Harmony's Way (22 page)

Jonas. Dane. The killing in Pinon. They were all connected somewhere. Somehow. And Alonzo. He had seen the fanatical hatred in the reverend’s eyes and knew they hadn’t seen the last of him.

“I’m finished.” Harmony stalked into the office and slapped the reports on his desk as he turned to her.

He glanced at the clock. It was close enough to midnight to leave for the night. He had finished the paperwork waiting on him and his second-in-command had shown up early.

“Did you have dinner?” he asked with a frown.

She didn’t eat enough, and that bothered him. How she managed to keep going on the amount of food and rest she took in amazed the hell out of him.

“Yes. I ate.” She frowned heavily. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Nothing, because I doubt you ate enough to keep a bird alive. Let’s go. You can eat with me before we head to the house.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Well, I am, and I hate eating alone.” At least she was following him—that surprised him.

“You’re getting too bossy to suit me,” she informed him, moving to his side as they neared the lobby doors.

“I’m not bossy, ask anyone,” he growled. “I’m as easygoing as they come.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t eating when you made that little statement.” She gave a mock cough. “I would have choked.”

He threw her a glare as they moved through the night, the summer night surrounding them, the hint of rain bringing a relief from summer’s heat.

“Let’s go—”

“Sheriff Jacobs?”

Lance turned at the sound of the county prosecutor’s voice.

He turned to watch as she moved out of her vehicle and walked toward them.

“Stephanie.” He nodded in greeting. “You’re out late.”

“I had to come into the office late.” Her smile was strained as she nodded in Harmony’s direction. “Alonzo’s lawyer just bailed out Ms. Lancaster’s assailant.”

“He was slow,” Lance grunted. “I expected that earlier.”

“He also bailed Tommy Mason.” She dropped her bombshell with a grimace. “We just released him from lockup.”

“Well, low and behold, the U.S. justice system prevails once again.” Harmony’s snide comment had Lance mirroring Stephanie’s grimace.

“He’s only out on bail,” she assured Harmony. “The trial will be another matter.”

“Good luck there.” Harmony leaned against the front of the Raider, watching the prosecutor mockingly. “Personally, my money is on Alonzo. He knows how to hire lawyers, Ms. Atwater, and if Mason is part of his organization, then Alonzo will see to it that he goes free.”

“Like hell.” Lance turned to her then. “Not here, Harmony. Not in this case. Tommy fired on officers and we have your testimony that he was holding his wife hostage. He won’t get out of it.”

“Then he’ll disappear into Alonzo’s organization and you’ll be lucky if you ever catch up with him.” She shrugged as though it didn’t matter. “So much for the promise I made to that kid, huh? I bet he’s real safe right now.” Lance saw the shadows of pain and rage burning in her eyes when she turned that bright, false smile up at him. “So, did you mention dinner? I’m hungry.”

She wasn’t hungry, she was brooding. He could see it in her.

“Lance, I’m really sorry about this,” Stephanie said softly. “The bail was ridiculously high. We had no idea Alonzo would step in like this.”

Lance sighed wearily. “Let’s pray he sticks to his routine and spends a few nights drinking and having fun before he goes home. I’ll have the deputies keep an eye on him and see if we can’t pull him back in.”

Stephanie nodded her dark head in agreement, her brown eyes concerned as she stared at Harmony.

“Bring him back in, Lance, and we’ll keep him this time.”

Harmony snorted at that.

“Thanks again, Stephanie.”

She nodded again before turning and moving back to her car. Lance turned to Harmony, taking in her emotionless features, her raging eyes as she watched the other woman leave.

“Have you slept with her?” She turned her gaze to him, arching her brow as though curious.

“Did I ask if you’ve slept with Dane?” he growled. “And what does that have to do with anything?”

“And if I have slept with Dane?” The question wasn’t a comfortable one. “I wasn’t a virgin when I came to your bed, Lance.”

“This has nothing to do with Mason, Harmony,” he snapped.

“Mason is a moot point.” She lifted her shoulder negligently.

“And that means?”

“Exactly what I said,” she told him coldly. “And since I can tell you have slept with her, I should warn you, I could get very jealous. Are you ready to go now?”

