At least right now.
She and Lawe Justice were like oil and water.
She was independent and he wanted a lap kitty for a mate, wife or lover. She wanted a man who trusted her abilities and the lifetime she had spent training, adapting and learning to protect not just herself and her men but those she was hired to protect and/or rescue.
She wanted a partner for a lover, and Lawe would never be a partner to his mate any more than he had been one with his lovers. Even the Breed lovers he’d had were forced to either stay behind the walls of Sanctuary or do without that perfect, hard, incredibly sexy body.
She bet he even growled when he fucked.
The thought of hearing that dangerous rasp in his throat as he came over her, inside her, was enough to send a shiver of anticipation surging through her.
And if he were her mate? There would be the barb, that extension her sister had told her about that emerged from beneath the wide crest of a feline Breed male’s cock when he found his release inside his mate.
The flush that mounted her sister’s cheeks and the gleam of remembered ecstasy in her eyes had been enough to immediately bring Lawe to Diane’s mind.
She turned away from him quickly.
She had to do a hard reverse where such thoughts were concerned or—
“Too late, he can already smell your arousal.” Jonas’s voice had her swinging around with a frown to glare back at him.
Both he and Lawe were watching her closely.
“Do you expect me to blush?” she asked as she crossed her arms over her breasts, more to hide her hardening nipples than out of confrontation. “Sorry, boys, I stopped blushing in my teens. I would like to know where those bugs came from, though.” She indicated the devices, then flashed Lawe a tight smile. “Any scent I may have, I can’t smell, so I can ignore.”
Lawe’s brow arched. “As long as you don’t expect me to ignore it.”
“I may not be able to ignore the fact that the mating heat is there, but I can sure as hell ignore any scent of need that I, myself, can’t detect,” she informed him firmly. “And you can ignore it too, Lawe, because it’s not going to happen. Period. You’re arrogant, imperious, and your attitude where women are concerned just piss me the hell off. We’re not pets, and I’ll be damned if I’ll play your little lap kitty, for even a second. Now take your toys there and get the hell out of my room. I’d like to get some sleep before I have to decide how the hell I’m going to repair the damage you did to my team when you showed them you’ve had your little purr boys watching over me rather than respecting my ability to protect myself.”
“As you did in that little village in Syria last year when your uncle’s enemies got their hands on you? Where were your men then, Diane? Let me tell you where they were,” he informed her as he cast a hard and brutally iced look. “They were nice and safe and not risking their asses because Thor and the two Breeds with you at the time had the good sense to contact Sanctuary. Do you have a fucking clue the danger it would have represented if your captors had had a clue that they held the sister-in-law to the director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs?”
Lawe could feel it. That loss of control that signaled Diane’s determination to challenge him in both words and deed. He could smell her intent to push him, see it in her gaze and in her expression as she stood there glaring at him.
“What about those Coyotes that pierced your hide with their bullets last year?” she charged as her brow lifted mockingly, anger glimmering in her dark brown eyes. “Neither of us exactly lives a safe life. Stop trying to pretend you’re the only one who does.”
“And I’m supposed to stand aside when I have the ability to hedge your chances of surviving?” He could feel the growl threatening to edge into his voice.
Damn her, he could feel the animal inside wakening at her determination to place her life in danger. As though she were daring the enemy to strike. Daring him to make his move and challenge her.
“What you should have done was left my Breeds on my damned team instead of taking them away from me and giving me the choice to contact you when I needed them.” Her voice rose along with her anger as she glared back at both of them.
“The shooter today was Gideon,” Jonas informed her quietly as he broke in on the battle getting ready to flare to life. “He’s been following you for weeks, Diane. The team tracking you has had signs of the shadow on your ass but they couldn’t verify. All they had was a sense of it. Catching sight of him has been impossible despite their efforts, and you know my men are damned good.”
She knew Gideon, the Executioner, had no intention of killing her, despite appearances. Not once had she herself been struck by one of the precisely aimed bullets. But three of her men had been. Three she couldn’t be certain weren’t betraying her.
