Caressed By Ice (Psy-Changeling 3)

And blooded.

Remember, fire melts ice.

Brenna blushed at the memory of Faith's words and straightened her short black skirt. Teamed with a soft V-neck sweater in red, it was a perfectly acceptable outfit. Except that the sweater caressed her curves and the skirt shaped her bottom. Her hair still looked like hell, but the rest would do.

Drew scowled when she walked through the living room of the family quarters, but let her go without argument, probably guessing she was going to visit one of her girlfriends - especially since she'd deliberately hinted at that earlier. She knew she was procrastinating, but she had no time to bring up the topic of separate quarters right then. At least her brothers were no longer trying to confine her to quarters now that she'd shown she'd take off if they tried.

She got several slow male grins as she walked down the corridor and one outright request for a date. Though she had to refuse, the invitation bolstered her confidence - SnowDancer men could be incredibly charming when they put their minds to it. Too bad I seem to have a fixation on the Man of Ice.

It had taken her all day to work up the courage to follow Faith's advice. Frankly, part of her remained terrified that she wouldn't be able to handle anything sexual. It was the first time since the rescue that she'd even contemplated being with a man, the first time the idea hadn't made her break out in a cold sweat. Santano Enrique had tied her to a bed, kept her na**d for his experiments, done other, sickening things...things she wanted to erase from her mind.

"Breathe." Reaching Judd's door, she unclenched her hands and rubbed them on her skirt before knocking. The memories she crushed into that locked box in her mind. She wasn't some victim, she thought, blood pounding a harsh drumbeat in her skull, she was an adult wolf in full sensual glory.

"Judd," she called sotto voce when the door remained closed. No response. Her nose backed up the fact that he was out - his scent was there but not as concentrated as it would have been had he been inside. "Brenna, you idiot." She wanted to kick herself. All this nerve-wracking preparation and she hadn't bothered to check if he was in. Now what?

Returning to her quarters - thank God neither of her brothers was still home - she put through a call to Judd's cell phone, expecting to find him elsewhere in the den. It didn't connect. "Turn it on," she muttered, then hung up.

Feeling a tad pathetic at being all dressed up with nowhere to go, she got undressed, crawled into her pj's and took out a book - a hardcover - Riley had given her for her birthday.

"Bloody expensive," he'd said, but there had been a grin in his eyes.

Her elder brother didn't smile like that anymore. She knew he blamed himself for not keeping her safe from Enrique, despite the fact that there was nothing he could have done. Riley had always been serious - ten years her senior, he'd pretty much raised both her and Drew, with the pack's help, after their parents died - but now he never so much as smiled. Drew put on a good front, but her wonderful, funny, smart middle brother was so angry.

Someone knocked on her door. "Bren, you back, too? Want some pizza?"

Tears pricked her eyes as she leaned against the metal bars of the headboard she'd fashioned using nineteenth-century patterns for inspiration. "What're you doing eating pizza at this hour, Andrew Liam Kincaid?" she said, forcing a smile.

Sure enough, Drew cracked open the door to throw her a grin. "I'm a growing boy."

"Well, I'm not, so don't tempt me." She opened the book. "Shoo."

"Your loss, baby sister." Sending her another grin, he pulled the door shut.

She squeezed her eyes closed and then took several deep breaths to think past the lump choking up her throat. But no matter how hard she concentrated, she was too emotionally torn up to focus on anything, much less the book in her hands. All she could think was that she needed Judd, needed him to hold her. She knew that to be a foolish, impossible wish, but the animal in her didn't care. Where was he? She tried calling him several more times, until finally, she could no longer fight the enveloping wings of sleep. What awaited her was anything but restful.

A jumble of sensory input, acrid fear on her tongue, a pulsating kind of panic. She'd made a mistake and now it had to be cleaned up -

Snatches of sound. A laughing child. Fear. Joy. Birthday cake -

He was so sexy, she wanted to -

Fear. A salty/wrong/bad scent. It was a mess. Had to be cleaned up -

Brenna moaned and turned onto her side. If someone had been in the room with her, they might've nudged her awake. But she was alone, and she was dreaming in inexplicable fragments, seeing broken snatches of thought. Her mind searched for an anchor and found the way blocked. It shouldn't have been.

A moment of clarity, of anger: He shouldn't have done that!

A second later, she was dreaming again.

Judd walked away as the first flames began to rise behind him, hands thrust into his pockets and head covered by the pulled-up hood of a black sweatshirt that turned him from Arrow to hoodlum. Even if he had been caught on surveillance equipment - highly unlikely, given his skills - his identity would be impossible to determine. To further muddy the waters, he'd gone to considerable trouble to ensure the blast bore no Psy fingerprint, using materials available to humans and changelings as well as Psy.

Alarms sounded behind him, followed by the hiss of sprinkler systems being deployed. That posed no threat. He'd designed the blast radius to take out a key section without reliance on the destructive powers of fire. Nothing inside that square should be salvageable if his explosives had functioned as they were meant to. And he had no doubts that they had - after all, he'd been trained by Councilor Ming LeBon himself.