Tanner's Scheme

Hard, deep pulses of release forced her to swallow, to moan, because the taste wasn’t unpleasant. It was silky, smooth, dark and masculine. Like a heated storm, filling her senses with the rich taste of him, her soul with the knowledge that she would never forget it.



“Damn you!” He moved again, flipping her to her stomach, his hands pulling her hips high as he covered her.



And just that quick she felt his cock pushing into her.



“Fuck. Too tight.” His hands clenched on her hips as he pulled back, pushed forward, working his way inside her as her back arched and a high, keening cry left her lips.



She had never made such a sound in her life. But she did now. Her hips rocked against him, her juices flowing, easing his entrance, preparing his way as burning spears of almost painful sensation whipped through her.



“It’s too much,” she suddenly screamed, the feel of his cock parting her, stroking hidden nerve endings, burrowing inside her.



She couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t survive it.



“The hell it is.” His voice was so rough, so deep that she could hear the animal inside him fighting to be free. “It’s not enough. Not yet.”



Her fists clenched in the blankets beneath her as her head fell to the bed, her upper body collapsing. Another scream tore from her throat as he surged fully inside her, impaling her, invading her.



“Please. Tanner, please…” She was shaking apart, shuddering so hard from the pleasure that she didn’t know if she would survive.



“That’s okay, baby,” he panted behind her, moving, drawing back, surging in return.



Her eyes closed against the sweat dripping down her face, the burning in her body.



“It’s okay,” he repeated. “Remember? I took notes. I know what you need.”



Be prepared. The Breed motto, she thought irrationally as he began to move inside her. Long, hard thrusts. Each stroke sending biting impulses of sensation through her, working through her vagina, her womb, her muscles tightening, preparing.



“Not yet.”



She screamed, her voice so hoarse now that the sound barely registered as the strokes inside her lessened, built, lessened again.



This wasn’t teasing. This was torture. This was a pleasure so destructive it stole her breath.



“Please…,” she begged. “Don’t do this. Please don’t tease me.”



“Tease you, baby?” His hand smoothed over a buttock. “I wouldn’t tease you, darlin’. Only please you. Please you so much.”



He drove in hard and deep, pulled back slowly, then thrust in with a striking surge of pleasure so hard, so swift she nearly blacked out.



“Harder again,” she gasped. “Please. Please, harder again.”



Hard. An impalement that had her reaching back for him, her fingers gripping his thigh, her nails digging into his flesh at the same instant that his hand landed on her rear in an erotic little slap that threw her higher.



Stars danced in front of her closed eyes; her muscles were so tight she wondered if she would ever relax again. She just needed a little, just a few hard thrusts, that was all. Just a few.



“So sweet and hot,” he panted over her, coming fully over her as his legs spread her thighs further and his thrusts continued to power inside her. “Keep tightening on me like that, pretty girl. Milk me with that sweet pussy. Give to me. Give me everything you’ve never given before.”



Was there anything left to give?



As his thrusts increased, became rhythmic, hard and driving, she found there was more to give.



Her orgasm caught her by surprise again, exploding, detonating and washing her body with such pleasure she could only shudder beneath him and take what he had to give.



And he had a lot to give. Harder. Deeper. Faster.



Until she felt everything inside her unraveling, tearing apart and reaching for him as his roar echoed around her again and sent her flying.



She felt him drive deep one last time, then the hard explosion of his heated release, the hard, pulsing dampness filling her, soaking into muscles clenched around his cock, spasming with a shuddering force she couldn’t even breathe through.



She collapsed fully beneath him, drained, exhausted, aftershocks of pleasure rippling through her vagina and causing her to gasp with halting little cries she could barely believe she was making.



She couldn’t move. She was lost, drifting. So drugged on the pleasure she had endured that she could only whimper as she felt him pull slowly from her and come down on the bed beside her.



“Sleep, baby,” he whispered at her ear then. “I’ll keep the lights on. Just sleep.”



Her eyes fluttered closed, her last thought following her into sleep: Tanner Reynolds would be the death of her.



CHAPTER 12



Sometimes, a man had to admit when he’d been a fool. He had to look inside and realize that he had let his hatred, his suspicions, rule his logic rather than letting his logic rule his emotions. He had to look beyond the surface, and dig past the emotions for or against the situation, and feel for the truth.



His gut had told something wasn’t right with Scheme Tallant all along. Nearly ten years he had been watching her, and he had known something was off. Something was wrong. But hatred and suspicion had clouded logic; the need to hate had clouded reason.



The proof the Breeds had gathered on her over the past ten years showed a spoiled general’s daughter as merciless and bloodthirsty as the monster who had sired her. Proof such as orders carrying her signature to execute Breeds still beneath her father’s command, for no other reason than whatever perceived weakness they possessed. Proof such as the surveillance videos the Breeds had managed to acquire of meetings between Scheme, her father and high-ranking soldiers within her father’s organization. Her cold, deliberate plans to strike against Sanctuary.



