If the rumors were true, he should have been arrested rather than released after the inquest into the Breed atrocities. He shouldn't have been killed the way he was.

"Grace, the smell of your fear is killing me." His voice was soft, gentle. "I promise, I'm not going to hurt you."

"And I'm supposed to believe that?" She turned her head to stare back at him, seeing the flash of somber regret in his gaze before he turned back to look at the road.

"You will believe it," he said, his voice as heavy with regret now as his gaze had been. "But you won't die. Not by my hand, or by any others, as long as I can protect you."

"What? You think you can make me forget what I saw?" She hated the tears in her voice, but even more, she hated the damned disillusionment. She hated looking at him and fighting herself to believe what she had seen with her own eyes.

"Not forget it," he admitted. "I'm hoping, though, that you'll understand it enough to keep the knowledge of it to yourself."

He was crazy. That was all there was to it.

"Oh, well, if that's all you want, then I'm all for it." Living was worth lying for. "Let me go now, and mum's the word. I promise."

He flashed her a chiding smile.

"I can smell your lie as easily as I can smell your arousal, Grace. Have you forgotten that?" Her eyes widened. Cream flooded her pussy and wept to her labial folds, rushing to surround her clit. That little bundle of nerves was pulsing now, engorged and swollen. The sound of his voice was rasping, filled with male lust and determined aggression.

"Yon never mentioned the arousal part," she gasped.

"I didn't, did I?" His fingers slid higher on her thigh, and, traitorously weak, her legs trembled, her breathing became rougher, and her juices thicker.

His fingers grazed the damp crotch of her panties, and Grace heard the low, weak moan that betrayed her slip past her lips.

"The scent of your arousal has made me crazy." His voice deepened, as a growl rumbled in his chest. The sound should have frightened her; it turned her on instead.

Sensation was humming through her body, tingling in her clit and her nipples, making her gaze heavy as his fingers continued to brush lightly against the damp cotton of her panties. That slow, deliberate caress held her spellbound.

He was using the hand that had held the gun that killed Albrecht. But it wasn't death she felt. And it wasn't disgust. It was pleasure. A hot, insidious pleasure that held her mesmerized.

"Matthias, this is wrong." She wanted to tell him to stop, but the words wouldn't push past her lips.

"Don't do this to me. Please."

"You do it to me, Grace," he accused her darkly. "Each touch you've given me, no matter how innocent, made me weak. Made me hard. I've been so damned distracted by you, my head so filled with the memory of your scent that I didn't know when you entered that suite. I should have known. I should have sensed you and been able to pull back. To hide until you were gone. But you were already so much a part of me, that I carry you with me, whether you're actually there or not." The SUV slowed. It didn't stop, but it was definitely slowing as he glanced at her. A second later he jerked his gaze back to the road, but his hand didn't leave her, his fingers didn't pause in their caresses. The implications of his declaration seared her mind. There were rumors, tabloid tales and obscure reports of Breed mates. Mates that were rarely photographed, rarely seen by journalists. It was said that in the ten years since the Breeds had been revealed, that the mates to those Breeds hadn't aged. Tabloids ran stories almost weekly of a sexual frenzy during what they called "mating heat." And then there were the wild tales of orgies and animalistic behavior.

There were also stories of other animalistic occurrences. Reports that the Breeds' sexuality was closer to that of their animal cousins than that of humans. Feline Breed males, were said to lock inside their females during ejaculation, with a penile extension just beneath the head of the cock, referred to as a barb. And as for the Wolves

Grace stared at Matthias's taut profile. Wolves were supposed to lock within a female with a heavy swelling known as the knot.

It couldn't be true. She'd scoffed at the stories then, and she refused to believe them now. But she couldn't refuse to believe the heavy, lethargic arousal overcoming her. He was barely stroking her, his fingers were but a slight pressure against the covering of her panties, and still, it made her too weak to protest. And the cotton covering was becoming damper by the second with her juices.

"You need to stop," she whispered, her lashes fluttering with sharply rising need. "Please, Matthias"

CHAPTER FOUR

Grace's family cabin sat in the Catskill Mountains northwest of New York City. The heavily forested area called to the wildness of Matthias's spirit. The sounds of the night wrapped around him, but the scent of Grace filled his mind.

The two-story cabin sat next to a small, unpolluted lake. The crisp scent of the water was refreshing, the sound of a waterfall played somewhere in the distance. It should have been relaxing. It would have been, if the fever to take his mate weren't filling his insides with a burning hunger. He sat his restrained captive in a wide, padded porch chair and dug the keys from her purse. She glared at him, her tapered, dark blonde hair falling over her brow and shadowing her eyes. The door opened easily. Matthias inhaled deeply, searching for any scent other than that of an empty cabin. Satisfied that they were alone, he picked her up, carried her to the heavily cushioned couch, and left the cabin again.

He carried her luggage and his bag to the large downstairs bedroom then checked the well-stocked cabinets and refrigerator. Once he had assured himself of the security of the cabin, he disconnected the phone lines, locked the front door, and turned back to her.

