And the release . . .
Was that a moan that slipped past her lips?
Gripping the counter tight, she breathed in sharply and fought back the insidious ache that insisted on tormenting the most feminine parts of her body.
She had to stop.
She could feel her pu**y dampening, clenching, preparing for the ultimate possession by the ultimate male animal.
And she had to stop it from happening.
Now.
She could not go into this meeting with Jonas Wyatt smelling of sexual need and the inability to concentrate.
She couldn’t allow Lawe Justice to turn her mind into mush like this.
There was too much at stake for that, not just for the Breeds but for her sister and her niece too.
The serum that the medical research giant Phillip Brandenmore had injected her niece with was so unknown that they had no idea what it would do to the child.
Diane knew there were changes in Amber. She could see them when she spent more than a few weeks away from the baby. And then there had been the night when Rachel called her on a secured sat line while Diane had been out of the country on a mission.
Rachel had been sobbing.
Her daughter was purring, she had cried, and the other children hissed and snapped at the babe whenever she was around, causing Amber to cry.
Amber wasn’t a Breed, but she was acting like a Breed, and she was becoming frightened of the other children because of their reaction to her. She was withdrawn, whimpering whenever Rachel took her around the other children because of their reactions to her. Amber was now frightened of all children, and she was barely eight months old. She was too little, too young, to have to face such an instinctive and primal reaction from others her own age.
Rachel had been nearly hysterical and trying to hold back her pain and fear from her mate, Jonas. Rachel had called her sister instead and spilled out the pain building inside her and the pain tormenting her.
The agony tearing her apart as the changes in her baby became more noticeable was destroying her. Sobbing, she had begged Diane to just make what was happening to Amber stop, when they both knew that if it could be stopped, then Jonas would have already done whatever was necessary to put a halt to it.
The mother inside her sister had splintered and wept for the changes in her baby. Changes that were so uncertain and unknown.
Brave, strong, resilient Rachel had waited until her mate had left for D.C. and then she had broken down. It was then she had finally called her sister and told her what was happening to Amber after Brandenmore had attempted to kidnap her that night.
Diane had rushed back to the States in the middle of a mission despite her men’s anger, and returned to her sister’s side.
What she had seen for herself had shocked her to her very core, and terrified her.
At five months old Amber had watched her with an intelligence and understanding that Diane couldn’t seem to process.
Amber wasn’t talking yet, but Diane had had the most intense feeling that Amber would have known exactly what she wanted to say if she could have spoken.
The fear that Amber would be harmed in the future was ripping those who loved her apart. So much so that Diane had begun immediately investigating Phillip Brandenmore in the search for the scientists that had helped him create the serum.
Jonas had his own investigation going, but, as she had told him, Amber wouldn’t have been his first victim. A scientist never used his most important research subject for the first trial. And Amber had been very important for some reason. A reason Diane had yet to find.
There would have been others.
Diane wanted answers and she was in a position to push buttons and go further than the Breeds. They were watched with the same intensity as any experiment under a microscope. They could only work in the shadows, but the type of social interaction Diane was an expert in, they hadn’t really been raised to do. That type came with the life Diane had been born to as a child and lived until she was a teenager.
She could charm, bribe and threaten people the Breeds had a harder time getting to in those more social settings. And she could do it without having to kill later. After all, there was no way to hurt the Breeds by going after her. They would only hurt her sister. And themselves, if the world learned they had harmed the wife of the director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs.
Diane had found in the past three months exactly what she had suspected. She had found proof that Brandenmore had done the same experiment before, and more than once. The first test subjects had been more than twenty years ago, and terminated when the serum had resulted in feral fever. With the second set, there had been success, of sorts. At least, there would have been if he hadn’t lost the test subjects he had used to help create his serum.
The same serum he had given Amber.
Three children. A male Bengal Breed, the daughter of a young woman who had been thrown out by her influential family when she had been diagnosed HIV positive, and a child reported to have been kidnapped from her very influential military family and held for five years. Those had been his second test subjects.
The Breed and the child of the homeless woman were to have been terminated once the experiments on the serum were considered a success and the scientists moved on to adult subjects. The daughter of the military family had been returned to her family, free of the rapidly spreading, fatal leukemia she had been diagnosed with at age two.
It began with those children. Children who were now adults and, according to an anonymous message she had received via a contact she’d found in New York before leaving for Argentina, were still living. They were doing more than living—they were thriving. And they held the answers to the dangers, and the changes, Amber now faced. Moving to the sitting area of the hotel suite, Diane grabbed the backpack she carried wherever she went and headed to the door.