Psy & Changelings 05 - Hostage to Pleasure

chrome-blue glance.
    Dorian shot her a furious look. “You’re so brainwashed you can’t even accept your own emotions and you’re judging mine? That’s fucking rich.” He shook his head, the blond silk of his hair shifting with ease.
    She wanted to do violence. “Next time,” she said, gritting her teeth, “I’ll leave you to your self-destructive urges. It would make my life considerably simpler.”
     
Dorian was still fuming more than an hour later. He’d showered at Tammy’s and changed into the spare clothes he always kept there. With Tammy being their healer, they often came to her bleeding or worse. Now he stood with his body braced against the frame of the back door, staring out at Ashaya and Keenan as they sat politely across from each other at the picnic table in the yard.
    “You want to talk about it?” A warm female voice.
    He glanced at Tamsyn. “No. I told Sascha the same thing before she left.”
    She wrapped an arm around his waist, leaning against him until he put an arm over her shoulders. “Always were stubborn.” A smile. “Sascha figured we’d tag-team you. She was round one. I’m the closer.”
    “Damn Pack,” he muttered. “No one’s heard of fucking privacy.”
    Tamsyn chuckled. “So? Ashaya hides it well, but that much ice in a woman’s eyes when she looks at a man spells trouble. What did you do?”
    “She disobeyed a direct order, put herself in harm’s way.” He watched as Keenan took something out of his pocket and put it on the table. Ashaya took the object at once, enclosing it tightly in her fist.
    “Are you sure you’re really angry at her, and not at what you saw inside that house?”
    He thought of the wall of blood droplets, the metallic bite of iron in the air. “What I saw inside that house was a nightmare,” he admitted. “But I’m very definitely furious with her.” The cat nodded in agreement inside him.
    “Why?” Tamsyn insisted. “She only did what any other woman would’ve done for a man she cared for, in the same situation.”
    Ashaya looked up at that second and even from this far away, he saw the primal awareness in her eyes. She looked away an instant later, but the damage had been done. His body tightened, the anger transforming into something else. “It was easier to keep her at a distance when she didn’t act so human.”
    Tammy hugged him, her warmth soaking into his bones. “I don’t think your cat wants to keep her at a distance.”
    “That’s the problem.” He broke their embrace. “I want her so badly I’m burning up from the inside out, and I can’t justify it.” He’d hungered for her from the start. But now that hunger was clawing into his heart.
    “Just because she’s Psy—”
    He cut her off with a sharp slice of his hand. “It’s not that. She worked for the Council, Tammy. How do I face Kylie’s memory if I feel this way about a woman who was part of the machinery that led to her death?”
    “Ashaya had nothing to do with Enrique.”
    His cat hissed at the sound of that name. “She kept the Council’s secrets, worked for Ming himself.”
    “You’re not making any sense.” Frowning, Tammy folded her arms. “Sascha was a Councilor’s daughter and, granted, you wanted to rip her throat out once, but you adore her now. Faith did predictions for the Council and you never reacted to her like this. What is it about Ashaya that makes her worse?”
    Dorian couldn’t betray Ashaya’s secret, her love for a sister who was more than broken, more than damaged. “Just leave it.”
    Tammy’s eyes widened. “Oh, my God, Dorian, it’s not only lust, is it? You’re starting to fall for her. She matters.”
    Tammy was wrong, Dorian thought, looking out and into the yard again.
    The truth was, he’d already fallen for her.
     
Did you even consider how it would’ve hit Keenan if you’d been captured or killed?
    The truth was, Ashaya hadn’t thought at all. She’d acted . . . on instinct. The need to protect Dorian had slammed into her without warning, broadsiding her with its sheer strength.
    It wasn’t as if she was a stranger to irrational behavior. She was used to acting that way where Keenan and Amara were concerned. They were both blood of her blood, flesh of her flesh, linked to her with invisible psychic threads. It made a certain kind of sense that she wouldn’t be entirely logical where they were concerned.
    But today, she’d acted against all reason and sense for a man who was wholly