by Lora Leigh
snapped at her. She’d always been far too timid.
“Fine, it’s no dream.” She watched the girl with narrowed eyes now. “Does that mean when I wake up I won’t be at the Reever house sleeping with Graeme?”
She almost smirked back at Claire, but being cruel to the girl just didn’t seem right.
“Don’t play games, Cat, both our lives are riding on this,” Claire demanded firmly. Not angrily or fiercely, simply with a firmness Cat had never sensed in her.
“Our lives are riding on what, Claire?” Cat demanded. “On me admitting that we’re in the research center? Fine, here we are.” She spread her arms out to indicate the cell they sat within. “According to you I never left it. What now?”
Claire rose slowly to her feet. Her image was clad in the jeans and the loose tank top she’d died in. They were dusty, torn; her feet were bare. She looked like the waif Cat knew those who had loved her had seen her as. Frail. Far too gentle for the life she’d been born into.
“You can’t see that a part of you is still locked in this cage, all alone, can you?” Claire whispered.
“Judd was here.” He hadn’t left. She’d always wondered why he hadn’t left, though. He was strong enough, smart enough that he had to have known when Graeme escaped that night. Yet, he’d stayed.
“Why do you think Judd stayed?” Claire turned back to her slowly. “If he could have escaped this hell as well, why didn’t he leave with Gideon?”
“Graeme,” Cat corrected her almost absently, her own thoughts lost in that question for long moments before she finally shrugged. “Judd was as secretive as Graeme. He never told me.”
“And you never asked?” Claire tipped her head to the side as she watched her inquisitively. “That doesn’t seem like you, Cat. You’re so damned nosy nothing ever gets past you. Why would you let Judd get by with not explaining that? I know you would have wondered.”
“I thought Graeme was dead.” She wanted to jump from the cot, wanted to throw herself out of it, desperate to escape the dream, yet she seemed locked in place as she watched Claire. “I guess I just assumed the soldiers assigned to the euthanasia team hadn’t been ordered to take Judd.”
What the hell was going on? What did Claire want from her that required them to be here?
Claire shook her head. “Until you realize you never left this place, until you ask yourself why and answer that question honestly, then you’re risking not just your life, but also Graeme’s.” She sighed. “I always thought I was the coward, Cat, but I’m starting to believe, in ways, you’re just as much a coward as I am.”
“Don’t piss me off, Claire,” Cat warned her, narrowing her eyes on her. “I can still kick your ass. Dream or not.”
Claire smirked. “You can’t come off that cot, Cat. You can’t kick anyone’s ass in this dream. You’re locked there, just as you were the morning those alarms woke you. Alarms that you knew meant an attempted or successful escape.”
Cat shook her own head at this point. “I thought the scientists were trying to trick us . . .”
“Why?” Claire laughed derisively. “Why would they do that, Cat? He was gone. You were smarter than that. Gideon made certain you were smarter than that.”
“Graeme. His fucking name is Graeme,” Cat corrected her, growing angry now. “Stop this, Claire. If you want to talk to me, then do it as you always have. We talk much better when I’m awake.”
Leaning against the steel bars, Claire watched her with such intent somberness that Cat almost feared the other girl would keep her within that dreamscape forever.
“You can leave anytime you want to, Cat,” Claire whispered, her expression never changing. “It’s up to you to wake up, just as it’s up to you to realize it doesn’t matter if you wake up, you’ll still be here.” She waved her arm slowly, encompassing the cells, the life Cat had once lived. “Realize that before it’s too late for both of us.”
She could wake whenever she wanted to? Well, she wanted to wake up now. Right now.
Closing her eyes tight for several seconds, she willed herself awake, willed herself away from the sad, waifish vision that showed far more backbone in hell than she’d shown in life.
“Hell?” Claire whispered. “This isn’t hell, Cat. This is what shaped you. This is where he saved you. Where he realized what you were to him . . . Before you took the first therapy, that enraged animal realized it and quieted, calming the maddened boy and allowing him to learn far more than any young mind should be able to learn. But he learned. For you.”
She would open her eyes and she would be awake. She’d be lying in Graeme’s arms, naked, his body warm against hers, his arrogant superiority infuriating her. All she had to do was open her eyes.
