Oh, God, Judd.” She squeezed his hand. “I felt the…shadow of that, an echo. If what I felt was diluted, how are you still conscious?”“Why did you feel it?” Protective instincts roared to life. “We aren’t mated.”Her shattered eyes went wide. “Are you sure?”His heart actually stopped for a second, he wanted so much for her to belong to him on the most irrevocable level. “I guess we’ll find out.

He and Brenna were different in one crucial respect, a difference they had both gone to great lengths to avoid discussing - the lack of a mating bond between them.He was a psychic being. He would have seen it had it been present in any form. That it wasn't, was a sign that though they might be drawn to each other, they weren't made to fit. He didn't give a damn. He was keeping her.

People always say it's changelings who most crave touch, but that's not the truth. A long time ago, long before Silence, Psy craved it more than any other." He let her words was over him like affectionate rain. His mate, his mate, was trying to temper his grief, trying to tell him they weren't so very different after all.

There was no bond, but she reached him in ways no one else ever had. "If you ever find your true mate," he said, "I won't allow you freedom." He didn't have such goodness in him.