by Lora Leigh
Because she knew exactly what it was.
It was mating heat.
She let the water hit her full in the face, wondering if she could possibly wash away the knowledge that somehow those savage animal genetics Lawe possessed had chosen her as his mate.
Should she be honored?
How insulted would he be to know she wasn’t, she wondered as she smacked the shower wall and let a more human growl of outrage pass her lips.
She so, so just did not need this.
She wasn’t about to deny it, though, and see herself in much more trouble than she was actually in. Denying the fact that mating heat was ready to begin burning like a wildfire through their senses was the worst thing she could do.
Denying it would only cause an even larger mistake to be made. Perhaps a kiss to be shared, or even the ultimate transgression—that they would actually have sex and then the agony of the heat would sweep through her and Lawe with a strength that would be destructive to them both.
Diane shivered at the thought. A wave of weakening hunger swept through her, causing her knees to dip at the very thought of having that primal male moving over her.
Moving in her.
Stretching her inner flesh—
Taking her—
Fucking her like a man possessed by the beast his genetics were derived from.
Oh yeah, she could so get into the pleasure.
It was the thought of that ultimate possession that had her completely freaking out, though.
It was the thought of being bound. Helpless. Watching death steal those she knew, those she loved, and being unable to stop it.
Her parents, because she had been too young.
Her uncle, because he hadn’t trusted her to help him.
And Padric. Padric with his smiling eyes, his devil-may-care grin and his love of poetry. She hadn’t been able to save him because neither he nor her uncle had heeded her warnings that the past would never completely go away.
Giving her head a hard shake, Diane stepped from the shower and quickly toweled dry before dressing in jeans, a white silk sleeveless camp shirt and the scuffed, worn leather half boots she preferred.
Fixing her hair was a simple matter of running her fingers through it as she spread a light gel and arranged the heavy waves as they fell to her shoulders.
The primping wasn’t exactly normal for her, but at the moment she needed all the feminine self-confidence she could steal. Facing Lawe at that meeting with Jonas was not going to be easy.
As a matter of fact, it was going to be killer arousing. It was going to flush her entire body with heat and cause every erogenous zone in her body to light up like the Fourth of July.
Dammit.
All she was going to be able to think about was riding that hard, powerful body. Moving above him. Taking him inside her. Feeling him working the engorged length of his cock into her—
Controlling all that exquisite, exceptional, male power—
She shivered again, glanced in the mirror then grimaced at the completely feminine image she saw in the mirror.
In the eyes of the men she fought with and commanded, there was a difference between being weak and feminine weakness. Just as there was a difference between being a woman and possessing a girlie side that had never affected her ability to lead them, and being a submissive woman. And submissive was something Diane knew she could never be. So it hadn’t affected their willingness to follow her.
A light application of makeup followed, just a dusting of a powder foundation. She spent more time on smoky hues of shadow applied to her eyes and a light application of mascara to lengthen and thicken her lashes. A coating of gloss to her lips, then a light misting of her favorite perfume.
The woman that stared back at her wasn’t the woman who had checked into the hotel the night before. Worn, exhausted and struggling to haul her bags to her room, she had felt as though she would never get enough rest.
This morning, rested, bright-eyed and approaching a clear mind, she drew in a deep breath and gave a brief nod to her image. Her determination to never allow his touch may have been compromised, but so far, she was dealing with the consequences of it.
Her pussy was wet and heated, longing for his touch.
Her nipples were tight and hard, aching for his lips, the stroke of his tongue, the sucking heat of his mouth and the rasp of his teeth.
Every cell in her body longed for the warmth of his, but it wasn’t agonizing. It was irritating. Damned irritating. It was close to a compulsion, but she was handling it.
And she would continue to handle it, she promised herself. Staring at the image in the mirror, she decided she was now ready to face the day.
Or Lawe.
A flush raced over her face and down her neck at the memory of the searing pleasure that had shot through her body at the culmination of his touch the night before. A pleasure that had suffused her entire body. It had been so unexpected, so hot, she’d been helpless against it.
It had weakened her, heated her, marked a part of her she couldn’t explain.
And the release . . .
Was that a moan that slipped past her lips?
Gripping the counter tight, she breathed in sharply and fought back the insidious ache that insisted on tormenting the most feminine parts of her body.
She had to stop.
She could feel her pussy dampening, clenching, preparing for the ultimate possession by the ultimate male animal.
And she had to stop it from happening.
Now.
She could not go into this meeting with Jonas Wyatt smelling of sexual need and the inability to concentrate.
She couldn’t allow Lawe Justice to turn her mind into mush like this.
There was too much at stake for that, not just for the Breeds but for her sister and her niece too.
The serum that the medical research giant Phillip Brandenmore had injected her niece with was so unknown that they had no idea what it would do to the child.
Diane knew there were changes in Amber. She could see them when she spent more than a few weeks away from the baby. And then there had been the night when Rachel called her on a secured sat line while Diane had been out of the country on a mission.
Rachel had been sobbing.
Her daughter was purring, she had cried, and the other children hissed and snapped at the babe whenever she was around, causing Amber to cry.
Amber wasn’t a Breed, but she was acting like a Breed, and she was becoming frightened of the other children because of their reaction to her. She was withdrawn, whimpering whenever Rachel took her around the other children because of their reactions to her. Amber was now frightened of all children, and she was barely eight months old. She was too little, too young, to have to face such an instinctive and primal reaction from others her own age.
Rachel had been nearly hysterical and trying to hold back her pain and fear from her mate, Jonas. Rachel had called her sister instead and spilled out the pain building inside her and the pain tormenting her.
