The Psy-Changeling Series, Books 6-10 (171 page)

Shadows clouded her expression, turning her gaze to midnight. “Kit, I—” Eyes narrowing as she glimpsed the grin tugging at his lips, she mimed throwing something at his head. “Not funny.”

Laughing, he pulled her body against his with one arm around her neck, deeply conscious that such informal skin privileges came hard for her, that he was one of the few people she trusted in this way—enough to have allowed him to spring a kiss on her. “How could I resist, Sin? You’re so adorable and earnest.”

She elbowed him.
Hard.
Wincing, he continued to hold her by his side. “So, still no chemistry, huh?” He nuzzled the top of her head with his chin. “Pity. Because you know you’re smoking hot.”

“Also not funny.”

“Wasn’t a lie.” He knew from the slight shake of her head that she thought he was spouting a whole boatload of shit, but the fact was, Sienna was gorgeous—in a way every dominant changeling male in both packs had noticed.

Hers wasn’t a delicate feminine beauty, for all that she was small and fine-boned. No, Sienna carried within her a deep, deep core of strength that had etched itself onto her face. This was a woman who would stand her ground, come what may. And to a predatory changeling male, that was both purest temptation and the most enticing challenge.

He got another intriguing glimpse of that internal strength when she pushed away to face him once more. “You didn’t answer my question.”

“I scented Hawke walking out,” he said, eyes never moving off her . . . so he saw the immediate stiffening of her shoulders, the pinched tightness around the lush curves of her mouth.

When she spoke, her voice held a husky undertone that stroked over his senses like rough silk. “Did he see us?”

“Yes.” Leaning against an old lodgepole pine, the trunk clear of branches high up into the canopy, he hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans, thinking again that chemistry was a bitch. But disappointing as it was that there were no fireworks between him and Sienna—oh, there’d been sparks, sure, but not enough to satisfy either one of them—he had the rock solid feeling that their friendship was here to stay. And Kit took care of his friends. “Don’t look at me that way.”

Arms crossed over her chest once more, she pinned him with an angry stare. “You know I don’t like to play games.”

Yes, he did. Sienna was smart on a whole different level than the majority of people, but she’d also spent most of her life in Silence. The conditioning designed to suppress her feelings, her very heart, had left her with huge gaps in her emotional education—which was why she needed friends to watch her back, especially now. “There are games, and then there are strategic moves.” He shook his head when she would have spoken. “Predatory changelings are possessive; it’s part of the package. Alphas take that to an entirely new level.”

“That doesn’t apply here.” A hard angle to her jaw, those arms so defensively folded. But she didn’t try to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about. “He doesn’t see me as an adult female, not in that way.”

“Hence my helping hand . . . or lips, as the case may be.” Walking over, he tugged on her braid because not touching someone he cared about was incomprehensible to his leopard. “Trust me, kitten. I know when a man wants to rip my head off.” Followed by various other parts of his anatomy. “Hawke was ready to make leopard mincemeat of my insides and feed it to those feral wolves who follow him around like he’s their alpha, too.”

“Even if you are correct”—tight words, tendons pulled taut along her jaw—“it won’t matter. He’s made up his mind.”

That, Kit agreed, was a problem. Because if there was one thing he knew about the wolf alpha, it was that Hawke’s will was as intractable and immoveable as granite.

HAWKE
finished the last of the two hundred crunches he’d set for himself, and sat up. It was three a.m. and his body was still buzzed, in spite of the fact that he’d been in the small indoor gym for over an hour, doing everything he could to exhaust himself. “Hell,” he grunted.

Getting up, he wiped off his face using a towel, then flicked on the entertainment screen on the wall, programming it to show financial reports. Cooper and Jem, in concert with a dedicated team, did the day-to-day caretaking of SnowDancer’s investments, but Hawke made sure he stayed up to date as the two lieutenants often used him as a sounding board.

But today, all he saw was gibberish, his brain hazed by a sexual hunger so raw and wild, he knew he’d have to take care of it or his wolf would begin to fight him, inciting a dangerous level of aggression in all the unmated males in the pack. Right now, they were edgy but the level was still manageable. If Hawke’s wolf slipped the leash . . . Shoving his hands through his hair, he was about to reach for the water bottle when he heard someone enter the training room next door.

Likely one of the night-shift soldiers, he thought. Taking a long drink, he put the bottle on a nearby bench as he pushed through the connecting door into the other room, intending to ask if they’d be up for a sparring session. Riley was the only one in the den who could take on Hawke at full strength and make him hurt, but Hawke often practiced with other packmates—just made sure to rein his strength back a fraction.

He halted three steps into the room, the scent of autumn fire, of some rich exotic spice twining around him, as the door closed with a quiet snick at his back. She hadn’t seen him, the woman dressed in black
gi
pants and a deep green tank top who moved with such fluid grace in the center of the room. The precise, stylized movements spoke not of combat, but of an attempt to find peace.

She’d pulled her waist-length hair into a neat braid, and the dark rope gleamed with ruby red highlights. It made him feel like a cradle-robbing bastard, but he couldn’t help but imagine those silken strands spread out all over his hands . . . over his pillow.
Fuck.
He should turn around right this second and walk out. There was a reason he made sure never to be alone with her in this kind of a mood.

But it was too late.

She went motionless, the stance of prey scenting a predator. When she turned, it was with wary cautiousness. Not a word passed her lips, but he knew he was intruding on her allotted free hour for the day to come—because whatever else she did, Sienna never lied, never tried to get out of punishment once she’d broken the rules.

He should’ve left. Instead, he shoved aside the voice of reason and walked to her, aware of her spine going stiff, her shoulders squaring. But it was the sheen of perspiration across her collarbones that fascinated him. The wolf wanted to lick, see if she tasted of the spice so hot and sweet in her scent.

