She was painfully honest and once again, Drake felt a surge of pride in her. It couldn’t be easy confessing she wanted to jump him in front of the woman she considered a mother—or the other men for that matter.

Pauline glanced at Amos and then cleared her throat. “I did have that reaction as well. Now that I think about it, when I’m near the flowers I definitely feel more amorous, for want of a better word.”

“This is crazy,” Joshua said. “Flowers? You’re telling me that a flower makes women want sex and men want to fight?”

“The leopards,” Drake said. “And in a way it makes sense. When a woman is close to the Han Vol Dan, every male within miles becomes belligerent and aggressive. The male leopard responds both aggressively and sexually to her scent. If Charisse managed to reproduce the scent of the female leopard during the emerging, the flowers would drive every male shifter crazy and enhance the female’s sex drive.”

“I can’t believe a flower would do all that,” Amos said. “It’s just a flower.”

“It’s a scent,” Drake pointed out. “Leopards are all about scent.”

“I’m going with Mr. Jeanmard on this, Drake,” Joshua said. “It’s a flower.”

“And that’s why we’re not leaders of the lair,” Amos said. “What other explanation is there? It seems ludicrous, but all of us felt our leopard’s reaction. If it happened out in Fenton’s Marsh as well . . .”

Jerico nodded. “We all felt it. There was something out there, something making our leopards belligerent and aggressive.”

“So what does it mean?” Saria asked. “Charisse can’t know how the males react, or she would have destroyed the flower. I know her. If she’s been slowly perfecting this plant, she’s looking for a fragrance to manufacture—probably a signature fragrance worth millions.”

“How long have the flowers been growing on Tregre land?” Drake tapped his finger on his thigh, his mind racing. If Charisse had been experimenting for years, then the flowers could have been subtly influencing the lair.

He had traveled extensively and had seen many lairs. None had the degree of inner destruction this one had. Something was terribly wrong, but, like Joshua, it was difficult to imagine that a flower’s scent would be responsible for the slow disintegration of an entire lair.

“I only went there for the first time a couple years ago,” Saria said. “The old man was scary and mon pere would have switched me had I gone near him. When he died, I braved it, and met Evangeline. I honestly can’t remember when I saw them for the first time, but I always take photographs and I’ll have those in an album somewhere. I always record dates and places and time of year when I put them in my albums. Seriously, though, I doubt more than two years.”