by Lora Leigh
As it slowly eased, ever so slowly gave her back her breath, Diane found herself slumped over the back of the chair, fighting to breathe, each intake of air harsh and overloud. Lawe shuddered behind her, his cheek against her shoulder, his breathing as labored, his hands kneading her hips as she felt his cock still throbbing inside her, though without the iron-hard strength it had possessed previously.
She was exhausted, drowsy, sated.
Limp, her eyes closed, she wanted to stay there until the world righted itself, until there was no need for protection, no danger to haunt them. She wanted to hide forever, right here, just like this, locked in his hold, shuddering with sensations too overwhelming to fight and too heated to conflict.
She wanted to ignore the world outside, ignore the problems she knew would rise between them again, and she wanted to ignore her inability to settle for what she should take rather than what she didn’t know if she could live without.
“I love you, Diane,” he whispered behind her, causing her breath to still for precious seconds at the declaration. “If there has been anything, or anyone, I have ever loved in my life, then it’s you. To the point that if something happened to you, then I would cease to exist alongside you.”
Tears filled her eyes.
She didn’t want to hear this.
She didn’t want to face this. Not yet, not until she had a handle on her own emotions, a handle on the decisions she knew she had to make.
“And I know you love me.” He kissed her shoulder gently. “I can feel that love, I can smell it when you forget to watch your emotions, to hide them from me. Just as I can feel your pain and your indecision.” Another kiss at the base of her neck, a gentle lick over the tender wound he had inflicted once again. “If I could give you what you need to survive, then I would, in a heartbeat,” he whispered, his tone deepening, becoming rougher with regret. “If I could do that one thing for you, and still live with the fear, then as God is my witness, I would.”
But he couldn’t.
The message was there, and Diane heard it loud and clear.
“If I thought I could survive without it, then I would,” she said, keeping her own voice soft as her breathing hitched on a sob. “If I could, Lawe, I would, just for you.” And the first tear slipped from her eyes. “Because I love you so much it breaks my heart. You break my heart . . . daily.”
Her eyes closed as she fought back more tears, feeling him withdraw from her, that bond breaking as his cock eased through tender tissue then slipped from her entirely.
As he helped her to her feet, Diane stepped back, knowing what he would have done, and knowing she couldn’t bear it. Her hand lifted in an instinctive gesture, palm held out, in a silent denial.
She couldn’t bear it if he did as he had before. Cleaning her so gently, and with such obvious enjoyment, did something to her that made it harder each time to fight against his need to protect her.
“I’m going to shower.” Her voice was rough, from her tears, from the cries that had been torn from her as the pleasure exploded around her. “I need to think.”
“What’s there to think about?” he stared down at her, his expression dark and forbidding as he watched her. “We can’t deny what we have, Diane. The mating heat won’t allow it.”
She gave her head a hard shake. “Later, Lawe. We’ll fight about his later. After we’ve found what we came looking for, after Gideon has been neutralized. Give me that much at least.”
“And if I can’t?” The question was voiced harshly, as though the words were torn from the very soul of the creature that lived inside him. “If I can’t let you do this, Diane, then what?”
She felt tormented, tortured. As though the pain that lived inside her soul was raking at her with jagged claws.
What would she do if he didn’t allow her to finish this? If he didn’t stand beside her rather than in front of her and let her find the three individuals who were once injected with the same, or very similar, serum that her niece had been injected with? If she didn’t learn from them what had happened to those who had died from the injections and the facts surrounding those deaths?
Could she live with the failure?
“If you love me,” she whispered painfully. “If you really love me as you say you do, Lawe, then you’ll stand by me.” The tears she battled edged closer to winning the war when another ran down her cheek. “Because you know I won’t be able to bear it any other way.”
He may as well lock her in a cage, she thought, as she moved quickly to the bathroom and the shower she so desperately needed. She needed the escape worse, though. The few precious moments she could steal to think, to weigh her options and consider the future. Because the time was coming when she wouldn’t be able to run any longer. The time was coming when she wouldn’t be able to hide anymore.
The time was coming when a decision would have to be made.
• • •
Gideon stared at the wall across from him, a frown on his face as he heard Diane all but beg her mate to believe in her.
Lawe Justice was a hell of a Breed soldier, as was his brother, Rule Breaker. Gideon didn’t think much of their choice of names, but they did seem to rather suit them.