“Yes,” Claire whispered, sounding strangely distant now. “All you have to do is open your eyes, Cat. But even open, they’re closed. Poor Graeme, he’ll always be Gideon in your eyes, no matter how much he’s changed, no matter how much he loves . . .”
She didn’t want to hear any more. She couldn’t bear it. She would wake up now!
Opening her eyes quickly, she found herself staring up at Graeme, the gold swirling in those dark green Bengal eyes of his. The fires of fury, she thought. The madness. That part of himself he called the monster.
A low, warning growl sounded in his throat. “That presence will cause me to become violent.” The low, vicious snarl was one she’d never heard from him. Even when he’d warned her that the monstrous part of himself was roused, still he hadn’t sounded so powerful, so enraged.
“A dream . . .” she whispered desperately. It had to have been just a dream.
“Mine.” Moving over her, his legs parting hers with dominant strength as he came over her.
There were no preliminaries, but she didn’t need any. Her body answered his hunger, his need, just that quickly.
“Graeme . . .” Her gasp was followed by a low moan as his hands caught her wrists. Securing them to the bed next to her shoulders, he pushed inside her with a hard thrust.
“Oh God. Graeme!” Crying out his name, she was shocked at the sudden, answering slickness that filled her inner flesh, that met him, aiding the penetrating of his swollen cock.
“My mate,” he snarled, bending his head to her ear, nipping at the lobe with his teeth. “Fucking mine.”
Securing her wrists above her head with one hand, he moved the other to one thigh, dragging her knee to his hip as he began pounding inside her. Each fierce push inside the clamping heat of her pussy sent striking flames of response rushing through her. Her fingers curled against his hold, desperate for something to hold on to. Desperate to hold on to him as he moved inside her like a man possessed by arousal, by possessive lust. He was determined to somehow mark her more than he already had.
His hips slammed between her thighs repeatedly, driving himself to the hilt inside her, pushing to her cervix, rasping over flesh so sensitive that each penetration rode the boundary between pleasure and pain and drove her wild with the complete eroticism of his loss of control.
The feel of his lips moving down her neck sent a rush of dizzying pleasure surging through her, making her pliant, driving a rush of sensation through her already sensitized body.
Down her neck, nipping at her collarbone, his head bending, his lips covered the tight peak of her breast, sucking it into his mouth and drawing on it with hungry pulls of his mouth as his tongue lashed at it, pushing her higher.
Pleasure whipped through her with hurricane force. It drove through her senses, arching her body closer; each thrust inside her tightening channel was met with an answering arch of her hips. She took him deeper, harder. Strangled cries tore from her lips until the rush of complete rapture exploded through her. The violence of the pleasure stole her breath. Her hips arched, her thighs tight around his hips, she held on to him, held on to reality the only way she knew how. By holding on to him the only way she could.
• CHAPTER 19 •
Graeme waited unt
il they had completed breakfast before considering bringing up the night before with Cat. She would no doubt be expecting it, which would make it harder to breach her defenses.
Leaning back in the metal chair that matched the metal and glass breakfast table sitting in the little alcove just off the kitchen, he watched her curiously. She drank her coffee as she went over the news pages she read each day on her e-pad. Cat was curious as hell, not just about everything surrounding her, but about the world itself. And it wasn’t likely she’d forget so much as a word that she saw, let alone read.
The information she retained with that unique memory of hers had never failed to amaze him, even in the research center. She might not understand exactly what she took in sometimes, but she could quote it word for word.
Understanding science hadn’t been her strong suit. She’d been confused by it in the center even though she’d managed to retain everything he’d shown her. Cat’s strong suit was people, strangely enough, though Cat detested crowds and rarely made friends as he understood it.
“Why did you give me Bengal DNA?” The question had him blinking back at her in surprise as her eyes lifted from the e-pad in asking it.
So much for quizzing her first.
“You read Dr. Foster’s reports.” Lifting his coffee, he sipped at the decaffeinated brew thoughtfully as he watched her, seeing her mind work despite her closed expression.
“Your reasons for it weren’t in the report,” she pointed out, her tone a little too calm. “I want to know what you were thinking when you decided to use Bengal DNA in my therapy. Were you looking for a sister, or had you already decided I was your mate?”
