by Lora Leigh
Matthias knew what mating heat was, just as he knew that Grace was his mate.
The glands beneath his tongue had been sensitive for weeks, and he could feel them becoming swollen tonight. Those glands were filling with a mating aphrodisiac, a hormone that would push sensuality, sexuality, into the bounds of extremity.
It would affect Grace worse than it would affect him. She would be unable to deny her natural response to him, unable to hide from it. She would be as helpless within it as he would be once he began touching her.
The fine, almost imperceptible little hairs along his body were prickling with another hormone, one more subtle, but no less intense. His cock was rock hard. His balls were drawn tight. And he had learned in the past week that jacking off only made it worse. There would be no satisfaction until he found his release within the snug depths of Grace’s body.
And there the problems would truly begin. If what Wolfe, Jacob, and Aiden had explained to their enforcers months ago were true, then during his mating with Grace, he would become more of an animal than he could have ever imagined.
Even now, as his fingers lingered on the flesh of her knee, he found a pleasure in that small touch that he had never known before. Even in the midst of the most sexual acts he had performed during his sexual training in the labs, he hadn’t felt such pleasure as he did now in simply touching.
He was one of the younger Breeds. Barely thirty, but he hadn’t escaped that phase of training. Not that the scientists had included sexual training for any pleasurable benefits. As in everything else, even that phase of training had held more sinister purposes.
When entranced by their lover, a man or a woman could be convinced to trade their soul for the love of the one capable of giving them such extreme pleasure. Powerful figures could be blackmailed, the sons and daughters of such figures could be used for information. Wives could be seduced, husbands could be tempted. It was all the same to the council. Every weakness could be exploited.
In the years since his release, Matthias had never used the talent he had found to please a woman, to betray one. Until Grace, he had refused to involve any woman in the dangerous, bloody life he led.
He was an assassin. The council had taught him how to be an assassin. He carried the scars from his failed attempts during training, and he carried the marks of his successes since his escape.
He didn’t kill for money, and he didn’t kill from hatred or greed. He killed for mercy. He killed to make the world a safer place, not just for his own species, but for the humans as well.
Council members, scientists, trainers, and soldiers—many had been released once they were revealed. If they were smart, they lived the rest of their lives without picking up their old ties. If they weren’t, then Matthias or one of his kind made house calls. And there were many who eagerly, if more secretly, renewed those old ties.
He had gotten lucky with Albrecht, though. He was impossible to forget. And Matthias just happened to have been at the right place at the right time, before the Breed rescues ten years before. He had seen Albrecht with several scientists, heard the scientists refer to him as “director.” Only council members were given that distinction.
Matthias had remembered, and he had given the bastard a chance. A chance Albrecht had deliberately ignored. The proof of that was in the bloody, broken bodies of the mated Breed pairs he had managed to capture over the past years. Young Breeds, independent. Rather than seeking the Wolf or Lion Breed compounds when mating heat overtook them, they had tried to figure it out on their own. And they had died in the effort.
The horrifying evidence that Albrecht was once again experimenting with Breeds was too much to ignore, and Matthias had been called in.
He had used Grace to make his house call, and gaining her forgiveness wouldn’t be easy.
“Where are we?” she finally asked wearily, staring up at the ceiling of the SUV, trying to hide her response to his touch.
“We’re about two hours from your cabin,” he told her softly, enjoying the feel of her satiny knee and the flesh in the curve of her leg against his fingertips.
“You researched me well then,” she said, fighting to control her breathing.
The scent of her arousal was growing. The glands in his tongue were thickening. He should stop touching her, he should place both hands on the steering wheel and concentrate on driving the vehicle rather than driving them both crazy with lust.
“I researched you for months,” he admitted. “I followed you at night when you jogged and tracked your movements otherwise. You were under surveillance for nearly six months.”
He hurt her. He could smell the scent of her inner pain, and he hated it.
