The Breed Read online

  The Breed

  E. L. Anders

  SMASHWORDS EDITION

  * * * * *

  PUBLISHED BY:

  E. L. Anders on Smashwords

  The Breed

  Copyright © 2012 by E. L. Anders

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Author’s Note #1—Please note--while Lexie and Lukas are not genetically related, they have been raised as siblings and still think of each other as brother and sister. If this kind of relationship bothers you, this is NOT the book for you.

  Chapter One

  I woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat from a dream I could only remember in snatches. Eyes, silver eyes staring at me from the darkness. Watching me. Wanting me…No!

  I rolled over, determined not to let it bother me but the image wouldn’t leave my head. Silver eyes with vertical slits for pupils—they looked like a cat’s eyes but no cat I’d ever seen had silver irises. And they weren’t the eyes of an animal—there was something almost human about them. A knowing look. As though they were watching me, waiting for something…

  Okay, I had officially freaked myself out.

  “Lights, dim,” I said, sitting up in bed. My bedroom with its high, vaulted ceiling and antique furnishings was immediately revealed. Nothing but the best for the heiress of Conley Conglomerate.

  I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. I would read a little while and see if that would help dispel the dream. But as I reached for my e-reader specs, a nifty little pair of glasses that held over forty-thousand books on file and projected the page I wanted right before my eyes, I felt it starting.

  “No,” I groaned. “Not again!” But when I looked down at my thin white nightgown, I could see dark patches appearing on it, right over my breasts. Since I’d already ruined four nightgowns and several sets of very expensive Baaja linen sheets in the past month, I knew I couldn’t ignore what was happening. Sighing, I got up and went to the bathroom.

  My mother had redone the entire penthouse the year before she died and the bathroom was just one example of her good taste. I stood on periwinkle blue and agate green hand cut mosaic tiles in front of the wide silver mirror and pulled the nightgown over my head.

  Sure enough—I was leaking. And not just a little bit, either.

  I stared in dismay at the clear, pale yellow liquid that was flowing freely from both breasts. I knew (from doing research, not from experience) that it wasn’t a bit like breast milk. It was thick—almost syrupy—and it had a sweet scent—kind of like honey made by bees that had been kept in a lavender field. It was coming from my nipples which, up until about a month ago, had been a soft pink. Now they were a dark burgundy that looked alarming against my pale skin.

  My breasts were swollen and achy as well—to the point where I had to force myself to wear a bra. But there was no question of going without one—I was in charge of a large corporation. Not the CEO but the power behind the throne, just as my parents had intended. There was no way I could go to the office with large wet patches of…of breast honey, or whatever you wanted to call it staining my expensive silk blouse.

  “What’s wrong with me?” I whispered staring at my reflection in the mirror. I looked normal enough on the outside—for me, anyway. My exotically tilted pure black eyes and dramatic high cheekbones were framed with a long straight mane of white-blonde hair I usually kept in a tight bun at the back of my neck. I had a good body—or so I’d been told—athletic and curvy at the same time, although lately I was tending a lot more toward the curvy side. In fact, a lot of my favorite blouses no longer fit and I’d heard several of the staff at Conley Conglomerate whispering that I must have had one of those new anti-grav breast augmentations done.

  I only wished that was the reason for my recent breast growth—and that there was a similar explanation for the other strange changes my body was going through. In addition to my nipples changing color and leaking the pale, syrupy honey, the inner folds of my pussy were a deep burgundy too—the color of an exceptionally good red wine. And lately I was so swollen and sensitive between my legs I could barely stand to wear panties. That was only in the past week, however. The problem with my breasts had started over a month ago.

  The first time it happened I had panicked. Being a wealthy heiress to a Fortune five hundred company has its perks—I immediately made myself an appointment with the best endocrinologist in town. And since Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville had merged into one large urban sprawl called Torlanville back in 2035, it was a very large town indeed.

  I lived in the part that used to be Old Tampa and Doctor Varnes was closer to the Disney medical complex, (the Mouse House had diversified of late), so I rode my private car on the Bullet to meet him. It only took fifteen minutes to get there but I was freaking out all the way. I had a huge winter coat on even though the weather was sweltering—ninety in the shade which felt more like a hundred because of the Florida humidity. By the time I got inside his private office and slapped the door closed behind me, I was drenched in sweat.

  I was understandably upset but Doctor Varnes calmed me down. Placing a Magnetic Resonance helmet that looked like a very expensive white metal bucket on my head, he did a functional scan of my pituitary gland. He was looking for tumors—micro adenomas, he called them—but the results were absolutely negative. So he scanned the rest of my brain and saw nothing there either. He sent me to a neurologist who sent me to a breast specialist who wanted to send me to a medical school to be studied and have experimental treatments. But that was where I drew the line.

