by Lora Leigh
“God, you make a man forget what he came for.” He tore his lips from hers, but he still held her. His large hands cupped her head, his fingers rubbing against her scalp.
“You came for something more than the kiss?” She stared up at him, dazed, needing.
“I need you to promise me something.” He laid his forehead against hers. “Just one little thing.”
“Okay.” Her bling? It was his. Her body? All he had to do was take it.
“No tests,” he said softly. “Promise me, Ria, you won’t let anyone take those samples Ely’s going to demand.”
It took her a moment to process the request, to pull her mind from the visions of his lips devouring her body.
“I had no intention of it,” she finally bit out. “But why ask me? What would it matter?”
“I don’t know.” He shook his head, his gaze turning hard. “I don’t know what’s going on with her, and I don’t want you involved. Promise me. No tests.”
“Fine. I promise.” She pulled away from him before turning back and glaring at him. “Is that what the kiss was all about? To convince me?”
His gaze moved over her slowly, his expression shifting, his eyes darkening.
“No, Ria. That kiss was because I was dying for the taste of you. And if I don’t get the hell out of here, I’m going to take far more than a taste.”
But he wasn’t moving as quickly as she was sure he meant to. His hand reach out again, his fingers tugging at the belt of her robe. The silken belt slithered free, the edge of her robe parting enough to reveal the snug bodice of the gown.
Ria watched, uncertain, breathing roughly, feeling her nipples peak hard and tight against the material covering them.
And he saw it. His eyes darkened to that unique color of hammered gold, and his fingers lifted, the backs of them brushing against the mounds that rose above the princess neckline of the deep purple gown.
“If I taste you here, I won’t leave,” he murmured, lifting his eyes to her. “I’ll keep tasting. And I’ll take you.”
There was a problem with that?
She was trembling, each movement of her breasts pressing her flesh more firmly against his fingers.
“Good night, Ria.” His hand fell away and he backed off from her.
She stood there, like a twit. Aching, her body burning furiously for more of his touch, and she just stood there as he left, terrified to reach out to him. Hurting as she watched him leave and cursing herself for it.
He could stay, but she knew that once she allowed him in her bed, she would be lost to him forever.
She watched as he left. She didn’t protest; she couldn’t. It would have been so easy to ask him to stay, and so hard to lose him when this job ended. Once again, she was playing with fire, but she feared that this time she was definitely going to get burned.
CHAPTER 8
Sunday was a waste of time. Dane couldn’t be found through the normal channels they used when she needed to contact him, and Ria was so seriously close to calling the Leo and informing him of his son’s mad plan that she had actually found herself dialing the number before she flipped her phone closed and glared at it.
She paced the cabin. She cursed men in general and Breeds in particular and spent a restless night tossing and turning in a bed that she knew was too big for her. Even as she watched that damned window.
She knew he was out there. She could feel him watching her, and the knowledge of it was tormenting. How easy would it be to invite him in to her? To let him take her? And once she did, how easy it would be to lose him once he learned the truth of how she had tricked him as well as everyone else at Sanctuary.
It was a double-edged sword, this job Dane had sent on her on. Secrecy was imperative, simply because of the nature of what she was finding in the electronic memos and orders that had been sent out.
The technology being used was so new and undetectable that only the most sophisticated programs could find it. Programs she possessed.
Monday morning, she was more out of sorts than normal and didn’t even attempt to head to Sanctuary until the second pot of coffee had been consumed.
As she walked into the file room, she found that the camera had been replaced. Her lips thinned as she shrugged her sweater from her shoulders, moved a chair beneath it and climbed onto it.
“No peeking,” she said clearly, certain the eyes that watched could read her lips before she draped the sweater over the camera’s all-seeing eye and got to work.
She was finding the pattern she had been looking for in the multitude of files, memos and faxes that went through Sanctuary, the Bureau of Breed Affairs and to the various offices and businesses Sanctuary dealt with. The code was subtle, and she still wasn’t 100 percent certain of what she was finding, but the knowledge was like an itch at the back of her neck. It was there. She just had to identify it. She’d begun picking up on it weeks before, but breaking that code wasn’t going to be easy. It was an unknown system of numbers, letters and odd glyphs that made no sense, and finding the contact points for where the code had been laid in was difficult as well.
Shaking her head, she moved to the file table, picked up several files she had laid aside for further review and moved back to her desk.
She powered up the desk computer, grimacing at that thought that she couldn’t use her own laptop here. And she couldn’t install the program to detect the transmissions on this one.
An hour later she was still going through the first file—faxes and requisitions to several businesses in D.C. She was frowning over one particular memo when the door to the office opened.
She restrained the need to groan at the knowledge of who was walking through the door. But at least he set a cup of coffee beside her elbow for the aggravation she knew she was about to endure.
