"A box was never under consideration," he finally admitted. "We'll find out who is behind the bombing soon. We know the why of it, we just have to identify the who. Once we've done that, you'll be safe. And once you've testified at the hearing against Brackenmore and Engalls next month, then they'll no longer have a reason to want you dead. They'll be too busy trying to save their own skins."

She didn't know if she agreed with him on that one. It seemed to her that the hatred Brackenmore and Engalls would feel toward her would be reason enough to kill her. Thankfully for the breeds, she wasn't the only proof they had against the pair.

"Jonas has arrived at the house," Mordecai Savant, the Coyote breed enforcer who had arrived at Sanctuary six months before, told Noble as he glanced at the handheld PDA he pulled from the heavy uniform pocket at his thigh. "It's clear. No signs of unwanted visitors. The lions have canvassed the area, and everything's clear."

"The lions?" She glanced at Noble again. "You have lions at my house?"

"The natural lions can sense things we don't," he told her. "If they hesitate, then we know there's a problem. They're our best first defense."

"Proceed in," Mordecai told him. "Jonas is waiting in the kitchen."

Haley had to bite her tongue to keep from commenting on that one. No doubt he had sniffed out her stash of cookies agairi. She was going to have to bake more before long. Breeds could find the cookies faster than her brothers could.

"Is he eating all the cookies?" Blade Travers could never, in anyone's imagination, look boyish. But the anxiety in his eyes reminded her of just that. A kid's concern that he wouldn't get his share.

"If there are cookies around, then Jonas is going to find them," the breed simply known as Crayven snorted from the front seat. "And I bet Mercury, Lawe, and Rule are taking more than their share, too."

Yes, she was going to be making more cookies soon, she thought as she heard Noble sigh, almost with longing beside her.

"I know how to bake more," she finally gritted out between clenched teeth.

And why she was that insane, she couldn't imagine.

"You would bake us more?" Mordecai's eyes narrowed on her, as though he suspected her of lying.

She was definitely going to have to add to that grocery list.

"I always bake at Christmas." And it seemed this year, she was going to be baking a hell of a lot more than she imagined.

Breeds. Why hadn't anyone warned her it wasn't just their sharp teeth, biting words, or flare for killing that she needed to watch out for? Someone should have warned her to watch out for their craving for sweets as well.

She wondered if it went to their hips as fast as it did to hers.

She glanced at each one, then grimaced. She couldn't get that lucky.

Chapter 5

Hours later, Haley was baking cookies out of sheer desperation. Chocolate chip cookies, chocolate oatmeal cookies, and chocolate drop sugar cookies.

Haley baked to feel good, to think, and to hide.

Tonight she was hiding.

Uriel. She'd heard that name before, she'd read that name before. One of the names associated with a god of death. The Grim Reaper. The taker of life. In this case an assassin.

According to Jonas, the assassin was suspected to be a breed still under the control of the Genetics Council that had created him.

The explosion had all his signatures, but the really telling mark was the so-far-untraceable e-mail sent to Jonas at his Bureau of Breed Affairs e-mail address. It stated that he really didn't want to kill more breeds to get to her, but he would if he had to. And it was signed, Uriel.

She had a professional assassin out to kill her. So what was she doing? She was baking.

The moment Jonas had given Noble the information the demeanor of the breeds guarding her had changed. The six under Noble's command turned hard and cold.

Mordecai had demanded Jonas have his pet released from Sanctuary. So, a full-grown, malevolent-eyed natural coyote was now on her property. Great.

Just what she needed.

Weren't they supposed to be impossible to tame?

Noble had changed as well, and that change made her more nervous than the others. The look he had given her had held a promise, a dark, almost forbidden promise, that shook her to her core.

As he and Jonas retreated to the living room to discuss security, Haley retreated to the kitchen to bake. And to try to forget that look she had seen in Noble's eyes. The one that promised her he had given her enough space, and that soon, he would be

crowding in even closer.

"Jonas is leaving, Haley." Noble stepped into the kitchen, his black gaze hooded as he flicked over the last sheet of cookies she was pulling from the oven.

Haley nodded slowly. "Fine."

She turned and faced Jonas as he moved into the kitchen.

"We'll have this taken care of soon," Jonas promised her. "We have several leads. Uriel was careless this time. Uriel has been erratic in the past few years anyway, so the successes could barely be counted because of it."

"But someone still ended up dead, right?" she pointed out.