What was he thinking? He had no other thought at that time beyond saving her life. The missing genes in her makeup would have killed her within weeks of the base injection used to keep her alive until Dr. Foster could come up with a therapy. Graeme hadn’t consciously made the decision to mark her with his genetics, but he had no doubt his animal instincts had.
“I’m Bengal,” he finally answered, deciding on the truth rather than sugarcoating it as he felt she so often needed. “Brandenmore gave you to me. I felt that made you mine. I was eleven, Cat, why would I have considered any other DNA to introduce into the therapy of a child given to me for safekeeping?”
It was as simple as that, yet also far more complicated and he felt she knew it.
“You were never eleven,” she snorted knowingly. “Even Dr. Foster said you were born far older than your years.”
His brows lifted at that information. “He never told me that. But if it was true, then it was no more than he programmed into me. I know while the surrogate carried me, he ordered her to listen to a variety of scientific theories that had been given over many generations in genetic manipulation. He knew what he wanted when he created me, and he ensured he got what he wanted.”
There was no resentment. Far from it. If he saw anyone as a “father” figure, then it was Benjamin Foster.
“He got far more than he bargained for, though, didn’t he?” she guessed. “When did he realize your intelligence was off any scale invented to rate it?”
Graeme almost smiled at that question. He’d always been far more intelligent than Benjamin Foster had guessed.
“I rather doubt he ever knew just how far I’d exceeded even the genetic manipulations he was trying for,” he finally answered her. “Man can manipulate all he wants, but the introduction of animal genetics is far more of a wild card than they ever imagine. Or want to acknowledge. And it will become more so in successive generations. If my suspicions are true, then once the children born of original matings reach maturity, they’ll surpass even the original Breeds.”
She paused for a moment, but evidently decided to allow that speculation to pass.
“So because I was given to you, you used the Bengal genetics in my therapy?” Cat pressed once more. “You chose Honor’s genetics as well—why not use Bengal with her therapies too? Didn’t you consider her worthy? Part of the Pride you claimed in the center?”
Oh yes, his little cat was far too intelligent herself. And she’d obviously been considering these questions for quite some time.
“Honor wasn’t given to me. And the leukemia she suffered from had the potential to become far more deadly with the introduction of any feline genetics. It could have mutated into a form of feline leukemia far stronger than the incurable human leukemia she already suffered from.” He finished his coffee and set the cup on the table before bracing his arms on it and leaning forward. “We were studying wolf genetics at the time she was brought in. Dr. Foster created her therapy himself based on his friendship with her father. I had no such ties where you were concerned, and you were mine.”
He wouldn’t deny that fact. The moment she was placed in his arms his animal instincts had instantly claimed her. Not as a mate, but as belonging solely to him.
“You knew I was your mate then?” Her mind was working, her need to understand her life and the choices made for her finally coming forth. He’d wondered when that would happen.
“I was eleven,” he repeated gently. “I was maddened, nearing insanity and euthanasia. I was only weeks away from being taken to the kill center, despite Dr. Foster’s best efforts to save me, when Phillip Brandenmore gave you to me. No, I didn’t look at you and instantly decide you were my mate. I looked at you, saw the will to live and realized the mistake Brandenmore had made. He’d given me something worth fighting for.”
He barely remembered life before Cat. He knew that, before the moment he’d held her in his arms, his brain had actually hurt from all the information he was trying to process. Headaches that surpassed even the pain from the experiments up to that time. Madness had been a constant companion, so much so that he’d felt himself slipping along a darkened tunnel that led only to a complete loss of any semblance of reality.
“So I was worth fighting for, but your brother wasn’t?” There was an edge of anger to her voice that caught his attention. “Judd is your twin. Why wasn’t he worth fighting for?”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t worth fighting for,” he corrected her. “Both he and Honor were worth fighting for, and I’d hung on through those years for them. But I knew Brandenmore would have me killed soon. My sanity was questionable. I couldn’t always control the animal genetics and the rage was eating me alive. The information amassing in my brain was far more than I could process. Perhaps those animal genetics recognized you as my mate, because those instincts instantly eased, the rage dissipated and I found the calm I needed to survive and to process more information than ever before. Whatever the reason, Cat, it changes nothing.”
