Harmony's Way by Lora Leigh

The woman who calls herself Harmony Lancaster has another name, the name of the famed Breed assassin, Death. But once she was a little girl, raised in the Breed labs to be an assassin by her mother, the lead scientist of the geneticists who created the Breed. Her brother, Jonas, was her mother's favorite one, petted, cooed over and never allowed to see the rot deep within that was their mother.

Jonas knew the other Breed were mistreated, and planned an escape from the labs. But it was Harmony that discovered a secret: Leo, the first Breed ever created, was somehow still alive. And another, that her mother knew of Jonas' plans to escape, through traitors among the other Breed, and planned to have him killed when he tried to escape. For Harmony, this was too much. She loved Jonas, but she knew he would never believe her if she tried to convince him how evil their mother was, so the young girl who was already an accomplished assassin slew her own mother to save her brother's life. But not only her mother. She also killed the Breed traitors who were planning to betray her brother and several of the lesser scientists, then escaped from the facility herself.

Since then, she has lived almost completely on her own, only surfacing to kill those who abuse children and leaving once they are dead, vanishing back into the darkness. But now she has been caught by her own people, and the Breed Council, headed by her brother, are fed up with her. Stay on the straight and narrow for at least six months, they insist, or they will kill her for her crimes.

Feeling that she is without a choice, she is taken from the Breed Labs in Virginia to Broken Butte, New Mexico, where she is to be a Breed Liaison to the local Sherriff's office and to the Sherriff himself, But a chance encounter in a bar the night before she is to meet her new Boss shakes her sense of herself, for the man she finds is not only hot, he makes her want him just from his scent. He takes her home, and they fall madly in bed together, and Harmony can't believe how she is acting around this man.

The next day, of course, she finds that the man she shared a one-night stand with is also her boss, Lance Jacobs. But she finds she can't stop thinking about what they shared, and whenever she so much as breathes his scent, she finds herself getting ragingly hot. But there is someone on her trail, and a preacher who hates and fears breeds is stirring up trouble for her by killing people using Death's signature, not knowing that she actually *is* Death. And when she finds out she's pregnant with Lance's child, she might have to give up her rootless ways to save what is most precious to her.

Lance certainly isn't going to let her go, and the power of the winds that runs in his family has made certain he can hear her pain no matter where he goes. The love and passion he feels for this beautiful, wounded woman compels him to fight for her and the love they share. But she has many enemies and many people chasing her. Will he have to sacrifice his life for hers and the life they have made together? Or can they finally build a life toether, where her former assassin's life does not intrude?

I liked this book, which was hot and filled with an interesting story that fleshes out the background of the breeds themselves and how they finally managed to escape the labs where they were grown and imprisoned. The overarching story in this one is the Breeds own uncertainty of how their lives work. Once a breed is mated, aging seems to either stop entirel or slow to an incredible degree. This, of course, is going to make the normal humans nervous, so Jonas, Harmony's brother, is working to find out the truth, and to do that, he needs to find the first Breed, who it seems is still alive, having been mated.

The way he intends to find out, though, is very distasteful. He plans to mate his sister with Lance, and settle her down thereby, then use the threat to her mate and child to make her give up the information and files she has on the first breed. She does so, but nearly loses both in the process. But her brother still thinks it was the right thing to do, making me wonder if he's more like his manipulative mother than he thinks. The next book seems like it will focus on him, and I have a feeling he won't escape how his manipulative ways impacted others when he finds his own mate. He embodies the Alpha Hero who also happens to cross the line into heavy manipulation and telling others what to do, not caring the cost.

The romance aspects in this book are cut rather short by the way Breeds mate, essentially, it boils down to a chemical and hormonal reaction that seeks to make them have sex with their mate over and over until the female gets pregnant. It doesn't even seem that they have to like each other much, just boink. In that, it seemed to me that breeds fall victim to their body chemistry and hormones, and not so much to love. But that may be just me. The sex is ultra-hot, and that's a pretty good reason to read it in my book. I also liked the storyline, though because of the specifics of breed mating and reproduction, I felt this was less romance and more erotica. Don't get me wrong. I liked the book, but I don't really feel it's a perfect fit with the "Romance" category.