Caressed By Ice (27 page)

She went to bed mentally exhausted but woke after only a few hours of disrupted sleep…because she could smell Judd's scent in her quarters. Getting out of bed still half-asleep, she saw it was four a.m. She walked out wearing the satin slip she used as her nightgown, her feet bare.

“Judd?” For a second, she couldn't locate him. Then her night vision kicked in and she found him seated in an armchair close to the coffee table.

He was watching her, his entire body motionless. It didn't strike her that she should be afraid or even wary. Yawning, she walked over and sat on his lap, curling her body into the armchair. His arms came around her without hesitation, one hand curving around her shoulders, the other sliding to close over the bare skin of her upper thigh.

The sensual contact brought her to full wakefulness. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she nuzzled at his throat. “Are you okay?”

His hand shifted to slide between her thighs, surprising a shocked feminine sound out of her. “Judd? Baby?” Something was wrong. With a changeling male, she would've let her body soothe him, used touch to connect. But Judd was Psy…and hers. At that moment, she knew the answer to the question that had tormented her all day—she would hold him,
accept him
, no matter what.

That was what mates did.

She didn't care if there was no bond—no one was going to tell her she wasn't meant to be with this man. “What do you want?” she asked, but he remained silent. Deciding to let instinct guide her, she softened for him.

His other hand tangled in her hair, tilting her head back in a sharp move. She went rather than resist. A woman who loved a dominant male had to know when to bend…and when to bite. His lips crushed hers, his hand squeezing her inner thigh. Moaning into the kiss, she opened her mouth. He didn't wait for any more permission, ravaging her with a sensual fury that had her trying to press even closer.

Her body craved Judd. She had no desire to back off, perhaps because she hadn't had time to be afraid, or perhaps because she could feel the hunger inside of him, a hunger only she could assuage.

He bit at her lower lip. She bit back.

His back muscles were rock hard under her palms as she splayed her hands and luxuriated in the unrestrained masculine heat of him. “No,” she protested when he broke the kiss to run his lips down her jaw and over her neck. She tugged at his hair. He nipped at her neck in reprimand. Something
melted
between her legs and when he stroked his hand farther north, she wanted to urge him to go faster.

He cupped her. Strong. Bold. Possessive.

She felt her claws threaten to release, sparks shooting behind her tightly closed eyes. And then he began to massage her like that, while her body simultaneously tried to get closer and writhe away. Her slip rode up and her bottom came in contact with the hard ridge of his erection.

A whisper of fear fluttered in her belly.

But her panties were gone, torn off her and oh God he was touching her skin to skin and his fingers were rubbing at the entrance to her body and—Crying out, she orgasmed with an almost painful clamping of internal muscles long unused. She buried her face in his neck and he held her there with his hand on her nape as he coaxed more and more pleasure out of her body.

The scent of him coated her tongue until she licked at him, taking the salt/ice/man scent inside. Slowly, the orgasm turned into a buzz of sensual heat, leaving her sated. Murmuring her pleasure, she relaxed back into her earlier curled-up position and opened her eyes. At first, she didn't realize what it was she was seeing. Why were there pieces of wood everywhere? And did her kitchen bench look lopsided?

Judd's teeth clamped down on her shoulder, as if he knew he no longer had her undivided attention. She jerked up. “Judd. Judd!” She tugged at his hair.

His answer was an explosion of tiny telekinetic bites in very sensitive places. Her entire body arched as pleasure short-circuited her nerve endings. In the corner of her eye, she saw the kitchen bench collapse, giving one final groan of creaking distress. And then all she could hear were her own gasping breaths.

By the time she came back down this time, she was lying crosswise in his lap, her slip puddled around her waist, the straps snapped. Judd wasn't touching her exposed flesh, just looking at her breasts with hunger that was close to madness.

Giving a sob, she placed her arms tight around him once more, eyes wide as she watched the violence over his shoulder. “Stop. Please, baby, stop.” Small pieces of broken furniture circled the room in a savage storm. “Judd, darling.”

His entire body
shuddered. “Brenna.” It was a raw sound stripped of his usual control.

“Yes.” She hugged him harder, her breasts crushed against the cool softness of his leather-synth jacket. “I'm here.”

“Did I hurt you?”

Hurt her? “You pleasured me.” The exquisite heat of it continued to spiral through her.

He withdrew his hand from between her legs and she had to fight her moan. “Baby, the furniture…” The pieces hadn't stopped flying.

One of his arms remained clamped around her back as he raised his head. “Critical breach.” He was beginning to sound close to normal. “Power sent outward instead of focusing on you.”

“You didn't hurt me,” she repeated. “Even out of control, you didn't hurt me.”

“Not this time.” The broken pieces of furniture began to settle on the floor.

She pulled back, wanting to meet his eyes. They were dark, devoid of those sparks of gold. “What happened?” He was never going to believe he wouldn't hurt her—she'd have to rely on time to fix that. “Talk to me.” Brushing the hair off his forehead with one hand, she pulled up her slip with the other.