She swung away from him, moving with flowing grace around the Raider before jerking the door open and stepping inside. Lance followed suit, feeling the tension mounting inside him as he heard the wailing moan on the wind. It wasn’t one of pain, or one of fear. It was the sound of the dead.

The drive to the house was made in silence. Harmony could feel the fears and the rage growing inside her. She had asked Jaime Mason to trust her. To disobey his father and she would make certain he was gone forever. Only to have Alonzo free him.

Justice. Even Death’s justice sucked. She couldn’t make a move, either as an officer of the law, or as Death, until Tommy Mason struck out at his child. It was the one boundary she had never crossed. And now she was paying for it.

As they stepped into the house, Harmony turned to Lance, watching as he set the alarm before turning to her.

“We were followed.” The look on his face was savage.

“Yes. We were.” Harmony loosened the Velcro straps that held her holster to her thigh before removing the belt from her hips and heading toward her bedroom.

She was only a few feet from the doorway before a manacle clamped around her upper arm and she was pushed against the wall.

Surprise and heat sizzled through her at the dominance reflected in his dark expression and tightening his normally sensual, full lips.

“As you said earlier, you’re a big girl,” he stated, his voice rasping. “Don’t do something stupid at this point and let him get the jump on you. He will take you, Harmony. You can’t trust him.”

“He’s trying to protect me…”

“Bullshit! He’s trying to protect himself for some reason,” he snarled. “Just like Jonas, Harmony. There’s something Dane wants. There’s a reason why he’s pulled your ass out every damned time the Council managed to capture you. Haven’t you ever asked yourself how he knew where you were, the fact that you were taken? According to you, you have no friends. Why did he do it?”

It was a question that plagued her more and more often.

“There’s always a job to do,” she retorted, hearing the flimsiness of her excuse. “Something he needs me for.”

“A job he couldn’t do on his own? He could rescue you from Coyotes, but he couldn’t do whatever he sent you out for?”

Harmony shook her head desperately. “There’s nothing I have that anyone could know about.”

“Do you really believe no one but the scientists you killed in those labs knew about the information you stole?” he growled. “What about the rest of the information you had? You stole a computer hard drive, hard copies of experiments and reports, as well as the information on the first Leo. What other secrets are you hiding, Harmony?”

She stared back at him in confusion. He was destroying her preconceived notions, just as Dane was destroying her trust in him. She had always depended on Dane, she realized then. Had always known that somehow, some way, he had her back.

“I don’t know,” she finally answered. “The files on the hard drive are encrypted and I couldn’t break the code. The only thing I was certain of were that the hard copies of the information on the first Leo were the only proof in existence that he lived. Madame LaRue was too triumphant, too assured of herself to have made a mistake and let the information out.”

“And you’re protecting him.” His hands loosened on her arms, but his body held her firmly in place. “You spend your fucking life killing to protect others. Who protects you, Harmony, that you don’t first have to pay a price?”

“There’s always a price to be paid.” She had accepted that long ago. Even before her escape from the labs, before she had met Dane or learned the ways of the world she lived in. “If the first Leo is alive, then he deserves to live in peace. In what safety he’s found.” Leo was her forefather, her only connection to a lineage; she couldn’t allow him to be destroyed, any more than she could have allowed Jonas to be destroyed.

“The price you’re getting ready to pay is unacceptable.”

Harmony shivered at the low, raspy tone of his voice and the heavy, aroused dominance that filled his face.

“And, by God, you won’t be paying it alone,” he continued a second before his head lowered.

Her response was instantaneous. She had never known hunger, never known need until Lance. This hunger, this need, was all consuming, terrifying, and sent her arching to him as her lips opened beneath his.

It wasn’t a long, hungry kiss. They were short, desperate kisses as his hands released her to tug at her shirt, to fight to pull the material over her head.

Did she hear material rip?

Hell, she didn’t care. He was no less desperate to get her naked than she was to get the clothes from his body.

She wasn’t a fool. She knew how very close she had come to being taken from him. But one thing about it, eventually she would have awakened and she would have fought through hell itself to be back here.

Right here in Lance’s arms.

“Fucking shirt has to go.” He tore his lips from hers, leaning back long enough to finish tearing it down the front. So it had been her shirt ripping.

