PLAY OF PASSION

Brenna paused, threw him a startled glance. “Yeah, me, too.” Stopping in her task for a second, she rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Judd can’t get away with the ice thing anymore.”


Andrew remembered how cold the Psy male had been before his mating to Brenna. “How’d you manage that?” Maybe he could learn something.

“Nothing I’d like to share with my brother,” Brenna said with a saucy smile.

“Brat.”

“Thank you.”

Her smirk made his wolf laugh. “How’re you doing with Judd still away?”

“He came back a few nights ago.” She scowled. “I swore I’d strip his hide if he did it again. Teleporting that far really wipes him out, even if he does it in stages. He was all but unconscious for hours.”

Andrew knew without asking that Judd had left as quietly as he’d arrived. The Psy male had sent them dispatches from various South American countries where he was following the scent of a Pure Psy operation. He was now certain that the group, with Henry’s backing, was behind the transmitters on SnowDancer land.

“You know,” Andrew said, turning his mind away from that situation for now, “that you can come to me for anything while he’s away, right?”

“As if I’d have to,” she muttered, “when somebody in the pack would rat me out to you the instant I even vaguely looked like I might be in trouble.” But she leaned over and brushed a kiss on his jaw before beginning to work on the screen again, erasing and redrawing points of what appeared to be parts of a complex computronic design.

“Is that your teleportation machine?” The FAST project was, he knew, her most important long-term undertaking. If she could one day invent a way to send anyone—not just Tks—place to place with such speed, it would change the world.

“Uh-huh.” Tiny frown lines between her brows. “Now that you’ve got the lieutenant’s attention,” she said, returning to their earlier subject, “what’re you planning on doing next?”

“Never you mind.” Shooting her a smug look when she gave a disgruntled scowl, he swung his legs off the table. “I need to go have a comm-conference with my team, make sure there’s nothing that needs to be brought to Hawke’s attention around the territory.”

“You can use the room through there,” Brenna said, pointing to her right. “No one’s booked it for now.” A pause, laughing eyes looking up at him. “And it’ll let you hide from Indigo until you’re ready to spring the ambush.”

Leaning down, Andrew kissed the top of his sister’s head. “I love you.” It was a smiling statement, but no less true for it.

“I love you, too,” Brenna said, “even if you are driving Indigo so insane, she’s starting to snap at everyone in the den. Did you really steal her phone and record your voice howling her name as the ringtone?”

“Maybe.” Deeply satisfied by the current state of affairs, Andrew strolled into the conference room, shut the door, and initiated the calls. He trusted Bren, but other techs could come in at any moment, and the information his team gathered was quite often sensitive. Having brought them all into the call, he sat back and listened, making notes as necessary.

Thankfully, things were very steady at present, partly as a result of Riley and Mercy’s mating. A strong mated couple wasn’t essential at the top of the hierarchy, but it did help steady the pack as a whole. “What about that group of old ones?” he asked one of the women on his team. “The ones you were worried were stewing over something?”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re just being grumpy old men.”

Laughter, then a few more snippets of information before they wrapped up the meeting early and Andrew snuck through the corridors to update Hawke on some of the smaller matters. His alpha liked to keep his finger on the pulse of his pack.

“We’re in good shape,” Hawke said after Andrew finished, neither of them having elected to sit for the short briefing. “Except for these games the Psy are playing.”

“Pure Psy seems to have accepted defeat in its proselytizing efforts at least,” Andrew said, having monitored the situation. “No new reports within the pack or in the city.”

“And we’ve had no more detected incursions onto our land.” Hawke folded his arms, staring at the territorial map on the wall. “But something tells me that’s not over yet.”

“No,” Andrew agreed, “there was too much planning there for them to give up their aim—whatever it is—so easily.”

“We might, at some stage, have to give Councilor Henry Scott a little warning tap to let him know he’s not welcome here.”

Since SnowDancer, together with DarkRiver, had already taken down one Councilor, Andrew knew that “warning tap” was a real possibility. “Are you thinking sometime soon?”

“No. We need more intel on the bastard. He’s smart.” Turning from the map, Hawke raised an eyebrow. “As of right now, you’re off shift for the next forty-eight hours. Go play your favorite game.”