please.” He stepped into her personal space, until she had to either step back or have her breasts brush against his chest with every breath.
She held her ground, paradoxically pleasing the wolf. “The only man,” she said, her words wrapped in that cold darkness he hadn’t seen in her since the first few days after her defection, “I’ll allow to use that particular endearment will be my lover. You are no longer in the running for the position.”
The rage that tore through him was a ravaging beast full of claws and teeth. But he bit back the primal demands that wanted to escape. And said the words that would keep her with him a while longer. Yeah, he was a selfish prick, but he’d never argued otherwise. Not when it came to Sienna Lauren. “I’ve never shown anyone else this spot.”
The cold dark retreated to reveal the stars in her eyes. “You’re playing me.” A stark vulnerability in her face, her soul stripped bare.
It didn’t rock him how much he wanted what he saw in her—the need had become an unrelenting ache by now. “Doesn’t make it any less true.” His wolf waited, tense.
When she fell into step beside him again, he clenched his hand to keep from reaching out to fist it in the jewel-dark silk of her hair, to tug her close, close enough that he could rub his face against it . . . close enough that he could pet and cajole her into melting into him. “Do all Xs have hair like yours?” he asked, needing to hear the sound of her voice if he couldn’t have the touch of her skin.
A genuinely startled glance. “I don’t know. But it’s funny how my hair fits, isn’t it?”
Fire hidden in darkness. Yes, her hair fit. “Tell me about your abilities.”
“You already know.”
“Not from you.” Judd had given him the low-down, instructed him on what to do if Sienna ever went critical and the others in the LaurenNet were incapacitated. His wolf snarled. Hawke had made some ruthless decisions in his time, but he didn’t know if he had it in him to cause her that kind of hurt, the kind that would slam her into immediate unconsciousness.
There was a long silence from the woman by his side. As the minutes passed, he began to hear faint rustling in the undergrowth, nocturnal creatures starting to go about their business again after the brutal blast of Sienna’s power. “They call it cold fire . . . X-fire,” she said at last. “It can burn things to ash . . . bodies to ash, within microseconds.”
He heard old pain in her words. “Were you a child?”
A rough nod, but she jerked away from his touch, refusing comfort. Her voice, when it came, told him they wouldn’t be talking about her childhood pain. It was coated in frost, but he heard the tremor beneath. “The cold fire is the first wave. The power has the capacity to build until it reaches—”
Another silence, his heartbeat synchronizing with her own.
“Synergy, it’s called synergy. If I ever reach synergy—” A sharp inhalation. “There’s a reason they call us living, breathing weapons.” Turning to him for the first time since she’d begun to speak, she shot him a piercing look. “You don’t have to worry about the pack being in danger. It does sometimes scare me that I’ll lose control,” she said with raw honesty, “but that means I spend even more time strengthening my shields. We also have a failsafe set in place just in case.”
Understanding that that failsafe might well be a lethal one, he said, “Do you really think I’d let you go that easily?”
An implacable glance from eyes that were suddenly decades older than him. “I’m not yours to let go.”
RECOVERED FROM COMPUTER 2(A) TAGS: PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE, FATHER, ACTION NOT REQUIRED
FROM: Alice
TO: Dad
DATE: November 18th, 1971 at 10:32am
SUBJECT: re: re: re: JA Article
Dear Dad,
Thank you for your last e-mail. Yes, you’re right. What I’m doing, it may one day help the Xs. That’s what I must cling to as things get harder.
This is just a quick note as I’m in Paris, about to head out to meet one of my volunteers. He’s a fascinating boy—intelligent, witty, and far too calm for his age. I’ve noticed that with all the Xs I’ve met in person. I hate to write this, to recognize the reason behind it, but it’s as if they live their lives in fast-forward, growing old before they’ve ever been young.
I’ll write again after the
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