying?”
    “No.” But man, he wanted to. He brushed the hair away from her temple instead, fingertips lingering on her soft skin. “Go back to sleep, angel.”
    Her eyes drifted closed, dark lashes on pale cheeks. “Tomorrow?”
    “Yeah, tomorrow,” he said, lying through his teeth, trying not to feel good that she wanted to see him again.
    As sleep pulled her under, Rikar straightened and spun toward the bedroom door. Escape was priority one. Nothing else he could do. No sense making another mistake. He’d made enough tonight to last a lifetime. Now he needed to get back to the lair. Back to reality before daylight hit and he got fried by the sun.
    Thirty seconds later, he was out of her apartment and in the corridor, door double-bolted behind him, security panel beep-beep-beeping as ADT reengaged the system. He breathed a little easier. His she-cop was safe, locked up tight behind the steel doors and concrete walls.
    His. Right. He needed his head examined. A total frickin’ reboot. One he was likely to get when he got home and had his hardware rewired by Bastian and his nasty grief-vengeance combo.
    Man, payback was a bitch.
    “Don’t think about it,” he growled at himself, cranking the door to the stairwell open.
    He went up instead of down, taking the stairs three at a time. The underground garage where he’d parked Angela’s Jeep wouldn’t get him anywhere but…well, underground. Not exactly where he wanted to be right now. He needed air and plenty of height to unleash his inner dragon.
    The beast was jonesing to get out. Wanting to stretch his wings, work out the frustration, and forget about the female. About how good she tasted. And where he’d left her.
    Moving as though he had rockets strapped to the