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watch a snake, expecting her to strike at any time.
    He had touched her heart that night, with the scar slashing across his forehead, over his eyelid, and onto his cheek. With his sexy, sensual lips and whiskey brown eyes, his obvious discomfort with a smile.
    But she had made him smile that night. Not a whole, unbridled smile. A tentative smile, as though he were trying it out first, waiting to see if it was going to hurt.
    Three weeks. He had come into her life just three weeks before, and he had become such a part of it that now she wondered how she was going to do without him.
    She looked at the window again. She really should run from him.
    A tear slid down her cheek instead, because she couldn't run from him. But she could never have him, either.
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    CHAPTER SIX

     
    It wasn't a nightmare. The next morning Grace awoke to the knowledge that she couldn't just escape the events from the night before any more than she could escape Matthias, and she couldn't run from them.
    She brushed her hair and teeth, stared at her pale reflection, then grimaced and headed to the kitchen. She could smell coffee, and she was dying for it. The need for caffeine was crawling through her system, with the same craving that desire for Matthias was clenching between her thighs.
    Dreams had tormented her through the night. Dreams, nothing, she had been tormented with visions of sexual delights that had her blushing at the thought of them. She should have had nightmares of blood and death, not dreams about what that bulge beneath those black leather pants could do to her.
    "Good morning." He came to his feet from the kitchen table, another pair of leather pants covering his muscular legs. His feet and chest were bare.
    Grace stared at the broad, hairless chest, as she came to a sudden stop. She'd been wanting to see that nipple ring she had glimpsed under his T-shirt. Now that she was seeing it, her mouth watered, her lips tingled with the need to capture it, to tug on it.
    But as sexy as the sight of it was, nothing could detract from the thin white scars that crisscrossed his chest and abdomen.
    He pulled a shirt from the back of the chair and shrugged it on, covering the horrific scars. They weren't thick and ridged, but they crisscrossed his flesh like a road map.
    "Sorry about that." He turned away from her, walking across the cheerful, bright kitchen, buttoning the black shirt. "I made coffee."
    She couldn't help it. Grace moved quickly across the room, facing him as he turned back to her.
    "I have to see it," she whispered, her fingers going to the buttons of his shirt. "All of it, Matthias. You don't have the right to hide it from me now."
    His hard, sharply defined features tightened, as her fingers undid the buttons of his shirt. She pushed the cotton shirt from his wide shoulders, and tossed it over a chair.
    "Did he do this?" she whispered, her fingertips touching the evidence of the cruelty he had experienced.
    Some of the scars were older, almost invisible. Tough, darkly tinted flesh rippled under her touch, as he glared down at her.
    "He enjoyed using the whip. The scientists needed to know under what conditions we couldn't fight or complete our objectives. We were put through a variety of simulations. Torture being the favorite of them all. If we didn't succeed in the objective given us, we died."
    Her breath hitched in her throat, as tears flooded her eyes. She followed the scars on his chest, his side, then moved around him to stare at his back.
    "Oh, God, Matthias." The scarring was worse on his back.
    She leaned her forehead against his back, clenching her eyes tight at the incredible pain he must have endured.
    "It doesn't hurt any longer, Grace," he assured her.
    Grace lifted her head, her gaze going to his shoulders. On his left shoulder was the Breed marker. A genetic shadow of a paw print. Within that print, four blood-red teardrops had been tattooed into his flesh. Around the paw, a precise tattoo of what appeared to