Her head lifted and she stared back at Jonas as he stared up at the sweater lying over the eye of the camera. His silver gray eyes moved back to her and his lips twitched.
“You are aware that camera is there for our safety as well as yours?” he asked her. “How are we supposed to know that you aren’t stealing files?”
She lowered her head once again to the memo she was going over. He didn’t want her to answer that question. She had already taken incredible advantage this morning and loaded the memory chips she had brought along with her for further study.
“If you treat Dane this way, then it’s a wonder he hasn’t fired you.” He took the chair across from her desk and stared back at her.
“Dane knows better than to disturb me while I’m working on a job he assigned,” she told him. “But then, he does pay me an exorbitant hourly wage, so it’s usually in his best interest to keep me satisfied and undisturbed.”
“And how much is he paying you for this job?” He leaned back in his chair, those silver eyes intent on her, his expression curious.
She almost snorted.
“Your brother Dane has the same annoying habit of couching nosy questions in a subtly curious voice. Go away, Mr. Wyatt, though I do thank you for the coffee.”
She threw the knowledge of his relationship to Dane and the Leo in his face.
She lifted the mug and sipped the heavenly brew before turning her attention back to the memo. But she wasn’t concentrating any better now than she had been the first few minutes after she opened the file.
She missed Mercury. It made her angry, it made her wonder where the hell her common sense had gone, but there it was, steeped in a feeling of loss and loneliness.
“Where is he?” she finally asked as Jonas continued to sit across from her and drink his coffee silently.
She didn’t lift her head, but she no more saw the words on the memo than she knew what they said.
“He spent the night patrolling your cabin. He came in right behind you and went to the barracks to crash.”
Her throat tightened as she swallowed and forced her gaze up to meet his.
“What’s going on, Jonas?” Sanctuary itself seem
ed subdued today, the enforcers guarding her quieter than normal, less friendly.
He leaned forward and set his cup on the desk before relaxing back in the chair. The white silk dress shirt and slacks did nothing to hide the body of the powerful male animal beneath.
“Mercury is an anomaly within the Breed community,” he told her. “Few of his kind were allowed to live.”
“What do you mean, ‘his kind’?” She already knew this information, but Jonas wasn’t aware of that. And she wanted his stand on it. It was hard to fight a battle when you weren’t certain the battle you were fighting.
His jaw bunched as he stared back at her. “Those whose features were so similar to the animal. The scientists in the lab he was created within kept him mostly isolated from the others, fearing his ability to escape or aid the others in escape if what they expected occurred.”
She stared back at him, staying silent. His lips quirked as he nodded with a subtle gesture of approval.
“They were right. Mercury was more cunning, swifter, stronger, more dangerous than other Breeds within their lab. His training was highly advanced, but as he grew older, he began showing signs of a phenomenon they called feral fever; other scientists named it feral displacement. It was something that normally only infected the young, those at toddler stages. It only affected adult Breeds who were closer to the animal they were enhanced with.”
“The call of the wild,” she whispered. “That’s what Leo calls it. He says all Breeds have it to a degree.”
Jonas inclined his head slowly as he grimaced.
“He was barely twenty when he learned the young female of the pride, the one the scientists were watching closely when he came in contact with her, had been killed. She was only fifteen and sent on a mission she should have never been a part of. When he was told, the Coyotes, two of them, the scientists that worked with her, weren’t exactly sympathetic. Mercury had just come in from a mission of his own; the feral displacement was already running high within him. He killed them all, with his bare hands, before he could be restrained by the other trainers and guards.”
“Sweet heaven,” she whispered. She hadn’t known the details of that event. “With his bare hands?”
“We have the videos of the event. At one point, Mercury slammed his hand into one Coyote’s chest and ripped his heart from his body. He took two bullets that should have been fatal wounds, but he kept going. He tore a scientist’s head from his shoulders, the trainer . . .” He paused and shook his head. “Bare-handed, Ria, he disemboweled a trainer. Once they managed to restrain him and begin running tests, they found a hormone that attached itself to the adrenaline pumping through his body. One they still have no name for, no idea from where it’s produced. But they found a way to recess it. A drug therapy that kept him calm, kept him controllable.”
Ria was horrified. She hadn’t known this. She stared back at Jonas, sick to her stomach, imagining the horror of being controlled.
“What did it do to him?”
Jonas steepled his fingers as he frowned thoughtfully. “I asked him that once. He said he felt as though he were walking in two worlds. An automaton. With it, he lost all the exceptional senses he had tested so highly in. But he was merciless when it came to killing. Cunning. He had no compassion and that was what they had wanted all along. When he was rescued, he was slowly taken off the drug therapy, and his adjustment was remarkable. I consider him one of my strongest enforcers. But still, his senses are barely better than a non-Breed’s. Sense of smell, hearing, scent and taste barely register when he’s tested.”