But the gut had warned him, even during the investigation, that something was off. That something wasn’t right with the evidence they had against her. As though he were seeing only part of the picture, and the rest was in shadow. He should have paid attention to his gut.



There were too many inconsistencies in the evidence they had gathered on her. A Breed marked for execution only to escape at the last moment because of a mistake she had supposedly made. Scheme’s profiling reports before the escape that the Breed was trustworthy and wasn’t an escape risk. Attacks Sanctuary had been warned were coming, or a transmission suddenly appearing that hadn’t been there before. Little things. Things that made it appear as though fate were on the side of the Breeds. Tiny little fuckups that, taken by themselves, were meaningless. No organization or person was perfect. But when put together—



And then there were the short disappearances she had made each time those little mistakes had been made.



She had been punished during those disappearances. Punished in ways that made Tanner’s skin crawl and his suspicions rise.



He knew Jonas had managed to find a spy within the Tallant ranks eight years before. One he had never revealed to the Breed Cabinet. That spy had been one of the successes that had allowed him to step in as director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs.



Jonas was a sneaky son of a bitch. He had managed to place spies in areas that the Breed analysts had considered impossible. He knew weaknesses and strengths and how to exploit them. And he had had an ace in the hole.



Somehow, Jonas had recruited General Tallant’s own daughter. He had to have. It was the only thing that made sense. Why else would her father beat her, bury her, in a search for information? And Tanner knew that was the reason why.



Cyrus Tallant was as evil as they came. He was a monster who believed in his cause. He wasn’t there for the power or the money, but because he believed in what he was doing.



To the general, the Breeds had no soul because man, rather than God, created them. They were tools, no more or less than a dog or a rifle. The only difference being in how they were trained.



Their humanity was stripped from them as babes. After they were weaned, they were placed in pens and taught to fend for themselves. Once there, they were watched every second, studied until each surviving toddler was finally placed in what was considered an appropriate training program.



Psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors created individual programs for each Breed, designed to create the weapon the Council envisioned.



They believed in their own rhetoric. That Breeds weren’t truly human, and therefore had no rights. They had no souls, and therefore the Council could not be held accountable for their deaths.



They believed in what they were doing just as desperately as the Breeds believed in their right to freedom and life. And General Tallant believed more strongly than most in his right to rid the world of the Breeds now that they were no longer controlled.



He wouldn’t hesitate to use his daughter in that battle. And if his daughter showed the same weakness his wife had, then she was as disposable in the war he was fighting as his spouse had been.



Not that there was any proof that the general had ordered her death. Dorothy Tallant had been a scientist within the Breed lab Tallant had first been assigned to oversee.



A petite Asian-American with an IQ off the charts and a talent for genetic engineering, she had supposedly died of a massive stroke twenty years before.



He breathed wearily as he continued to go through the information he had pulled up on his laptop. The surveillance on the Tallants had begun even before the revelation to the world that the Breeds existed.



Only in the past year or so had the Breeds managed to actually formulate a case against Tallant. After all, it wasn’t illegal to hire Breeds as security personnel. Just as it wasn’t a law that Breeds had to register with the Bureau of Breed Affairs, though most did to assure their own safety.



Tallant’s Breeds didn’t. The dozen Coyotes he employed had never registered, which meant no fingerprints, no way of identifying them. And they were damned good killers. The best the Council had ever created from the Coyote DNA.



He pushed back from the laptop as he disconnected the link into the Breed satellites and sighed wearily.



Something was eating at him; he could feel it. Something that just didn’t set well with what he knew about Scheme Tallant so far.



Forget the lust and the raging hunger. He knew himself; he didn’t lust after whores and killers. And he could smell them; the animal inside him could sense them.



Scheme was neither a whore nor a killer. And that definitely didn’t fit with the profile the Breed analysts had put together on her.



So where did that leave him? The minute he walked into Sanctuary with her, she would be placed under Breed Law, convicted and possibly executed.



Her only chance had been a mating. If he had mated her.



He stared at her, his lips flattening in anger as his teeth clenched with it.



And there lay his problem. There was no mating heat.



He had almost been certain she was his mate. The emotions were there. The lust, the need, the overwhelming, primal protectiveness. He was falling in love with her. The animal inside him was claiming her. But there was no mating. Occasionally, at odd moments, an unusual taste would tempt his senses. The taste of wild lust and heat, similar to the tastes mated couples described. But it was never there for long. And the glands that held the mating hormone beneath his tongue didn’t swell and release the hormone created from the biological and chemical reaction to a mate. It could be that his DNA was just almost compatible for the mating. Which meant she might be another Breed’s mate. A Breed whose DNA matched his own.



He ran his tongue over his teeth. The glands hadn’t inflamed, and even more, the barb hidden deep within each Feline Breed cock hadn’t shown itself. The hormone within the saliva and that barb marked the mate even more surely than the bite to the shoulder that reportedly always occurred, unknowingly, by the Breed. They rarely remembered the need to bite their mate and only became aware of it after the taste of blood filled their mouths.



Shit. Shit. Had he been taking Cabal’s mate?