by Lora Leigh
an a father get to his own son? It's no wonder he finds every opportunity to remind you that you claim your home is in Africa, rather than here."
Rachel could feel the anger mounting inside her now. For too many months, she had overheard or been forced to watch the confrontations between Jonas and Leo, and for just as long she'd thought how cold and unfeeling Leo could be while his son was watching.
Let Jonas turn his back though. Once he did, Leo's gaze would darken with regret, anger and sadness. He kept a facade, a cold, unfeeling attitude whenever Jonas watched, only to become a regretful father later.
Leo glared back at her. "Think Sanctuary can survive without Vanderale Industries, do you, young lady?"
Did Jonas truly think they couldn't?
Her brow arched. "I have no doubt they could survive, Leo. It may not be as easy, but they would do better than survive. They would thrive with or without your help."
"All because of Jonas?" Leo snapped.
Her eyes narrowed as she took note of Elizabeth laying her hand on her mate's arm in warning. "I never said that, Leo."
"You're his mate. Like all his women, you think the man has no faults."
She turned to Elizabeth. "Your mate is out of control, Dr. Vanderale. When he can be the rational man I know he's capable of, please place a notice on his chest; otherwise, the rest of us may never know." She shot Leo a tight smile. "Excuse me, but I'm sure my daughter needs to be fed soon."
"You should be breast-feeding," Leo snarled as she turned away. "That sissy formula you're giving her isn't nutritious."
Rachel clenched her teeth and continued to the door. Her temper wasn't in the best of states. Whatever mating heat wasn't doing, she appreciated, but it seemed it was triggering reactions in her that she sure as hell wasn't expecting. One of those reactions was the temper she had mastered years ago, when she was far younger.
"There's no way that child will be a fitting mate for a Breed if you're not feeding her properly."
Rachel swung around. Elizabeth was glaring at her mate as Leo crossed his arms and stared at Rachel with that chilling intensity.
"I certainly hope she isn't a fitting mate as far as you're concerned." She advanced a step, temper slowly getting the best of her. "Because your opinion is one I would fully distrust, Mr. Vanderale. And coming from you, any opinion on parenting you would have would be completely hypocritical."
His brows creased into a heavy frown. "I have never been a hypocrite."
"You're definitely a lousy father," she retorted furiously.
"I'm sorry, Leo, but if it weren't for your wife, I'd pity your babes."
Fire lit his gaze. "There is nothing more important to me than my children."
"Nothing except your secrecy, your pride and your own ideas of right and right," she stated caustically. "Poor Dane, it's no wonder he's such a manipulator. He has to be to stay under your radar and to keep your love. He's probably had nightmares about losing your regard and suffering the hell of your disinterest as Jonas has."
"Do you have any idea who you're talking to?" he growled, his head lowering, his lips pulling back in what she was certain was intended to be an intimidating snarl.
"An asshole, just to start with," she informed him. "Shall I go on?"
"I've destroyed lesser little upstarts than you pretend to be," he warned her, his expression shifting, turning calculating--just as Jonas's gaze shifted whenever he was playing one of his interminable games. She'd already picked up on this particular game though, as well as the reason for it.
She shook her head, smiling mockingly. "You don't scare me, Leo. You do no more than amuse me."
Surprise almost got the best of him. Rachel watched his eyes widen in surprise, his lips thin as he nearly snarled in frustration.
"Does it work often, Leo?" she drawled politely. "Pissing off your sons' mates to see how they'll respond? To see if they're worthy to be a mate to a Vanderale 'get'?" She sneered. "I don't just feel sorry for your children. I feel sorry for your wife, too. And I must say, she has amazing sons, despite the bastard who sired them."
She turned on her heel, her spine ramrod straight, and stalked back to the door.
"I love all my children, Ms. Broen." Leo's voice stopped her at the door. "And you are more than a worthy mate for my son."
"You're still a lousy fucking father." She jerked the door open and stalked from the lab, her entire body shaking with the anger surging through her.
Manipulating bastard. Jonas had come by it honestly, she had to say, but he was by far kinder about it. He manipulated for the good of his Enforcers. He manipulated and calculated for the good of the Breed community as a whole. Never, at any time, had she seen an edge of cruelty in him.
The Breeds had refined themselves from their beginnings. Leo was still the animal the scientists had tried to create. Jonas was the Breed who gave an air of mystery and romanticism to this savage new race of humans.
Leo still lived in a world where hiding was the only option and games were the only way to survive. Jonas was creating a world where future Breeds had a chance to walk down the street in peace, play cards with neighbors and raise their children as others would.
A world Rachel wanted to be a part of.
Ely watched silently from the shadows of her office, her door open as Leo and Elizabeth yelled at one another like combatants set to exchange blows.
