Author: Lora Leigh
Category: Paranormal
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/24065_8
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.
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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.