“And if your men hadn’t been between me and him, perhaps he would have taken the advice I left for him at my previous location and actually come out of the shadows and arranged a meet,” she suddenly yelled at him as she threw her hands up in fury.
In her room she’d left an answer to the message she’d received in Argentina. She’d done everything possible to draw the Executioner to a meeting after he had left her the warning that she was being betrayed.
“My God, Jonas, do you realize how many times your men, by his order probably, stood between me, my contacts and my damned missions?” She stabbed her finger in Lawe’s direction as a haze of disbelief filled her mind.
She was furious.
There was no scent quite as intoxicating as feminine fury, unless it was female lust. And the lust was definitely there, Lawe thought as he felt that instantaneous, burning hunger suddenly sear his mind.
She wanted to hide it. She wanted to deny it. She would have denied it to hell and back if he confronted her over it. She would cut her nose off to spite her face and they both knew it.
She was so determined to be alone, to push him away, that she ran in the opposite direction of him every chance she had.
“Both of you stand down,” Jonas ordered, his tone harsh with irritation.
Turning to him, Lawe realized the other man hadn’t taken his eyes off the devices lying so innocently on the pristine gleam of the table.
“Why don’t you take your handler and leave,” she ordered him, the command grating on the animal instincts threatening to take over. “Then the two of you can moon over the electronics together.”
“These aren’t just electronics,” Jonas said as he reached into his pocket to extract a handkerchief before carefully wrapping it around the three bugs and pocketing it before turning his gaze back to them.
“Really?” Her arms slid down to allow her hands to prop on her hips defiantly. “Are they aliens disguised as electronics? Didn’t I see that movie already?”
Jonas’s lips quirked. “Only if you managed to find a copy that I couldn’t. That movie is over forty years old and harder to find than Casablanca. But these little babies are like fingerprints. I’ve only seen them twice before, which means if Gideon put them in place, then I may have a way of tracking him.”
Diane focused her attention on him rather than the anger demanding action as it rose inside her.
“Such as?” Diane asked.
Not that she cared. Come daylight she would be after far different prey. “Such as the same signal that he used to pull information into these babies can be used to pull information out of them,” he told her. “I’ll explain it tomorrow when we meet with the Leo, Leo Vanderale. He’ll need to talk to you as well as Thor in regard to where you found them and how they were connected to their power source.”
Oh yeah, she was going to be at that meeting. Besides the fact that she had no intention of being in D.C. come morning, she also had no intention of facing the First Leo, the rumored first ever successful melding of human and animal DNA, more than a hundred years before.
“Speaking of that information, I’ll have it before I leave.”
Autocratic, demanding
and arrogantly certain of himself. She would have expected Jonas to demand the information, not Lawe. Diane laughed at the pure Breed confidence he had in himself and his certainty she would be led so easily.
“You can get the information at the same time Leo and your alpha do,” she snorted. “I don’t explain things twice, Lawe.”
And he knew it.
It was a test. Had she told him, then he would have known she had no intention of making that meeting.
His eyes narrowed.
“The meeting’s at ten,” Jonas informed her as she and Lawe were locked in a silent battle fought only with their eyes.
“Fine. Now you can leave.” She had no intention of speaking to Leo Vanderale the next day. Once the first glimmer of light had made its debut, she intended to be on her way to Window Rock, Arizona.
Giving a brief, sharp nod, Jonas turned to Lawe. “I’ll contact Callan and Leo tonight. When you’re finished here . . .” He paused before his lips edged into a grin. “Or should I say instead, sometime tonight, you should contact Rule and let him know we’ll need every Breed in the vicinity on grounds when the heli-jet arrives in the morning.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Lawe promised, his nod sharp as Jonas headed for the door.
When the door snicked closed and locked behind the director, Diane turned back to Lawe.
“You need to leave with him,” Diane stated, her chest tight and aching as she battled tears that made no sense. She was stronger than this, she told herself. She was no ninny to cry over a man as though he were essential to her life. But for some reason, the betrayal she felt was tearing at her heart.
Lawe felt himself still. With his gaze locked with Diane’s, he had a feeling the battle of wills beginning was one that could end up destroying them both.
