Burning Up

grandmother. Just make sure she knows someone will be shadowing her every time she goes out alone.”
    “Knowing her, she’ll get them to carry her shopping.”
    Emmett’s eyes gleamed. “And you?”
    “I’ll be ignoring you,” she said, feeling an odd sense of excitement in her gut.
    No smile, no hint of softening in his face. “You’re welcome to try.”
     
    E mmett finished fixing the computronics inside his mother’s car and picked up his cell phone to call her. “I’ll drop it off tomorrow morning. It was a short circuit, nothing big.”
    “Thanks, baby.” His mom was the only one Emmett let get away with calling him “baby.” The one time he’d tried to question her about it, she’d simply stared at him until he’d sighed and given in.
    “Has Dad gotten in yet?”
    “No,” she told him, her voice holding a rare kind of clarity. “He’s running an extra training session for some of the new soldiers. If things keep going the way they have been, I think there’ll come a time when we’ll have to take a stand against the Psy—we need to be prepared.”
    Since his mother was the pack historian, her words carried real weight. “What do you see?”
    “I’ve been tracking the Psy Council’s actions since I was a teenager,” she told him, “and year by year, I see more and more darkness creep into their world. They’re slowly going beyond cold, to a place that makes me scared for the Psy race as a whole.”
    Emmett felt no pity for the Psy—not given what he’d seen of their tactics, but his mother had always had a soft heart. “Lucas is obviously listening to you—I’m scheduled to teach more sessions as well.” Somewhat to his surprise, he’d inherited his father’s way with the younger members of the pack.
    His mother chuckled. “I hear he gave you the ten- to fourteen-year-old crowd.”
    “They teach me patience.” It was a deadpan comment.
    “Oh, Emmett.” Another laugh. “Why are you single? You’re gorgeous, good with children, and you adore your mother.”
    Grinning, he fixed the timecode on the dashboard computer. “Not that you’re biased.”
    “I get to be biased about my baby.”
    “There is someone,” he found himself saying, “but she’s being stubborn.”
    “I like her already.”
     
    R ia did try to ignore Emmett as she’d vowed. But ignoring six feet and a few spare inches of predatory changeling, especially one as quietly dangerous as Emmett, was not an easy task. She could feel his eyes on her even while he stood easy task. She could feel his eyes on her even while he stood outside as she walked into a shop with her grandmother.
    “Tea will take some time.” Miaoling patted her arm. “Go and talk to that leopard who looks at you like you’re food.”
    Heat rushed into her cheeks. “He does not.” Though she’d found herself fighting the insane urge to stroke him . . . just to see what he’d do. Would he let her? The thought caused her stomach muscles to clench.
    Miaoling made a face at Ria’s response.
    Ria kept talking, knowing she was protesting too much. “He’s only protecting us because the Crew poses a threat to DarkRiver’s control of the city.”
    “Pah!” Miaoling waved a hand. “I know when a man’s hungry. And if you’d use your woman parts more often, you’d know, too!”
    Thankfully, Mr. Wong appeared at that instant, eager to lead Miaoling upstairs to his apartment for their weekly tea-conference, as they called it. The two were as thick as thieves. Ria had no idea what they discussed at these conferences, but her grandmother always had a Cheshire cat smile on her face when she left Mr. Wong’s.
    At first, Ria had thought the two were . . . well . . . but her grandmother had put her straight with an unexpectedly solemn response.
    “No, Ri-ri. I’ve loved only one man my whole life. I love the same man still.”
    The depth of devotion in that single sentence had brought tears to Ria’s eyes. Her grandfather had been twenty years her grandmother’s senior, and had taken his last breath when Ria was fifteen. His death had devastated Miaoling, but she hadn’t ever broken down where Ria could see her. Instead, she’d used the memory of her love as a shield.
    Miaoling still spoke to her husband as if he could hear her. Though she never did it when pragmatic Alex was nearby, she was open with it in front of Ria. Because Ria understood. Truly, when she was with her grandmother, she sometimes thought her