Kiss of Snow

SASCHA RUBBED THE hard mound of her pregnant belly and stared at the jar of Moreno cherry jam. “No. Absolutely not,” she said to the child in her womb.

The baby wiggled, its emotions sparking of hunger.

Groaning, she picked up the jar, unscrewed it, and spooned up the jam. It should’ve tasted far too sweet, far too rich. Instead, it was ambrosia on her tongue. Unable to stifle a moan of greedy pleasure, she leaned against the counter in the staff kitchen at DarkRiver HQ and licked the spoon. It was tempting to eat a second spoonful, but in spite of the baby’s ravenous urgings, she closed the lid and put the jam away. It’s not good for you, she told her child. We already had chocolate-cherry ice cream.

“You missed a spot.” Lucas crooked a finger from the doorway.

Leaving the spoon in the dishwasher, she walked over. “Did I?”

“Hmm.” He leaned over to lick up the jam with a quick, catlike flick of his tongue, his hand stroking with gentle possessiveness over her abdomen. “Mmm, cherries.”

Laughter in her mind, pure delight. Their baby knew its daddy.

“You look more beautiful every day,” he murmured in her ear, his breath warm, his body so sensually familiar.

Sascha ran her hand up over his shoulder to close around his nape. “Charm me some more.”

A chuckle, wicked words that made her toes curl. “Dorian’s ready to drive you home,” he finally said. “But maybe I should come instead.”

“I’ll never get any work done then.” Unable to resist that look in his panther-green eyes, she pulled him forward to claim a single deep kiss. “Now, behave.”

Laughing, he put one hand on her lower back and walked her down to the elevator. “I want to have a sentinel meeting tonight to discuss the security issues. You up for it?”

“I’ll order the pizza.” Nuzzling her face against his neck when he stopped to press the down arrow, she heard a couple of wolf whistles at her back.

Lucas grinned. “How’s our little princess?”

He’d asked her not to tell him the sex of their child, but he was convinced it was a girl. “The baby—which may or may not be a girl,” she teased, “is quite active and interested in the world this morning.” Their child had an inquisitive mind. “High level of psychic activity.”

Lucas waited until they were inside the elevator to say, “Any idea what type?”

“Strong telepathy,” Sascha said, “but hard to know other than that. I’ll have a chat with the Shine medic, see if he has any ideas about how best to measure the baby’s psychic abilities.” The Psy race, focused as it was on “purebred” Psy, didn’t have the protocols in place to deal with a child who would carry its father’s wild changeling blood intermingled with Sascha’s own.

Shine, on the other hand, was made up of the descendants of Psy who’d defected from the Net at the inception of Silence and intermarried/mated with the human and changeling populations. “I’ll need to make certain I teach our child the correct shielding procedures.” Her heart ached with a sudden, potent rush of emotion. She’d never expected to be a mother, having decided long ago that she wouldn’t sentence a child to the same half life she’d lived in the Net. Then Lucas had appeared in her life. You are my heart.

He wasn’t a telepath, but their mating bond had grown even deeper during the pregnancy, and she knew he heard her. Turning, he took her into his arms. The words he whispered were raw, rough, the love words of an alpha to his mate. Lucas could charm, but this was who he was at the core, and she adored him. “Come home early tonight,” she said against his mouth when they parted.

Kisses on her closed eyelids, her nose, the corners of her lips. “Anything you want.”

A couple of hours later, her body and soul were still humming in bone-deep contentment when someone knocked on the cabin door. The sole reason Sascha didn’t send out an immediate alert was that she recognized the mental signature of the man on the other side. Opening it, she smiled. “Why do you live to aggravate my security?”

Judd Lauren glanced over his shoulder to where a scowling DarkRiver soldier had materialized out of the trees. “It’s good to keep them on their toes. Can you talk?” he asked after she waved the sentry away.