Grace remained silent. And she was still aroused. He could smell the arousal, and it was killing him. But he could also smell her fear and her anger. She had judged him the moment she saw him pull that trigger, and if she had her way, he'd be locked up forever.

It was a heavy burden, to understand the event from her viewpoint. Her innocence couldn't understand the conditions under which the Breeds had been trained, the forces that had shaped their lives from conception to escape. The nightmares were nearly as brutal as the reality of it had been. Even now, ten years later, Matthias could feel the agony of those years.

"Why did you do it, Matthias?" When she spoke, her voice was agonized, filled with tears and disillusionment. She had already tried him and found him guilty.

Matthias knelt in front of the couch, his hands moving to the restraints that bound her hands and feet, his fingers massaging the slight welts on her flesh as he frowned down at them. The beatings, the hours of mental torture, and the deaths. Imprisoned behind bars and forced to watch as friends and littermates were murdered with such brutal means, that even now, Matthias had trouble sleeping for the horrific memories.

All in the name of training. Of numbing the Breeds to the sight of pain, cruelty, and death. Turning them into emotionless machines that responded at the council members' beckoning.

"I was created in Albrecht's lab," he finally answered her, lifting his head to stare back at her. "I know his cruelties. I know the monster he was." He lifted his hands from her flesh and stared at the palms. The scars that crisscrossed them had been put there by Albrecht's knife. A punishment for a failed mission.

"He was released after the hearings about Breed atrocities. You had no right to kill him after that." His gaze jerked back to hers. "He was released on his oath that he was not a part of the council directorate, which I know was a lie. He was released on his oath that he would never again attempt to create or imprison Breeds. Ten years ago, he was released. And he never stopped. We found the bodies, his scent covered them as well as the marks of his abuse. He never stopped." To know they hadn't found all the Breeds, even in the ten years of searching was like a poison in Matthias's soul. The council scientists and soldiers who had escaped had taken the young with them and turned them over to the Council, to be hidden in other, even more secret labs. And now those children, ten years older, were turning up dead, horribly tortured. The experimentation that had been done on them was brutal. But even worse were the mated pairs, those that had known freedom for but a short time, recaptured, and tortured to death.

"We were the test models. The first generation of Breeds to actually survive the first few years of life are barely older than forty. They had their first success nearly a century agoLion Breed who managed to escape with one of their scientists. But it took them another several decades to get it right again, because the first Leo destroyed everything in that hellhole of a lab as he escaped. We were the disposable models." Fury twisted his expression. "Imagine watching your friends, your brothers and sisters being dissected, live. Being beaten until they died, broken and still trying to fight. Or so drugged they were no more than the animals whose genes they carried. I watched Albrecht do this. For years. For so many years." He pushed his fingers through his hair and moved away from her.

The blood. He could still smell the blood and death.

"Had he finished, I would have walked away from him, as I was ordered to do." He turned back to her, his eyes narrowing on the tense set of her expression. "I would not have killed him, Grace, had he not continued those atrocities."

"You should have gone to the authorities."

"The authorities had their chance. I took care of it. He will never rape another young Breed. He will never dissect another while they scream in agony, and he will never, ever attempt to prolong his own misbegotten life because he lucked out and found a mated Breed pair." That had been the final nail in his coffin. They had found the bodies. The two young mates, so horribly mutilated, the signs of experimentation so monstrous, that even he and Jonas had thrown up.

"That doesn't make sense. What would two lovers have to do with prolonging his life? You're lying to me, Matthias. Don't do that."

Matthias shook his head. It would do no good to argue it with heruntil she experienced the mating, she would never believe it.

"One of these days, you'll know the truth," he said heavily. "Are you hungry? I could fix us something to eat."

Grace stared back at him in disbelief. One moment he was talking of death, the next he was willing to cook? She shook her head as she moved, tugging her skirt farther over her thighs, before shrugging her restrictive jacket off.

"What are you going to do with me?" she asked. "You promised not to hurt me." He nodded. "I won't hurt you."

"Even knowing I have every intention of telling the police what I saw?" She couldn't lie to him. He would smell it.

The hurt that flashed in his eyes shouldn't have bothered her, but it did.

"Even knowing that," he answered. "I'm going to spend this week with you. Let you come to know me better. Try to make you understand"

"Why?" She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. "What does it matter if I understand or not? You murdered a man, Matthias."

"And if you report it, and I'm arrested, then I can't protect you. Other Breeds will come for you, and they will kill you before you ever have the chance to testify. Is that what you want? Do you want to die?"

"The authorities will protect me."

"Don't be so fucking naive, Grace," he snarled, causing her to flinch. "Don't be stupid. You know better than that."

Yes, she did know better. She knew she didn't have a chance at living if she ever breathed a word of what she had seen. Perhaps, in some small way, she could even understand why he had done it. Now that the shock had worn off and her mind had accepted the fact that he had done it. It was her own anger driving her instead.