Kissing Sin (Riley Jenson Guardian 2)

I gave him my standard deadpan look.

"So what, exactly, are you in the military?" Rhoan asked, his fingers drumming the arm of his chair.

Kade grimaced. "I'm military intelligence, and part of an investigation that started with the theft of a crate of laser weapons from the Landsend Military Base."

Landsend was one of the military's top research centers. "The same lasers those creatures attacked us with?"

His gaze met mine. "The same."

"I'd have thought a crate would have been a little hard to conceal or steal," Rhoan said dryly.

"This happened over several months. And they're certainly not the only thing to go missing from Landsend."

"Security that slack, huh?"

Kade gave him a cutting look. "No. Under normal circumstances, you can't get an ant out of there undetected."

"Well, someone succeeded. You checked all personnel?"

"Not me personally. By that stage, I was undercover."

"As a builder. With your so-called brother."

Kade's rich gaze met mine, and the cold fury I'd glimpsed over the last few days was there for all to see. "He was my partner. And they killed him."

"They who?" Quinn asked.

"The same people who got the guns out of Landsend." Kade's look became grim. "Or maybe that should be the same things."

"Define 'things,'" Rhoan said.

"We caught them on some special cameras the division installed. Staff thought they were infrared, and we didn't disillusion them. In reality, they were designed to record only when motion combined with certain lower-than-normal body temperatures were sensed."

I raised my eyebrows. "Reverse heat sensors?"

He nodded. "There are some creatures - chameleons, for example - who are not only cold-blooded, but invisible to normal and infrared cameras."

"But it wasn't a chameleon taking the lasers, was it?" Quinn asked.

"No. It was something we'd never seen before. It was spiderlike, and yet fluid in form, able to pour itself through the tiniest of cracks. It ingested the weapons and got them out that way."

I propped a hip against the wall. My feet were beginning to ache, but the only available seat was between Quinn and Kade, and being squeezed between two delicious men might be a little too hard for my hormones to handle. Especially when I was trying to concentrate on what was going on.

"If they ingested them, how could the weapons be retrieved?" I asked.

"The creatures could somehow reconstruct them as they regurgitated." He shrugged.

Weird. "So what did they want the weapons for?"

"I think the weapons were little more than a side benefit. Landsend is high security. If you can get in and out of there undetected, you could go anywhere."

"And how does this connect with you ending up a sperm donor in that breeding center?" Rhoan asked quietly.

"My department rigged the doors and air ducts in and around the stores with special containers designed to trap the creature as it moved through in liquid form. We did tests that told us two things - that nature wasn't responsible for its birth, and that it came from somewhere near the Blue Mountains area."

I raised my eyebrows. "How can you tell something like that?"

Amusement touched his lips. "There were traces of soil picked up on the creature."