This, this bothered him, though.
Not that he should care either way. Hell, the more conflicted the two were the easier it would be to keep them distracted and to learn more about them.
The fact that they had missed the new electronic bug was pleasing as well. Keeping ahead of their little bug detectors was getting harder by the day. This one wasn’t as strong as the others, and there was a lot he missed of any conversation. White noise, which Breeds most always used when discussing missions, would completely incapacitate it. But information such as this was damned useful as well.
Lawe and Diane weren’t at their peak fighting abilities because of mating heat. That would make them weaker, slower. And they were the leaders, the commanders. With any luck, the others wouldn’t feel the need to work over or around the two. They trusted them. And Gideon was trusting them to remain immersed in each other while he found Fawn.
Her big dark eyes, so filled with tears. “Give him my blood,” she sobbed out to Judd. “Don’t you let him die!” she had screamed at the Breed as the chill of the night air seeped into Gideon’s bones. “Don’t you dare, or I swear, I swear I’ll make you pay.”
And Gideon had been dying. He had wanted to die. God knows it would have been such a relief, to slip over that edge of nothingness and find eternal rest.
She had denied death to him. She had begged and she had ordered, until Judd had found a medical kit in the transport vehicle. As fate had had it, there was a transfusion kit too, and she gave him her blood.
They had saved him, and he hadn’t wanted to be saved. He’d been too weak to stop them, too weak to do anything but glare at her in hatred.
He’d known that by saving him, she had only extended his horror. He had been right.
He’d tried to forgive her. He’d fought to get the memory out of his head. Then, a decade later, he was forced to allow his recapture to get into the labs once more to destroy the records kept on Judd, Fawn and Honor. To ensure that no DNA matches could be found when he’d learned the Brandenmore Labs were once again searching for them.
The suspicion that Judd and Fawn weren’t dead revived every few years, but this time, General Horace Roberts, desperate to find his only child, had demanded they search until Honor was found. That they search until it was proven that the others had died. He was certain his daughter would never have run away without help and the only friends she had known had been Judd, Gideon and Fawn. Gideon had planned it perfectly. He was certain he would have at least a few weeks before the testing began again.
Then, they had tested his blood. He had immediately been restrained, the paralytic pumped into his body, and then, they had killed him themselves. There on the autopsy gurney, as he screamed and begged, they had cut him open to investigate the changes found
in his blood. The additional strength he’d acquired over the years had been strange enough, even to him. But after he’d died on that table beneath their scalpels, after they’d transfused him again, using the blood they had taken from her years before, the changes had begun multiplying.
Not that they had found answers after cutting him open. There was nothing there. No reason for the anomalies showing up in his body until he’d begun experiencing brief episodes of full-blown feral fever.
The thought of death had been wiped away. The pain that clawed at his insides didn’t mean he couldn’t extract vengeance, though. That was something he had never wanted. He hadn’t wanted to live, to develop a fever so agonizing the animal inside him had been forced free to pull him back from the brink of insanity.
As the man huddled in blessed silence within his body, the animal had raged and roared; it had clawed at the walls and snarled at the guards. It had stared at the scientists, remembered the girl, the blood the scientists had used as they laughed at him and he had sworn vengeance.
Her blood had destroyed him. And she was gone. He hadn’t been able to find her in ten years, and several times, he’d actually searched for her and Judd, then for Honor once he’d learned of her disappearance.
It was as though they had simply ceased to exist.
When he had returned to the wilderness where he had left the night he’d awakened after that first transfusion, there had been no sign of them. He had brief memories of the termination facility. A small metal building, a cremation vault and the bloodied bodies he’d thrown inside it. There were flashes of images of guards, looks of horror on their faces, the taste of blood overriding his senses.
The animal had raged inside him, for how long, Gideon had never been certain.
When he’d finally come to himself and made his way back to the scene of their escape, it was to find it all gone. The wrecked vehicle, the two guards, Judd and Fawn.
It was only later he’d begun to suspect the lie of it. Only later that the animal inside him had begun to dream of dark eyes in an adult’s face. But the features of that face he never saw in the animal’s dreams.
She would pay for that demand that he live. For whatever her blood had done that had changed him, that had stolen the time he needed to ensure she was never found. She would pay for the additional agony. And when he was finished with her, maybe, just maybe, he would put them both out of their misery.
