Three Worlds 01 - Seduce Me In Dreams

“By all that is cursed and holy!” he swore, suddenly rushing to her and falling to his knees behind her. “Ravenna, what in the Great Being‟s name happened?” Why did he even ask?

He already knew, even before he brushed her hair away with both hands as gingerly as he could.

The strands, delicate as they were, clung to the wounds, stuck to the dried blood on her back. She had been whipped. There was no mistaking such wounds. No mistaking the ragged tearing of her silken gown down its back.

“Please, don‟t …” she whispered.

Bronse could not grant her the request. In their short, vague acquaintance, he had come to know her as a proud beauty who knew her mind and how to express her convictions. She was gentle by nature in spite of that. She was not the type to give anyone cause to do such a thing, not that anyone ever deserved it. He knew it hurt her to be seen like this by him, to be shamed and weakened before him, and he felt his throat closing with fury and sympathetic pain for her because he would feel exactly the same way. He, too, would have tried to push her away, had the situation been reversed. Yet he would have secretly welcomed what he was about to do for her.

“Hush,” he soothed her gently, reaching to cup her chin in his fingers, his thumb stroking her cheek from his position behind her. “There is no shame between friends, Ravenna. No shame when we are abused in ways we do not deserve.”

By Jacquelyn Frank

THREE WORLDS

Seduce Me in Dreams

NIGHTWALKERS

Jacob

Gideon

Elijah

Damien

Noah

SHADOWDWELLERS

Ecstasy

Rapture

Pleasure

Seduce Me in Dreams
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author‟s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Ballantine Books Mass Market Original

Copyright © 2011 by Jacquelyn Frank

Excerpt from
Seduce Me in Flames
copyright © 2011 by Jacquelyn Frank Excerpt from
Supernatural
copyright © 2011 by Jacquelyn Frank All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book contains excerpts from the forthcoming books
Seduce Me in Flames
and
Supernatural
by Jacquelyn Frank. These excerpts has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming editions.

eISBN: 978-0-345-51770-8

www.ballantinebooks.com

Cover illustration: Craig White

Cover design: Lynn Andreozzi

v3.1

For Kate,

My fairy godmother

For my team at Random House/Ballantine.

You make me feel special …

and that‟s worth a thousand words.

(Well, more like a hundred thousand!)

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen
Excerpt from
Seduce Me In Flames
Excerpt from
Supernatural

It pissed him off royally, but Commander Bronse Chapel couldn‟t help stumbling once again as the sand shifted from under his fast-paced footing. He corrected himself with a hard, jolting body movement in order to keep his balance, and the jerking motion elicited a soft, barely discernable groan from the burden on his back.

“How goes it, Chief?” he asked, pausing in his stride to request the answer and to allow his fellow soldier a few beats to grit out the agony that had to be washing through him by then.

“Just waiting on my encore, sir,” Chief Trick Hwenk responded with the traditional gung-ho attitude of an ETF officer, his young voice sounding suddenly much younger and far weaker than it had two miles back.

Chapel hesitated and then shifted the weight of his human burden up a little higher against his spine and shoulders, wishing that the grip Trick had on him was not getting so obviously lax. Bronse could smell the injured soldier‟s blood just as easily as he could feel it soaking through his gear where the man was slumped over his back. The commander had a well-powered grip around the younger man‟s thighs and knees as the soldier rode piggyback. But if the kid couldn‟t hold on to his shoulders, they‟d be in deep shit, and Bronse felt that fact clear to his straining bones.

“All right, Chief. Just hang by your grip for three more miles and we‟ll be in the nest. Of course, that means you‟ll have to listen to the medics bitch at you for a few days,” Bronse noted, using the jovial reminder as a cover for restarting their staggering progress across the ever-shifting sand. Bronse narrowed his eyes behind his goggles, peering at the west sandline.

The wind was getting antsy, but he couldn‟t yet see a cloud forming on the line.
That
was a blessing, at least. Provided it stayed that way. The last thing they needed to contend with was a sand hurricane.