“Why did you choose me? Why not the head of security? Or the head manager? Why a lowly assistant manager with limited power?”
He snorted at that. “You mean the lazy manager who has shifted all the work, responsibility, and information to your shoulders, while claiming the fruits of your labor?” He asked. “I didn’t have to smell the laziness on that woman to know the truth of her. All I had to do was read the file that had been prepared on her.”
“How did you know Albrecht would be here during the security upgrade?”
“I have my sources.” He shrugged.
“How many of you are working together?”
Matthias flashed her a grin. “How many of us did you see?”
“You had help,” she bit out. “How else did you manage to get my luggage or have my car moved? You couldn’t have done this alone.”
“I kill alone and this is all that matters.” He wouldn’t tell her different. There was always a chance she wasn’t the person he thought she was, and he didn’t dare betray the others. “Stop asking me questions, Grace. We’ll talk when we get to the cabin.”
“Stop touching me then. And I swear to God, if your fingers go any higher, the first chance I get I’m cutting them off your hand.”
His hand had slid higher, inches above her knee, and despite the vehemence of her order, she was enjoying it. The smell of her arousal was now covering that of her fear. The air around him was indolent with the scent of a wicked storm. He could feel the wild pulse of her blood beneath her flesh, and he knew it matched his own.
“I’ve been dying to touch you, Grace,” he finally admitted. “Holding back these past weeks has been hell on my control.”
“Well isn’t that just too damned bad,” she snapped, though he could hear the breathlessness, the hunger inside her. “Because you don’t have a chance in hell now. Unless it’s rape you’re after, big boy, you fucked up when you pulled that trigger. I wouldn’t sleep with you now if all that mating heat crap the tabloids printed were true.”
He almost winced. Those tabloids had no clue. And neither did she. Because he would have her, and by the time the mating heat was finished with them, they would both be begging for it.
• • •
She couldn’t believe this mess. She couldn’t believe Matthias had actually killed, in cold blood. He hadn’t even given Dr. Albrecht a warning.
She shuddered at the memory of it. The memory of his face, so dispassionate. There had been no anger, no fury, it hadn’t even been emotionless really. Just unconcerned. What he had done had caused not so much as a flinch of remorse.
How many others had he killed? Would he kill her the same way?
Grace turned her face away from him and stared at the door of the SUV. The seat was reclined fully: that, in combination with the dark night and the rural area they were driving through, left her completely out of sight.
She was stretched out, bound, helpless. Most women would have been begging for their lives, screaming, crying. She was trying to think instead. To wait. To steal a chance to escape. If one came.
She had a feeling one wouldn’t come. And begging would do her no good. It wouldn’t have done Albrecht any good, either.
She had been falling in love with Matthias, and perhaps that was the part that hurt the most.
They had spent most of her breaks sharing coffee in her small office, and the evenings enjoying quiet dinners together, or long walks in the park.
He fascinated her. Drew her. Knowing what he was, the horrors he had experienced had pricked at her heart, and her woman’s heart had wanted to erase those horrors with softness.
She had even told her family about him. About the Wolf Breed whose eyes were so filled with loneliness. Who smiled as though he hadn’t known he could do so. Who watched her in a way no other man ever had. Her father had wanted to meet him. Her mother wanted to cook for him. Her brothers offered to teach him to play football.
She blinked back her tears at the loss. At both their losses. He had no idea what he was missing out on when he lost her family.
She liked to say she was fully a part of reality, and reality demanded that she accept that Matthias wasn’t just going to let her go. He couldn’t afford to. The whole Breed community would suffer for what he had done tonight, if the authorities ever learned of it. And Grace was well aware of his loyalty to not just the pack he claimed as his own, but to the Breeds in general.
She closed her eyes as she felt his fingertips stroking her leg again. His palms were horribly scarred, the faint ridges from those past wounds rasped over her flesh, and her soul. They brought pleasure and pain. Pleasure from his touch, pain at the knowledge of all he had endured.