  According to every doctor I saw there was nothing technically wrong with me. Certainly my breasts had enlarged, my nipples had darkened and I was producing honey-like stuff at very inconvenient times but I had no tumors or cancers or malignancies and in every other way I was as healthy as a horse. Not a single one of them had any explanation for my problem but they all agreed I was fine. Well, if you can call being sensitive, achy and leaky fine. I didn’t, but what could I do? I started wearing larger bras with padding inside—breast pads that nursing mothers use to keep from ruining their clothes. No wonder my staff thought I’d had a boob job.

  My parents were dead and my brother Lukas was off being a playboy tycoon which was what he did best. My fiancé, Richlow Farnsworth, was at a conference in Sweden about the future of interplanetary banking and I never told him much of anything anyway. We’d been matched up by a dating service for the uber rich and we only saw each other rarely, which was, to tell the truth, kind of how I liked it.

  The only other person I could talk to was my best friend, Sylvia, a professor of Biology at the prestigious Disney U. Ever since college we’d made it a point to meet once a week no matter what but after my problems had started, I had cancelled on her for four weeks in a row. She’d finally called and demanded to know what was going on. Feeling desperate, I had broken down and agreed to tell her. To her credit, she’d listened with a completely straight face and made no interruptions.

  As I looked in the mirror, I thought of our meeting in her office earlier that day…

  “It’s almost like you’re going through some kind of estrus,” she said, frowning over her chamomile tea.

  “I’m sorry but some of us got a degree in business,” I reminded her. “What the hell is estrus?”

  “A female animal’s cycle of fertility,” she sa
id. “Specifically, the physiologic changes that are induced by reproductive hormones in most mammalian females.” If it sounds like she was lecturing me like a student in one of her courses, she wasn’t. That was just the way Sylvia talked. In fact, sometimes it was hard to know where the scientist ended and my friend began. But that was all right—I would far rather her be cool and clinical about my problem that start cooing and sympathizing in that fake way so many woman have.

  “Cycle of fertility?” I said blankly. “You’re saying I’m going into heat?”

  “Naturally not.” She took a sip of steaming tea. She’d offered me tea as well but I had refused. It reminded me of the special herbal blend I had shared with my mother every single morning for years before she died. In the year since her death I hadn’t been able to make myself touch a drop of it—preferring to stick to coffee instead.

  “Well then what are you saying?” I demanded.

  “I’m just saying that’s what it’s like.” Sylvia pushed the old fashioned glasses she wore up her knife blade of a nose. Aside from e-reader specs, no one wore glasses anymore but she refused to have corrective surgery of any kind. “Have you found yourself feeling more amorous lately? Wishing you could see more of Richlow?”

  “Not especially.” I shifted uncomfortably in my chair because the words weren’t completely true. I had been feeling more interested in sex lately—though not with Richlow.

  During the long strange month since my breasts had started leaking I’d found myself wanting to read trashy erotica novels—the kind I usually scorned. Even worse, one night I’d been flipping channels and had come across a soft-core porn movie and I’d actually watched it.

  The plot was bad but the actors were easy on the eyes. I had meant to flip the channel the moment I saw them naked in bed together but somehow I couldn’t. It didn’t show much—not by porn standards—but the male actor had been sucking and licking his costar’s large, obviously fake breasts while she moaned and tugged at his hair as though trying to get him closer.

  I sat there mesmerized on the couch, my own nipples throbbing in a way I couldn’t explain. The nightgown I’d been wearing was a sticky mess after the movie was over and so was I. Not that I had touched myself in any way—I’d been raised to know how low class that kind of self gratification was. But for the first time ever I had wanted to touch myself. I’d had an urge to slip my hand under the hem of my ruined nighty, spread my swollen pussy lips and stroke my clit which was positively begging for a release.

  It was strange because I normally didn’t have any sexual desire at all. Even Richlow—who wasn’t exactly a world class lover himself—had complained about it. He always said I just lay on my back and took it. But really, what was there to get all excited about? A few pumps and a tickle between my thighs wasn’t exactly fireworks material though I was too polite to tell him so.

  I chalked his complaints up to grumpiness because I always made him wear a condom. Regular birth control didn’t work for me—it gave me horrible cramps and break through bleeding. So a condom was my own option. Not that I minded—the idea of getting any of Richlow’s cum in me was to put it mildly, disgusting.

  “So you’re not experiencing any other symptoms?” Sylvia’s words had pulled me out of my reverie.

  “No,” I said, deciding to keep the more intimate and recent developments to myself. “I’m just…leaking all the time. It’s very inconvenient.”

  “I’m sure.” She took another sip of tea. “Of course if you were a female animal in heat, your cycle would run its course faster if you let a male breed you. When is Richlow coming home?”

  I shivered involuntarily. “Not for awhile yet but I really don’t…don’t think that’s what I need.”

  “What do you need, then Lexie?” my ever practical friend had asked, pushing her glasses up again.

  “I don’t know.” I sighed. “At the moment, nothing but a drycleaner who doesn’t ask questions. You have no idea how many shirts I’ve ruined.”