She had suspected for the past weeks that there was an edge of conflict between them, but she hadn't been certain until now. Watching Leo's mate as he raged at Rachel Broen, Ely had seen the explosion coming--one it hadn't taken long to blow sky-high.
It would have been amusing if Ely hadn't lost her ability to be amused months ago. Now she was simply clinical, bordering on cold, as she listened, trying to ignore the pain and aching sorrow Elizabeth Vanderale was feeling.
Elizabeth's voice was strong, clear. There was no hint of tears, nothing but anger shading her voice.
"When will you stop?" she yelled up at him, her small fists clenched at her sides furiously. "What the hell is wrong with you, Leo? I haven't seen you like this since we mated. You're like a lion with a sore tooth, and I for one am growing sick of it."
"You're not the one I'm trying to make sick of it," Leo yelled back. "The bastard ignores us as though we're not blood. He treats us as no more than guests to Sanctuary."
"And what do you expect?" Emotion now entered Elizabeth's voice. "How long, Leo? How long did you ignore the whispers that he wasn't LaRue's son? How long did you put off rescuing Breeds from that lab?"
"Because I knew he was protecting them," Leo charged, enraged now. "You know that, Elizabeth, we discussed it. Others were not so lucky to have a Pride leader such as Jonas. Others were suffering more."
"He's our son!" Elizabeth screamed, filled with pain now. "No wonder he refuses us the courtesy of acknowledging it. Not only did you allow his lab mates to suffer, but the very moment you were face-to-face with him, you did nothing but insult him."
Elizabeth turned away, and Ely watched as she dashed tears from her face. "I can't bear it any longer. That's my son. If I had known the game you were playing with him when it began, I would have instantly put a stop to it."
"We're Breeds, not fucking sissies," Leo snarled. "He's a man, Elizabeth, not a child. Our world is different from others, and you know this. Strength is what matters."
"That's your world." Elizabeth jerked her lab coat from her shoulders and threw it to a gurney. "I'm human, and our children are part human. You can't raise them like animals."
"They are animals." Frustration fed Leo's voice now. "We all are. How many more decades will it take for you to see this?"
She turned back to him, the scent of her tears strong now within the lab. "How long will it take you, Leo, to realize that you're not? It's an excuse all of you use for your own prickishness and inability to cope with any emotion. You want freedom. You want peace. But I'll be damned if any of the male Breeds I've met are willi
ng to be human enough to ask what they demand from other humans. You're no better than they are, simply different."
She gave her mate no chance to protest. Instead, she stalked from the labs, the door slamming behind her. Ely slipped carefully back from the door that led into the labs and used the other door at the back of the room to leave her office.
This was something she couldn't keep to herself. A division in the ranks was too important not to report.
CHAPTER 21
"Someone has a big mouth. Should I guess who?" Rachel knew the moment she stepped into Callan Lyons's office to meet Jonas that Dr. Morrey had told Jonas exactly what had happened in the labs.
She should have gotten here first, she thought. She'd run into Merinus as she came to the main floor. Merinus had been carrying Amber, cooing at her, causing the baby to giggle and laugh at the faces she was making.
They had stood and talked before Rachel took Amber and headed to the office. Stepping inside, she saw Jonas's face, and Ely Morrey's cool, composed features.
Ely was half in love with Jonas. A hero-worship that stemmed from the care Jonas had taken of her during a particularly traumatic time several months before. Rachel understood it; she wasn't jealous over it, but she was beginning to see that it could become a problem.
Moving to the small baby bed in the corner of the room, a bed normally used for Callan's own infant daughter, Rachel laid Amber on the mattress, covered her gently and caressed her head before straightening and turning to Ely.
"I'd suggest, Ely, that you find your own mate to cling to while steering clear of mine for a while," she stated. "I do understand that he's been a friend, but you're now beginning to overstep the bounds of that friendship."
Weariness filled her as she stared at the naked rage in Jonas's silver eyes.
"You would have never told him the complete truth." Ely shrugged as she headed for the door, her hand shoved into the pockets of her white jacket. "He deserved to know what happened after you left."
"Very good excuse." Rachel sighed, still staring at Jonas. "And I hesitate to say this, but I will: It was none of your business."
"You believe the insults he deals to my mate are none of my business then?" Jonas growled as he leaned against Callan's desk and crossed his arms over his chest with an air of arrogant assurance and fury. "She was well within her rights to report to me."
"She wasn't reporting to you, she was snitching." God, there were times it was like dealing with children.
The door closed as Ely left the room, leaving Rachel and Jonas facing each other across the room now.
"Snitching is childish," Jonas rebutted. "Her report was logical, concise and to the point. There were no embellishments."
"I didn't say she was lying."
"He insulted you." Jonas straightened from the desk. "Not once, but repeatedly."
