The Purest of the Breed (The Community) by Tracy Tappan

rule and, wham , taken her anyway. Women had been strictly prohibited to Jaċken, but being around Tonĩ had just about driven the tightly disciplined man insane, and Dev himself had let a case of horniness convince him that he’d wanted her. But now, wham , he’d met and smelled this woman, Marissa, and every cell in his body was tangled up and screaming for her, making him… Shit, that’s what his problem was this morning; this was the something wrong that he hadn’t been able to put his finger on. His Vârcolac instincts were already homed in on Marissa, claiming her as his , so being apart from her felt about the same as being separated from a limb.
    Gábor’s brows and mouth lowered in a frown. “You better not be screwing around with me over something like this, Nichita.”
    “I’m not.” Dev leveled a look at the warrior. “You need to back off, Gábor.” If the man made any move on Marissa or, God forbid, touched her, Dev would tear into him with all the finesse of Norman Bates with a Tasmanian devil shoved up his ass. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself. And that would be a damned shame. “I’m asking you to back down.”
    Gábor exhaled coarsely. “You could’ve asked nicely.”

 
    Chapter Ten
     
    Marissa tossed her head, sending her new dangly earrings dancing against her throat as she stepped up to the bar tucked into a corner of the mansion’s garden parlor. Setting her empty glass on the counter, she smiled brilliantly at the bartender. “Another Cosmopolitan, please.”
    “Yes, miss.” The white-jacketed fellow kept his eyes studiously pinned on his blender, but even with the don’t-gawp-at-her precaution, his cheeks turned splotchy with color.
    She tucked back another smile. She looked hot tonight, knew it and felt it, dressed in a clingy, short cocktail dress, plain black in color and simple in design, with only a row of rhinestones edging the scooped neckline and plunging back. Rarely did she show so much of her back due to the ugly birthmark near her spine…and some of her vertebrae appeared sort of lumpy. Luckily, the back of the dress didn’t plummet low enough to expose all of that, but definitely low enough to make a bra impossible. Her boobs were young and firm, though, so the look worked. She also had exceptionally perky nipples, which made the whole braless-thing obvious, and, well…extremely sexy.
    She leaned an elbow against the bar while she waited for her drink, scanning the room. Heck, the half a million bucks she’d been offered today was probably chump change to these people. The garden parlor was as elegant as every other room in this mansion she would call home for the next year. Huge fake palm trees soared in every corner, fainting couches and daintily flowered chairs were arranged artfully on plush, velvety emerald carpet, cut crystal vases filled with a rainbow selection of fresh roses sat on every available surface, along with branching silver candelabra. Exquisite crown molding and heavily brocaded curtains framed floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of…yep, that was a cave out there. Freaky.
    As a part of their negotiation meeting with Tonĩ Parthen, she and Hadley had been given a tour of the facilities, starting with the non-classified areas of the research institute. She’d watched from behind glass as white-lab-coated scientists puttered about in their quest to understand certain genetic anomalies. Fascinating . Apparently, it was also dangerous; the institute had gone toe-to-toe with pharmaceutical companies in the past—their lab topside had even been sabotaged—which explained the need for underground secrecy and security. How she, Hadley, and Kendra played into this was more frightening than Marissa had originally imagined. She’d assumed they’d been kidnapped for white slavery purposes, but the three of them had actually been marked for illegal genetic testing by the institute’s competitors. Thank goodness the institute’s