Free Tanner's Scheme by Lora Leigh Page A

had brought a man to her bed, each time she had used her vibrator. She should be throwing up in disgust rather than creaming in excitement.
    “Why are you doing this? Did Sanctuary somehow miss a psychopath in their ranks?” She jerked away from him, trying to hide her reaction as her fingers knotted in the towel. “Are you forgetting who I am, Tanner? Scheme Tallant. Remember me? General Cyrus Tallant’s daughter? His right hand. Breed killer.” She was pushing it and she knew it. Tempting her own death, and it wouldn’t be a painless death if Tanner were the one meting it out.
    His nostrils flared, his eyes gleaming with predatory awareness as he advanced on her.
    This was why she’d fought to avoid him throughout the years. Why she had made certain there wasn’t so much as a chance meeting until that stupid ball. It was in his eyes now, primal, primitive, the same hunger she had felt growing within herself throughout the years. The more she tracked him on the television, received reports about him, the more he had fascinated her.
    “Are you forgetting how hot and wet you were in my hand?” he countered. “The feel of my fingers fucking you, stroking that tight little pussy until you came for me?”
    He stopped stalking her, but only because her back met the stone wall and there was no place left for her to go.
    “That was a mistake.” Oh yeah, big mistake. That was why every cell in her body was reaching out for him. Good going, Scheme, just keep up the good fight there, her inner voice of reason chided her.
    “The mistake is in lying to me, pretty girl,” he growled, his eyes flashing with a dangerous mix of lust, danger and anger. “Now, we’ll assume the good general has decided his daughter is no better than his coyotes and you’ve just become a liability. So why stay?”
    Ahh, the reasons. Just let her count them. Of course, it could take days.
    “And go where?” she asked. “By the time I was strong enough to run, your people were free and many of them would have eagerly killed me if they had caught me. They would have hunted me. Just as my father would have hunted me.”
    “You had enough information against him to turn evidence during the hearings in the Senate and secure your safety.”
    Scheme gave him a droll stare. “I was twenty years old, and I was still fighting the conditioning Father had used to raise me. When you train a child rather than raise it, Tanner, you condition it to certain things. I was conditioned. By the time I had the strength to break away, it was too late. And I knew it. He would have never let me live. And he’ll be even more determined now to see me dead.”
    To a point, it was the truth. Once she had found the strength to break her conditioning though, the hatred had been all she lived for. It was then that she had secretly met with Jonas Wyatt and made her bargain. In exchange for her complete safety when the time came, she would help him bring her father down. He had enough information now. And she had more that she had held back for insurance when that time came. She could have waited. She could have tried to gain the last vital pieces of information that she needed to access the inner sanctum of the Genetics Council, but her time had run out.
    If she didn’t get away from him soon and get to Jonas, then it would be too late for the pride leader’s son. And if that happened, then the Breeds world would quickly go to hell in a handbasket. Because nothing would restrain their rage then.
    Her time had run out. And Tanner was deceptive enough, merciless enough, that he could be trying to gain her trust for one reason only. To gain the information her father’s agent had sent, the location of the first Leo and his child. That information couldn’t get into the wrong hands. Until she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Tanner wasn’t her father’s spy, then she couldn’t trust. She couldn’t afford to ever trust her heart or her hunger again. Chaz had