He pushed the material to the side, baring her swollen, lace-covered breasts as he stared down at them with a drowsy, erotic expression.

“Good Lord, I love your breasts.” His hands framed the rapidly rising and falling mounds. “And your sweet, pretty nipples.”

His fingers ran beneath the soft lace before lowering it, using the bra to frame her flesh as he revealed it.

“There. Just like that,” he crooned.

Her head tipped back as his lips swooped down, taking a hard tip beneath them as he lifted her in his arms and began moving.

“I need you,” she panted, feeling the flames building in her womb, shooting to her pussy. “I need you now.”

“You’ll have me. Now.”

Before she could do more than gasp, he had her on her feet, turned, then pressed to the bed.

“Get on your knees.”

A shudder shook her at the submissiveness of the position she knew he wanted from her. He pushed her shoulders down as one hand gripped her pants.

Within seconds her lower body was bare and he was moving, kneeling behind her.

For some reason, she had expected foreplay. Except for the one event in his office, Lance was always very big on foreplay.

But there was no foreplay.

She screamed as she felt his cock penetrate the liquid heat of her vagina. Her back arched, the long wail of agonizing pleasure that tore from her would have shocked her if she’d had enough sense to think at the moment.

“You’re still so fucking tight you kill me,” he snarled as he gripped her hips, his own shifting, stroking her inside, sending shooting fragments of pleasure to torment her nerve endings.

She was so full. He was hot, hard, and he took her breath with the pleasure that suffused her, the emotion that built inside her.

His control was gone. How he had sustained it this long she wasn’t certain, but it was shot. She could feel it. Gloried in it.

As he began to move, the heavy length of his cock fucking into her with hard-driving strokes, Harmony could do nothing but brace herself, fight for breath and take him.

She was helpless beneath him. Lost in a world of sudden, irrevocable pleasure with no beginning and no end. There was only Lance and the brilliant heat of his touch, his possession.

“Damn you. Are you going to let them take this from us, Harmony?” He thrust inside her hard and deep, each impalement taking her breath, stealing another part of her ability to think. To reason. “Are you going to let anyone take this from you?”

The orgasm, when it hit, was unexpected. His arm curled beneath her; his fingers found the blistering ache of her clitoris and stroked it with devastating results.

She knew she screamed his name. She felt her muscles tighten then dissolve as excruciating pleasure whipped through her. Stars exploded around her and she was lost in the chaos. The pleasure. Her head thrown back as she let her body, her senses, absorb every pounding thrust that elevated her release.

She was lost and she knew it. The sexual dominance that had lurked just beneath the surface was free. Lance wasn’t a man to be crossed; she had known that all along. He wasn’t a man who would stand back and hope for the best.

And he wasn’t standing back now.

“We’re not finished.” The rough statement, delivered in a graveled, hungry voice, had her womb clenching and her breath catching.

“Wait…” Just a moment. Just long enough for the violent sensitivity to ease within the muscles clenching his thick cock.

“For what?” He leaned over her, holding her still as his thighs flexed, causing the throbbing crest of his erection to stroke her internally. “What am I waiting for, Harmony? For you to think? For you to trust someone who will fucking destroy us?”

His hips jerked against her, driving him deeper as her breath shuddered in her chest and her fists knotted into the blankets beneath her.

“For some bastard to decide you’re better off without
me
?”

“No!” The agonizing emotion she heard in his voice tore at her heart as she felt his lips at her neck, his breathing hard, harsh at her ear.

And she felt his pain. His fear. The scent of it wrapped around her, mingling with his determination, his strength.

“Mine.” He nipped her ear as she felt the slow retreat of his cock, rasping over burning nerve endings. “Do you hear me, Harmony? You’re fucking mine!”

The latter part of the declaration came with a hard, quick thrust that had her bucking beneath him. Oh God, it was so good. The whipping tendrils of pleasure seemed to flare from her sensitized pussy along the rest of her body. Her nipples ached, her clit began to throb in renewed need and her flesh began to sensitize to the point that she could feel the air against it, moving over it. Another caress. Another pleasure that had her crying for more, muted little feline growls leaving her throat.