“Nothing is ever that simple with you, Graeme,” she bit out, confusion and anger warring inside her. “I knew you then and I know you now. You were born to manipulate and deceive as well as to heal. I have no doubt in my mind your ability to manipulate far surpasses Jonas Wyatt’s abilities. You were my world and you deliberately ensured I felt that way. Then I don’t see you for thirteen years, no matter that, over and over, I did everything but take out an ad with the news agencies to have you contact me. If I belonged to you, then why didn’t you come to me once you were sane enough to realize that something had been taken from you?”
He could see the pain in her face, the haunted need and search for answers. It was a need he couldn’t ease for her. One he refused to ease.
Instead, he leaned closer until his face was only inches from hers.
“I always knew you were mine, Cat. Even when the monster raged unabated I knew and I watched over you as closely as I dared. Trust me, you did not want me to come to you then. Even my instincts refused to come near you. Nothing mattered during that time but blood. And I spilled enough of it that sometimes I feared I could drown in it.”
Her eyes widened as he spoke, surprise gleaming in the golden brown depths for a second before her spine straightened.
He knew the moment she decided she could push him, that she could dare hi
m.
“And you felt that was something you should and would handle alone. Without your mate,” she stated. “Yet now that you’ve decided to claim what you feel is yours you believe you can oversee my every breath?”
There was no anger, no fire. The independence and sheer stubborn will he glimpsed in her were terrifying.
“They nearly took you,” he reminded her icily. “They drugged you, incapacitated you and would have taken you, Cat, had I not been close enough to stop them.”
“And you ensured I can’t be incapacitated in such a way again,” she reminded him, still calm, despite the emotions he could feel roiling beneath the façade. “Perhaps you should have taken care of that sooner, Graeme.” Rising to her feet, she stared down at him, the hurt in her gaze nearly more than he could stand to stare into. “But then, there are a lot of things you should have taken care of sooner, aren’t there?”
He was out of his seat just that fast.
Damn her. She had no idea what she was talking about, no idea the hell he’d endured to ensure she was never found, no matter what. No matter her anger that she didn’t have the answers, he’d be damned if he’d allow her to continue to feel this way.
“This vendetta you have against me will stop, Cat,” he ordered, the demand in the low, harsh growl impossible for her to miss.
Surprise flared in her gaze then. “Vendetta, Graeme?” she whispered. “You believe my need for answers is a vendetta? Some attempt to avenge whatever slight I might feel?”
“Isn’t that exactly what it is?” What more could it be? He’d walked away from her; he understood her anger for that at the time. She was an adult now, she should understand that the need for her protection meant far more than her hurt feelings.
“You trained me to fight at your side,” she reminded him with bleak knowledge. “You trained Judd and me both to ensure we were able to aid you in our own protection.” Tears gleamed in her eyes now. “That wasn’t what happened, though, was it? I’m sorry, Graeme, I don’t know how Judd feels, but I feel as though both of you threw me away and I don’t know if I can make myself forget it.”
• • •
Cat stalked from the kitchen, rather surprised that Graeme allowed her to go.
The dream, or whatever the hell it had been the night before, had left her unsettled. She couldn’t get it out of her mind nor could she forget the accusation that she had never left the research center.
She wasn’t stupid, she understood what Claire what saying, but merely rejected the idea of it, Cat assured herself as she moved to the small library/office off the foyer of the house. She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have time for the second-guessing and soul-searching that each day with Graeme seemed to bring.
She loved him so desperately, but it wasn’t the research center she couldn’t escape. It was the knowledge that he had left her there. For months she had believed he was dead. That he had been so frightened that he had stolen the teddy bear she had been so attached to because he was frightened. Only to learn that he had left her and he had taken the only other comfort she’d had in her young life, that damned teddy bear.
Where are you, Claire? she snapped furiously, throwing herself into the large leather chair behind the desk. Come out and play now, dammit, while I’m awake.
There was no answer and she was growing used to the fact that the one friend she had believed she could depend upon was gone. And one day, she would be completely gone, Cat knew. Whenever the prophecy from that ritual came due, it was possible both of them would lose their lives.
