Connor (5 page)

Allie's head was reeling. In what must have been less than an hour her whole life had been flushed down the toilet. One minute, she'd been minding her own business, well, maybe minding someone else's business, but still, that
was
her business. The next, she was meeting cat-people, cat-clones to be exact, and being turned into one herself.

That was just wrong.

She halted that knee-jerk mental reaction. Normally, when she did something that didn't gel with the general populous she declared herself wrong. But that wasn't how
this
felt. Even though it was crazy insane, it didn't feel wrong. For the first time in her life, it felt oddly right.
She
felt right. Therefore, dismissing it out of hand would be a mistake.

Her analytical brain went into categorising what she knew.

H S's explanation for the anomalies made sense. More sense than any theory she'd come up with so far. And when she looked at the two men here in the room with her, she could see how alike they were. They
could
be clones. It's not like people hadn't been talking about illegal human cloning experiments for decades. Why shouldn't these men be examples of such an experiment?

She had been watching H S move faster than was humanly possible on his treadmill for weeks now. At no time was she drugged or hallucinating when she did so. If that kind of speed was possible, then who said the other traits she'd seen weren't possible too? So maybe she really had seen all that weird shit without being drugged by Connor.

And if she accepted she wasn't drugged, then she had to accept that she had the same DNA as they did, because she had seen her cat-eyes and teeth. She had felt something primal come to life inside her. And Connor had given her two incredible orgasms by simply biting her neck.

She never had orgasms with the men she had sex with. Ever since she was fifteen she'd been sexually active, and while she enjoyed some of it, she'd never reached an orgasm. If it wasn't a standard joke that women faked it, she would have thought something was wrong with her. Instead, she'd decided that she just hadn't come into her sexual prime yet. Or just needed a better sexual partner. She'd even experimented with a girl in high school, but the results of that were even more underwhelming than with guys.

So if she was one of these cat-people it might explain why she never come with anyone but herself until she met Connor. Did that make him her mate? Hell no! They'd barely clapped eyes on each other. Allie was all for the concept of love at first sight, but this wasn't love, this was…something else. Something that came from that unknown part of her she had no reason to trust.

Allie had been hot for H S's body from Day One, but didn't particularly like him. The more she came to know him, the more that feeling was confirmed. He was superior, anal and cold. Not appealing in the least. And Connor? Well, she was hot for him, that was a no-brainer, but that didn't mean she loved him. She liked him more than she did H S, but that was a long way from the love someone felt for their life-mate.

If she met more of these Scorpio Sons would she fall in love with one of them? Connor seemed to think she would. Allie wasn't so convinced.

Which brought her to the big issue. The elephant in the room she'd avoided while scrambling to get her head around truths she
could
determine. H S told her that these Guild members were like locusts eating up their planet before moving on to another.

It would be nice to think that humanity wasn't the Bad Guy in the shit-feast of ecological disasters confronting their planet. It would be nice to think they were just being manipulated by unfeeling monsters, as much victims in all this as Nature was. But how did she know any of that was true?

Allie had the evidence of her own eyes for the truth about clones and her own DNA cocktail. She had only these strangers' word for it that the Guild was the Bad Guy and these men were the Good Guys. After all, it wasn't the Guild who had invaded her room, threatened her life, threatened to drug her if she didn't co-operate, and then kidnapped her. That was all Connor. If she hadn't turned out to be his mate, what might have happened to her?

No, that wasn't the behaviour of Good Guys. Allie was many things, but gullible wasn't one of them. She didn't just believe what she was told. Proof was the only way they could convince her of their truth.

The men had been surprisingly quiet while she sorted out her thoughts. She appreciated that. When she looked up, it was to meet H S's intense, light-brown eyes sizing her up.

"I'm going to accept that you
are
cloned warriors and that I'm part of that experiment. But that doesn't mean that I should side with you. Nothing you've done so far convinces me that you're on the side I should be on. So,
convince
me that this Guild is what you say it is."

H S sat back and smiled. "I think I like you, Alice N. Wunderlund. And you won't catch me admitting something like that too often. I don't have the patience to tolerate fools, and you most definitely are not a fool. So, if proof is what you need, proof is what I'll give you.
We
will give you." He looked over at Connor, who nodded back, wordlessly.

Allie was surprised by the warmth H S's compliment aroused in her. Most men either saw her as non-existent or as a hot babe, if she worked at it, and no more. She doubted even the people who knew her best would give her this level of respect. Maybe she needed to re-evaluate her opinion of this guy.

"Let me start with your reaction to my fiancé. You seemed sure I couldn't love her. Why?"

"Why? You were the one who called her
Godzilla
, isn't that enough reason? And it was you who said the incredible sex I witnessed was a show put on for my benefit and that you had to close your eyes and think of England to do it, for fuck's sake. That seems to justify my reaction pretty well, don't you think?"

"That's all true. But that wasn't why
you
didn't believe I could love her."

Allie felt embarrassed by her bitchy reaction to Meredith and had no desire to lose this man's respect so soon after winning it. So she'd paper over that little fault in her character.

"She just wasn't as attractive as I would have expected, that's all. People tend to choose partners within their own range of attractiveness. And powerful, rich men like you can even step up a level if they want to. Your fiancé is not on your level. I couldn't see anything about Miss Hall that made me think she was someone you could love."

H S leaned in and narrowed his eyes. "Now you're letting me down. Don't tell me what I want to hear. Tell me what you
really
think."