"And I insulted him back, not once, but repeatedly," she assured him. "It's over."
Jonas stared back at her, still fighting the same sense of amazement he had felt when Ely had come to him to describe the argument, not just between Leo and Elizabeth, but between Leo and Rachel.
This was his mate, and possibly the only person he knew who had gone up against the Leo, nose to nose, and called him on his own arrogance and manipulations. She had described the Breed to a T. He was impossible. A gamesman, and so certain he could bring Jonas to heel.
He'd been certain of it since the day he had stepped into that hospital where Callan Lyons had nearly died the year before.
There were so many of them. Breeds who hadn't had the chances others had because they weren't the children of Leo and Elizabeth.
Elizabeth hadn't deserved Jonas's disregard, and that was the conclusion Jonas had come to as the sun had risen that morning. But Leo, well, the Leo deserved far worse simply for attempting to use Rachel and Amber in his battle against Jonas.
"You held your own very well." Jonas turned and walked to the other side of Callan's desk. From there, he stared down at the computer monitor that still showed the deserted lab. "And though I appreciated Ely's report, I had already caught the tail end of it anyway."
He turned the monitor to face her. "Just so you know, when I kill the bastard, it won't be because of anything Ely said. It will be because of what I saw for myself."
What he had seen had filled him with pride. His mate, so proud, her temper flashing in her green eyes, her face flushed as she stood up to one of the strongest males of the Breed species.
And though he had seen something after she left, in both his father as well as his mother, that he hadn't expected, the fact that both of them in some way had been manipulating him didn't sit well with him. By the very fact of her silence, his mother had been playing the same game as Leo.
Bringing Jonas to heel.
Jonas wasn't a dog, and he didn't take commands so well.
Rachel lifted her gaze from the monitor and stared back at him, her gaze tinged with sorrow now. "He does love you, Jonas," she whispered. "Just as she does."
His lips quirked. "It isn't love, Rachel, because they have no idea of the man I am, nor do they respect the man they see. They regret. They ache for what could be but isn't. They hurt for what might never be, but it's not love such as what you feel for Amber, or even as they feel for Dane. Regret can hurt just as deeply as disappointment, sweetheart."
What was she supposed to say to that? She couldn't defend the Vanderales, because in her eyes, they were in the wrong. But a part of her knew Elizabeth loved her child, whether that child had come from her body or been created in a lab.
They left the office and collected Erin and Amber before heading back to the cabin. Amber was fast asleep and placed gently in her crib by Rachel. Jonas gave Erin her orders for the next day before sending the Breed female back to the barracks.
Kissing Amber gently on her forehead, Rachel covered the baby and quietly left the room. Closing the bedroom door, she stood for a moment and stared at Jonas as he gazed into the fire.
As though there were answers in the flames, she thought. He frowned into the newly lit fire with a concentration that hinted at the dilemma roiling through him.
"A mother's love is all-consuming and complete," she stated quietly as he lifted his head. "A father's love is often veiled in the appearance of disappointment, or exacting expectations. It isn't regret, disappointment or whatever else you want to see it as. It's a parent's love, and a parent that even now, despite the veil of civilization, still doesn't know how to handle or to show the emotions that fill him."
His lips quirked. "God made woman to help him come up with excuses for man."
"He made woman to love man," she retorted.
"Yeah, probably because he knew nothing else would," he snorted.
She wasn't going to argue it. Rachel shook her head with a slight smile, watching as he moved slowly toward her now.
There was a new purpose in him, a hunger that had less to do with lust and more to do with pure, confusing emotion.
Like the Leo, Jonas wasn't always certain of the emotions he felt or what to do with them. These men, Breeds, they loved their women and children with a dedication that bordered the extreme at times, but when it came to loving anyone else, they became contradictory masses of complete denial.
Stopping in front of her, his hands lifted to cup her face as he held her still for his kiss. A long, slow kiss. His tongue touched hers, licked at it, mated with it.
The mating hormone wasn't filling the glands, it wasn't flavoring the kiss, but still, Jonas felt his hunger for her clear to the soles of his feet.
She was his woman. She was his life. Hell, he wondered if he had even had a life before her. Before he saw the innocence and clarity in her eyes, before he'd learned the gentleness and courage that filled her soul.
As he felt her fingers at his neck, sliding around, gripping the strands of hair that grew low along his nape, Jonas knew he had never known a moment's peace until Rachel.
She had the p
ower to humble him, to still his rage, but she also had the power to weaken him.
His knees were nearly shaking at the thought of the pleasure to come as he lifted her against him and moved back to the fireplace.
The flames were blazing, devouring the heavy logs Jonas had placed in the pit, licking greedily at the fuel, consuming it slowly despite the heat pouring from it.
