Nalini Singh: Play of Passion

Drew took a long, deep breath. “I can scent your hunger,” he murmured, his voice dropping until it scraped over her skin, raw and arousing. “I want to taste it.”

Thrown off center by the unexpected, shocking shift in atmosphere, she shook her head even as her muscles seemed to melt, her body aching in a way that had nothing to do with the hunt they’d just completed. “I don’t sleep with my subordinates.”

“And I don’t report to you.” Another bite of cheesecake lifted to her lips in teasing promise. “I’m independent of the lieutenant hierarchy.”

Her skin tingled, her palms itching to trace the sculptured beauty of his pectorals. It had been so long since she’d had a lover. The pickings weren’t exactly plentiful for a dominant changeling female in this region—though since Drew’s brother, Riley, had mated with a cat, she’d checked out the leopards, too, even gone on a date or two. None of the men had made her body spark. Not even a little.

But that body was making up for lost time now, her skin seeming to stretch as a voluptuous warmth invaded her very cells, curling through her veins to pulse beneath flesh turned unbearably sensitive. Too long, she thought, shocked at the spread of need, it had simply been too long. “Drew . . .”

His mouth so close, his tongue licking over the seam of her lips to steal a tiny bit of the creamy treat she’d bought into the room. “Let me in, Indy.” The heat of him was wild, fresh, young, and it stroked over her like a physical caress.

Groaning, she nudged the next bite to his mouth. “I can’t sleep with Riley’s baby brother.” She wouldn’t be able to face her fellow lieutenant when he came back from his trip to South America.

A hard glance out of blue eyes gone a turbulent cobalt. “I’m not a child, Indigo.”

She was so startled at his use of her full name that she blinked. “You’re too young for me—and I was your trainer, for God’s sake.”

He snorted. “Next excuse.”

The tone of his voice made her hackles rise. “Careful, Drew. I’m not one of your little playmates.” He had a harem that tumbled into his bed at the crook of a finger. And they all apparently left happy—none of his former lovers had ever bad-mouthed him. In fact, as far as she knew, they continued to adore him.

“Did I say I wanted a playmate?” Putting the cheesecake carelessly on the mattress on his other side, he reached for her. His fingers were on her jaw and his mouth on hers while she was still forming a response to his snapped question.

The punch of sensation went straight to her gut, but so did the wolf’s confusion at the sudden change in this relationship. She pushed against his chest. Of course, since he was a predatory changeling male, he kept on kissing her. She could’ve gotten away, but unwilling to reject him so roughly, she chose to push at him again. He broke off only long enough to say, “You want me. I can scent it.” His tongue licked against hers in blunt demand, his free hand closing over the back of her neck as he pressed her to the wall, the heat of his skin burning her through and through.

A red haze of anger, powerful enough that she had to fight to keep her claws sheathed.

Wrenching away using the skill and strength that made her one of SnowDancer’s most senior lieutenants, she swept off the bed, fury pulsing in every inch of her. The kiss she would have forgiven. Even the pushiness—she understood what he was, wouldn’t have penalized him for it. But the hand around her neck, the way he’d tried to use his body to pin hers to the wall, and most of all the arrogance with which he’d taken it as a given that her touch-hunger made her his for the taking? No.

“I,” she said, in a tone so calm it took all of her control to maintain it, “haven’t given you the right to touch me as you please.” There was play . . . and then there were lines you didn’t cross. “Next time you try to touch me like that”—in possession, in ownership —“be prepared to get that pretty face shredded.”

So infuriated she couldn’t hear anything but the surge of her own blood, she turned on her heel and left. The worst of it was that she’d trusted Drew, thought he was a friend who accepted and appreciated her for the dominant female she was—but clearly, he was just another cocky young male who thought the lieutenant could be brought to heel by sex. And where she might’ve easily forgiven everything else, she could not forgive that betrayal.

Enclosed within theprivacy of a secure London apartment, Councilor Henry Scott looked across the desk at his “wife,” Councilor Shoshanna Scott, and considered the pros and cons of their relationship. They were Psy—unlike with the other races, emotion didn’t come into the mix when undertaking that evaluation. Their marriage had been—was—a piece of political strategy, a way to placate the human and changeling media by giving them an easily relatable image.

However, of late that plus was being canceled out by the questions people were asking about the exact nature of their relationship—there had been too many leaks and the emotional races now had information they should have never had. It had led to several probing inquiries at the most recent press conference, inquiries that wouldn’t have been made even two years ago.

But, though problematic, that issue could wait.

“It is still possible to close the Net to outside influences,” he said, focusing on the more important concern. “Nikita is incorrect to say that things have reached a critical mass, that Silence is close to falling.” Councilor Duncan had been tainted by her constant and prolonged contact with the changelings in her territory and, as such, was a threat to the purity of Silence, the Protocol that erased their race’s madnesses as it erased their emotions.

Henry intended to reinitiate that purity at all costs, and he had a significant amount of support. Membership in Pure Psy, the group formed to ensure Silence didn’t fall, was rising day by day. “Our race neither wants nor needs any change in the Protocol.”

Swiveling in her chair, Shoshanna picked up a remote and switched on a screen to her right. “These are the key players we need to eliminate in order to initiate a full closure of the Net.”

The first image on the left was that of Sascha Duncan, Nikita’s flawed daughter. It was followed by those of Faith NightStar and Ashaya Aleine. “All high-level defectors from the Net,” he murmured, watching as Shoshanna brought up more images.

“The males they’ve bonded with in the DarkRiver leopard pack will also need to be executed,” Shoshanna added. “Changelings are proprietary about their women.”

“They’re also relentless,” Henry said, staring at the row of images. “We need to eliminate the entire pack, or at least the strongest part of it, if we’re to ensure success.”

“Correct.” She flicked up another image, that of a man with ice blue eyes and hair of an unusual silver-gold. “The alpha of the SnowDancer pack needs to go, along with his lieutenants.” Nine new images appeared on-screen. “The wolves are too tightly allied with the leopards to risk leaving them untouched.”

“I thought our data stated that SnowDancer had ten lieutenants.”

“It appears they’ve lost one, or we had the wrong information in the first place.”

That, Henry knew, was quite possible. Their spy in the SnowDancer ranks had been executed over a year ago. Since then, any information they had was sketchy at best. “Any assassination attempt on a changeling stands a high chance of failure. Their natural shields give them enough of a warning that they have an opportunity to retaliate.” And while he considered the animal races far less intelligent than his own, he respected their physical strength against weaker Psy bodies.