She wasn’t angry, and she should be, he admitted. Had she admitted to him that she had worked him so easily, or that she had attempted to interfere in one of his missions then he would have been furious. With himself as well as her.
It hadn’t been easy to do, but he had given her just enough rope to hang herself, Gideon and the three individuals they were searching for.
Did she realize they were even working toward the same end? The survival of a child too small and too vulnerable to understand the changes going on inside her or to explain to anyone what those changes were?
He couldn’t allow his feelings or his pain for her to become involved in his decisions. If he allowed himself to sympathize or to understand how the three from the Brandenmore Labs would feel about being dragged into this war, then it could alter his ability to do the job Jonas had entrusted to him. And it could affect the survival of the Breeds as a whole. There were too many changes evolving in mating heat, too many children who were displaying unexpected anomalies and changes as they matured, to allow emotion to sway what had to be done.
His loyalty was to his mate, to his Pride leader and to the Breeds. In that order. He couldn’t allow anything or anyone to change that.
God knew he wished there had been no victims to the Council’s madness or to Phillip Brandenmore’s insanity. But there had been. Thousands of them. Every child kidnapped as genetic material, every woman taken as a vessel to grow the creations they envisioned and every Breed created had been a victim.
For more than a century research had evolved. Jonas actually believed the research had been going on for over a hundred and fifty years. One hundred and fifty years of the horror that had evolved to the lives they now lived.
He couldn’t allow himself to turn his back on it, or on those depending upon the decisions made now to preserve the future.
“Josiah, is the director’s mate with him?” Diane directed the question to the Enforcer driving.
“Yes, Ms. Broen. Mrs. Wyatt is traveling with the director, as is your niece, Amber. Your sister hopes you’ll attend the coming meeting this evening as well.”
Lawe watched as she lifted her hand and rubbed at her forehead wearily.
The scent of her hopelessness had slowly eased away, but it hadn’t been replaced by other emotions as it would with anyone else. There was only the scent of the woman, a fresh, summery scent that had altered only the slightest with his own and the mating hormone. The scent of the mating heat was there, but that altered mated scent hadn’t evolved as it should have.
He controlled his frown, his confusion. Each couple developed a unique scent, a combination of both of them that they carried after mating heat began. Its habit was to completely change each individual scent to ensure that the mates were one scent, just as they were one complete unit. Yet Diane’s scent was still uniquely her own. It was tinged with his scent, similar to that of an impending storm, but nothing more, and he found the primal genetics reacting to that with a wary lifting of the hairs at the back of his neck.
A warning of danger or an instinctive response to a situation that the animal sensed wasn’t quite right, Lawe acknowledged. He barely caught the growl that would have rumbled in his throat. He barely held back the sudden, raging need to have her or the scent of that need from filling the interior of the SUV.
He wanted her. Naked, willing. He wanted her arching to him, the heat of her pu**y enveloping the engorged shaft presently tormenting him, and he wanted her to accept him.
To accept that he couldn’t face the danger she was so determined to challenge.
Lust was rising hard and fast inside him, and Lawe silently admitted the meeting with Jonas and Callan Lyons would have to be delayed for it. Locking his mate to him was a priority he couldn’t ignore much longer. The knowledge that she was somehow, emotionally and forcibly, refusing the mating had his senses in an uproar. Ensuring she carried his scent, if only for the few hours it lingered on her skin after he possessed her, was raking at his balls with merciless talons. The hunger for her was a fever in his blood, one that was rising beneath his flesh as each second without her touch went by.
The glands beneath his tongue began swelling, the hormone filling it and sinking into his senses with heated demand. There would come a point when denying it wouldn’t be possible. When he would have to have her, immediately, without the control needed to ensure he touched her, held and loved her as he ached to do.
It seemed that every time they came together it was with a flaming hunger that stole his ability to drive her to the edge of sensual madness with just his touch. The mating hormone fueled a different kind of hunger, ensnared them with the addictive, sexually charged fever they both found impossible to delay.
As though sensing the hunger tearing through him, Diane’s head jerked to the side to stare at him rather than the passing scenery.
Lawe had to clench his fists; his entire body tensing with the need to f**k her as the scent of her emotions finally reached him. Or rather, the scent of her hunger.
It slammed into him, as though the act of glancing into his eyes, seeing his need burning there for her, had opened the floodgates to her own.
And she ached. She needed.
She wanted him as he wanted her, fast and hard, with a pleasure so incredible it would burn them to the core and meld them to each other, heart and soul.
Nothing mattered to Lawe but holding her, feeling her wrapped tightly around him, crying out his name, her sharp little fingernails piercing the flesh of his back and shoulders.
That was what mattered.
Just one more time. Before he met with Callan and Jonas, he needed her, just one more time before reality intruded any further and attempted to steal her heart from him.
If he even had it at all.
The question was: Could he survive without the heart of the woman he longed for? Or would he experience the slow, agonizing death of his own soul because of her rejection of him?
Or because of his refusal to accept her?