She shuddered as his lips made contact with her neck. “Ah, you smell so sweet, Harlee. I could give you much pleasure.” He buried his nose against her neck. She stood, frozen, her body sizzling, her pussy moistening with desire.

  “I could make you come with just a few flicks of my tongue on your clit,” he whispered against her neck. “Then when I fucked you, the lycan within you would burst free. You could be wild, untamed as the animal within you comes to life.”

  Oh God. Her heart slammed against her ribs, her clit knotting and swelling as his words soaked her panties. She looked over at Adrian, who stood there and watched. His cock was hard, visible against the leather of his pants. Thick, long, it made her mouth water and she flicked her tongue over her lips to moisten them. The action made his eyes darken and he took a step toward her.

  If he touched her too, if he used the same words Duncan used, she’d be lost. She had a tenuous hold on her self-control right now. She couldn’t explain this unexpected desire, this need to strip them both down and let them do what they wanted to her and in turn explore every inch of their bodies with her hands and mouth. But she knew she had to stop it.

  Remember what they told you vampires and lycans do to humans. The savagery, the animalistic behavior. It’s your responsibility to put a stop to it. You’re the only one who’s ever gotten this far.

  She closed her eyes and forced the pictures she’d seen into her mind. Pictures of humans lying dead, eviscerated, drained of blood, all because of what these creatures had done. A cold chill skittered down her spine and made her shiver. Duncan lifted his head and she opened her eyes.

  “I need more time. I can’t do this right now. It’s all too much, too soon,” she pleaded.

  “Putting it off won’t help,” Adrian said, drawing close enough that she could smell his musky scent. It penetrated her senses and made her tremble with need. “It’s in you. The thirst, the hunger, the lust, just waiting to be released.”

  “The sooner you allow it to happen, the sooner you’ll feel more comfortable here,” Duncan whispered.

  “Please don’t do this to me.” She’d never begged for anything in her life, always felt she was strong enough to withstand anything. But this…this she couldn’t handle. Not right now. Not ever.

  Duncan took a step back.

  The heat in Adrian’s eyes smoldered. “We’ll wait. For a while. But you know I’m right. I bet you’ve always felt something deep inside, sensed it in your dreams. You just didn’t know what or why. Duncan and I both knew it the minute we entered your bedroom. We’ll give you a little more time, but we’re not going to wait forever. Besides, sometimes waiting is good. Builds the tension. But soon you’re going to want us as much as we want you.”

  What were they doing to her? How could she loathe what they were, yet need them with a ferocity that shocked her? She had to find a way out and fast. But at least for the moment she had a reprieve.

  Relief nearly made her fall to the ground. Her muscles were so tense her jaw ached. She forced calm into her system and smiled, trying to think of something to distract them from their primary “mission”. “Thank you. I have so many questions that haven’t been answered yet.”

  Duncan nodded. “Let’s start in the library. We’ll show you the books outlining the lineage of both the clans. It might help to know exactly where you are and to learn a bit more about us.”

  “That sounds wonderful. Shall we go?” Get me out of this bedroom and away from thoughts of what I almost did. Shame washed over her. How easily she’d let them manipulate her with whatever powers they had. No way would she respond to these creatures, knowing what they were capable of.

  She had to get her head screwed on straight and keep it there. These people weren’t human. They were savages. If it took every waking moment, she would keep reminding herself to fight the spell they’d cast over her.

  FOUR

  The library was phenomenal. The first thing to catch her eye was the dark, rich red carpet spread like a sea of blood across the floor. How appropriate, Harlee thought.

  Duncan and Adrian had taken her from the residence to the elevator and up to the corporate floors housing the operation known as Dark Moon. Apparently the lycan and vampire headquarters was also where many of the vampires lived, so corporate shared space with housing, with housing located underground and corporate aboveground. The building was located outside the city on several thousand acres of private land. Very secure, very private.

  The library was filled with floor to ceiling bookshelves, antique Queen Anne furniture and glossy cherry wood tables, where they now sat with thick volumes of gold encrusted books spread open for her perusal.

  What she wouldn’t give for her laptop right now so she could make notes of everything she saw and heard. The lineage of both the vampires and the lycans was astounding, going back multiple centuries.

  “So what you’re telling me is that vampires and lycans have lived among humans for at least ten centuries?”

  “As far as we can tell. The history books only go back so far,” Duncan explained. “For so long much of our history wasn’t documented for fear it would fall into the wrong hands.”

  “Human hands, you mean.”

  Duncan nodded. “The elders who started these volumes wrote as far back as they could recall, but it’s estimated that we have been here since the time of Christ.”

  Her eyes widened. “Really?”

  “It’s not like the movies, Harlee,” Duncan said with a smirk. “Actually, we’re very similar to humans in a lot of ways.”

  Harlee choked back a snort. “How do you figure that?”

  “We look the same, we run businesses, we raise families.”

  “You drink blood, you shapeshift into wolves…” she finished. “That’s hardly the same as humans.”

  Duncan laughed. “Oh lass, you sound just like them. Humans are meat eaters, just as lycans are.”

