“No attachment,” Brock muttered around a low curse. “You can say that again, man. Maybe you can give me some pointers on that don’t-give-a-damn-about-anything attitude of yours. I’m thinking it would come in real fucking handy from time to time. Especially when it comes to women.”

With a growl, he tossed his gear onto the bunk at his left, then scrubbed his palm over his face and the top of his head. The groan that leaked out of him was ripe with frustration and the pent-up lust he’d been stifling since he’d forced himself to walk away from Jenna and the temptation he sorely didn’t need.

“Damn,” he ground out, his body thrumming all over again from just the remembered image of her beautiful face, tipped up to look at him.

If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought she’d been waiting for him to kiss her. Everything male inside him had been clamoring with that certainty at the time, but he knew it would be the last thing Jenna needed.

She was confused and vulnerable, and he supposed he was a better man than the one who might take advantage of that fact simply because his libido craved a taste of her. Of course, that didn’t make him feel any better about the raging hard-on that was suddenly coming back to life again, honor be damned.

“Way to go, hero,” he berated himself tightly. “Now you’re gonna need to soak in a tub of ice water for a week to pay for being noble.”

“Are you unwell?” Hunter asked, startling Brock to realize the other male was still standing behind him in the room.

“Yeah,” Brock said, giving a sardonic chuckle. “I am unwell, all right. If you want to know the truth, I’ve been unwell since the moment I laid eyes on her.”

“The human female,” Hunter replied with grim understanding. “It is apparent that she is a problem for you.”

Brock blew out a humorless sigh. “You think?”

“Yes, I do.” There was no judgment in the answer, only level statement of fact. He spoke like a machine: total precision, zero feeling. “I presume everyone in the tech lab reached the same conclusion today, when you allowed Chase to provoke your anger over his comments regarding your attachment to the woman. Your actions showed a weakness in your training, and worse, a lack of self-control. You reacted carelessly.”

“Thanks for noticing,” Brock replied, suspecting his sarcasm was wasted on the unsociable, unflappable Hunter. “Remind me to bust your balls from here to next week if you ever loosen up enough to let a woman get under your skin.”

Hunter didn’t react, merely stared at him without a speck of emotion. “That will not happen.”

“Shit,” Brock said, shaking his head at the rigid Gen One soldier who’d been raised on neglect and punishing discipline. “You obviously haven’t been with the right woman if you can sound so sure of yourself.”

Hunter’s expression remained stoic. Distant and detached. In fact, the longer Brock looked at him, the more clearly he began to see the truth. “Holy hell. Have you ever been with a woman, Hunter? My God … you’re a virgin, aren’t you?”

The Gen One’s golden eyes stayed fixed on Brock’s gaze as though he considered it a test of will that he not permit the revelation to affect him. And Brock had to hand it to the guy, not a single degree of emotion flickered in those uncanny eyes, nor in the perfectly schooled features of his face.

The only thing that made Hunter flinch was the soft shuffle of slippered feet that sounded from the corridor outside. A child’s voice—Mira—called into the living room.

“Hunter, are you here?”

He turned without offering an excuse and went to meet the little girl. “Now is not a convenient time,” Brock heard him tell her in that deep, level tone of his.

“But don’t you want to know what happens when Harry puts on the invisibility cloak?” Mira asked, disappointment dimming her normally bright voice. “It’s one of my favorite parts of the whole book. You have to hear this chapter. You’re gonna love it.”

“She’s right, that is one of the best parts.” Brock came out of the bunk room, not sure what made him grin more—the realization that the stone-cold, Gen One assassin was an untried virgin, or the newer, equally amusing idea that the appointment Brock had apparently interrupted by coming to drop off his gear was Hunter’s reading hour with the compound’s youngest resident.

He gave Mira a wink and a smile as she plopped herself onto the sofa and cracked open the book to the place she’d left off. “Relax,” he told Hunter, who stood there, stiff as a statue. “I’m not going to tell anyone your secrets.”

He didn’t wait to check for a reaction, just strolled out to the corridor and left Hunter staring in his wake.

CHAPTER

Eleven

Cross your fingers, you guys, but I think we may have just gotten the lead we’ve been looking for.” Dylan hung up the phone and spun her desk chair around to face Jenna, Alex, Renata, and Savannah, all of whom had been gathered in the Breedmates’ meeting room for the past couple of hours.

Actually, to call it a meeting room hardly did it justice. No less than half a dozen computer workstations sat at the ready on a long table at the back of the room. Boxes of manila files were organized by location and housed in a tall bookcase for easy access. Nearly every inch of wall space was covered with highlighted, pin-dotted maps of New England and detailed investigation charts that would have put most police cold case units to shame. Among those maps and charts were several expertly hand-drawn sketches of young women—faces of a few of the missing, whom the Order and their diligent Breedmates were determined to find.

No, Jenna thought as she took in her surroundings, this was no mere meeting room.

This was a room devoted to strategy, mission, and war.

Jenna welcomed the energy of the place, especially after the disturbing news she’d gotten about her blood work. She had also needed a distraction from thinking about the unexpectedly heated moments she’d shared with Brock in his—or, rather, her—quarters in the compound. She had all but jumped at the chance to get out of there after he’d left. It had been Alex who came looking for her not long afterward, and it was Alex who brought Jenna with her to the Breedmates’ war room for some companionship and conversation.

She hadn’t wanted to get interested in the work the women of the Order were involved in, but as she sat there among them, it was next to impossible for the cop in her to ignore the scent of a good information chase. She sat up a bit straighter in her chair at the conference table as Dylan walked over to a laser printer and grabbed the sheet of paper that slid into the output tray.

“What’ve you got?” Savannah asked.

Dylan slapped the printed page down on the table in front of the gathered women. “Sister Margaret Mary Howland.”

Jenna and the others leaned in to look at the scanned image. It was a group photograph of a dozen or so young women and girls. From the style of their clothes, it appeared to have been taken perhaps twenty years ago. The group was gathered on the lawn below the steps of a wide covered porch, the kind of organized pose that schoolkids were sometimes corralled into for an annual class picture. Except in this case, it wasn’t a school behind them but a large, unassuming house proclaiming itself to be the St. John’s Home for Young Women, Queensboro, New York.

A kindly faced, middle-aged woman wearing a cross pendant and a modest summer dress stood just to the side of the group assembled under the white eave that bore the painted sign. One of the youngest girls stood with the older woman, her thin shoulders held in a caring grasp, her little face upturned and beaming with affection.