Eventually, my enemies will find me. When they do, they'll strike where I'm weak."
"Chemistry doesn't bind you to another person, Harmony. Emotion binds." She stared back at him in shock. Emotion?
"I have no emotions," she snapped. "Unless you count vengeance."
"Then you have no weakness." He shrugged. "Your enemies can't use what you care nothing about."
She stared back at him, pressing her lips together as she clenched her teeth on the furious words threatening to fall from her lips.
"A one-night stand does not a lover make, darling." His smile was faintly sardonic.
"So I should just become your little bedmate and forget the danger in it?" she snapped. His brow arched slowly. "I wasn't asking you for sex, Harmony. I was trying to get to know you. I was pointing out how stubborn and willful you are. Not trying to find out how easy you would fall into my bed."
"I've had to be stubborn. Strong," she bit out. "I would have died that first year I escaped if I hadn't been."
The year Dane Vanderale had found her, broken, all but dead. He had saved her, just as he had saved her many times since.
"Yeah, there were a few notes in your file concerning that first year." He nodded as though the information were general knowledge. "The Coyotes sent after you reported you were wounded, severely. They would have caught you if they hadn't been diverted by an unknown team of men."
One of the Coyotes must have lived. She had hoped she had taken them out. There had been two, merciless and bloodthirsty.
"I don't know about that." She shook her head firmly. "I just know I escaped. That was all that mattered to me."
"You were fifteen years old, severely wounded and alone," he pointed out. "Yet you survived."
"What's your point?"
Harmony watched Lance warily now. He was fishing for information, which meant he knew something. Something more than her file had provided for him.
She remembered well the fight between those two Coyotes. Running on nerves alone, hungry, exhausted, they had nearly taken her. Instead, she had escaped when two shadowed figures had jumped into the fray.
The knife wounds she had carried had nearly been fatal once infection and fever had set in. The wounds had been too deep, and her body too weak to fight. She would have died if Dane hadn't found her.
He was the son of an African industrialist, a rogue and a man who followed his own rules. At that time, he had been tracking the Coyote Breed who had been sent to kill a friend of his, a young man who knew more than he should have. His death had not been easy. And neither had the Coyote's after Dane had caught up with him. The secretiveness of his work was imperative for him to succeed in his goal of helping the Breeds destroy the Genetics Council. If it were ever learned that the heir to the vast holdings of Vanderale Enterprises was no more than a vigilante, it could destroy all his family held. It was a secret Harmony had sworn to carry to her grave.
"How did you escape, Harmony?" He lay there asking the question as though the subject meant no more than the weather. He wasn't demanding answers, he wasn't interrogating her. He was asking.
"I had help," she whispered. "Two men heard the fight. I ran while they distracted the Coyotes."
"Why did the Coyotes say they didn't have a scent?" A light frown furrowed his brow.
"The interrogation reports stated that the Coyotes swore there was no identifying scent. Does everyone have a scent to the Breeds?"
"Yes." She nodded slowly. "Everyone has a scent."
"Is it unique, or can it be disguised by perfumes and whatnot?"
"It's unique," she answered carefully, watching him warily. She knew where this was going and was helpless to prevent it.
"So, why would the two men who saved your butt have no scent?" He frowned as he laid the remote on the floor and scratched, rather absently, at the hard, well-muscled flesh of his abdomen.
The movement lifted his T-shirt, flashing the dark tough skin before he allowed his hand to rest there. Harmony fought to drag in enough oxygen to make her brain work again. Dammit, she was a cold-blooded assassin, not his sex kitten. But at the moment, the sex kitten was definitely making itself known.
"I'm not certain." She really didn't understand the process, so she wasn't technically lying to him. Right?
"But you have an idea?"
Harmony stared back at him suspiciously.
"Why all the questions? What does this have to do with the fact that a mate is a weakness and I'm not willing to play the sex kitten for you?"
"Sex kitten?" Wicked amusement lit his eyes then. "I hadn't thought of that one, but I like the idea. I like it a whole lot."
"You are not making sense." She held her hand up to halt the words his lips were parting for. "These myriad little subjects of yours are not going together well, Lance."
"Hey, you brought up the sex kitten thing, not me. It just happened to interest me, that's all. Tell me." His brows lifted then lowered suggestively. "How does a Breed sex kitten do it?"
"With claws?" she suggested in irritation.
His lips pursed as his eyes gleamed with playful lust.
"I like claws," he whispered as he raised his hand to rub absently at his shoulder, the area next to his neck. The exact area where she had bit him. "You could come over here and show me how it's done."
She actually moved to go to him. Harmony stared down at her feet in alarm when she took that first step; then she stopped and glared back at him furiously. She hissed.
Without thought, without realizing the sound was moving through her chest, she really hissed. She had never hissed in her life. Not the catlike, growling hiss that came out of her mouth now.
