Kiss of Crimson by Lara Adrian

Dante is a Breed, the offspring of a long-ago mating between humans and aliens. Each Breed also has a special ability passed down through the blood, and his is prophetic visions, which he inherited from his mother. His problem is that his visions are always of his death- by fire. Each vision debilitates and hurts him, setting him up for massive pain. But all that he gets from each vision is that he's tied down and dying. He isn't sure where or when or why.

Dante's job is as a Breed warrior, protecting their race from the ones who go rogue and spend their time killing and feeding from others. Luckily, the touch of titanium makes the rogue disintegrate from the inside out. But when Dante runs into a strange sort of Rogue at a local hotspot, it worries him. The Breed definitely has Rogue characteristics, but the titanium doesn't affect it at all, and there is pinkish saliva dried around his mouth in a froth. But after he runs after it, he comes under attack from a hidden opponent with a gun, and hurt, falls into the River and is swept away.

Meanwhile, Tess Culver is a local vet with problems. She wants to be a vet, but she deals with patients with owners that don't have a lot of money, and her business is failing. Not dramatically, but slowly, draining her of money that she doesn't have too much of to begin with. And her ex-boyfriend, Ben, helps her as much as he can, but he has a sideline in freeing mistreated animals from cruel owners, and she helps him by providing them with free medical care.

Tonight, he's "liberated" a de-fanged, de-clawed tiger that was owned by a local gunshop, and the tiger is pathetically friendly, too thin, and has wounds from the chains and shackles used to restrain him. Tess thinks she may have to sedate the tiger, but its friendliness helps her out in that regard, and she is able to work on it anyway. Ben tries to renew their relationship as lovers, but Tess is resistant. She can't bear to be intimate with him any more.

Soon after Ben leaves with the Tiger, Tess hears something in one of the rooms of her clinic, and discovers Dante, who is badly wounded and needs blood. He tries to disarm her suspicions, but he's soon on her and drinking blood from her neck. Her blood seems especially delicious to him, and as he's drinking, he sees a strange birthmark on her hand. It's a breedmark, making her a breedmate. He curses to himself, but doesn't have time to do anything else, because she sticks him with the sedative intended for the tiger, knocking him out.

Terrified, she tries to help herself and calls Ben, but the sedative doesn't work for long, and Dante re-awakens and wipes her memory. The next day, all she can remember is that she fell asleep at her desk and somehow speed-dialed Ben in her sleep. Ben is happy because this gives him another chance to see her and try to mend things between them. He invites her to a soiree at a local museum to view a new art collection, and she agrees.

Dante, meanwhile, can't get the thought of Tess out of his mind, even though another breed named Chase shows up from one of the Breedhavens with stories of young male Breeds disappearing and not being seen again. Or if they are, turning up dead, their mouths covered with pinkish dried saliva. This tingles Dante's radar, and he tells of what happened the night before, of the strange Rogue/notRogue he'd cornered in an alley, and how it resembled the dead bodies of the Breed youths.

Chase has been asked by the Breedhaven to investigate, and he insists on coming along with the Breed warriors. They agree very reluctantly, and send him out with Dante to a location suspected to contain Rogues. Nearby, Dante spots Tess, and he trails her into a local market, where she meets Ben and reiterates their time to meet, and that it's for a special occasion, but the Rogue location turns out to be a bust.

Chase has his own reasons for tracking down the missing Breed youths, his own nephew ia one of them, the child of his brother's widow. The woman is named Elise, and Chase has always loved her. He wants her for his own, and hopes that if he can track down Cameron, his nephew, he and Elise can be together. He knows that she won't marry again, but wants her anyway.

Dante turns up at the museum soiree and makes contact with Tess. She's attracted to him, but all they get to do is share a kiss. Even so, it makes her tingle inside. Afterwards, he goes out on a mission while she goes home with Ben. Ben tries again to revive their relationship, but she's not having it. On Dante's mission, he and Chase look for the missing Breed youths at various clubs, and discover a young Breed who buys a drug, a crimson powder, and after taking it, goes completely Rogue, surprising both the dealer and the humans in the room.

Dante takes out the Rogue, but recognizes the dealer- it's Ben, Tess's former boyfriend. He sends Chase after Ben, but Ben gets away this time. From there, they find out that this new drug, called Crimson, is what is causing the Rogue-like behavior in the young Breed male. But is it something that is just a coincidence, or is the Rogue Gen-One Breed using it to make more Rogues for his army?

