Hostage to Pleasure by Nalini Singh

Ayasha Aleine is a cold-blooded M Psy. The M stands for "Medical", and her powers give her special insight into DNA, which is why the Psy Council assigned her to working on a special project to create implants that will allow the Psy to become a true hive-mind.

Realizing, though, that they will still need leaders once the Psy have become Hive-Minds, they have also ordered her to create three kinds of implants. The first will allow complete control over the mind it is implanted into. The second allows a bit more autonomy, but still creates unthinking obedience to the hive mind. The last will be for the council themselves, allowing them to control the other two types of implanted minds completely. Ayasha is appalled by what they have asked her to do, and to force her to comply, they have kidnapped her son.

She isn't willing to take that lying down, however, and has contacted the lycanthropes to get them to free her son. And they do so, wondering why a Psy who seems so completely under "Silence", a psy-imposed code of conduct that drowns the emotions of those who live under it in coldness and ice, would even care about a child of her body. Or about any other child, since Ayasha Aleine also helped them recover two other children the Weres wanted back.

Dorian Christopher lost his sister to the murdering hands of a Psy psychopath, and he isn't willing to lose anyone else to the murdering bastards. He has become a sniper, picking off the Psy who come to take down the Weres. When he rescues Ayasha's son, Keenan, however, their blood mingles, so when her Keenan's ties to Psy Net are cut, he resurfaces in the Web of Light that powers the Psy linked to the Weres. Dorian also agrees to go after Ayasha when she fakes her own death to escape from her captors and bring the truth about the machinations the Psy are perpetrating on their own people to the forefront.

But doing so makes them aware that she is still alive, and sets their murderous operatives on her trail. Dorian is forced to keep her alive, when he's more than happy to see any "murdering Psy bastards" die. And Dorian is damaged as a Were. The leopard, his animal, lives in his soul, but he has never been able to shift shapes as a Were should. Dorian is already fighting his attraction, but when Ayasha offers to see if she can uncover what in his DNA keeps him from shifting, he becomes even more interested in her.

But as the Psy grow more desperate to find and recapture Ayasha, they set the one person on her trail who she cannot hide from, no matter how desperately she tries, her twin sister Amara. And Amara, like the man who killed Dorian's sister, Shayla, is a psychopath at heart. Can Dorian keep Ayasha alive without killing her sister, whose death she would never recover from? Or can he somehow eliminate the threat her sister poses to her and Amara's son, Keenan?

I've always enjoyed Nalini Singh's books, but this one fell a bit short. Yes, the story is strong and engaging, and the romance aspects are fine. I enjoyed learning more about the Psy, the Psy Council, and how the Psy aspects of identical twins worked. But Dorian as the hero? Din't work for me, mainly because to my mind, he came off as more of a nervy punk teenager rather than a strong hero. He keeps jabbing at Ayasha with words to keep her off balance, but that just contributed to the "nervy teen punk" image of him I had gotten. And he never seems to grow out of it, though he is making strides in that area towards the end.

In the end, when it comes down to it, because of me not seeing the hero as a strong romantic figure, this was a less than successful book to me. Now, other readers may not have that reaction to the character, but for me, I'll only recommend this book with a strong caution to others.