Harper Stone was a hot mess waiting to happen.

Or so her sisters claimed. Pfft. Fidiots. The work that she did was vitally important to the safety of animals, and she couldn't comprehend why they persisted in complaining about it. As far as she was concerned, they were judgmental jerks because they didn't understand what drove her to do the things she did.

Arguing with them about it was about as productive as herding cats.

The simple truth of the matter was that she couldn't stand to see an animal suffering. There was just something fundamentally wrong about mistreating creatures that were not in a position to defend themselves. So what if she ignored the rules and broke a few laws while doing it? Her efforts might be unorthodox, but they worked.

Sure she'd been thrown in jail a few times, but it was worth it. She'd liberated hundreds of animals from appalling circumstances and found them decent homes with loving families. In most cases, the bastards who'd abused the animals had been convicted for their heinous crimes and found out what it was like to live in a cage.

Needless to say, she'd made a few enemies along the way, and not just the bad guys she'd helped put away. The police considered her a nuisance at best. The press called her an overzealous animal rights activist. Her sisters claimed she was a pain in the ass. Harper just considered herself to be an animal lover.

It had all started the first day of kindergarten when Tommy Bartlett had kicked the class's pet rabbit. Harper had punched him in the nose and been expelled for three days. Her dad had bought her ice cream and told her that the world needed people brave enough to stand up for those who couldn't defend themselves.

From that day forward she became a defender of animals. A few years ago, she had bought a farm and converted it into a no-kill shelter that had housed every type of creature imaginable. The animals she rescued were transported there and treated for whatever type of injury they had sustained before being placed in furever homes.

The shelter also took in strays, but the majority of the animals came from people who bought them without realizing that owning a pet was more time consuming and labor intensive than they wanted it to be. Or that their cute little puppy was going to grow up to be a huge seventy-pound dog.

Fidiots.

Fur babies were supposed to be a part of the family and not something you could exchange like an unwanted Christmas gift. Her staff educated the people who wanted to adopt on everything from breed size at maturity to diet and the amount of exercise required for the animal they were interested in, and the success rate was excellent.

The sense of accomplishment that the shelter's success provided was very fulfilling, but it was just a happy by-product of what she loved. Because rescuing animals from unsafe conditions or abusive situations and rehabilitating them wasn't just her job, it was a calling. Sure it was risky, but her exploits had never endangered anyone except herself.

Until now.

Over the years she'd built up quite a reputation and had a network of reliable sources that informed her about cases of suspected animal abuse. Not just the kind where someone neglected their pet, but organized operations like pit fighting rings, illegal breeding farms, and the unlawful use of animals for experimentation.

One of those sources had told her that GenMod Lab was guilty of the latter. So she'd followed her usual modus operandi and gone in undercover to investigate. After securing a job with the cleaning crew and enduring weeks of scrubbing toilets, she still hadn't been allowed inside the high-security lab area.

Fortunately, she'd been mopping outside the lab door early one morning when it opened. A man in a suit came out, a phone to his ear as he barked orders to whoever was on the other end. Realizing that this was probably the only chance she was going to get, Harper had stuck her foot in the door to keep it from closing.

Once the man turned into another hallway, she scurried through the door as fleet-footed as a cat and closed it silently behind her. Then she turned around and stared in absolute horror at what could only be described as Frankenstein's lab. The scene was so appalling that she could barely believe her eyes.

Large glass containers sat in rows atop the stainless steel tables running the length of the room. Inside those jars were unborn fetuses in various stages of growth. She didn't need a degree in biology to determine that those were not animal fetuses. These lunatics were growing human babies.

That fact was confirmed a moment later when she heard a baby crying. Heart in her throat, she carefully made her way to the opposite side of the room and looked through the glass door. A baby lay naked and screaming atop a steel exam table while a man in a lab coat sliced an incision across its chest.

Harper screamed in outrage and could not believe what she'd just seen. Because GenMod wasn't experimenting on animals, they were torturing babies! Intent on putting a stop to this madness, she twisted the doorknob to no avail and banged her fist against the glass to get his attention.

The bastard didn't hear a thing due to the noise canceling headphones he wore to drown out the sound of the baby's screams. Yeah, that was a sound that she would never forget. She began to hammer on the glass, slamming her body against the door, fighting with all of her strength to get inside the room.

Because the man had lit a propane torch and she knew he was going to use it on the baby next. He did, and she screamed right along with the infant. Enraged, Harper picked up one of the empty containers and flung it against the door. When the glass shattered, she reached inside, turned the handle and wrenched the door open.

She'd rushed into the room, cursing and screaming like a mad woman, grabbed the first thing she laid hands on and smashed the man in the face with it. She'd seen his oddly colored green eyes widen in surprise through his safety goggles before he snatched the file folder away from her, a page ripping loose in her hand.