The heavy, incredibly soft fake fur rug spread across the hardwood floor awaited them. He'd had dreams of taking her in front of this fire. Dreams of watching her transform from cool, collected female to the heated, hungry mate he had fantasized about for so long.
She was the perfect mate for him. Strong where he was often weak, understanding of emotions when he had trouble just accepting them. She would keep him warm, keep his heart steady.
He was passing warm now though. As her kiss began to fire the unique Breed mating heat inside him, Jonas felt his cock throbbing in urgent demand.
He was always hard for her, always hungry for her. He swore there hadn't been a day since she had walked into his office that he hadn't been hard for her.
Smoothing his hands down her back, Jonas gripped his mate's hips and pulled her to him, lifting her, finding a ready seat for the brutally hard length of his cock.
"You make me crazy to fuck you," he growled. "There's not a minute of my day that I don't want to be inside you."
His fingers bunched in the short length of the skirt she had worn. She was always dressed so ladylike, so damned buttoned down and proper. The above-the-knee dark skirt was at once conservative and provocative.
He jerked it to her hips, just as it provoked him to do.
The white, long-sleeved black cardigan she wore over the white silk blouse was dropped to the floor. It was all he could do not to rip the blouse from her body.
The sweet swells of her breasts were an enticement; the tight, cherry nipples topping them created a hunger inside him that was both pleasure and pain.
"Leave the shoes on," he ordered, his voice rough as she moved to step from them. "Are you wearing stockings again?"
A siren's smile tipped her honeyed lips. "Would I wear anything else for you, Jonas?"
Something clenched in his gut, some emotion, some overriding sense of rightness.
"So you wear them for me?" Leaving the shirt hanging from her shoulders, her breasts swelling over the cups of her lacy bra, Jonas went to work on his own clothing.
"I wear them for you," she agreed as her fingers moved to help with the buttons of his shirt. "I never wore stockings until I began working for you."
That was no lie. He could smell the truth of her statement. "And this." He rubbed his finger over the soft scalloped lace edge of her bra.
"For you," she breathed out, her breathing growing harder, deeper, as the last button released from his shirt.
Jonas shrugged the material from his shoulders as her fingers went to the closure of his slacks. He could see the hunger heating inside her, smell it burning deeper, brighter, with each passing second.
As his slacks loosened he pushed his shoes from his feet, his fingers still rubbing against the lace of her bra, moving from the scalloped edge to the tight peak of her nipple beneath.
He could feel the heated warmth of her, the throb of blood pounding through her body and echoing in his cock. She was the pinnacle of hunger and need.
The slacks slid down his legs, releasing the torturous length of his cock as his head lowered to her breast, his suddenly sensitive tongue probing at the hard tip.
She stiffened in his arms, her hands going to his shoulders, her fingers gripping tight as he allowed his teeth to rasp the sensitive peak.
"I want to fuck you just like this," he groaned, the need ripping through his balls as he experienced the peaches-and-cream taste of her through the lace.
"Dressed?" Her nails pricked at his shoulders as her voice roughened, a little moan vibrating in it.
"A little dressed." His hand pushed beneath the skirt, gripped the side of her panties and ripped the fragile lace from her hips.
"Buy me panties," she breathed out roughly as the scent of her juices flooding her pussy wafted through his senses with a hint of peaches and heat. Damn, she made him hungry.
He dropped to her knees, his hands holding her hips, the swollen glands beneath his tongue filled with the mating hormone.
Gripping her hip, he touched her with the fingers of his other hand. He parted the glistening, curl-shrouded folds, parted them that tiny bit to see the little bud of her clitoris gleaming within her pink flesh.
The scent of her was addictive.
Kneeling before her, he watched her softly rounded thighs tremble, watched her juices gather thicker along the tiny curls hiding the entrance of her vagina from him.
He would get there. But first, he wanted a taste of her tender clit.
Leaning forward, he flicked the tip with his tongue, felt Rachel's hands grip his head, her nails pricking at his scalp now. Glancing up, he almost grimaced at the flushed, sensual look on her face, the arousal gleaming in her eyes.
He licked around her clit again, felt the flinch of pleasure that rippled through her body, smelled the sweet flush of moisture and felt a purr rumble in his chest.
Fuck, he couldn't stop the sound. She was too good; pleasing her felt too good. He couldn't hold it back. A moan echoed through his ears and her thighs parted farther at the sound.
He let the purr free, let it vibrate, let the sound wash over his tongue and her clit.
"Jonas." She panted his name as her fingers raked over his scalp.
"Shhh, pretty girl," he whispered against her clit as he pressed a firm, sensual kiss on the tiny bud.
"Jonas," she whispered his name again, her tone rife with sensual hunger. "It's so good."
Her legs parted even farther, her thighs opening as he ran his fingers down the slit, parting it, caressing her inner flesh as his tongue licked, stroked the pearly bud.