He was starting to think it was possible.
...
This was a complication.
Dane inhaled the sweet, black cherry taste of the slender cigar and considered his next move.
It wasn’t that he enjoyed this particular game, and God knew he didn’t. It was that he knew his brother far too well, and their parents were certain at the time that there were no alternatives.
Dane had even suggested to Jonas that if the message went out to Gideon and Judd that the injections rather than the code itself were needed, one or even both would help. Both Jonas and Rachel had instantly rejected such an action, though.
And Ely, the Breeds’ doctor, wasn’t yet in a place where her confidence could match Jonas’s will as it had once done. That had left Dane to do the dirty work, as it usually did.
He didn’t care to get his hands dirty, but if Gideon, or Graeme as he was called now, didn’t give Jonas what he wanted within forty-eight hours, then Dane could kiss his entire American family and friends good-the-fuck-bye, because Rule’s little mate would tattle on him like a five-year-old.
“Remind me to stay the fuck out of your little games from here on out.” Dog sidled next to him, struck a match and lit the tip of his own cigar. “I’d heard conspiring with you could get dangerous. Strange, never heard of you getting caught before, though.”
Dane threw him a careless, confident smile. “I’ve got this, my friend,” he drawled with far more assurance than he felt, he admitted. “All will be well.”
“Let’s hope Leo’s ready to welcome me home when Jonas puts out that execution order on me,” the other Breed sighed in response. “I’ve been getting rather bored with America anyway.”
Dane almost snorted at that one. Dog? Bored? He rather doubted it. Dog lived for the games he was able to play within the Breed societies here. Like all the Leo’s protégés, Dog was a master manipulator and a calculating son of a bitch in the bargain. So much so that when Leo realized Dog was in America working at freeing the Breeds and not just helping them to set up their societies, but encouraging it in a fashion, he’d been livid and dared the Coyote to return.
Leo was still a bit upset over that one.
The patriarch worried incessantly about the safety of the American branch of the family, and still swore that the world simply wasn’t ready for Mating Heat, and keeping it a secret much longer would be impossible.
Dane shuddered to consider what his father would do if he ever learned that his son, his legitimate heir, had been bankrolling the Coyote’s little venture at the time. He often wondered if Leo, as he often threatened, would actually disinherit him.
He was afraid his father just might do so.
“You worry too much, Dog,” Dane informed him absently as he drew on the cigar and considered the night thoughtfully. “You should relax a bit.”
“This is why we were never friends, Dane,” Dog reminded him with that ever-present mockery. “Hell, this is why I just stayed the fuck away from you. You cause havoc no matter where you go.”
Of course he did, that was his job, Dane thought as his gaze narrowed on a flash of long auburn hair and a particular turn of the head.
When the female turned back to him, the face was wrong, the slender body too soft, without the play of well-honed feminine muscles beneath her flesh.
Would he ever stop searching for her, he wondered a bit somberly. Each time he was even near the area he would watch, wait, certain at some point that he would catch a glimpse of her.
Yet he never did.
He prayed he never would.
Letting her go had been the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life. Allowing her to have the mate she longed for, the life she had dreamed of, had shattered his heart even though her happiness was all he’d ever asked for.
Sadly, he’d forgotten to include himself in the wish.
He breathed in slowly, heavily.
“We were never friends because we truly never knew each other,” he retorted to the Breed’s earlier statement. “Father was smart enough to ensure that one of us was always gone whenever the other was there.”
The Coyote had come to the compound ragged, filthy and suffering from dehydration and juvenile primal fever. Dane had been in London at the time overseeing several of the Leo’s properties, but he’d heard of the bedraggled Coyote youth, more wild than trained, who had gone in search of the fabled compound of the first Leo at the tender age of six.
“Leo’s going to have both of us killed if he finds out about this one, Dane,” Dog assured him.
Dane shook his head. “He’ll regret it. He’ll hate the need for the deception, but he’s as aware as we are that the child would have died without the assurance we gave Gideon of protection if he would aid the child. We never specified how he was to do so.”
Dog grunted at that.
“What now?”
“Now, we wait,” Dane informed him, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned against the rough stone of the outer wall and continued to watch the guests of the hotel arrive and depart.
“You do that a lot,” Dog observed.
“What? Wait?” Dane grinned.
He did rather do that a lot.
“No, tense whenever you see a particular color and style of hair,” Dog pointed out just as Dane tensed further, cursing silently as the black military-reinforced SUV pulled slowly beneath the hotel awning.
Several Breeds sat in the front; behind them, he knew the small family.
He waited, hungry for the sight of her. Watching as first Lance Jacobs stepped from the SUV before lifting the toddler into his arms, then helping his mate, his treasured wife, from the vehicle.
Jacobs made her a good mate, though, he admitted. And that boy, he was a combination of both. The child who had finally tamed Death. Auburn hair, a little long and a bit shaggy. Loose jeans and a blue T-shirt. He looked like his father, thankfully, though the boy had his mother’s eyes.
Then she stepped out.
God help him, how beautiful she had become over the past years. Still regally graceful, as exquisitely beautiful and more dangerous and . . . His throat tightened, his chest aching at the sight of her rounded tummy beneath the pretty gold silk blouse she wore with her jeans.
Pregnant.
Once again, she was with child, and just as before, it gave her a glow to her features that made her incandescent. Made his chest swell with such emotion that once again he wondered if hybrid Breeds had the ability to find their mates, or if the natural age retardation once they reached adulthood also signaled that they, like their human counterparts, risked losing the very hearts that could come to mean so much to them?
Just as he had lost this heart.
“Harmony Lancaster,” Dog murmured. “Son of a bitch, what’s she doing here?”
“Amber,” Dane whispered as he felt his stomach pitch with the pleasure of hearing her laughter. “She became very close to Amber the last time she and her family were in Sanctuary.”
“There are too many high-ranking Breeds here, Dane,” Dog protested then. “Someone’s going to become a target. Her mate’s already taken two bullets. I wouldn’t imagine he’d survive very many more.”
The fucking bastard was healthy as a horse, Dane thought furiously. As though having nearly met his maker twice had only strengthened his resolve to ensure that his mate and children were never left unprotected.
They would never be unprotected, though, Dane knew as he watched the two dark-colored vehicles pulling in behind the SUV. The six hard-eyed, steel-cold Breeds who exited the vehicles and stood watchfully in place were her permanent shields.
Hers and her mate’s.
They were rushed into the hotel as Dane watched, dipping his head as she seemed to pause for a moment, looking behind her as the guards surrounded her and her mate urged her inside.