Allie heard Connor growl at her side and his fingers closed protectively over her shoulder. That action shouldn't have felt so welcome. Just because he'd claimed her, didn't make it so. But having someone support her
was
comforting. No one had ever been wholeheartedly on her side before. Her life, up until now, had been filled with strategic alliances that could end in a heartbeat. Somehow, she felt that Connor wasn't like that. Once he gave his loyalty, it was for life.

Hell no, she didn't know any such thing. It was just her deepest need being projected onto him. All she knew for sure was that he was a possessive alpha-male who had no trouble committing crimes that chilled her blood. It was the stranger in her, the cat, who trusted this man, not the
real
Allie. She knew better than to trust strangers who called themselves friends.

But still, having his unspoken support in this helped her throw caution to the wind. H S's approval could come and go depending on her actions, depending on his mood, so it was worthless to
try
to stay in his good books. Compromising herself never worked for her in the long run.

"All right. When I watched you fucking her, I was repulsed. My first thought was that it was an act of
bestiality
. I know that's awful and bitchy. I don't believe people should be measured by their looks, but that was my reaction to Godzilla. You made me feel sick fucking her. I feel yuk just looking at her." She lifted her chin and challenged H S to tear her to shreds for her superficial attitude.

Instead, he smiled triumphantly. "So, trust that reaction. It's based on your gut, which knows the truth. Meredith actually isn't that bad looking. She's had enough work done to correct most of her flaws. But she's Guild, as pure bred as they come. And your reaction to her is instinctive. The way a cat's first reaction is to hiss at a dog, even if it's never had experience with the species before. I think we're more attuned to our instincts than most humans, therefore we sense that something is 'wrong' with the Guild, even when they appear normal.

Allie thought about his words. Was that what was happening with Meredith? Did her gut tell her that sex between humans – or not quite humans like she and the Sons were – and whatever Meredith was, just wasn't right?

So how could H S do it?

"If that was true, Mr Haversham Smythe, how come it doesn't turn your stomach to have sex with her two or three times a week? Thinking of England can only get you so far. And you're not known for having a high sex-drive, so I have to discount the idea that you'd fuck anything on two legs."

She heard Connor snigger at her side. So, her straight-shooting was appreciated by him, at least.

"Call me Cam. And believe me, my stomach turns every time I look at her, no less fuck her. But in bed that turns to anger and violence, and luckily she likes S & M kink. If I tried for tenderness I'd vomit, even after a lifetime of living among those creatures." Cam paused and looked as if he was trying to make a decision. When he started speaking again his tone was different – more apprehensive.

"Let me try to explain myself a little to you, so you can understand how I do what I do.

"I've had a special purpose, right from the cradle. I just didn't know what
I
was
until I was activated at twelve. Up until then, all my father told me was that I was created to save the world from a terrible 'enemy', and that he'd do everything in his power to prepare me for that mission. When I was activated and then told I was a genetically engineered super-soldier with panther DNA, created and then thrown away by the Guild, I finally knew who the 'enemy' was that my father had been alluding to all my life: An organization I'd always known about because of my mother's family. It only confirmed what my gut had always told me about the Guild I knew.

"In a way, I was glad my adoptive mother, who was purebred Guild, died when I was a baby. It would have been hard to deal with the conflict between familial love and natural aversion." Cam paused and seemed lost in painful thoughts for a moment.

She was definitely warming to this guy. He wasn't nearly as cold as he made out. What would it have been like to have the weight of the world on your shoulders from childhood? To be told you were the One, like Neo in the Matrix, who was going to save the world. No kid needed that kind of pressure.

When he went on, Cam's voice was strong again. "What you have to understand about me, Alice, is that I was raised from birth knowing there was an enemy out there I was meant to fight. I just never joined the dots. I never considered my aversion to my mother's family, and the rest of the Guild I'd met over the years, meant
they
were the 'enemy'. I guess because I thought I was one of them back then, if only a lowly half-breed. When I was activated, I suddenly had my gut, or my cat's instincts, validated. From then on I found it easy to pick the monsters out in any crowd. Not just because they were always the arrogant, entitled ones, but because they were ugly to me. The more pure their blood, the uglier they appear. So, by the time I met Meredith, I knew
what
she was and just how pure her bloodline was.

"Of course, she has some human DNA. They all have, because the first of their kind to come to earth were all males and they had to breed with human women to sustain their race here. Since then they've interbred on occasion and tainted their gene pool even more, but it's frowned upon. The lower echelons have done more of that than the upper, so they look more human. Some studies undertaken by the Résistance posit that as much as a third of the human race has at least some of their DNA. The more of their DNA we have, the less active the sensorimotor cortices and limbic and para-limbic systems in the brain are."

"Keep it simple. This isn't about showing off your superior education, you prat," Connor growled.

Cam sighed in frustration. "The more of their blood runs in human veins the less empathetic the person is. Without empathy humans hurt others without compunction."

"Like sociopaths and psychopaths," Allie put in, finally getting her head around what Cam was saying.

"Yes, there is a hypothesis, as yet unproven, that those with such attributes have more non-terrestrial DNA than the norm."

Cam paused again and used the time to pick imaginary lint off his sweatpants. His long, square fingers were so like Connors that for a moment she felt as if it had been those hands that had covered her mouth and cupped her breast.

This clone business was going to get confusing. Although her cat didn't have any problem determining which brother was which.