The agony tearing her apart as the changes in her baby became more noticeable was destroying her. Sobbing, she had begged Diane to just make what was happening to Amber stop, when they both knew that if it could be stopped, then Jonas would have already done whatever was necessary to put a halt to it.
The mother inside her sister had splintered and wept for the changes in her baby. Changes that were so uncertain and unknown.
Brave, strong, resilient Rachel had waited until her mate had left for D.C. and then she had broken down. It was then she had finally called her sister and told her what was happening to Amber after Brandenmore had attempted to kidnap her that night.
Diane had rushed back to the States in the middle of a mission despite her men’s anger, and returned to her sister’s side.
What she had seen for herself had shocked her to her very core, and terrified her.
At five months old Amber had watched her with an intelligence and und
erstanding that Diane couldn’t seem to process.
Amber wasn’t talking yet, but Diane had had the most intense feeling that Amber would have known exactly what she wanted to say if she could have spoken.
The fear that Amber would be harmed in the future was ripping those who loved her apart. So much so that Diane had begun immediately investigating Phillip Brandenmore in the search for the scientists that had helped him create the serum.
Jonas had his own investigation going, but, as she had told him, Amber wouldn’t have been his first victim. A scientist never used his most important research subject for the first trial. And Amber had been very important for some reason. A reason Diane had yet to find.
There would have been others.
Diane wanted answers and she was in a position to push buttons and go further than the Breeds. They were watched with the same intensity as any experiment under a microscope. They could only work in the shadows, but the type of social interaction Diane was an expert in, they hadn’t really been raised to do. That type came with the life Diane had been born to as a child and lived until she was a teenager.
She could charm, bribe and threaten people the Breeds had a harder time getting to in those more social settings. And she could do it without having to kill later. After all, there was no way to hurt the Breeds by going after her. They would only hurt her sister. And themselves, if the world learned they had harmed the wife of the director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs.
Diane had found in the past three months exactly what she had suspected. She had found proof that Brandenmore had done the same experiment before, and more than once. The first test subjects had been more than twenty years ago, and terminated when the serum had resulted in feral fever. With the second set, there had been success, of sorts. At least, there would have been if he hadn’t lost the test subjects he had used to help create his serum.
The same serum he had given Amber.
Three children. A male Bengal Breed, the daughter of a young woman who had been thrown out by her influential family when she had been diagnosed HIV positive, and a child reported to have been kidnapped from her very influential military family and held for five years. Those had been his second test subjects.
The Breed and the child of the homeless woman were to have been terminated once the experiments on the serum were considered a success and the scientists moved on to adult subjects. The daughter of the military family had been returned to her family, free of the rapidly spreading, fatal leukemia she had been diagnosed with at age two.
It began with those children. Children who were now adults and, according to an anonymous message she had received via a contact she’d found in New York before leaving for Argentina, were still living. They were doing more than living—they were thriving. And they held the answers to the dangers, and the changes, Amber now faced. Moving to the sitting area of the hotel suite, Diane grabbed the backpack she carried wherever she went and headed to the door.
She was reaching for the doorknob when a heavy knock sounded on the other side. She knew that knock. Thor wasn’t exactly timid.
A grin tilted her lips as she pulled the door open and met the gazes of the four men she had led since her uncle’s death five years before.
And that damned warning that had been slipped beneath her hotel door haunted her.
There was a spy close to her. These four men were the closest and the only people, besides her sister, that Diane trusted. And she couldn’t discount the fact that each time she had thought she had found someone who would know something, and she had shared that information with her men, something had happened to her sources.
“Had a feeling you’d be ready to roll before a humanly decent hour,” Thor grunted, his gaze clear but his demeanor his early morning normal. Grouchy as hell.
That was the problem. She couldn’t imagine any of her men betraying her. Hell. She felt like a traitor herself for even considering one of them could betray her.
“Did you miss your coffee this morning, Thor?” she asked archly as he glared back at her silently.
“Come on, I hear Jonas has Rachel in town with him. She always makes sure he has excellent coffee at his office.” Closing the door firmly behind her she moved out ahead of the others as she ignored the hope that lightened his morose expression.
“Any new information come in, boss?” Brick asked as they headed for the elevators. “I’m ready to head home for a little vacay if not.”
Diane had put out a few feelers before leaving Argentina. She had found several of the scientists and research technicians that had worked at the Omega lab in the Andes as well as one that had worked briefly in a little-known lab in Alaska in the Denali mountains.
Getting any of them to talk once she had managed to slip away from her men hadn’t been simple, though. Fear was a hell of a silencer and working around it wasn’t often easy.
Blackmail was such a dirty word, and so very effective when those scientists and research assistants were terrified of the world learning they had worked with Brandenmore or the Genetics Council.
It was then that Diane had learned of the three research subjects from Brandenmore labs who had disappeared. Research subjects who had been treated for years with the serum Brandenmore had created.
If those three had lived, that meant the answers she needed for Amber were out there as well. That night, Diane had found the warning note in her room. A location and the warning that she was being betrayed by someone close to her. It had been signed, The Executioner. The Breed rumored to be killing the scientists and some researchers who had worked in the secretive Brandenmore labs assigned to Breed research.
“Evidently not,” Thor answered, his tone disgusted when she didn’t speak. “It’s like they dropped off the face of the earth, Diane. There’s not even a hint as to where they could be.”
Oh, there was a hint, Diane knew, but she just couldn’t share it yet. Not until she managed to check it out herself and figure out exactly what was going on.
She hated distrusting her men, but she wasn’t stupid either. There was something that simply didn’t feel right since her capture in the Middle East sixteen months before. Something that had never set just right with her.
Her uncle’s enemies should never have found her while she was in Syria. They hadn’t kno