Lora Leigh - Rule Breaker

The next time, he’d be ahead of the Genetics Council’s lapdogs.

The next time, he wouldn’t face the fact that he’d failed in the shattered eyes of a girl who would never forget the nightmare of her brother’s death or her own near rape.

The next time—

Jonas sighed as he walked out of the cavern. God help him, he didn’t want there to be a next time.

NINE YEARS LATER

She was his fix and he’d been long months without his fix.

Too long.

This time, she would know he was there. He’d waited. For six years, since the night she’d shown up at her eighteenth birthday party dressed in leather and dancing like a seductress, he’d waited.

He’d been there every year for her birthday since the night her brother had died nine years before. Actually, he made certain he was there every few months just to check up on her, but the night of her birthday, he made damned sure he was there. Not to bring a present; he never did. Just to make certain she was safe, that she was taken care of and that she wasn’t living on the streets, as it was reported her mother often threatened to send her.

The hell of that night, over nine years before, still haunted her.

Hell, it still haunted everyone who had been there. But Gypsy had paid more than anyone else. And she was still paying.

Staring across the bar, his gaze caressing the gentle lines of her face, he willed her to sense the caress. To sense his presence. To feel the hunger that had begun growing since the night she’d turned eighteen, the night she’d entranced him with the grace and erotic promise in her absorbed face as she’d given herself to the music.

Standing across the large room, the gyrating mass of dancers between them, her head turned slowly, her gaze seeking the sensation of whoever watched her. When her eyes met his, he watched the transformation.

Green eyes darkened, dilated. Arousal flushed her sun-kissed face as a sudden, vulnerable pain flashed across her expression. It was gone just as quickly, to be replaced by a hint of uncertainty, of want and hunger that he knew she believed she could never appease. Not if she intended to continue to pursue the shadowed course her life had followed for the past nine years, since the night she had lost the one person who held her uppermost in his life.

Most young women were raised knowing that their mother, father, even both, were there to protect her. That one or the other would ensure she was cared for. For Gypsy, that one person, that parent who had loved her above all others, had been her older brother. The brother who had died in the desert, drawn there by the Coyotes who had taken his sister, who had threatened to destroy her in ways Mark McQuade couldn’t have imagined unless he took her place.

Surely the brother knew neither of them would escape? What had made him go into that desert believing his sister would return from it unscathed?

Whatever the reason, Mark had died and Gypsy had spent the past nine years trying to atone for a death she hadn’t been the cause of. A death she was told repeatedly had been her fault.

The time for Gypsy to pay for sins that were not her own was over, he decided. Just as it was time to draw free of the past, to save one fragile infant’s life and ease the hell a friend and his mate were enduring.

In that moment, as her gaze touched his, as he watched the heat and the hunger rising inside her, he made her a silent promise.

Soon, very soon, the games of the past nine years would be over and he’d ensure the shadows that lurked about her would come to light. While he was at it, he’d appease a hunger he was entirely certain was not, could not be, Mating Heat.

Because Mating Heat couldn’t be allowed.

Rule Breaker, Investigative Commander of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, refused to allow himself a mate.

He refused to allow any woman to die beneath the cold, merciless blade of scientists determined to learn the secrets of a mating that nature was still determined to play with . . .

He shook the thought away. Before he could move to possess what he’d waited for for six years, he first had secrets to reveal, a game to end and a Bengal Breed to slowly draw into the fold of the Bureau of Breed Affairs. Years of searching for the Breed called Gideon, and he’d finally arrived in the one place Rule had been pushing him to.

The danger Jonas’s daughter faced and the hell of a past research project, would see the end of its secrets. He would either see the brutal truths hidden among four victims of that horrible project revealed, or the possible death of an innocent child and the slow destruction of a man he respected above all others but his brother.

It would end here, he promised.

But what would happen to him, who or what he would have to fight for, once it was over . . .

TWO MONTHS LATER

Jonas stared down at his sleeping daughter, his hands clasped together as his wrists rested on the rail of her crib. For the moment, he could almost convince himself that she was going to be fine.

Almost.

Rage festered inside him. His daughter was being killed right before his eyes, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop the serum she had been given seven months previously from doing as the scientists predicted: It was killing her.

Just as it had killed its creator, Phillip Brandenmore, weeks after he’d injected Amber.

It had rotted his brain from the inside out, killing him slowly, painfully.

God help him, he couldn’t allow that to happen to Amber. It would destroy her mother, his mate.

It would destroy him.

Pulling back from the crib, his arms dropping to his sides, he gazed around the room, not for the first time, searching for some shadow, a spirit, something, some sign of a presence that could answer his questions.

Fairies, Cassie Sinclair called them. Jonas knew them to be spirits, psychic remnants or broken dreams.

And no such spirit or remnant, psychic or otherwise, walked his daughter’s path.

Yet.

That didn’t mean she had none.

It didn’t mean she had no future.

It simply meant she was far too young to have drawn one to her yet.

Either way, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep fighting for her life.

The answers were here, in Window Rock, Arizona, waiting to be unburied, while other secrets were waiting on the day they could be buried.

He didn’t see the things Cassie saw and he didn’t see those vague images near as often. But he knew enough to know that the ancient Navajo ritual that had played out in this desert nine years before, three years after the escape of four incredibly gifted creations, would reveal the secret he needed to save Amber.

The question was whether he would uncover the truth in time.

Jonas knew he’d searched every area he could think of. He’d gone over every memory, no matter how unfocused or uncertain, that Liza Johnson had of her previous life as Honor Roberts. He’d especially probed at the hazy, scattered memories of the ritual itself that she remembered. The ancient power that transferred the consciousness of two dying girls into Honor Roberts’s and Fawn Corrigan’s bodies wasn’t as easy to decipher as he’d hoped, even with the help of the guides that sometimes came to him.

The spirits of Honor and Fawn had somehow been put to sleep until the time of the awakening, as it was called. Cassie assured him they were awake now, though, and working quite well with those of the spirits of Claire and Liza when they’d chided her for attempting to interfere.

A recent attack on Liza had revealed the partial memories that now allowed Jonas to piece together some of the missing clues they needed to crack the code that hid the information on the serum Amber had been injected with.