Bronse went back to concentrating on where he was putting his feet, and how fast he could risk going without jostling his precious burden too dangerously. His every muscle burned from the exertion, but he welcomed it. He preferred being soaked in sweat, working himself to the limit of his endurance and pounding out whatever was necessary to see a certain goal achieved. He‟d always felt the most in control when he had that kind of dedicated focus, and he supposed that was what had gotten him the command position on the First Active squad of the ETF in the first place.

Then again, he had wanted to be an Interplanetary Militia soldier since …

Well, his
matra
would swear it was since they cut the cord, and his
patra
would have proudly boasted that it was set down in his very genes, but Bronse remembered the first time he had seen a BioVid of the history of the Interplanetary Militia‟s ETF when he was six years old.

The IM was an intra/interplanetary peacekeeping and defensive military outfit, and it had existed for well over a century. The IM had been created as a joint military effort among the three inhabited planets in the system: Tari, Ulrike, and Ebbany. It had more or less succeeded in its charter of keeping the treatises of coexistence among the three entities, as well as managing missions of peace and humanity on and among the individual planets.

The IM had several specialized branches, but nothing compared to the Special Operations sector known as the Extreme Tactics Force. To a six-year-old the ETF had sounded deadly, dangerous, and exciting as all hell. Watching the BioVid had only confirmed what Bronse had already dreamed of. Being in the ETF was a good way to get an adrenaline rush and have an opportunity to do things with nothing but your balls and your skills to get you out of hellish situations. Not to mention that it was an excellent way to get important body parts blown off.

Unfazed, Bronse had known right then that he was destined to be one of those elite soldiers, and nothing would stop him. Learning that kind of goal setting and determination at that young an age had served him well. Now, here he was, commander of the crack team of the First Active ETF soldiers. First Active meant they were the lead team and were always called first for an assignment, and it meant that his team was the best of the best. They were the ones who went to do the impossible in the worst situations, maintaining a no fear/no fail/no fatality motto that was rarely betrayed.

That motto was balanced on Bronse‟s back at the moment, losing blood too fast for what remained of a three-mile hike. But Bronse was doing his damndest to make them the fastest miles ever to be hiked on sand. He‟d never lost a team member in the field, and he wasn‟t about to start with a rookie communications officer who had balls the size of jumbo adder crystals. The kid had more than proved his grit today. Trick might be their newest and youngest member, but Bronse had known the minute he‟d laid eyes on him that he was the perfect fifth for his group.

They‟d been searching for a communications officer for a whipsnout‟s age, going through three washouts before Trick had sauntered onto the base, fresh out of the grueling ETF training program.

Trick had those blond boy-next-door good looks that you could see a block away, riveting blue eyes that penetrated at every glance, and the disarming manners and engaging charm to go with them. He‟d been in the mess hall hardly ten minutes before he‟d had a small harem of female officers and noncoms all around him. They had been laughing and flirting with him like they weren‟t already surrounded by a cafe overflowing with virile, accessible men.

Keeping in mind that militia women were not something one toyed with lightly, or at all for that matter, Trick‟s magnetism was impressive.

Bronse had turned to Lasher and said that any boy who could communicate that well with IM women deserved their team position as communications officer. Lasher had agreed, looking mighty impressed himself. Another recommendation in and of itself because very little impressed Bronse‟s second in command. So Trick had joined Bronse, Lasher, Justice, and Ender‟s First Active ETF team all of two months back, and this had been their third mission out since the team had been locked in. The first two missions had been sterling. Chief Hwenk had proved himself capable of jacking into everything from TransTel satellites to the antennae of a Flibbean ground slug. The boy was a damn miracle worker.

The third mission, however, had run into a bit of a snafu.

Bronse had to stop again, this time so they both could toss back a few gulps of nutria-treated water. The sand and sun, not to mention Bronse‟s labors, were sucking the hydration right out of his body. The Grinpar Desert on Ebbany was merciless in that respect.

Actually, it was merciless in all respects. Only the Great Being knew why anyone would want to fight over the right to live on such a forsaken piece of hell-acre. The sand hurricanes alone could rip solid stone out of the ground. A person caught aboveground was as good as dead, or at least scoured to a bloody stump.