"Did I ask if you've slept with Dane?" he growled. "And what does that have to do with anything?"
"And if I have slept with Dane?" The question wasn't a comfortable one. "I wasn't a virgin when I came to your bed, Lance."
"This has nothing to do with Mason, Harmony," he snapped.
"Mason is a moot point." She lifted her shoulder negligently.
"And that means?"
"Exactly what I said," she told him coldly. "And since I can tell you have slept with her, I should warn you, I could get very jealous. Are you ready to go now?" She swung away from him, moving with flowing grace around the Raider before jerking the door open and stepping inside. Lance followed suit, feeling the tension mounting inside him as he heard the wailing moan on the wind. It wasn't one of pain, or one of fear. It was the sound of the dead.
The drive to the house was made in silence. Harmony could feel the fears and the rage growing inside her. She had asked Jaime Mason to trust her. To disobey his father and she would make certain he was gone forever. Only to have Alonzo free him. Justice. Even Death's justice sucked. She couldn't make a move, either as an officer of the law, or as Death, until Tommy Mason struck out at his child. It was the one boundary she had never crossed. And now she was paying for it.
As they stepped into the house, Harmony turned to Lance, watching as he set the alarm before turning to her.
"We were followed." The look on his face was savage.
"Yes. We were." Harmony loosened the Velcro straps that held her holster to her thigh before removing the belt from her h*ps and heading toward her bedroom. She was only a few feet from the doorway before a manacle clamped around her upper arm and she was pushed against the wall.
Surprise and heat sizzled through her at the dominance reflected in his dark expression and tightening his normally sensual, full lips.
"As you said earlier, you're a big girl," he stated, his voice rasping. "Don't do something stupid at this point and let him get the jump on you. He will take you, Harmony. You can't trust him."
"He's trying to protect me…"
"Bullshit! He's trying to protect himself for some reason," he snarled. "Just like Jonas, Harmony. There's something Dane wants. There's a reason why he's pulled your ass out every damned time the Council managed to capture you. Haven't you ever asked yourself how he knew where you were, the fact that you were taken? According to you, you have no friends. Why did he do it?"
It was a question that plagued her more and more often.
"There's always a job to do," she retorted, hearing the flimsiness of her excuse.
"Something he needs me for."
"A job he couldn't do on his own? He could rescue you from Coyotes, but he couldn't do whatever he sent you out for?"
Harmony shook her head desperately. "There's nothing I have that anyone could know about."
"Do you really believe no one but the scientists you killed in those labs knew about the information you stole?" he growled. "What about the rest of the information you had?
You stole a computer hard drive, hard copies of experiments and reports, as well as the information on the first Leo. What other secrets are you hiding, Harmony?" She stared back at him in confusion. He was destroying her preconceived notions, just as Dane was destroying her trust in him. She had always depended on Dane, she realized then. Had always known that somehow, some way, he had her back.
"I don't know," she finally answered. "The files on the hard drive are encrypted and I couldn't break the code. The only thing I was certain of were that the hard copies of the information on the first Leo were the only proof in existence that he lived. Madame LaRue was too triumphant, too assured of herself to have made a mistake and let the information out."
"And you're protecting him." His hands loosened on her arms, but his body held her firmly in place. "You spend your f**king life killing to protect others. Who protects you, Harmony, that you don't first have to pay a price?"
"There's always a price to be paid." She had accepted that long ago. Even before her escape from the labs, before she had met Dane or learned the ways of the world she lived in. "If the first Leo is alive, then he deserves to live in peace. In what safety he's found." Leo was her forefather, her only connection to a lineage; she couldn't allow him to be destroyed, any more than she could have allowed Jonas to be destroyed.
"The price you're getting ready to pay is unacceptable."
Harmony shivered at the low, raspy tone of his voice and the heavy, aroused dominance that filled his face.
"And, by God, you won't be paying it alone," he continued a second before his head lowered.
Her response was instantaneous. She had never known hunger, never known need until Lance. This hunger, this need, was all consuming, terrifying, and sent her arching to him as her lips opened beneath his.
It wasn't a long, hungry kiss. They were short, desperate kisses as his hands released her to tug at her shirt, to fight to pull the material over her head. Did she hear material rip?
Hell, she didn't care. He was no less desperate to get her na**d than she was to get the clothes from his body.
She wasn't a fool. She knew how very close she had come to being taken from him. But one thing about it, eventually she would have awakened and she would have fought through hell itself to be back here.
Right here in Lance's arms.
"Fucking shirt has to go." He tore his lips from hers, leaning back long enough to finish tearing it down the front. So it had been her shirt ripping.
He pushed the material to the side, baring her swollen, lace-covered br**sts as he stared down at them with a drowsy, erotic expression.
"Good Lord, I love your br**sts." His hands framed the rapidly rising and falling mounds. "And your sweet, pretty ni**les."
His fingers ran beneath the soft lace before lowering it, using the bra to frame her flesh as he revealed it.
"There. Just like that," he crooned.
Her head tipped back as his lips swooped down, taking a hard tip beneath them as he lifted her in his arms and began moving.
"I need you," she panted, feeling the flames building in her womb, shooting to her pu**y. "I need you now."
"You'll have me. Now."