  “You can buy more. I think you can afford it.” That was Sylvia’s way of teasing me about my inheritance. She’d been a scholarship student during our college days and had been awed by my family’s house when I brought her home during breaks and holidays. But unlike a lot of other people who wanted me for my wealth, she had looked beyond my material assets and seen the person underneath. I valued her dry sense of humor almost as much as her analytical mind and firm, unshakable friendship.

  “I think you’re right. I can afford one or two new shirts.” I tried to smile but my mouth didn’t want to work that way.

  “Hey.” Sylvia leaned over and put a hand on my arm. “You’re really worried about this, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am! I’m just…this is wrong. And nobody can tell me what’s causing it.” There was a lump in my throat and my eyes burned—it took me a moment to realize I felt like crying. The ridiculous, girly emotion was completely unlike me. I hadn’t even cried my mother’s funeral a year before and I wasn’t about to start now.

  Sylvia must have seen the tears in my eyes because she patted my arm again. Another woman might have pulled me into an embrace but that wasn’t the kind of friendship she and I had. We were both touch-me-not kind of people which was one reason we’d always gotten along so well.

  “Let me know if there’s anything I can do,” she said at last, removing her hand.

  I shook my head. “There’s nothing. I’ve just got to…get through this somehow.”

  “And you will,” she said with such confidence that I felt a little better. “Lexie Conley doesn’t let anything get in her way or get her down. Not the Lexie I know, anyway.”

  “Right.” I tried to smile at her, grateful for the encouragement. And just at that moment, it had seemed that everything would be okay.

  But now, standing in front of my mirror in the middle of the night I had to acknowledge that things were not okay. Something was happening to me. Something strange and wrong that I didn’t understand. Worse, no one seemed to have any idea what it was or where it was leading.

  Or where it would all end.

  Chapter Two

  “Knock-knock.”

  I looked up from keying my sequence into the penthouse’s security pad and was annoyed to see my older brother, Lukas standing there. Well, not exactly standing. He was lounging indolently against the wall with his hands in his pockets and his head cocked to one side, watching me.

  “Lukas,” I said, frowning at him. “How very unusual to see you. I thought you’d be at the other end of the galaxy this time of year. Isn’t it spring break somewhere in the Milky Way?”

  “Very funny, Sis.” Lukas had eyes as black as mine but his matched his thick, coal black hair which he wore neatly trimmed above his ears. He was wearing an expertly tailored charcoal suit which probably cost as much as the average family’s car and his deep red silk tie emphasized his tan skin. He strolled forward and leaned down to give me a lingering kiss on the cheek. His expensive cologne—something masculine and spicy—enveloped me and his lips were warm against my skin. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?” he murmured in my ear.

  Actually, I really didn’t feel like dealing with him right then. After my bad dream the night before, I’d hardly gotten a wink of sleep. Work had been stressful and I’d been leaking all day. All I wanted to do was go inside and take a long hot shower which sometimes relieved the ache in my breasts. And now I had Lukas to deal with.

  “I haven’t seen you since Mom’s funeral,” I said, stepping back and crossing my arms over my aching breasts. To be honest, I’d barely seen him then. He had only showed up at the very end of the service and then he’d given me a kiss on the cheek and whispered something cryptic about seeing me in a year. That was the last I’d heard of him until now which, while irritating, was hardly surprising.

  Lukas and I had been inseparable when we were younger but once my parents sent him away to military school on Mars when I was twelve and he was fourteen, we�
�d hardly seen each other. Then he and my father had a falling out and my father had disinherited him.

  Lukas had promptly gone out and built his own company from the ground up. He was a multi-billionaire in his own right now and he spent his time doing whatever he wanted which was mostly drinking, gambling, and womanizing—if you believed the interplanetary press.

  As far as I knew he and my father had never reconciled before Dad died and he hadn’t come to see Mom when she was sick either. In fact, in the fifteen years since he’d first been sent away to school, my once-dear brother had become little more to me than a handsome stranger. So why was he bothering me now?

  “What do you want, Lukas?” I said, blocking the doorway to the penthouse.

  “Just to see you, Sis.” He stroked a strand of hair that had gotten loose from my bun out of my eyes and looked at me seriously. “I told you I’d come visit you in a year—so here I am.”

  “Here you are,” I said, still not moving. When I thought about it, it had been exactly a year since my mom’s funeral. Something I’d been trying not to remember all day. And now here Lukas was, reminding me. Thanks a lot, big brother. “Why a year?” I asked.

  “Because it’s just enough time.” His black eyes were suddenly pleading. “Come on, Lexie—let me in. Please?”

  It was the ‘please’ that got me. Lukas never asked anybody for anything—he preferred to just take what he wanted.

  “All right.” I stepped to one side grudgingly and gestured for him to precede me into the penthouse. “But you can’t stay long—I’m really tired tonight.”

  “Long day at the office?” He strolled in, hands still stuffed in his pockets, and looked around. “Looks like you did some redecorating.”