Their laughter was good-natured and teasing, but Chelsea caught the thoughtful look on Cassie’s face before it was quickly replaced by amusement. There was something the other two weren’t telling her, some secret they all seemed to share where Cullen was concerned.
If they believed that deeply that he somehow cared for her as more than a friend, then they were wrong. He’d had four years to figure it out if he did. The fact that he hadn’t proved her suspicions. Cullen might desire her, definitely wanted to protect her. But he didn’t love her and his lust wasn’t enough—
Unfortunately it was all he was willing to give her.
CHAPTER 7
From Graeme’s Journal
Recessed Primal Genetics and Mating Heat
Wild and unpredictable, the recessed Primal genetics are like the animal itself—waiting, stalking and ready to pounce with deadly force—
Four weeks into the operation to identify any unknown Breeds and their target, and still she and her team hadn’t been able to narrow the list of possibilities. Cassie of course headed the list of targets; the price on her head was highest. Ashley ran a close second. After that, Alpha Reever, Cullen’s brother, the Western Division’s director, and the highest-profile Breeds in the area brought the list to over a dozen.
Until she could find a parameter, a name—hell, she’d love to find a loose-lipped Genetics Council puppet willing to spill a few secrets. That was just her favorite scenario. Finding the Genetics Council Breeds or their potential abduction targets wasn’t coming easy at all.
There were suspected Council Breeds in the area, but anywhere Breeds congregated, there were suspected spies, especially if Coyote Breeds were among them.
Tracking down the source of the information had proven impossible, and actually identifying a Council spy and getting him to talk was even more so.
Entering the house a week later, Chelsea headed to the shower, hoping to clear her head. If she didn’t manage to find the answers soon, Director Breaker would shut her down as quickly as he’d given her the go-ahead on it.
The attack the week before hadn’t helped matters in the least. Now her team as well as the director seemed suspicious that she’d somehow given herself away as she navigated within the underground world of contacts and information. Chasing down rumors of Breeds. That had been her primary focus in the Breed Underground. Though she’d been searching for Breeds seeking safety rather than spies, she admitted.
She’d been part of the Breed Underground since she was sixteen years old and still worked with them occasionally. Going covert was just about a requirement for the job.
She hadn’t given herself away.
So why had she been targeted that night? And why was it suddenly impossible for her to gain information that she’d been accessing easily in the ten years prior?
She’d begun working with the Breed Underground just after Cullen’s wife, Lauren, had died from the cancerous tumors they’d found in her brain. Cullen had worked with the Breed Underground only rarely at that point, though if needed, the few Breed agents he had were assigned to aid certain Breed Underground cases.
He’d worked one of the cases when she first joined, and she remembered being sent home immediately when she’d arrived at the meeting. When she protested, he told her he didn’t think her family needed to lose another of its daughters. Especially because of foolish courage.
Because he had lost Lauren, he thought it was perfectly okay to shatter her dream of working with him and send her home as though she were a child. Her knowledge that Lauren had only tried to use his love, she had kept to herself. He’d been hurt enough, she’d told herself painfully. No matter how angry she was, she wouldn’t hurt him more.
Her cousin had always been a bit superior, a little smug, but in the year before her death, she’d become cruel and cutting, seeking to hurt everyone and anyone she could focus on.
Especially her husband.
Unknown to her father, Chelsea had learned Cullen was a Breed before he’d ever married Lauren. It had been that first night Cullen had arrived in the Nation. She’d overheard them talking as she watched from the darkness in the other room, and her father had called him a Breed.
A year or so later she’d been practicing the survival skills she’d been learning, when she followed her father one night into the desert. There, he’d met with several Navajo, their faces obscured by shadowed markings, and Cullen.
“I may be recessed, but I’m still a Breed,” Cullen had stated in reply to her father’s doubt that Council Breeds were in the area searching for someone. “They can’t sense me, but I can damned sure sense them.”
Chelsea had remained silent, a shadow within a shadow as her grandfather had been teaching her. When the meeting concluded and her father returned to the house, Chelsea had remained hidden, sensing that perhaps all the men he’d met with hadn’t left the area.
She remembered the feeling of another presence, not a danger, but watching, waiting. And someone had been. They’d outwaited her, so still and silent in the night that after two hours she was certain she had been wrong.
Still, she’d been careful creeping back to the house and into her room. Two days later, her father and her cousin Lincoln Martinez had been waiting when she came home from school, aware of the meeting she’d overheard. And from that day, her cousins had taken over her training.
Her father had worried; he still worried. Her grandfather railed at her constantly for putting herself in the slightest danger, while her sister, Isabelle, always remained quiet but concerned.
The phone calls and visits she’d received from her family after Cullen learned of the attack just pissed her off. Her grandfather’s mutterings that the winds were failing him because he hadn’t known of it, her father’s angry demands that she stop whatever she was doing and her sister’s quiet concern had gotten on her nerves fast.
Stepping from the shower, she quickly dried her body and then her hair before staring into the mirror silently. She was twenty-six years old and her family thought she was wasting her life chasing danger. But it wasn’t danger she was chasing.