Ria felt her chest tighten. “And now?”
Jonas shrugged. “He doesn’t talk about it much. But the last tests Ely ran showed an advanced state of the feral displacement. She wants to restart the drug therapy.”
She stared at him in shock. The doctor the entire Breed community held in such regard would suggest something so horrifying?
“Why?” she gasped in outrage. “Why would she want to do that if he can control it?”
“Because she believes, based on the video from that camera”—he nodded to the camera—“that Mercury was within minutes of sexually assaulting you. You didn’t see his expression before he moved to you. His features seemed to shift, became more animalistic, and his eyes . . .” He frowned.
“Blue,” she said softly. “Blue sparks.”
He nodded. “The woman he was bred from was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Swede reputed to be from a family that once bred berserkers. Vikings.”
Ria rose to her feet, rubbing her hand over the back of her neck as she closed the file she was working on and moved around Jonas to the file table.
“I have a favor to ask you, Ria,” he said then, his voice quiet as she stopped at the table and stared down at the files. “I want you to come to the labs with me. I want you to have the blood, hormone and saliva samples taken.”
She stared at the wall, remembering Callan’s order to do just that, as well as the promise Mercury had extracted. He didn’t trust the doctor now for some reason.
“Did Ely find the mating hormone in his tests?” she asked, though she knew the answer.
“No. She didn’t.”
It was no more than she had expected.
“Then there’s no need for me to submit to a woman who would so unfairly accuse and betray someone who went willingly to have those tests done.” She turned back to Jonas slowly. “She tricked him, didn’t she, Jonas? She deliberately antagonized him to get what she wanted.”
He stared back at her, his silver eyes solemn and, for the first time since she had met him, without the cynical mockery they usually contained.
“You’re very perceptive,” he acknowledged. “Yes, she deliberately antagonized him to prove what she suspected.”
“Why?”
With that question, he shook his head. “I’m not certain why,” he finally said. “There were traces of the displacement found when the tests were mixed with the results from the blood, saliva and hormone samples of yours that Vanderale sent us before your arrival. We knew you would be in close-quarter contact with Mercury, Lawe and Rule. We run the mating tests as a precaution. The hormone showed up in those tests where they didn’t show up in the tests done on his samples alone or with other women.”
“And you’re telling me this why?” she asked him. “Is it somehow my fault?”
“It’s not your fault, Ria, merely an anomaly.” He shook his head. “One that concerns me.”
“You’re afraid he’ll hurt me?” She couldn’t imagine that, and didn’t want to hear it.
“On the contrary.” He looked at her as though surprised by the question. “I believe Mercury would destroy himself before he ever risked harming you. I believe it’s merely coincidence that the hormone showed up in the mating tests. An error perhaps on Ely’s part. The tests aren’t infallible and aren’t always right. But her opinion carries quite a bit of weight with the Ruling Cabinet. If she suggests Mercury be placed back on the drug therapy, then he’ll have one of two choices. Submit to it, or leave Sanctuary.”
“They wouldn’t order him to do such a thing.”
Jonas stood slowly to his feet. “Ely has begun the paperwork to have it presented before the Ruling Cabinet. How it’s handled will depend a lot upon you.”
“Me?” And now she watched him suspiciously.
“Get him back in that cabin, Ria. Get him back on your protective detail. Unless I can prove Mercury isn’t going to start ripping hearts out and heads off at the spur of the moment, then we’re all screwed. The Breed community is fighting to keep public opinion on its side. It would take very little to turn the tide of approval at present, and the Ruling Cabinet knows this. If I can’t prove this is something he can control, then they could unintentionally destroy a damned good enforcer, and a hell of a Breed.”
“You’re manipulating me.” She crossed her arms over her breasts and stared back at him in disgust. “I know you, Jonas. You and Dane are so simil
ar it’s terrifying.”
He grimaced and shot her a look that would have withered a weaker personality.
“Insulting me will get you nowhere,” he stated as he moved to his feet. “Do as you please. I’ve merely informed you of the situation, just as Mercury knows it stands.”
He stood up then, surprising her as he moved to the other side of the door a second before it opened.
And there was Mercury. His gaze was flat, his face expressionless as he stepped into the room. He wasn’t wearing his enforcer uniform; instead he wore jeans, a black T-shirt and boots. He looked dangerous, exotic and less than pleased to find Jonas there.
“Warning her?” Mercury questioned him with an edge of sarcasm as he stepped into the room.
“Merely apprising her of the reason why she’ll be receiving orders from the Ruling Cabinet to submit to the lab for testing later.” Jonas shrugged as though unconcerned.
