As his thrusts increased, became rhythmic, hard and driving, she found there was more to give.
Her orgasm caught her by surprise again, exploding, detonating and washing her body with such pleasure she could only shudder beneath him and take what he had to give.
And he had a lot to give. Harder. Deeper. Faster.
Until she felt everything inside her unraveling, tearing apart and reaching for him as his roar echoed around her again and sent her flying.
She felt him drive deep one last time, then the hard explosion of his heated release, the hard, pulsing dampness filling her, soaking into muscles clenched around his cock, spasming with a shuddering force she couldn’t even breathe through.
She collapsed fully beneath him, drained, exhausted, aftershocks of pleasure rippling through her vagina and causing her to gasp with halting little cries she could barely believe she was making.
She couldn’t move. She was lost, drifting. So drugged on the pleasure she had endured that she could only whimper as she felt him pull slowly from her and come down on the bed beside her.
“Sleep, baby,” he whispered at her ear then. “I’ll keep the lights on. Just sleep.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, her last thought following her into sleep: Tanner Reynolds would be the death of her.
CHAPTER 12
Sometimes, a man had to admit when he’d been a fool. He had to look inside and realize that he had let his hatred, his suspicions, rule his logic rather than letting his logic rule his emotions. He had to look beyond the surface, and dig past the emotions for or against the situation, and feel for the truth.
His gut had told something wasn’t right with Scheme Tallant all along. Nearly ten years he had been watching her, and he had known something was off. Something was wrong. But hatred and suspicion had clouded logic; the need to hate had clouded reason.
The proof the Breeds had gathered on her over the past ten years showed a spoiled general’s daughter as merciless and bloodthirsty as the monster who had sired her. Proof such as orders carrying her signature to execute Breeds still beneath her father’s command, for no other reason than whatever perceived weakness they possessed. Proof such as the surveillance videos the Breeds had managed to acquire of meetings between Scheme, her father and high-ranking soldiers within her father’s organization. Her cold, deliberate plans to strike against Sanctuary.
But the gut had warned him, even during the investigation, that something was off. That something wasn’t right with the evidence they had against her. As though he were seeing only part of the picture, and the rest was in shadow. He should have paid attention to his gut.
There were too many inconsistencies in the evidence they had gathered on her. A Breed marked for execution only to escape at the last moment because of a mistake she had supposedly made. Scheme’s profiling reports before the escape that the Breed was trustworthy and wasn’t an escape risk. Attacks Sanctuary had been warned were coming, or a transmission suddenly appearing that hadn’t been there before. Little things. Things that made it appear as though fate were on the side of the Breeds. Tiny little f**kups that, taken by themselves, were meaningless. No organization or person was perfect. But when put together—
And then there were the short disappearances she had made each time those little mistakes had been made.
She had been punished during those disappearances. Punished in ways that made Tanner’s skin crawl and his suspicions rise.
He knew Jonas had managed to find a spy within the Tallant ranks eight years before. One he had never revealed to the Breed Cabinet. That spy had been one of the successes that had allowed him to step in as director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs.
Jonas was a sneaky son of a bitch. He had managed to place spies in areas that the Breed analysts had considered impossible. He knew weaknesses and strengths and how to exploit them. And he had had an ace in the hole.
Somehow, Jonas had recruited General Tallant’s own daughter. He had to have. It was the only thing that made sense. Why else would her father beat her, bury her, in a search for information? And Tanner knew that was the reason why.
Cyrus Tallant was as evil as they came. He was a monster who believed in his cause. He wasn’t there for the power or the money, but because he believed in what he was doing.
To the general, the Breeds had no soul because man, rather than God, created them. They were tools, no more or less than a dog or a rifle. The only difference being in how they were trained.
Their humanity was stripped from them as babes. After they were weaned, they were placed in pens and taught to fend for themselves. Once there, they were watched every second, studied until each surviving toddler was finally placed in what was considered an appropriate training program.
Psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors created individual programs for each Breed, designed to create the weapon the Council envisioned.
They believed in their own rhetoric. That Breeds weren’t truly human, and therefore had no rights. They had no souls, and therefore the Council could not be held accountable for their deaths.
They believed in what they were doing just as desperately as the Breeds believed in their right to freedom and life. And General Tallant believed more strongly than most in his right to rid the world of the Breeds now that they were no longer controlled.
He wouldn’t hesitate to use his daughter in that battle. And if his daughter showed the same weakness his wife had, then she was as disposable in the war he was fighting as his spouse had been.
Not that there was any proof that the general had ordered her death. Dorothy Tallant had been a scientist within the Breed lab Tallant had first been assigned to oversee.
A petite Asian-American with an IQ off the charts and a talent for genetic engineering, she had supposedly died of a massive stroke twenty years before.
He breathed wearily as he continued to go through the information he had pulled up on his laptop. The surveillance on the Tallants had begun even before the revelation to the world that the Breeds existed.