The awakening would bring death. The words Orrin Martinez had whispered just after the ritual when he believed both Cat and Claire to be held in a deep sleep, had never been forgotten by Cat.
But she’d been awake for the better part of the thirteen years since she’d been given Claire’s life and she hadn’t died yet. But neither had she revealed herself until now. She didn’t want to die, but she couldn’t live as Claire Martinez any longer either. Especially if it meant allowing Raymond to continue to destroy the women of the Nation that the Council deemed experiment-worthy, such as Raymond’s sister, Morningstar.
The bastards. They would burn in hell, every damned one of them, for the destruction they’d wrought in the past. What would happen to Raymond and the Jackals who’d been taken into custody by Jonas she wasn’t certain, but she knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.
Tonight, after she’d met with Honor’s parents, following through with one of the promises she’d made to herself the night of that ritual, she and Graeme would have to fight this out. If she had to give him an ultimatum, then she would do it. He would come up with answers or she would leave.
Where had he been for the four months before he’d arranged for her and Judd’s transfer, and what had happened to him when he’d been returned to the research center several years later? She knew why he’d lashed out at her as he did. She would have never stopped searching for him if he hadn’t hurt her so deeply. Nothing Judd had said or done would have convinced her to leave without searching for Graeme the next morning if she hadn’t believed she was hated by the Breed that meant so much to her.
Perhaps she’d known that then as well.
Moving from the desk to the glass door that opened to a private patio, she stood in the entrance and inhaled the scents of the desert around her.
She hadn’t offered to give General Roberts the location of his daughter for free. She’d demanded all information on the two Breeds confined with her and Honor during the time they’d been at the research center, as well as the complete file on the reacquisition of the Bengal Breed Gideon.
She hadn’t dared ask Jonas for it, but General Roberts was another story. His connections while his daughter had been in the research center had been strong. Afterward, she knew he’d stayed in contact with one of the few lead research techs Graeme had left alive after his rampage. That tech remained alive because he’d been in Washington delivering evidence against the center to the Bureau of Breed Affairs. Jonas still had him in hiding for fear Gideon would strike out at him.
“You know Graeme’s completely pouting again.” Khi Langer, Lobo’s stepdaughter, stepped around the side of the house, her vivid blue eyes not nearly as amused as she would have had Cat believe.
Dressed in riding pants and a snug sleeveless white silk shirt and knee-high black boots, she looked as though she would be more at home on an English estate than at the Reevers’ desert home.
“I wondered how long it would take you to visit.” Cat sighed. “Ashley’s already given her warning, I don’t need another from you.”
She’d known Khi was Graeme’s little sidekick for months.
The bastard. He’d allowed this woman to aid him, yet he’d never given Cat that option, even now. She knew of his little midnight sorties into the desert each night as he patrolled for Council soldiers in the area. But had he invited her to patrol at his side?
Hell no, he hadn’t.
“Ashley’s been a little intense since she tried to stop that bullet with her heart,” she snorted with a slight edge of anger. “Not that she was ever less than intense, she’s just more so now.”
Strolling along the short walk from the pool area to the little shaded, brick-lined patio off the office, Khi kept her eyes on Cat. What was she searching for? Cat wondered curiously.
“I’m not here to warn you, anyway,” the other woman assured her when Cat remained silent. “I wanted to make certain you didn’t need anything. A shoulder to cry on, perhaps, or a willing ear to listen to you curse that arrogant mate of yours. Of course, we could sit and diss men in general.” Smiling, Khi plopped into one of the overstuffed chairs placed beneath the covered pergola. “I always enjoy that.”
She wasn’t lying, Cat observed silently, but there was an air of secrets that surrounded Khi that had always made her wary.
“If I start, I might not stop,” Cat admitted with a shrug.
She remained at the entrance to t
he office, though she leaned against the door frame, one hand propped on her hip, the other relaxed at her side, rather than taking the other chair across from Khi.
“Yeah, I know that one,” Khi admitted as she flicked something from the knee of her pants, her gaze remaining on that area for long moments before she lifted her head again and flashed Cat another of her bright smiles. A smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