“You’re not serious.” Her lips curled in disgust. “I do believe I made my opinion on that clear Saturday. There will be no testing done.” There it was, that damned hint of an accent.
She was infuriated that they would even consider making it an order. And offended on Mercury’s part that they would dare to make such a move.
“They can shove their orders,” she informed him before turning to Mercury. “And you took your damned good time showing up, didn’t you? Do you have any idea how chatty that insane Breed Shiloh is that they’ve assigned to me?”
She jerked several files from the pile and stomped back to her desk, casting both men an impatient glance.
“I believe that’s my cue to leave.” Jonas’s lips twitched as he glanced at Mercury. “You’re still on detail and your mission status hasn’t changed.” He nodded in her direction. “She’s your primary concern unless you wish to be relieved.”
Mercury’s arms crossed over his chest. “I’ve been ordered back to the labs as well. I refused.”
Evidently that meant something because Jonas grimaced at the knowledge. He finally nodded. “Continue refusing.”
Mercury grunted. “I don’t need your permission, Director.”
Jonas let a smile tip his lips then, his gaze flicking back to Ria. “I’ll leave you to your job then,” he told them both. “I’ll be here for a few more days yet. If there are any problems I expect to be informed.”
“I’m sure you’ll hear the bones breaking if it’s needed.” Mercury shrugged.
“And you’re out of uniform,” Jonas growled as though finally realizing that.
Mercury’s expression hardened further, his jaw twitching as tension seemed to thicken and fill the room dangerously. “I don’t need the uniform to do my job.”
No, he didn’t; he appeared more dangerous, more exciting, with all those weapons strapped over his body while denim hugged his legs.
But Jonas’s eyes narrowed. “Where’s the uniform, Merc?”
Mercury grinned. It wasn’t a friendly smile. “I was informed my rank has been revoked until I submit to those tests. Don’t worry, Jonas. I made my opinion of that clear.”
“By doing what?” Jonas’s voice was icy now.
“Ask Callan.” He shrugged, moving into the room and glancing at the camera, still covered by Ria’s sweater, before turning back to Jonas. “I’m sure he’s waiting on you.”
He took the easy chair in the corner, sat down and lifted one of the magazines lying on the table beside it. As though he wasn’t raging inside, as though fury wasn’t eating him alive.
Ria could see it, feel the danger in the air, and so could Jonas.
“Did you break any bones Mercury?” he finally sighed.
“Nope. All bones are intact and in working order,” he retorted.
The muscle at Jonas’s jaw flinched. “What about other enforcers’ bones?”
“All intact and in working order.” Mercury flipped open the magazine.
“Then what did you do?”
Mercury settled back in the chair comfortably, crossed one ankle over the opposite knee and focused his gaze on the magazine. “I think they’re still trying to figure out exactly how to repair my shoulder weapon.”
That was when Ria realized what was missing. The unique gun, rather like a mini-Uzi, that the Breed Enforcers carried. Vanderale had donated the weapons to the Breeds and limited the sale of them anywhere else. They were powerful, deadly, and Mercury wasn’t wearing his.
Breeds, you had to love them, Ria thought as Jonas’s expression turned as deadly as Mercury’s. His silver eyes flashed, his entire body tensed. They could look more savage in their anger than the animals they were created from.
“I’ll talk with you before you leave this evening,” he stated, his voice cold. “Contact me before doing so.”
“Sure.” Mercury flipped the page of the magazine, his gaze still focused inside it. “I’ll do that, Jonas.”
Ria stayed silent. She was certain a snarl was pulling at Jonas’s lips as he stalked from the room and slammed the door behind him.
Mercury moved then, reach over and flipped the lock on the door, before going back to the magazine, remaining silent, almost thoughtful, as he read.
Ria lowered her gaze to his well-worn reading material, an auto engineering magazine that was quite popular, even in Johannesburg, with some of the top designers who worked in the production departments at Vanderale.
Mercury might well have been reading it, but the tension rising in the room was so stifling that when the phone rang beside her, she jerked and barely held back a gasp before reaching for the receiver on the land-based line.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Rodriquez, this is Austin, from the Security Control Center. Could you please remove the covering from the camera?”
The arrogance in that nasal little voice antagonized her with the first words out of his mouth.
Her lips flattened as she glanced at Mercury. He was staring at her from beneath his lashes, the look from those exotically tilted eyes both wickedly sexual and dangerous.
“That might be a little difficult,” she stated with a heavy emphasis on the false sweetness in her voice. “I’ll tell you what, Austin, why don’t you come down here and see if you can remove it yourself?”
She hung up the phone and glared at Mercury. “Stop the damned growling or you can sit outside. My day has been messed with enough.” And she went back to work. Concentration shot, nerves raw, but she was determined to find what Dane needed so she could leave Sanctuary and the man she knew would break her heart if given the chance.