"Only because the victims didn't know they were targets," Jonas stated. "We know. Now, I'll leave you with Noble. You have six men guarding you outside as well as that bloodthirsty animal Mordecai carts around with him. Nothing gets past any of them."

He moved to the back door, shrugging his suit jacket on over the white dress shirt and shoulder holster he wore. Once he had the jacket on, he seemed like any other powerful businessman, until you looked in his eyes.

"Noble, I'd wish you luck with the other thing,"

Jonas suddenly turned back to them, his gaze amused, his hard face almost smiling. "But I have a feeling you have that covered as well."

He left the house, and Noble secured the door behind him before Haley could comment.

"What's the other thing?" she asked, as he turned back to face her.

"Something more personal," he finally stated.

His voice was different. There was a rasp to it, a brief roughness that sent a chill up her spine.

She rubbed her hands together, ignoring the tingling warmth that filled her palms. Her hands tingled every damned time he was around her. The need, the desire to touch him often nearly overcame her common sense.

She nodded rather than asking about it. For a few minutes anyway—while she transferred the cookies from the baking sheet to the wire rack for them to cool.

"What is something more personal?" She laid the spatula down beside the rack and turned to him.

Facing him across the distance of the kitchen, she somehow felt braver than she had in days. Someone was trying to kill her. Someone who knew how to kill.

Excuse me for taking a little initiative here.

"Are you sure you want to know?" Sensually curved lips quirked knowingly.

"Is it about that mating crap you tried to pull on me the other night?"

She hadn't forgotten. It had been in the back of her mind, teasing her, taunting her, and following her into her dreams when she managed to sleep.

His brow arched. "Mating crap?"

She lifted her hand, indicating he should stay in place, then stomped to her bedroom, jerked several tabloids from beneath her bedstand, and moved back into the kitchen and slapped them on the table.

MATING HEAT SWEEPS THROUGH

THE BREED COMMUNITIES.

BREED APHRODISIAC RUMORED

TO CAUSE UNSTOPPABLE LUSTS.

ARE THEY MORE ANIMAL THAN WE IMAGINED?

MATING HEAT RUMORED

TO PRODUCE ANIMALISTIC RESULTS.

The headlines were ridiculous, but they all reported nearly the same phenomenon.

"You read this trash?" he asked her, flipping his fingers over the magazines.

She crossed her arms over her breasts. "How much of it is true?"

He flipped through the magazines one by one. His brows arched a few times. Mockery tugged at his lips before he tossed the last one back to the stop.

"I'd say ninety percent of it is fairly accurate."

She blinked, then narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

"You're lying to me."

His grin was slow, and did nothing to still the nervous feelings rising inside her.

"Yeah, I am." He shrugged. "Probably more like eighty percent."

He pushed his hand into the pocket of his jeans and withdrew a vial. Within it were several oddly colored pinkish pills. He tossed the vial to the table and stated. "One a day, starting tonight."

She stared at it, wondering if the breeds were into poison.

"For what?"

He moved around the kitchen then, stalking closer as she refused to retreat. He came behind her, brushed the hair from her shoulder, and his head lowered, his lips brushing her ear.

"When I kiss you, the taste of that kiss is going to make you crazy for more. The hormone in the small glands beneath my tongue will be released into your system, and the mating hormone will begin to fill your senses. It's like a drug for sex. It's like a need that only one thing will ease, and that's my semen pumping inside you. When that happens, a small, thumb-shaped extension will become erect from beneath the head of my cock. It will lock me inside you, spill another hormone into you, then, together, they'll prepare your body for the few viable sperm breeds possess. That pill will ease the effects of the heat. It might even ward off the pregnancy that will come, eventually. It takes a while sometimes for fertilization, for a child to be created. But it always happens, eventually. And the heat never goes away entirely. It grows, day by day, year by year, until mates are bound so closely together that life without each other is unimaginable.

"Breeds only mate once, Haley. One time only. A breed has one chance, and one chance only to claim something in this world that belongs to him and to him alone. And my body is claiming yours."

"You're crazy." She forced herself away from him, rounded on him incredulously, and stared back at him in shock. "That's not true."

"Why do you think I kept such a careful distance between us?" he asked her, his expression imposing, his black eyes gleaming, glittering with hunger. "A year. I've tasted the need to kiss you, to fuck you, for a year. I've tried to drown my lust, ignore it, fight it.