She knew she should protest. She should. She should find her anger again, but she couldn’t. He was too close, and for the first time in her life she realized just how powerful a connection between two shifters could be once their leopards were mated. A sudden thought occurred to her.

“Oh. My. God. Tell me you didn’t put cameras in my house.” Of course he knew where she lived, he had her followed home every night. Twice she was certain a car sat outside all night with a couple of sentries in it. From him. Alonzo had done that to keep her safe. She didn’t even know what she was supposed to be kept safe from. His enemies? Patrizio Amodeo had wanted an alliance with him.

There was a small, telling silence.

“You did not.”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at her with his glacier-cold eyes. She shoved at his chest, angry all over again when it didn’t even rock him.

“What would you have done if I’d brought a man home and had wild sex in my livin’ room or wherever you put the cameras? For all you knew I paraded around naked the moment I got home. How many people have been watchin’ me?”

He straightened slowly, with the fluid grace of a cat, looking menacing and intimidating all at once. His blue eyes went from ice to blue flame, a scary focused blue that seemed to spread out from the iris, slowly turning the white to a frozen flame of blue. The cat was there, easy to see, and it wasn’t a happy animal. A chill went down her spine and she tried to shift back in her chair. He was standing right in front of her, blocking her every escape, so she didn’t have any option but to sit there, staring up at him.

“You were raised in a lair, Evangeline. You know you don’t put the idea of you with another man in front of a shifter after your female has been claimed.”

“I wasn’t raised in a lair.” Contempt crept into her voice. Disgust even. “My father and brothers were in a lair. My uncle and my grandfather. Not that it did any of them any good. I don’ know the first thing about lairs, other than they are corrupt and I want no part of them.”

She couldn’t help the fact that her voice was almost a hiss of anger. She meant it and he needed to know that. To hear it. To understand that she wouldn’t be intimidated into living under lair rule. She was independent. Had she dreamt of having her own family? A man she could love? Of course. But she was born a shifter. Whether or not her female would ever emerge remained to be seen, but even if she did, no way in hell was Evangeline going to be part of a lair.