A Taste of Ice Read Free

late.
    Here it came. That low, ragged voice breaking free from the dark place where Xavier had stashed it the day he’d arrived in Colorado. The gravelly, taunting voice of the Burned Man spiraled up from the past, and it hadn’t lost any of its punch.
    Stay here
, ordered the Burned Man.
You’re already hard for her. I brought her for you. Take her. She’s yours
.
    Three seconds. It had taken just three seconds to destroy three years free from the hallucinations.
    They came back in a horrible rush, filling Xavier with terror and shame. One moment he was on the crowded festival street of White Clover Creek, the next he was back in the Plant’sbreeding block, known as the Circle. White walls, a well-used mattress. Him, naked and anticipating the Burned Man—the Ofarian guard who’d tormented Xavier most of his life—bringing him a woman he was supposed to impregnate.
    Today it was the smiling freckled woman whose joy Xavier would quickly erase.
    In his waking nightmare, she crossed the Breeding Circle’s white floor without enthusiasm or emotion, like all the others had. In his mind, Xavier plucked the red hat from her head and tossed it to the floor, then he went for the zipper of her coat. Pulled it down, peeled the thick garment from her body. She was naked underneath, and the rest of her was as tan and freckled as her face, but he’d been trained to care only about the heaven between her legs.
    He pulled her to the mattress, and even though he hadn’t been made to lie on it in almost seven years, his nightmares recalled the stiffness of it, the bleachy smell of the sterile sheets changed before every breeding session. The freckled woman lay back, turned her face away, and he pushed himself inside her. He shouted at the feel of her—it had been so long—and took what he’d been made for. Years without release built and built and built inside him, propelling his thrusts.
    Xavier—the man he had become since escaping this torture, the man who knew this was wrong—grabbed desperately for reality. It slipped out of his reach. In the hideous world of his past, his body still worked inside hers. Long-denied fulfillment—because it could never, ever be called pleasure—and self-loathing collided together at a violent crossroads.
    He threw his head back, pleading for mercy.
She doesn’t want this. And I don’t want to want this
.
    The square window he knew should belong to the Tea Shoppe morphed into the wire-crossed observation holes in the Circle. The Burned Man appeared on the other side of the glass, terrifying as ever. Unchanged over the last three years. The scarred cheek and chin, the missing hair, the melted ear, the webbed hand…
    Don’t stop
, he growled in his fire-damaged voice, the puckered skin on his neck stretching.
If you stop, I’ll just bring another
.
    In the waking nightmares, as in life, Xavier always came.It was what he’d been bred for: to create new generations of Tedrans. New slaves for the water-worshipping Ofarians.
    It’s okay, what you’re doing
. The Burned Man’s tone rang syrupy false. Xavier had always suspected he’d enjoyed watching, and it had turned his stomach.
Her life will be better if she gets pregnant anyway.
    A red-mittened hand touched Xavier’s arm, snapping him back to Colorado.
    He gasped as though he’d been held under water—a paralyzing sensation he knew intimately—and gulped down the sweet, cold air. The loud drone of the festival slammed back into his ears. Sunlight bounced off the snow piled around the square, blinding him. He knuckled his eyes, hard enough to hurt. When he opened them, she was still there right in front of him, gorgeously and hideously innocent.
    “Are you okay?”
    Her voice was smoky, sexy, and it tugged him between reality and the evil place in his head. She wasn’t naked beneath him, taking it because she had to. But the possibility of it terrified him.
    “Fine.” He ripped away from her touch. “I’m fine.”
    Right