His eyes fell to where she clutched the slippery material above the curve of her breasts. “You need to get dressed first.”

She might have argued with him if the ruins of the bench hadn't chosen that instant to compact with a groan, sending up dust she could taste. “I'll be quick.” Wriggling off his lap, she blushed. “You're still—”

“Go.”

She went. Sometimes, discretion really was the better part of valor. Dropping the slip and pulling on a pair of sweats and a T-shirt took maybe two minutes. She ran back out. “Oh!”

Judd had turned on the light and already cleaned up most of the mess using his telekinetic abilities. As she watched, the last broken pieces settled down into a neat pile by the door. “I'll replace everything.”

“I'm not worried about that.” Walking over, she fought the urge to touch him. He was all coiled muscle and intensity. Dark. Dangerous.

Take him as he is.

Her spine straightened. “Now tell me what happened.”

His tone was flat as he told her about the PineWood pack. “We went in, cleaned out their den. A number of them were compromised—I had to undo the programming.”

Relieved he hadn't been forced into using his more covert skills, she blew out a breath. “There's no need for you to beat yourself up about that. You did something good.”

“It's not that.” A bead of sweat rolled down his temple and she remembered the pain. The dissonance. But before she could speak, he told her the rest. “What our contact didn't know was that the Psy had attempted to place commands on immature minds, too.”

“Children?” Her voice shook. “They tried to do that to babies?” She wanted to bury her head in the sand and not hear the rest of what he had to say—she'd almost died after having her mind raped. And children were so much weaker. “How many?”

“One died before we reached their den.” His cheekbones stood out like blades against his skin. “I was able to remove the programming on the others but two are damaged. Their brains couldn't handle the pressure and battered themselves bloody trying to get out.”

“Oh, Judd.” She could feel his hurt inside herself. “There was nothing you could have done.”

Another bead of sweat, the only indicator of the amount of pain he had to be in. “There was no reason for them to mess with the children's minds.
No reason.
They were too young and weak to provide assistance in the plot. It was done as a message.”

The most visceral kind of fury exploded in her. “They've crossed the line. But”—she stared him in the eye—“you haven't.”

“I know.”

Startled, she snapped her mouth shut. “Then why…?” She waved her arms at the ruin of her living room and kitchen.

“Don't you recognize rage when you see it?”

“Oh.” She wasn't sure what to say to that blunt admission. “You've broken Silence?” Something in her said it couldn't be that easy.

His next words proved it. “If I had, you wouldn't have been able to bring me back.” His eyes traced over her body and though she was demurely covered, she felt her nipples peak, her thighs press together. “I can still taste you on my lips.”

She put a hand on the wall to steady herself, certain her knees were about to buckle. “You pushed your anger into sex.” Burning it up without causing harm to living creatures.

“It wasn't planned.” He couldn't seem to take his eyes off her lips. “I was about to leave your home when you walked out. I should have never come here in the first place.”

“I didn't mind.” Heat in the air, so thick she could almost touch it. Her eyes dropped to his erection, hard and heavy against his jeans. She wanted to feel him in her hands, to experience more of the animal passion he'd shown her tonight.

Something smashed to the floor, jolting her out of the erotic fantasy. Her eyes widened as she realized he'd thumped the armchair—one of the few undamaged pieces of furniture in the room—hard onto the floor.

“I need to leave.” He pulled out a phone, skin stretched tight over his features.

It made her wonder if he was as tightly stretched in other places.

“Brenna.”

“Why not?” She met his gaze. Stubborn. Needy. Changeling to his Psy. “I don't care if you destroy the whole apartment.”

His hand clenched on the slim width of the phone. “As the state of this room shows, I'm no longer listening to the dissonance. It's not keeping me in check. All it would take to kill you would be one mistake in the heat of passion.
One.
”

The taut restraint in his voice cut her. “Judd, I need you.” They had to find a way past this. She was so hungry she was almost to the point where she wanted to cry. “I need your touch and I need to touch you in return.”

A crack appeared in the casing of the phone in his hand. “Where's your comm console? I'll call someone to stand watch—you're not safe from Timothy's assailant.”

“No.” She thrust a hand through her hair, fingers shaking with need such as she'd never before felt. Yes, changelings craved touch. But this was something so primal it was a claw inside of her. “I'm awake. I'll stay that way. I'll call you if anything happens.”

“Somebody is trying to hurt you.” Something not wholly on the side of the angels moved at the back of his eyes.

She had already decided she wasn't going to run from what he was, but that didn't mean she was going to submit to his every wish. “I don't need a babysitter if I'm wide-awake.” She swallowed. “Go. Looking at you makes me
want
.”