She stared back at Lance in shock.
"Keep that up and you're going to make me come." His voice had lowered, thickening with arousal as his eyes gleamed with heated hunger.
"You are insane."
"I'm so fucking horny I'm about to come in my jeans just listening to you hiss." He grunted in irritation. "Insanity is probably closer than you think it is." The pain of her arousal before the doctor had begun the hormone treatments had been horrible. Did he suffer too? She frowned, drawing in the scent of the room deeper than she had allowed herself to this point.
The smell of male arousal was intoxicating and thick. It permeated her senses, rushed through her brain, and sent her heartbeat to a thundering speed as she felt her mouth fill again with that strangely sweet taste.
"Does it hurt?" she whispered, fearing the answer. Knowing the answer.
"No, baby, it doesn't hurt." Lance sighed heavily. "It's just aggravating as hell." And he was lying. Why was he lying when telling the truth could guilt her into giving him what he wanted? He could have easily played the wronged male and had her in his bed hours ago.
"Then why aren't you moving?" she asked him then. "You've been in that same position for more than an hour. Sit up."
She could see his erection outlined by his jeans, pressing hard against the material.
"I think I'll just lie right here for a while." He chuckled instead. "Did I mention I'm a little low on rest myself?"
He hadn't slept in two days, not enough to matter. He had watched over her, protected her when she couldn't protect herself.
Harmony licked her lips nervously. "When I was wounded, the men who fought off the Coyotes found me a week later. I was very ill."
His gaze sharpened on her.
"They had known then about the Coyotes. They hunted them; I wasn't certain why." She hadn't known then, though she knew now. "They nursed me back to health and protected me. They never told me exactly why they had no scent. But sometimes, if I'm in trouble, they know it, and they show up."
"Does Jonas know about them?"
"The information contained in the Breed database on me isn't everything the Council had," she revealed. "I don't know why Jonas has hidden the files on the few times the Coyotes actually managed to capture me, but those reports aren't in there. Just as the reports reveal that each time I was captured, the same two men rescued me."
"Who were they?"
She glanced away for a second before turning back to him. "I can't reveal their names to you, Lance. Their lives…"
He held his hand up. "I don't want names. Why do they watch you, Harmony? What do they want? What does Jonas want?"
She shook her head, a frown creasing her brow.
"Jonas wants me dead, Lance. But he can't kill me without giving me a chance to redeem myself first. But make no mistake, he hates me."
"Why?"
She inhaled painfully at the question.
"I killed his mother. The only person at those labs who cared anything about Jonas, besides me. And I couldn't show him how much I cared, or I suffered for it. Madame LaRue was very possessive of her personal creation. As for why the others help me, it benefits both of us. They help me, I help them. It's enough that they've been there."
"So why tell me this much now?" he asked her, rather than pursuing the information further.
"You protected me while I slept," she whispered. "You didn't have to do that. You deserve to know what you're facing."
"You're my woman, Harmony," he growled. "I always protect what's mine." She shook her head slowly. "I can't belong to you, Lance. Not ever. In six months, when this is over and I've redeemed myself by Breed Law, then I'll leave. If I can manage to keep my enemies from finding me that long. You can't afford to take me as your woman, any more than I can claim you as anything of mine. Doing so will only get us both killed."
"How much longer can you fight alone? How much longer, Harmony, before Death gives up because she can't kill enough monsters or save enough children?" he asked as she moved to turn away from him.
"Why are you doing this?" It was a question she had fought for too long now herself.
"Why can't you just let it go, Lance?"
"Come here." His voice gentled.
"What?"
He lifted his hand, crooking his fingers in a wave back toward himself.
"Come here," he repeated.
She moved toward him slowly, hesitantly. He didn't know what it did to her to be too close to him, how much he made her want. It rose inside her like a hungry beast, tearing at her soul with a need she had pushed back all her life.
"What?" she asked again as she paused by the couch.
"Touch me, Harmony."
"I told you…"
"I didn't say fuck me, dammit, I said touch me," he growled. "Right here." He thumped his chest. "Just touch me."
She bent and placed her palm on his chest.
Heat. Harmony felt the weakness that flooded her as she went to her knees beside the couch, feeling the incredible heat of his body moving into hers. The phenomena was unlike anything she had ever known with another person. She had touched others, she wasn't a virgin, but she had never experienced this.
"This is why, Harmony." He brushed her hair tenderly back from her face, his thumb caressing her cheek as she stared into his eyes. "Feel my body giving to you. I've never done that before. As though my soul knows what you need, just as my body knows, and it gives to you selflessly. That's why I can't walk away. It's why I claim you as mine, even knowing that isn't what you want. Because that bond is already there. It was there when I pulled into the parking lot of that bar when all I wanted to do was head home. It was there the second my eyes met yours, my skin touched yours. Run away if you have to, but at least be aware of what you're running away from, baby."