As she suggested, he should simply leave with Jonas. Staying here, accepting that challenge was the worse decision he could make, but that was exactly what he was doing.
“After last night, you really think it’s going to be that easy?” he asked with silky smoothness.
Diane’s gaze flickered with a glimmer of excitement and anticipation that he could feel her attempting to fight.
Attempting.
Lawe felt his own body preparing, his cock hardening, lengthening, the glands beneath his tongue swelling and the faintest hint of the unusual taste of spiced, candied pears.
He hadn’t expected that.
He’d heard the hormone tasted of cinnamon, spring rain, even summer heat. But he’d never heard of candied pears.
“I don’t want this.” The surprising statement had him fighting every instinct he possessed to ignore her.
Jonas had suggested he just mate her and get it over with. Mating her hadn’t been his preferred course of action until he’d seen those bullets slamming into the cement wall above her head.
Until he’d almost seen her die before his eyes.
His mate.
She was his, and other than those stolen moments the night before he hadn’t touched her. Even then, he hadn’t kissed her. He had felt her sweet heat, but he hadn’t tasted it. He was dying for it. He wanted to lick the heated flesh of her pussy, taste the slow glide of her juices as they met his tongue.
He wanted her with every cell of his body, with every breath he could drag into his lungs.
“Don’t look at me like that, Lawe.” There was an edge of breathlessness in her voice that had sweat popping out on his forehead and along his back as he fought the need to kiss her. To share the erotic taste filling his senses.
The head of his dick throbbed imperatively and the need that had it stiff and aching wasn’t something that was going to go away any time soon.
That order, though, that female arrogance as she demanded he deny himself even the pleasure of looking, had that dominant animal inside him rearing its head in furious denial.
“I can look at you however I want,” he growled, moving closer to her, aware that she wasn’t backing down; she wasn’t edging away from him.
A woman as wary as Diane should have been running to protect her virtue, because his intention was to steal every ounce of it.
And once he had her virtue, he would have her submission. His hands actually ached to grip the curves of her ass, spread them apart, show her an erotic hunger that would lead to the full, feminine acknowledgment that he was her mate, her protector.
Diane drew in a slow, deep breath and he could almost hear the thunder of her heart. He could definitely see it in the fierce throb of blood in the vein at her neck.
“You think you can intimidate me?” she asked.
“I’m not trying to intimidate you.” Intimidation had nothing to do with what he had in mind. Hell no. He wanted to fuck her until they both passed out in exhaustion, but he had no intention of intimidating her.
Unless he had no other choice.
And only after he sated the hunger tearing at his senses.
She stared up at him now, the nervousness that flowed through her senses based more in her need for him, a need she was fighting desperately to deny. And he could feel the fight, the desperation, and though he could understand why she fought it, even approved the fight, he refused to allow her to be any less helpless than he.
“Fighting it doesn’t work,” he murmured as he moved around her, his head lowering, his lips at her ear. “It only makes the body hotter, the need more intense. It only makes you hungrier, doesn’t it, Diane, especially after having some small, tempting taste of it.”
Her breathing accelerated.
He could smell her heat then, burning hotter and wilder than ever before. It was blooming inside her, overtaking her control and reaching out to him as he stopped behind her and allowed his hands to settle at her hips, his fingers curling over the fragile bones lightly.
“Right here,” he breathed over the fiercely throbbing vein in her neck. “I could take the gentlest of bites and it would begin. It would burn through both of us, making the hunger impossible to deny, impossible to walk away from.”
Her hands curled over the top of the chair in front of her then. A hard, desperate grip as he felt her fighting to hold on to the last of her control. The same as he was fighting to hold on to his.
“I won’t wait much longer,” he warned her, knowing he couldn’t deny that instinctive, desperate edge of need beginning to tear at his senses.
“And that’s supposed to make me step into line?” The denial, the defiance, was still there.
“I could only hope.” He couldn’t resist brushing his lips along her neck.
Just his lips.
He didn’t lick them first. He didn’t place a layer of the hormone between his lips and her flesh.