In spite of what might have gone on in the forest earlier, the leopard cub hadn’t managed to imprint his scent into her skin. It was all Sienna. Swallowing his growl of satisfaction, he reined in the primal impulse to taste, to take. “Your arm,” he murmured, moving to stand behind her and stroking his hand down that arm to raise it, “should be straight on that final turn. You’re dropping it.”

Her pulse thudded hard and fast against the delicate skin of her neck, and it was all he could do not to drop his head and bite down on it. Not to hurt. Just a nip. Just enough to leave a mark. “Like this.” He moved his hand along the smooth warmth of her arm until it was straight. “Do you see?”

No sound as she angled her head to one side. He knew she hadn’t meant it to be, but it was an invitation to his wolf, the offering of that vulnerable part of her. He could close his hand around her throat, close his teeth around her jugular, anything he wanted. He was so much stronger than her that he could do that no matter what, but conquering wasn’t the same as surrender. “Do it again,” he whispered. “I want to watch.”

It took every ounce of will he had to drop her arm, to not accept the unintended invitation and take them both to the floor in a tangle of skin and heat. But he couldn’t stop himself from running the knuckles of one hand down her throat as he stepped away, his gut tight, his body so damn hard he might as well have been made of steel. He moved until he was in prime position to watch her, and then he waited. She did nothing for a long, still moment, and he thought she would deny him this.

But then Sienna began to move.

And his wolf stopped pacing.

HUNDREDS OF MILES
away, in the barren heart of another continent, an Arrow named Aden scanned his gaze over a desert wasteland that was a rich rust red under sunlight, but now glimmered silver in the glow of the moon. “Why do you always come here?” he asked the fellow member of the squad who’d teleported him to the location.

“There’s clarity here,” Vasic said, looking out at the rolling vista of sand dunes, his eyes a piercing silver that echoed the brilliance of the moon.

“There’s nothing here.”

Vasic merely shook his head. “Pure Psy.”

“A possible problem.” Aden sometimes wondered if he and Vasic hadn’t formed an inadvertent subconscious telepathic connection, they understood each other so effortlessly.

“Perhaps,” Vasic said with unerring accuracy, “it was when we were placed in training as children. Bonds are more easily formed prior to complete Silence.”

Aden preferred not to think about those days. A child was weak, simple to break. He was no longer that child. “Pure Psy,” he said, returning to the reason for this meeting.

“Gutierrez and Suhana are already inside and reporting back. We may lose Abbot and Sione.”

“That’s not unexpected.” The two Arrows both had unstable abilities.

“No.”

Aden watched as a tiny insect crawled across the sand at his feet. “The adherents of Pure Psy say they seek to preserve the integrity of Silence.” The insect stumbled, turned onto its back.

Vasic righted the creature with a delicate touch of Tk, and it hurried into its burrow. “What is said and what is done are often two different things.”

“Yes.” More than a century ago, Zaid Adelaja had formed the Arrow Squad to watch over Silence, to ensure it would never fall and shatter the PsyNet. But now . . . “We will have to make a choice soon.”

Going down on his haunches, Vasic picked up a handful of sand, the silica catching the moonlight as it passed through his fingers. “Yes.”

What neither of them said was that it was a choice that might well change the face of the PsyNet forever.

THE INDULGENCE OF
the previous night came back to bite Hawke the next morning. His wolf had had a taste of Sienna Lauren, and it was through with waiting. It wanted her, and it wanted her now. The scent of her—the maddening spice and steel of it—lingered in his skin until he drew it in with every breath.

He couldn’t allow himself to surrender to the compulsion. Everything else aside, she was nineteen years old, for Christ’s sake, nowhere near mature enough to handle either man or wolf, especially given the razor’s edge he was walking right now. More than likely, he’d terrify her.

His jaw tightened.

Making a decision, he packed up some gear and strode down to the underground garage where SnowDancer stored its vehicles. “I’ll be back in two weeks,” he told Riley when the lieutenant met him beside the camo green all-wheel-drive. “I’m going to head up to the mountains, make sure we haven’t missed any vulnerable spots along the perimeter.”

It was a legitimate way to burn off his frustration, especially given the extra patrols they’d been running in that region. Riley would simply switch Hawke in for one of the other soldiers and reassign their packmate a task closer to the den—no one would complain since the mountain shifts tended to be quiet and lonely. “Hold the fort.” His unflinching trust in his lieutenants was the only reason he could consider being out of the den for such an extended period.

“Don’t I always?” Riley folded his arms, those dark brown eyes watching Hawke with a patient calm that did nothing to hide the incisive mind behind them. “You have your sat phone in case we need you?”

Hawke held it up. Nothing would keep him from returning to the den if called, whether through technology or through the music of a wolf’s howl.

Riley pulled a small datapad out of his pocket. “I’m promoting Tai from senior novice status to full soldier.”

“I had a feeling.” The young male had gained a maturity this year that would hold him in good stead when it came to his new responsibilities. “I’ll make sure to speak to him when I get back.”

A nod. “As for Maria—she’ll be on supervised shifts after she’s out of confinement.”

“Good.”

“Sienna’s going to be spoiling for a fight when her punishment is done.”

Hawke dumped his gear in the truck with more force than necessary. “No more long leash for her, Riley. She steps out of line, slap her back into it.”

His most senior lieutenant, his friend, raised an eyebrow. “You know what I said about taking you down if you so much as looked at her?” A reminder that both Riley and Drew considered Sienna family and thus theirs to protect. “Well, I’ll still beat you bloody if you hurt her, but I won’t stand in your way if you want to court her—she’s no longer as vulnerable as she was back then.”