For a timeless second, it appeared he wouldn't listen. Then he turned on his heel and left even as she reached out to touch the odd glint of dark red she thought she saw at the side of his face. “Oh, God.” She fought the urge to collapse, to rage at the unfairness of it all. Instead, she pushed up her sleeves, found the vacuum-bot, switched it to manual, and began to clean up the dust Judd hadn't manage to corral.

 

Judd touched
the wetness near his jaw and brought his fingers up in front of him. Pale red stained his fingers. His first guess was that he'd been cut by a piece of flying debris but when he moved to the mirror over the sink, he discovered his mistake.

The blood had leaked from his ear.

Extreme dissonance.

His body was literally fighting itself, the conditioning and its attendant pain controls slamming up against the emotions he shouldn't have been feeling. He wiped away the blood and did an internal check. The rupture had already healed over, his body having automatically utilized the same technique as the one that made his scars disappear.

But he knew it couldn't keep up with what was happening inside him. Sooner rather than later, he'd have to shut down every facet of emotion, every glimmer of passion. Because otherwise, his brain would look exactly like those of the hyena children he'd seen.

Bloody. Battered. Irrevocably broken.

 

Several hours
after her cleaning frenzy, Brenna found herself bad-tempered from lack of sleep, lack of touch, and a sensual need that refused to quit. It probably wasn't the best of times for her to be charting a hack, but she'd made a promise. So here she was with Dorian in the second subbasement of DarkRiver's business HQ.

The blond sentinel had growled at her several times, but she'd just snarled back.

“You're going about it ass-backwards,” he said for the fourth time in an hour.

Brenna's eyes narrowed. “The whole plan is to sneak in, not stampede so loudly that everyone from the Psy Council to your uncle in Poughkeepsie can hear us.”

“Where the hell is Poughkeepsie anyway?” Dorian pushed into her personal space, standing with his hand on her chair as he leaned over her shoulder to look at the screen.

Brenna was itching for a fight after the frustrated night she'd had. But there was something she had to talk to Dorian about. “Can I ask you a question?”

“What?” He scowled, tapping at her screen and threatening to shift the pathway she'd mapped out. “You should've gone—”

“Dorian.”

Her tone must've gotten through to him because he swung around to take a seat in the chair beside her, swiveling so he faced her profile. “What is it, kid?”

He was the only one she let get away with calling her that—she had guessed that Dorian, who had lost his sister to Enrique, saw her as another baby sister. It was the reason he acted so bossy with her. That was more than okay with her, because while Dorian was hard to read, if he was anything like Drew and Riley, then his sister's murder had to have devastated him, tearing into the protectiveness at his core.

“First, Judd knows but that's all. Don't tell anyone else, okay?”

His surfer-blue eyes were piercing. “I can't make that promise until I know if it'll affect either of our packs.”

“It won't.” Glancing over her shoulder to double-check that no one was listening, she turned back to the DarkRiver sentinel and simply asked what she needed to know. “How do you deal with not being able to change into animal form?”

Dorian's face reflected surprise. “Most people dance around that. Like they're afraid of hurting me.” His voice said that that was a ridiculous worry.

“Please tell me.” She held his gaze. “Please, Dorian.”

Realization dawned. “Oh, damn, sweetheart. That bastard messed you up, didn't he?” Reaching out, he stroked a hand over her hair. “How bad?”

The gentleness brought tears to her eyes. “I can use my teeth and claws, but I can't shift fully. No loss of strength, speed, or flexibility.”

Dorian dropped his hand to lie on the back of her chair. “I grew up latent—I never had anything to lose.” His tone was matter-of-fact. “But you're different. Are you sure it's permanent?”

“I don't know anything. But I want to prepare myself for the worst-case scenario.” That way, her heart couldn't break all over again.

“Alright.” Dorian's handsome features settled into decisive lines. “The first thing you have to do is stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

She swallowed but didn't defend her emotions. This was why she had asked him. Dorian might see her as a sister, but he was the kind of brother who'd give it to her straight.

“You survived,” he said, “and you aren't a basket case. You should be fucking proud of yourself. He tried to cripple you, but he didn't succeed.”

“No. But he stole something precious from me…he stole my wolf.”

 

The depth
of pain in those words stopped Judd in his tracks. He'd raced down here after discovering Brenna's absence from the den, ready to face the consequences of last night's critical breach. But he wasn't prepared for this. For a Brenna with trembling hands and a whisper of a voice.

Moving soundlessly out of the doorway, he leaned his back against the wall and hoped they were too distracted to scent him. He knew he should leave, should allow her privacy. But he couldn't. Brenna should've asked Dorian's opinion while Judd was with her—but she hadn't. Because Judd was Psy and couldn't give her comfort.

Not only had he never truly understood the staggering depth of her loss at not being able to shift, he'd left her in the early morning hours when she had needed him so desperately. How could he blame her for going to another man for succor? Yet he did.

“Enrique stole a lot from you.” Dorian's voice cut through the air. “But you can get some of that back.”