Blake, Abby - Keen Inclination [A Bride for Eight Brothers 4] (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme Forever) Read Free Page B

answer. A quick glance around the room found half-peeled vegetables but no Mikayla. It seemed strange that she would leave dinner partially prepared, and concerns he hadn’t considered for a few weeks made a way back into his thoughts. He headed to John’s office but met the man halfway. John went back to the offices to check there, and Brock turned toward the living quarters.
    Each moment he couldn’t find Mikayla ratcheted his concern tighter. Over the last few months, Brock and his brothers had watched their wife slowly lose her self-confidence, despite their best efforts to stop it. In some ways, it had happened so gradually that it was only when Brock remembered a particular moment from the past and compared that to the woman she was now that he noticed just how much she had changed. All of the brothers knew it would take time to recover emotionally from her miscarriage. They’d minimized her contact with the female scientists as best they could, but Brock couldn’t help feel there was more to it now.
    But right at this moment, she had to be on the base. She knew she was supposed to stay with one of her husbands or be in the kitchen. When the raiders had started arriving, they’d all been in agreement, Mikayla included, that they would create a protocol and stick to it.
    He went to the intercom unit on the wall just inside his quarters. He buzzed each room in the building until his brothers checked in. Ryan and Ty were still near the lab, and Matt was inside the communications room monitoring the invaders’ movements. Brock had seen Lachlan and Bryce head out the back door, so he knew if she wasn’t with Peter or John that they had a serious problem.
    Feeling a little panicked, Brock did a quick sweep of his and Lachlan’s quarters and was about to move to Matt and Bryce’s when he heard a soft noise in the bathroom. He called her name, but Mikayla didn’t answer. Weapon raised, he headed cautiously through the doorway.

    * * * *

    The raiders weren’t hard to find. The three men were already affected by the musk and were literally rubbing themselves raw. One was even trying to hump a tree. Lachlan didn’t even want to think about the splinters that would cause.
    He pulled out his electric gun and stunned splinter-boy almost out of mercy. The other two seemed barely aware of his and Bryce’s presence and in the end needed to be stunned as well.
    “I’ve been in some pretty dangerous life or death situations,” Bryce said on a deep laugh, “but I didn’t think I would ever be involved in something as fucked up as this.”
    Lachlan nodded his agreement. It was looking more and more unlikely that the proposed mining would go ahead. Unless they could find an exclusively female workforce, chances were that the mineral ores weren’t plentiful enough to deal with the chaos that the mating musk would cause.
    The fact that the company the female scientists worked for had sworn him and his brothers to confidentiality, and threatened to withdraw the vitamin supplement if they’d refused, just made the whole thing more frustrating. The supplement was the only weapon they had to combat the mating musk’s effects. Add that to the fact that the company decided against arranging for security to protect their staff—effectively leaving the women vulnerable to attack—and Lachlan was ready to break their contract and get his family the hell off this strange jungle planet.
    Unfortunately, he wouldn’t leave the three female scientists alone to deal with the raiders, and it would seem by the smug attitude of the decision makers at the medical research company that they knew it, too. It didn’t help that his time in the defense forces had left him with a publicly available download listing his exemplary service history and supposedly heroic deeds. He didn’t feel like a hero. He felt like a man who’d lived through a nightmare and barely returned whole.
    The worst of the current situation was that sooner or later