  “Yeah, but we tend to avoid eating each other.”

  “Meat is meat. Granted, at first our people didn’t discern, but eventually they figured out that eating humans not only called unwanted attention to themselves, but there were much tastier things to eat. Long ago, lycans stopped eating humans. Now, only the occasional rogue will do that.”

  “That’s the freaking understatement of the year,” she replied, shaking her head at their rationalizations. She wished she could reveal what she knew but then they’d know who she worked for, so she had to bite her lip and keep her mouth shut about the atrocities she’d seen photographs of. Atrocities committed by vampires and lycans. Instead she turned to Adrian. “What about blood?” Harlee asked. “Legend says you need it to survive.”

  Adrian nodded. “That’s true to a certain extent. We eat food, just as you do. But we drink blood to heighten our senses and increase our strength.”

  “Human blood.” Harlee fought back a shudder. How could she possibly be a hybrid of both species when the very thought of drinking blood or tearing flesh from bone made her nauseous?

  “Not necessarily. While it’s true that the blood of a human is the richest and enhances our powers the most, any blood will do, and just as Duncan said, vampires stopped doing humans, well, the unwilling ones anyway, long ago. And we never drink lycan blood. It makes us sick,” he finished with a direct look at Duncan.

  Duncan shrugged. “Good thing, too. There’d have been massacre otherwise. It’s to your advantage that vampire hides are tougher than buffalo and taste like burned leather. Otherwise the lycans would have obliterated your species centuries ago.”

  “Kiss my ass, lycan. There’s no way a bunch of Neanderthal wolves could defeat us,” Adrian said.

  “Up yours,” Duncan replied.

  Then they grinned at each other. Harlee rolled her eyes at both of them, wondering if testosterone was universal for all species. It had to be, since it appeared to be the key to men acting like idiots.

  Listening to the two of them insulting each other made her laugh for the first time since she’d been there. Once again she found it difficult to reconcile these people with the information the government spouted about vampires and lycans.

  “So if not from humans, where do you get your blood?” she asked Adrian.

  “One of Dark Moon’s enterprises is cattle ranching. Cattle blood is rich enough to enhance our powers. If we could only keep the lycans from hunting and eating them we’d have a copious food source.”

  “Hey now,” Duncan objected. “Hunting and killing prey is ingrained. We can’t help it. Besides, there’s plenty of cattle to go around.”

  Admittedly, Harlee could sit and listen to both of them talk for hours. Not only was the information fascinating, but Duncan’s Scottish brogue was like beautiful music, and Adrian’s husky tones were like a caress on her skin. Her senses were in overload just from their voices. Before she started drooling, she turned away and focused on the volumes of history spread out on the table before her.

  “So does the history give you any idea of your origins? Were you always here, were you once human and …mutated somehow or did you come from somewhere else?”

  “Like outer space?” Adrian asked, an amused smirk on his face.

  “Whatever. How the hell am I supposed to know? Yesterday I was a human who didn’t even know your species existed except in horror movies and in books. Fiction, fantasy, not this bizarre reality you’re forcing me to accept at face value, so cut me some slack.” She lifted her chin, supremely satisfied that she’d pulled off a big lie like that without stumbling.

  “There are a lot of species on this planet that even we don’t know about,” Duncan said. “It’s only humans who are arrogant enough to think they are the master race here.”

  “Other species? Like what?” Nothing the government knew of, or at least none that her security clearance made her privy to.

  “We don’t know. We’ve read things in the history books that lead us to believe they exist. Maybe they’ve chosen to keep their identities a secret. Maybe we’re the first guinea pigs with the humans,” Adrian added.

  “Guinea pigs?”

  “Humans are the dominant population. Though we have superior speed, strength and skills, they still outnumber us. Plus, they’ve captured and used our own people to figure out how to weaken and eliminate us.”

  And Harlee had played an integral role in that process. Guilt washed over her. But why? She did the job she was trained to do, based on what her government told her about the lycans and vampires. She held onto her training like a lifeline, forcing the doubts away.

  “Together, we are stronger than separate,” Duncan said. “Lycans and vampires have forged an uneasy peace. We cannot fight the humans as well separately as we can united.”

  “Then why haven’t the lycans and vampires allowed cross mating?” she wondered.

  Adrian stood and leaned against one of the bookshelves. “Centuries ago, our people were lax about interaction between humans and their kind. The vampires and lycans created from blood interaction with humans developed a madness, the blood lust, which couldn’t be contained. They became uncontrollable killers, preying on other humans. Of course this was attributed to the pure lycans and vampires, so we realized it would have to stop. But by then the blame had been cast in our direction. We became the enemy. We had to round up and kill the humans who had been turned and our people forbade blood contact with humans. That’s where we still get the occasional rogues. Though we tried to get to all of them, we knew some had managed to slip through our nets. They’re still out there.”

  Duncan nodded. “And vampires and lycans had always been at war for supremacy and control, but once the government began tracking us down and destroying us, we knew we had to join forces. Because of the nightmare the transfer of blood into humans had caused, our people theorized that cross breeding vampires and lycans would produce a similar result, or possibly one even worse. So it was outlawed.”

