Lion's Heat by Lora Leigh

Jonas Wyatt has been Director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs for a good many years now, but he runs through assistants like they are going out of style. His habits of barking at them and refusing to tell them where he is going has led to them getting fed up and leaving, until Merinus Lyons, the wife and mate of the Breed Leader, tells him that she's found a solution to the problems he's been having, and produces Rachel Broen, a dear friend of hers who is pregnant and desperately needs a job. Jonas isn't happy about it, but he takes her on, and finds her to be more than a match for his temper.

As time goes on, and her daughter is born, Jacob becomes closer to his secretary-cum-assistant, and her daughter is able to wind him around her little finger almost effortlessly. So when she is kidnapped, Rachel is distraught, but Jonas steps forward to have his Breeds get her back from her kidnapper. But it appears that the kidnapper doesn't just want Amber, Rachel's daughter, he wants something else besides. But what could that thing be?

As soon as Rachel gets her daughter back, she has to deal with the fact that she is Jonas's mate, and all that this implies. But she has no intention of bowing to fate, and doesn't want to acknowledge mating heat. For her, it's not as bad, but for Jonas, it is ripping him up inside, and her constant pushing him away is driving him a little crazy, Rachel does care for him, but she's scared of getting too caught up in him.

Problems with Amber at their center continue. Amber's kidnapper claims to have injected the girl with something when she was kidnapped, something that the breed medics, as good as they are, have no chance to detect what it was. And the man who is Amber's real Father comes to get her back- not for any reasons of love or sentimentality, but so he can give her up to the same organization that kidnapper her, for money and because he hates breeds. His whole family does.

Luckily, the Breeds are protecting Rachel and Amber, and Rachel's former lover signed away all rights to Amber when she was born. Now, he has no legal recourse to get her back, and outside forces turn up the heat on the Breeds, trying to take away their funding and legal standing.

As Jonas and Rachel, as well as Breed Leader Callan Lyons and first Leo and his wife try to keep the Breed from being ground under the boots of the humans who made them and want to keep them as soldiers and tools, their concerns for Amber are heightened, and they must still try to keep Amber safe. But can Jonas follow through on the promises he's made to Rachel and Amber?

I love the Breed books, and this one was no exception. Jonas is the character who has been keeping all the other breeds in line, and now we finally get to see him lose his cool, and to his own secretary, no less. For someone who seemed to have a bit of standoffishness towards those caught up in mating heat, it was nice to see him getting it for once.

Rachel seems to be perfectly a match for him, able to stand up to him, and not quite sure about the whole "mating" thing. And while she doesn't know if she wants to be tied to Jonas forever, she's unhappy that she is causing him pain, and doesn't want to cause him pain. Because she's human, she can masturbate, but as a Breed, Jonas has no such release valve. Trying to do so will cause him pain as well, and to be honest, that troubled me a bit- because if a woman doesn't want to be with a Breed, and doesn't want to cause pain, she will have no choice but to enter into a relationship- otherwise, she will be seen as some horrible sadist

I found this book an interesting read, although some of my feelings on the subject of breeds have turned a little funny and strange- see above. For that reason, I wasn't as much into this book as I wished I could have been. But still, recommended.