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Mica wasn’t surprised, and that was really troubling. The fact that she wasn’t surprised, that Ely hadn’t shocked her, should have worried her.
“He obviously still has the attitude, but not the title, but why are you so intimidated? He doesn’t have the power without the title.”
Ely’s lips did twitch then. “Is that what you believe, Mica? That all it takes is the title? Do you believe the Breeds follow blindly?”
She stared back at the scientists silently.
“Mica, to follow a pack leader, a Breed has to have much more than a title. It’s the strength, the ability to lead and the strength to lead properly. You may not see it, but I’m damned sure you’ve sensed it. And other Breeds feel it. As though the acknowledgment of such strength is coded into our DNA.” A rueful smile tugged at her lips. “Some things are simply inherent, perhaps?”
Breed head games, she hated them.
“And some things are simply male, but, I’m not going to stand here and argue Breed points with you. I have to do that enough with Cassie when she’s deliberating Breed Law and forming arguments for it.”
Cassie was like a super genius when forming the legal parameters and arguments for Breed Law. But she still insisted on someone to debate her arguments with, and she never failed to insist on Mica to play devil’s advocate.
“Be intimidated, Mica,” the Breed doctor warned her confidently. “He’s not a typical enforcer any more than he’s a typical Breed. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can control him as easily as you control Cassie.”
A start of surprise jerked through her and she frowned, her lips parting to question the doctor indignantly regarding her statement.
She had never even attempted to control Cassie, and she wouldn’t have succeeded if she had. No one controlled Cassie, even her parents.
“Fine, whatever.” She gave a hard shrug and saved the anger for later.
She’d been doing that for years. Saving the anger for later. For when there were no damned Breeds around to smell it, become nosy of it and begin suspecting her of betrayal.
She didn’t blame them for their paranoia. They’d been betrayed by friends, by those they called family, and by those they trusted their lives to. She simply didn’t want to give them a reason to suspect, or a reason to bar her from Haven or Sanctuary and her parents from the safety the two Breed communities provided.
Her family was aligned with the Breeds; they would never be completely safe. Her parents were even discussing selling their ranch and moving into Haven to ensure the family’s safety as her father grew older.
She couldn’t endanger that. She wouldn’t allow herself to endanger it. But if she weren’t very very careful with Navarro, then that was exactly what she would do.
CHAPTER 7
Navarro sat on the steel gurney, the thin padding that cushioned the cold metal doing little to obliterate the reminder of the same gurneys once used at the Genetics Council labs. The only exception was the fact that the Council hadn’t bothered to pad the steel, or to hang around the labs the bright, childish drawings that Ely had hung on the partitions surrounding her examination area.
He was wrong, the only real resemblance to the labs was the steel gurneys, but that was more than enough. Any reminder of those hellholes was too much for even those Breeds who hadn’t suffered the full measure of the scientists’, trainers’ and guards’ brutality.
The one he had been created in, high in the Andes Mountains, had been one of the worst.
His jaw tightened. Deliberately, he tried to push those memories behind him and focus on now and the question of mating heat.
He dressed once again, blood samples, saliva and semen having been collected, as well as skin and hair scrapings, which contained the minute, all but invisible silken body hair Breeds possessed.
In the thirteen years since Callan Lyons had stood before reporters, his mate Merinus at his side, and revealed the secret experiments that had been going on for more than a century in the creation of the Breeds, mating heat had become an imperative secret.
“Let me get your blood pressure, pulse and a few other readings and we’ll be finished,” Ely promised as she came toward him, her assistant pushing a lab cart behind her.
He remained still and silent, forcing himself to relax, to accept the electrodes on his chest, at his temples and his back. To hold out his arm for the pressure cuff, and his finger for the heart rate monitor.
“What happened to the simple stuff? Blood, saliva and semen?” He stared down at the cuff, resigned to the fact that to get the answers he wanted, he would have to deal with it. He didn’t have to like it. He didn’t have to like the memories the tests evoked, but he’d been trained to endure them.
Ely gave a muttered little snort, a sound filled with both frustration as well as resignation. “Evidently you haven’t been paying attention to your friends in the past few years, Navarro.”
Oh, he had, he just hadn’t wanted to admit what he was seeing.
His brow arched as though he was still unaware of that was going on. As though he was going to convince her he’d been living under a rock? It wasn’t going to happen.
Her head lifted, her brown eyes so confidently knowing he almost grinned. She knew he knew, but he wanted confirmation.