•CHAPTER 15•
Amber was changing.
Diane stood next to her sister at the end of the crib and stared at the sleeping child. In just a few brief days, even she could see the changes. Tiny, so very tiny, for her age.
Her dark brown hair was longer, hanging down her neck in little ringlets. Her lashes had always been long, feathering her rosy cheeks. Soft baby lips were slightly parted as she lay on her back, her breathing slow and easy.
She looked picture perfect. A babe, innocent in her slumber, dreaming whatever bright, happy dreams happy babies had. But there were changes.
Her face was thinner, the features altered almost imperceptibly and appearing almost feline. Her hair was lighter, with soft black and reddened streaks showing themselves amid the golden brown.
There was the faintest point to a tiny ear and every so often a very distinct purr.
“She’s running a fever,” Rachel whispered, her voice husky with tears. “She’s been running one for the past two days. It’s spiked on us twice, going over a hundred, and Dr. Morrey has tried everything to bring it down. Nothing works. Then it will just go away on its own.”
“Should she be here?” Diane wanted nothing more than to reach out and pick her niece up, to cuddle her, to hold her closely and keep whatever was tormenting her from ever hurting her again.
“Dr. Morrey is in the next room,” she answered. “With Callan and Merinus traveling here as well, they decided it best to bring Amber. That way, she’s with us if needed.”
Another little purr left the baby as a small frown wrinkled her forehead before easing away.
Lawe stood behind Diane, his hand resting against her hip as he too watched the baby. She could feel his concern. Just as she could feel Jonas’s as he stood behind her sister.
“She’s healthy,” Jonas whispered. “Ely keeps a daily check on her. She’s not hurting.”
But that was little comfort today, when tomorrow it could all change.
“Did you get my report from the doctors in Argentina?” Diane glanced back at the director.
He gave a sharp nod. “The main scientists working with the girls were killed by Gideon, though.”
“Before I could get to them,” she agreed. “I only had their assistants that I could talk to.”
The information they had given her had terrified her. The girls had survived, obviously, but those assistants hadn’t understood how, or why. Because the stages of agonizing pain and adjustment owing to the serum had had the children begging for death more often than not.
Had her sister seen those reports?
“She’s so tiny,” Rachel whispered. “She’s not growing properly, even Ely admits it. If she goes through one of the stages those girls did . . .”
Fawn Corrigan and Honor Roberts had been older. They hadn’t been infants when the experiments had begun, nor had they been healthy children.
“Ely will be there for her,” Diane promised. “And we’ll find the girls, Rachel. I promise you we will. They’ll have the answers we need.”
She prayed they’d have the answers needed, if nothing else, the memory of what the scientists had done. Honor Roberts’s mother reported her daughter had possessed a photographic memory. There was nothing she heard or saw from that time that she had forgotten. She remembered it all, in blinding detail.
Those details had been what had convinced her mother to help her run. When the scientists had come to General Roberts to request he return his daughter to the labs, she had known she had no other choice. Because her husband believed her daughter had somehow been infected with Breed genetics. Genetics he wanted out of her.
“She’s not in pain now, Rachel,” Jonas whispered at her ear. “So far, she’s been relatively free of anything but our worry. Let’s pray it stays that way.”
Diane glanced at the director. He should have never shown Rachel those reports, but somehow she had known he would. Rachel hadn’t been raised as Diane had been, amid the blood and horror the world could spawn. Diane and their uncle had done everything possible to protect her, to ensure her life was more settled, that it was safer.
Diane was older, and she had longed to follow her uncle into his chosen career. The night their parents had died it had been Diane who had used the few tricks her uncle and her parents had taught her to save herself and her sister.
Just in case, they had always reassured her. She had never suspected their trips could carry the risk of their deaths, as well as her and Rachel’s. She had never known their secrets, their rescue of certain Breeds and aid in transporting them to a hidden base in Africa could have come back to destroy the lives they lived.
Rachel hadn’t been prepared for the life she had been thrust into.
Diane had sensed, and then known, she thrived within it.
“Come on, sweetheart.” Jonas kissed the top of his mate’s auburn hair. “Let’s let her rest. We can talk in the living area.”
They eased quietly from the room.
“This is the first day she’s napped in weeks,” Rachel said as Jonas closed the doors carefully behind them.