“Will your furry friend be with you?” he asked bitterly.
“He’ll be around,” she finally sighed. “But I’ll talk to you alone. Be there at four, Mike. And remember, five minutes. That’s it.”
“Five minutes. That’s all I need, Nat.”
She hung the phone up and moved back to the stove as the front door opened once again, and seconds later Saban strode back into the kitchen.
As Saban sat back down at the kitchen table and took a healthy sip of the decaffeinated coffee he’d slipped into the canister days ago, he drew in a slow breath.
Sometimes his sense of smell was a curse rather than a blessing. Times such as moments before, when he had smelled the emotion pouring from Natalie. Rich and saturated with arousal, tempestuous with need, and overlaying it all, the deep, heady scent of love.
Love had a scent, though it varied from person to person and couple to couple. It wasn’t easy to detect and often wasn’t even apparent except in high-stress, personal moments.
What was she thinking of? he wondered. What had caused that well of emotion to open inside her and break free and then to touch him. To touch him of her own volition, as though testing her ability to do so or his patience in allowing it.
God help them both—he would lie at her feet until hell froze over to feel again what he had felt when she had touched him so timidly. Sensation, like an electrical current had run over his scalp and sizzled down his spine. He’d barely restrained a weakening shiver, and he cursed himself for it. For a second, he’d been like the pitiful cub he remembered himself as, so long ago. Staring at the scientists from his metal pen, hungry for something that went beyond the need for food. And now he knew what that hunger was, not for just a touch, but for one filled with emotion.
That touch had set his nerve endings on fire, and now, long moments later, it had him on edge, off balance, and filled with his own emotions.
“I’d like to postpone the trip to the mall that you planned for today,” he told her, keeping his voice level as she set the plate of food in front of him. “There are still some safety issues I’d like to have taken care of first.”
His control not withstanding, the report Jonas had sent out via the eLink wasn’t happy news.
“I can’t postpone it.”
Saban’s head snapped up. Her voice was carefully bland, non-confrontational, but he heard the nervousness behind it. The same nervousness he sensed every damned time she disagreed with him. Did she think he was going to beat her for disagreeing with him? That son of a bitch, Claxton, had a lot to answer for; unfortunately, Saban had already come to the conclusion that he would have to allow Jonas and his team to take care of getting the bastard out of town, rather than taking care of it himself.
Natalie might not like his methods.
As he watched her, he noticed that she didn’t meet his eyes. She took her seat, salted and peppered her food, sipped her coffee, and said nothing more.
He could see the pulse beating a ragged rhythm in her throat though, and he could smell her trepidation.
“Very well.” He lowered his gaze to his own breakfast and dug in. “I’ll contact Jonas and have a few extra men assigned around the mall just to be on the safe side. An enforcer caught sight of a suspected Council soldier in town last night. The Council has been attempting to capture Breed mates for years, so we need to be careful.”
“Why?” She lifted her head then, suspicion flickering in her gaze.
Did she believe he would lie to her? Saban wanted to growl, he wanted to throw something, wanted to beat her ex-husband until he was nothing but bloody pulp.
“Why are they attempting to capture our mates? Or why do we need to be careful?”
Her lips pursed as mocking patience filled her expression. “What do you think?”
Saban smiled, making certain to add just enough wicked sensuality to the look. “Many things, but I’ll concentrate on your question. They want our mates to experiment on the phenomenon, which by the way, they saw as early as the first Breed’s creation more than a century ago. Unfortunately for them, that first Leo escaped in his twenty-seventh year of creation. The mating hormone and the genetic viruslike condition it creates is of interest to them.”
“What sort of interest?” She was eating, but her attention was caught, he could see.
Natalie was a curious little thing, and that curiosity was rarely a problem. Until now.
He finished his breakfast, pushed back his plate, and stared back at her coolly. “It creates a condition that decreases aging in both the Breed and his or her mate. In ten years, Merinus and Callan have aged perhaps a year. There are rumors the first Leo, who should be nearing the age of one hundred and thirty, is still alive and still in his prime. And that, my dear, is the reason the Council scientists would do anything to capture our mates.”
TWELVE
It was hard to take in. Hours later, as Natalie entered the huge, two-story indoor mall just outside the town’s limits, she felt as though she had been sucker punched with the information.
Saban had answered all her questions, he had even offered to take her to Sanctuary to allow her to discuss some of the more advanced effects of the mating heat. Nothing dangerous, he had assured her. There was nothing life threatening in being a mate. Why, hell no, just an advanced life span and only God knew what problems in the future. Not to mention mentally defective, in her opinion, Council scientists and soldiers drooling for a chance to slice into a body verified as a mate, Breed or human.
It amazed her at odd times, the destructiveness that men could force on each other. The horror and cruelties didn’t exist in the animal world. It was survival of the strongest there, and in some ways, that was how the Breeds saw living now. Survival of the fittest.
Did nature see it that way as well? Was that the reason for the mating heat? The reason for the advanced life span once mated? She knew that women, Breeds and those who were married or mated to feline Breeds, conceived quickly without the hormonal treatments Dr. Morrey had worked up. But after the first conception, it then became much harder to conceive. And Saban had told her that the Wolf Breeds had had an even harder time of it until only recently, when their doctors had detected additional hormones, so far unknown, within one of their mates.
The whole mating process was confusing as hell, but according to Saban, the one constant in it all was the emotion the mates shared. So far, in over eleven years since the announcement of their existence, a mating had always resulted in love. And the look he had given her as he related that information had been filled with heat, emotion, and the unvoiced question she wasn’t ready to answer yet.
Yes, she loved him, and knowing it terrified the hell out of her.
As they neared Sally J’s, Natalie checked the watch on her wrist surreptitiously and glanced around at the crowds mingling from store to store. She had ten minutes to meet Mike on the other side of the store.
The restrooms were on the other side, with two entrances and exits into them. She was hoping she could enter from one side and move quickly to the exit on the other side, beside the doors that led to the outdoor parking.
Five minutes. That was all she was giving Mike, and she intended to do that talking. Enough was enough. They were divorced, they had divorced for a reason, and she wasn’t going to turn the new life she wanted for herself into an international incident. Which was what it would become if he became the first recorded non-Breed to die from jealous rage.
She trusted Saban, she did, with her own life. But Mike’s, she wasn’t so certain of.