She thought she had gotten to know him. She knew he could kill. He’d told her of some of the assignments he had been sent on during his time in the labs. She’d known he had killed since then in the confines of the investigative work he did. She hadn’t imagined he could kill in cold blood, though. Shooting a man from behind, without warning, somehow seemed worse than killing one face-to-face.
She knew there were rumors that Albrecht had been part of the Genetics Council. Rumors that he had ordered deaths, worked on the genetic alterations, and perhaps even been a part of what the press called the twelve-member directorate. He had been the head of the Genetics Council—the shadowy figures that financed, directed, and oversaw each stage of the Breed development.
All Grace had ever seen was a mean, disillusioned old man, though. One who didn’t even have the common sense to close the door to his suite and was constantly searching for his appointment journal.
If the rumors were true, he should have been arrested rather than released after the inquest into the Breed atrocities. He shouldn’t have been killed the way he was.
“Grace, the smell of your fear is killing me.” His voice was soft, gentle. “I promise, I’m not going to hurt you.”
“And I’m supposed to believe that?” She turned her head to stare back at him, seeing the flash of somber regret in his gaze before he turned back to look at the road.
“You will believe it,” he said, his voice as heavy with regret now as his gaze had been. “But you won’t die. Not by my hand, or by any others, as long as I can protect you.”
“What? You think you can make me forget what I saw?” She hated the tears in her voice, but even more, she hated the damned disillusionment. She hated looking at him and fighting herself to believe what she had seen with her own eyes.
“Not forget it,” he admitted. “I’m hoping, though, that you’ll understand it enough to keep the knowledge of it to yourself.”
He was crazy. That was all there was to it.
“Oh, well, if that’s all you want, then I’m all for it.” Living was worth lying for. “Let me go now, and mum’s the word. I promise.”
He flashed her a chiding smile.
“I can smell your lie as easily as I can smell your arousal, Grace. Have you forgotten that?”
Her eyes widened. Cream flooded her pussy and wept to her labial folds, rushing to surround her clit. That little bundle of nerves was pulsing now, engorged and swollen. The sound of his voice was rasping, filled with male lust and determined aggression.
“You never mentioned the arousal part,” she gasped.
“I didn’t, did I?” His fingers slid higher on her thigh, and, traitorously weak, her legs trembled, her breathing became rougher, and her juices thicker.
His fingers grazed the damp crotch of her panties, and Grace heard the low, weak moan that betrayed her slip past her lips.
“The scent of your arousal has made me crazy.” His voice deepened, as a growl rumbled in his chest. The sound should have frightened her; it turned her on instead.
Sensation was humming through her body, tingling in her clit and her nipples, making her gaze heavy as his fingers continued to brush lightly against the damp cotton of her panties. That slow, deliberate caress held her spellbound.
He was using the hand that had held the gun that killed Albrecht. But it wasn’t death she felt. And it wasn’t disgust. It was pleasure. A hot, insidious pleasure that held her mesmerized.
“Matthias, this is wrong.” She wanted to tell him to stop, but the words wouldn’t push past her lips. “Don’t do this to me. Please.”
“You do it to me, Grace,” he accused her darkly. “Each touch you’ve given me, no matter how innocent, made me weak. Made me hard. I’ve been so damned distracted by you, my head so filled with the memory of your scent that I didn’t know when you entered that suite. I should have known. I should have sensed you and been able to pull back. To hide until you were gone. But you were already so much a part of me, that I carry you with me, whether you’re actually there or not.”
The SUV slowed. It didn’t stop, but it was definitely slowing as he glanced at her. A second later he jerked his gaze back to the road, but his hand didn’t leave her, his fingers didn’t pause in their caresses.