  “So no vampires and lycans had ever mated?” she asked.

  “Not that we’re aware of. If they had, we think we’d have known,” Adrian said. “Until Stefan and Amelia, of course. And we still haven’t determined the result of that union. You hold the key to those results, Harlee. So far, you seem okay.”

  Or so they thought. And if her luck held out, they’d keep on thinking that, because she couldn’t give them the opportunity to discover who she was. Or rather, who she wasn’t.

  “We had just started working on what strategies to use to go about the experimental cross breeding,” Adrian explained. “It’s all tech/medical stuff so it’s over our heads, but the bottom line is, the plans are on hold because of Stefan’s death. Tensions are high and so is suspicion. But now that we have you, what we can learn from you might provide our tech people with information on how to go about it.”

  “Didn’t Stefan and Amelia mate the…uh, natural way?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Duncan said. “But we still don’t know how it affects a child of that kind of union. Like Adrian said, you’re the key.”

  “We’ve recently decided it’s imperative for us to determine whether lycans and vampires can breed successfully. Increasing our numbers and possibly our powers can only help us if our fight with humans goes to all-out war. Their technology is growing, at least in some areas,” Adrian said, disgust evident on his frowning face. “They have no idea how much we could benefit them. Instead, they concentrate on using our own people to develop weaponry to use against us.”

  “How can you benefit them?” Harlee asked, pushing aside that constant niggle of guilt at what they’d done to the vampires and lycans they’d captured.

  “We’ve done a bit of our own testing here in the labs,” Adrian explained. “Genetic testing, researching ways to assist humans in becoming more resistant to the diseases plaguing them. Our original goal was to come out of the darkness, to make peace with the humans by offering our assistance. We sent negotiators to discuss this. Only our negotiators didn’t return.”

  “No, they were used,” Duncan chimed in. “And now the negotiations have stopped but the humans are relentless in their quest to hunt us down and exterminate us. We have to hide who and what we are, maintain a cloak of secrecy that neither of our species want, because humans are too afraid of us to negotiate, to even let us demonstrate how we can help. Their paranoia is groundless, so we may yet have to go to war with them, if only to save ourselves.”

  The trickle of doubt within Harlee began to grow, and no matter how she tried to discount what Duncan and Adrian said to her, she could no longer ignore what they said. With the doubt, fear surfaced, and a sick feeling that they might just be right and humans had been wrong all along.

  Dead wrong.

  * * *

  Duncan watched the mix of emotions cross Harlee’s face. Confusion, fear, disbelief and finally resignation. He’d love to crawl into her mind and figure out what was going on in there. Trying to imagine what she was going through was impossible. He admired her strength in dealing with everything she’d learned in such a short period of time.

  And her sass…he loved that about her. There was nothing more attractive than a woman who gave as good as she got, who showed no fear.

  “What’s up, everyone?”

  He turned at the sound of a sexy voice, not at all surprised to find that voice attached to Annmarie. Speaking of sass, she was really something, all wrapped up in a petite, bombshell package that never failed to fire his imagination. His mind was always full of ideas of what they could do together. Too bad she was vampire and forbidden to him. Then again, when had “forbidden” ever stopped him?

  “What are you doing here?” Adrian asked.

  Annmarie arched a brow. “I came to see my new friend, if you don’t mind,” she said, ignoring her cousin’s warning looks and taking a seat in the chair next to Harlee. “You look like you need to get out, get a little fresh air and party a bit.”

  “No,” Adrian said curtly.

  “I can speak for myself, thank you,” Harlee said, lifting her chin. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Yes, it does,” Annmarie replied before staring at Adrian. “And why not? Are you intending to keep her prisoner here until she agrees to fuck your brains out?”

  Duncan chuckled at how easily Annmarie pushed Adrian’s buttons. That kind of banter among kin made him miss his own family in Scotland, even though the work he did here was important. There was just something about the comfort of family, even if they did occasionally drive you crazy.

  “What makes you think she’s capable of fucking my brains out?” Adrian challenged, his gaze directed at Harlee, not his cousin.

  The vampire was either completely daft or teasing. Duncan could smell Harlee’s sexuality, banked like a smoldering fire and ready to ignite at the first touch of an accelerant. He was going to make damn sure he added fuel to her fire, though he wondered if she’d burn him alive.

  “Keep it up, pal, and you may never find out,” Harlee replied with a smirk of her own.

  There it was. That spunk that made her so attractive. It wasn’t hard to see the sparks flying between Adrian and Harlee. Some chemistry definitely at work there. He wondered if that had anything to do with her dominant side slowly coming to the surface. Was she inherently vampire instead of lycan? He supposed he’d have to wait patiently and see what developed, on both counts.

  “So? Are we up for a little party? I was thinking Blood and Guts,” Annmarie said.

  Adrian rolled his eyes. “Yeah, throw her right into the fire on her first night.”

  “Not a bad idea, though,” Duncan said, sending a pointed look to Adrian. “Might be a learning experience for her and step up the process a bit.”