Meanwhile, they also find out the truth about Chase. He isn't doing this for Breedhaven security- they fired his ass when he committed an act of flagrant disobeyal of orders. None of the warriors are very happy about this, and they track him down to learn the truth. He tells them why he did it- to help Elise, his sister-in-law find her son, one of the missing. But he still wants to help find whoever is pushing Crimson. They accept it, for now.

Dante tracks down Tess again to find out more about Ben, but he spends more time asking about her and talking to her. He pretends to have a dog just to get closer to her, and later adopts a sick and soon-to be killed dog from the shelter to bear out his story. But the dog is so sick, he ends up taking it to Tess to get it help, and Tess wants to keep it overnight- but during the end of the day discovers its true problem- it has advanced cancer, and cures it with her touch.

Soon after, she and Dante become lovers, and while Dante captures Ben before he can be killed by the people who gave him money to distribute Crimson, he sends Ben off with Chase to bring him back to the warrior Breed Compound while he goes to see Tess. Dante has been injured, and while Tess sees to him, she reveals her power to him, healig a wound in his thigh with merely a touch. She confesses her past- that her father had died, and her mother was an alcoholic. When she remarried a man from the local church, the man didn't marry her mother for herself, he married her for Tess.

Tess sensed something was wrong with him and tried to stay away as much as possible, but one night he came into her room and tried to rape her- her seventeenth birthday. When he had a heart attack and died in the process, her mother, who had been drinking and knew of Tess's powers, demanded she bring him back, calling her a murderer. Tess did as she demanded, but soon found pictures concealed in her stepfather's things showing that she wasn't his first victim, so she lured him into her bedroom and undid her healing- after that, she left and never looked back.

Now, her mother is dead, but she's still running away from what she did so long ago. She's afraid Dante will hate her for killing her stepfather, but he views it as admirable- she took out a predator who was hurting innocents. There is no way he can hate her for that! But meanwhile, Chase discovers that Ben sold Crimson to his nephew and attacks him, then lets him go, telling him that if Cameron has died, his life will be forfeit. He doesn't wipe his memory, either. But Ben is picked up soon after he calls Tess to warn her about Dante by the Rogues who work for the man who is backing him.

They want him to recreate the formula, but he's already wiped his computer and put the information on it on a small hard drive, which he hid in Tess' clinic. They don't want to let him go and get it, and give him two hours to recreate his work. But he's unable to do it, so they turn him into a Rogue as well. Dante is worried about Tess when he gets a call from her asking him to explain about the message Ben left on her voicemail, but he can't come over until night falls to explain to her what's going on.

When he gets there, she's being attacked and drained by Rogues, which he kills and saves her by letting her drink his blood. He takes her back to the compound and provides his blood for her, binding them irrevocably since they have now exchanged blood. But before he can explain much to her, she encounters Rio, a barely-sane Breed Warrior who has a mate but who nearly attacks her. When she realizes the Breed are vampires, she gets upset and runs off into the day. Dante has another vision and realizes that the visions he's been having aren't of his death, but of Tess'. But can he save her from Ben, her killer, when it is full day outside? And even if he can, will the doing kill him as well from Sun damage?

This is a fairly long romance book, packed with story, that builds on Lara Adrian's earlier Breed books such as "Kiss of Midnight". But even though this is only the second book, I liked it much, much better than the first. Dante, the Breed Warrior is sane, making him a much better, much more likeable hero than Rio. Yeah, he didn't have as much of the angst factor, but sometimes less angst is better.

Dante isn't sure he wants a mate at the beginning of the book. But after he meets Tess, he realizes that this is one woman he can't live without, and changes his attitude accordingly. He also comes to realize that his discomfort with the other warriors with mates came not because he didn't want one, but because he wanted it too much and wasn't sure he'd love his own mate as much as his parents had loved each other.

I was less thrilled with the "heroine's ex-boyfriend turns out to be a villain" trope. Why can't a woman ever have a romance with a guy who's nice, but just not the one for her? It always seems like whenever a romance heroine has had a relationship with a man in the past, he always turns out to be "teh EVUL!" rather than just a guy who's "Not the One". At least Ben wasn't complete evil- that waits until after he becomes a Rogue, but when he turns out to be a drug dealer before then, well, I just knew this was in his future.

Apart from my distaste over that trope, this is a good book, and you may not find that subplot objectionable yourself. The attraction between the two is strong, and the chemistry is there. The sex scenes are solid and nice, but not so much on the heat scale. I go by my earlier review of "Kiss of Midnight"- nice, but I'll pick these up from the library rather than purchasing them myself.