Savage Alpha (Alpha 8) by Carole Mortimer

gaze with his. Her eyes looked green now rather than blue, dark and feverish, her cheeks flushed and her lips slightly parted.
    Jonas pressed his thumb harder against her clit, watching as her back arched, pushing her breasts forward. He couldn’t wait to bare those too and gorge himself on the ripe nipples he could see pushing against her sweater—
    “No…!” Lily groaned in protest as the musical ringtone of her cell phone sounded in the quiet of the kitchen, causing Jonas to slowly sit back on his heels and look up at her enquiringly, his lips wet with her juices. “Ignore it,” she encouraged desperately. Damn it, she had been so close. So close…
    The ringtone stopped.
    Only to start up again immediately.
    “Seems urgent,” Jonas drawled.
    Her need to come was more urgent.
    She had never been as aroused so quickly. Or so desperate to have a man’s mouth and hands on her. She wanted more, damn it!
    Except her cell phone didn’t stop its musical intrusion this time, the continuous—and previously favorite—tune, grating on her in a way that made her decide to change the ringtone as soon as possible. Or throw the damned phone across the kitchen in a fit of pique.
    “Lily?”
    To her chagrin, Jonas rose to his feet in front of her, a sure indication the moment was over, despite the ache and throbbing of Lily’s body and the hunger still coursing through her.
    She pulled her sweater back down over her thighs, self-consciously aware she wasn’t wearing any clothing beneath the waist and her cell phone was all the way across the kitchen on another work top. “Would you mind?” She grimaced, not quite meeting Jonas’s gaze.
    “No problem.” Jonas crossed the kitchen in two long strides to pick up her cell phone and hand it to her.
    He seemed unruffled by the interruption, at least. Too unruffled, considering Lily’s state of arousal.
    “Yes?” she snapped as she answered the call.
    Jonas watched through narrowed lids as Lily’s eyes widened, becoming even rounder, her face paling the longer she listened to whoever was on the other end of that call.
    Saved by the bell?
    Or, in this case, the ringtone?
    What the hell had he been thinking, half stripping Lily and then going down on her like a ravenous beast? He hadn’t been thinking, only feeling, wanting.
    He suppressed a groan as he made the mistake of licking the taste of Lily from his lips. He could become addicted to that taste. Could become addicted to Lily.
    Women came and women went in his life, most of those encounters as fleeting as a one-night stand. Jonas knew his mixed heritage was a lure, his outer calm a challenge, but once those women realized they weren’t going to get beneath that façade, they usually backed off.
    Lily didn’t back off.
    Instead, she kept chipping away at his outer shell a bit at a time. Hell, he’d already told her more about himself, his parents, than even his closest friend knew. She—
    “What is it?” Jonas’s tone was sharp as Lily ended the call, her eyes once again full of those haunted shadows that turned them a dark green similar to Gabriel’s. “Lily?” He moved swiftly across the kitchen to take her in his arms as she seemed precariously close to falling off the work top.
    Tears swam in her eyes as she looked up at him. “That was Giles, the director of Desperation . Tonight’s performance has been canceled.” She drew in a ragged breath. “Everyone is being called back in to the theater, though, so the police can talk to all of us.”
    “Why?”
    She began to tremble in reaction to whatever she’d been told. “Someone… Someone broke into the theater after we left earlier.” The trembling deepened. “Charlie—the doorman… He… He’s dead, Jonas, beaten with his own walking stick! And—and—”
    “And?” Jesus Christ!
    The tears began to cascade down her cheeks. “And Evan is in the intensive care unit, in a coma after being hit on the head too.”

Chapter 5
    Jonas glanced across