A garbled yell for security came from behind the surgical mask before he'd turned tail and fled through another door. Harper had lifted the baby into her arms and run like hell, the page still clenched in her fist. She burst through the emergency exit, the sound of an alarm confirming that the cat was out of the bag.

After a mad dash to the parking lot, she hopped up into her truck and laid the baby in the seat beside her. Security guards began to pour out of the building brandishing weapons. Her right hand laid protectively over the infant, she tore ass out of the parking lot and drove straight through the gate arm blocking the exit.

Sliding sideways onto the highway, Harper slammed the accelerator to the floor and got the hell out of Dodge. Twenty minutes later, she stopped at the nearest hospital and dropped her head onto the steering wheel. She'd seem some pretty gruesome things in her career, but nothing that compared to this level of depravity.

Human beings torturing babies in the name of science. It was too horrific to be true, but the evidence was laying in the seat beside her. Realizing that the baby's cries had stopped, she gently lifted him into her arms. Amber eyes were wary as they stared back at her. Much like the abused animals she normally rescued.

Her heart shattered because this innocent infant already understood that humans couldn't be trusted. Ignoring the tears streaming down her face, Harper grabbed a towel from the back seat, wrapped it around him and began to remove the blood from the babies torso gently. Much to her astonishment, his skin was completely unblemished.

There was no cut, no burn, no evidence that the little boy had been harmed in any way. What the hell? She knew she'd seen the bastard slice him with a scalpel. The blood she'd cleaned away was proof of that. And the stench of burned flesh still clung to both of them. So what had happened to the wounds?

Judas Priest.

What kind of babies were they growing, she wondered as her scientific mind frantically sought to unravel the puzzle. GenMod specialized in genetic modifications, so if they were growing babies in test tubes, then it was a reasonable assumption that they were making some form of genetic modifications to them.

Maybe even the ability to heal faster.

Which would explain why the bastard had been inflicting wounds on the infant. He'd been trying to determine how fast they healed. Although that would be an amazing medical breakthrough, it did not excuse torturing innocent babies. It was illegal, unethical, inhumane and Harper was going to shut the bastards down.

The problem was that without the wounds on the baby she had no evidence to substantiate her claim. And the page she'd torn out of his chart didn't prove to be much help. Other than confirming what she'd already deduced about the testing, the only pertinent piece of information that it contained was the name and address of the paternal donor.

The poor man probably had no clue what his sperm had been used for, and she doubted he'd believe it if she told him. Lord knew the police were not going to take her word for it without evidence. She'd been through this too many times already. Which meant she had to find some way to get back inside that lab and gather the proof.

In the meantime, she needed to find a safe place to stash the infant. Taking care of human babies was completely outside of her wheelhouse, but she knew someone who adored them. After cleaning the blood off of herself and the little boy, she found the nearest Walmart and loaded up on baby gear.

Less than eight hours later she had arrived at her half-sister's house in Richmond and didn't bother correcting Aylese's assumption that the baby was hers. Explanations could come later, and she didn't have time for lectures. Harper had to find a way to bring GenMod down and get justice for Jerrett Black and the other unwitting donors.

She suspected it wouldn't take long for them to come looking for her, so she'd begged her sister to take the baby to his father. Hopefully, the man would be able to protect the child until the truth was revealed. As usual, Aylese had proved obstinate, so Harper had snuck out in the middle of the night and left the baby behind.

If anyone would make sure he was taken care of, it was her most annoying sister.

Only things hadn't worked out quite the way she had planned. By the time she returned to Atlanta, GenMod had been burned to the ground and everything inside completely obliterated. The bastards had torched the lab to destroy the evidence, so now she was going to have to start from scratch.

Fortunately, Harper had a list of the company's executives to investigate. Unfortunately, she realized they'd managed to track her down. She'd lost the tail and gone to ground, but following up on the leads had proved difficult when she was forced into hiding. The middle of the night phone call from her sister hadn't helped matters.

Aylese had taken the baby to his father, and both of them had been demanding answers. As expected, her sister had given her hell until Harper had explained why she'd stolen the baby. Luckily she'd had a great excuse to end the call, but she knew that wouldn't be the end of it. The oldest could be as tenacious as a bulldog.

She'd been expecting her sister to call the next morning and had been shocked as hell when it turned out to be the baby's father on the phone instead. A man who claimed to be Jett Black, the infamous Prince of Pussy. She'd nearly wrecked the truck when he'd said her sister was his guest at the Pussycat Palace.

Because the only way anyone would get Aylese Delacort inside a world-famous cathouse was with deadly force. The Purity Princess did not frequent gentleman's clubs. Then he'd tried to get Harper to reveal her location so he could send someone to get her and demanded that she tell him everything she knew about the lab.

His refusal to let her speak to her sister had kicked her suspicious mind into gear. Until then she had assumed that Jerrett Black hadn't known what GenMod was using his sperm sample for. But if he had known that they were torturing his child, having her sister deliver the baby to him had been a huge mistake.

Because Aylese could be in danger!