The implications of his declaration seared her mind. There were rumors, tabloid tales and obscure reports of Breed mates. Mates that were rarely photographed, rarely seen by journalists. It was said that in the ten years since the Breeds had been revealed, that the mates to those Breeds hadn’t aged. Tabloids ran stories almost weekly of a sexual frenzy during what they called “mating heat.” And then there were the wild tales of orgies and animalistic behavior.
There were also stories of other animalistic occurrences. Reports that the Breeds’ sexuality was closer to that of their animal cousins than that of humans. Feline Breed males were said to lock inside their females during ejaculation, with a penile extension just beneath the head of the cock, referred to as a barb. And as for the Wolves …
Grace stared at Matthias’s taut profile. Wolves were supposed to lock within a female with a heavy swelling known as the knot.
It couldn’t be true. She’d scoffed at the stories then, and she refused to believe them now.
But she couldn’t refuse to believe the heavy, lethargic arousal overcoming her. He was barely stroking her, his fingers were but a slight pressure against the covering of her panties, and still, it made her too weak to protest. And the cotton covering was becoming damper by the second with her juices.
“You need to stop,” she whispered, her lashes fluttering with sharply rising need. “Please, Matthias …”
• CHAPTER 4 •
Grace’s family cabin sat in the Catskill Mountains northwest of New York City. The heavily forested area called to the wildness of Matthias’s spirit. The sounds of the night wrapped around him, but the scent of Grace filled his mind.
The two-story cabin sat next to a small, unpolluted lake. The crisp scent of the water was refreshing, the sound of a waterfall played somewhere in the distance. It should have been relaxing. It would have been, if the fever to take his mate weren’t filling his insides with a burning hunger.
He sat his restrained captive in a wide, padded porch chair and dug the keys from her purse. She glared at him, her tapered, dark blonde hair falling over her brow and shadowing her eyes.
The door opened easily. Matthias inhaled deeply, searching for any scent other than that of an empty cabin. Satisfied that they were alone, he picked her up, carried her to the heavily cushioned couch, and left the cabin again.
&n
bsp; He carried her luggage and his bag to the large downstairs bedroom then checked the well-stocked cabinets and refrigerator. Once he had assured himself of the security of the cabin, he disconnected the phone lines, locked the front door, and turned back to her.
Grace remained silent. And she was still aroused. He could smell the arousal, and it was killing him. But he could also smell her fear and her anger. She had judged him the moment she saw him pull that trigger, and if she had her way, he’d be locked up forever.
It was a heavy burden, to understand the event from her viewpoint. Her innocence couldn’t understand the conditions under which the Breeds had been trained, the forces that had shaped their lives from conception to escape. The nightmares were nearly as brutal as the reality of it had been. Even now, ten years later, Matthias could feel the agony of those years.
“Why did you do it, Matthias?” When she spoke, her voice was agonized, filled with tears and disillusionment. She had already tried him and found him guilty.
Matthias knelt in front of the couch, his hands moving to the restraints that bound her hands and feet, his fingers massaging the slight welts on her flesh as he frowned down at them.
The beatings, the hours of mental torture, and the deaths. Imprisoned behind bars and forced to watch as friends and littermates were murdered with such brutal means, that even now, Matthias had trouble sleeping for the horrific memories.
All in the name of training. Of numbing the Breeds to the sight of pain, cruelty, and death. Turning them into emotionless machines that responded at the council members’ beckoning.
“I was created in Albrecht’s lab,” he finally answered her, lifting his head to stare back at her. “I know his cruelties. I know the monster he was.” He lifted his hands from her flesh and stared at the palms. The scars that crisscrossed them had been put there by Albrecht’s knife. A punishment for a failed mission.
“He was released after the hearings about Breed atrocities. You had no right to kill him after that.”
His gaze jerked back to hers. “He was released on his oath that he was not a part of the council directorate, which I know was a lie. He was released on his oath that he would never again attempt to create or imprison Breeds. Ten years ago, he was released. And he never stopped. We found the bodies, his scent covered them as well as the marks of his abuse. He never stopped.”