Page 92 of Storm Echo

She’d never known a man who needed tenderness, affection, love more. All things of which she had an endless amount to give. Yet instead of letting her love him, he kept asking her to break their bond, kept rejecting her at every turn. It hurt her as much as it angered her. She’d had enough! Her cat raised its nose in the air, both parts of her looking stiffly in the other direction.

Two minutes of silence, and then Ivan said, “I thought I was content with aloneness, with quiet, but I don’t like your silence.” Reaching out, he closed his hand over her own.

Uncurling her fingers, she wove them through his. Rebuffing his olive branch was beyond her, no matter how infuriated she might be. Not only because that was just how she was built—to love with every cell in her body and for always, but because she could sense the need inside him.

Ivan loved his family and from what she’d learned of them from him, they loved him back, though only one of them—the empath—would likely put it in those terms. But people could only love a person as much as they allowed themself to be loved.

And Ivan, she thought, had only allowed them to love him so much and no more. Well, too bad for him—if he was with her, he’d have to get used to being looked after, being adored, being hers.

“My silence would only ever last a minute or two,” she muttered, giving him a weapon he could use to hurt her—except that she was certain he wouldn’t. Not her Ivan. “Even at my angriest, if you reach out to me, I’ll be there. And if you don’t reach out to me when you’re in pain and need comfort, Iwillbite you.”

A pause, followed by, “You sound very sure of that.”

“I am. So if you were intending to ever shut me out, get rid of that thought right now.”

“I could never ignore you, Lei,” he said with that intense Ivan Mercant focus. “When I’m around you, you’re all I see. You’re like a star, you shine so bright. If I had my way, I’d keep you forever.” He flexed his hand on the steering wheel to bone white tightness. “Now you know. I’m a monster who’d keep you tied to me even though nothing good lies at the end of that road.”

Her skin hot and her cat at the surface, Soleil said, “It’s not up to you. It’s up to me. In a mating dance between a man and a woman, it’s the woman who makes the decision.”

A sharp glance from Ivan. He hadn’t known that, she realized, hadn’t understood how this primal dance worked.

“People,” she continued, “have been making decisions for me my whole life. My parents decided to roam and take me with them, never once asking me if I maybe wanted to spend summers or the school terms in a pack.”

Soleil had loved her mama and papa to her very bones, but she’d been born a healer, had craved the arms of pack until it was a constant pulse of hunger inside her, a gnawing she hadn’t realized wasn’t normal. She would’veneverleft them on a permanent basis, but even short stints in a pack would’ve healed her in ways she hadn’t understood as a child.

She and her parents could’ve approached a friendly pack, asked for that accommodation. Having seen how DarkRiver was run, she knew that a large number of packs—maybe even most of them—would’ve been open to hosting the baby healer daughter of two inveterate loners.

“Then, after my parents were gone,” she said, “the authorities decided that I should be placed with my grandfather, this man who was a total stranger to me and who hated my lovely, artistic mother with every fiber of his being. That same man decided that I should grow up an outcast within SkyElm.”

Soleil believed in an afterlife, and she hoped that her mother’d had a chance to ream out her grandfather in that afterlife. Hinemoa Bijoux would’ve destroyed him for how he’d treated her cherished baby girl. A grieving young Soleil had often imagined such a confrontation and found great delight in it.

“I’m through with all that,” she said now, her eyes on the flawless profile of this man with so much courage and heart if only he’d see it. “The only person who gets to decide my future is me. And I’ve decided that I’m going to be yours.”

IVAN couldn’t speak.

The last time he’d been claimed with such unyielding intensity, it had been by his grandmother—and that had been a welcome into the family. This was the first and only time in his life that he’d been claimed on a personal level. Claimed with such obdurate possessiveness that he could feel the cat’s claws in his mind, holding on to him, daring him to try to break away.

“Lei.”It came out as cracked as his failing shields, rough and full of broken edges.

“No buts.” A hint of the ocelot in her tone, a rumbling bass to it. “You want to snap our bond, end us before we begin on the basis of something thatmighthappen.”

His jaw worked. “My shields are failing. That’s not conjecture but truth. The spider has already captured multiple minds in the ChaosNet. Because of where they are, how they’re trapped, I can’t let go of them without consigning them to death, but the longer the connections hold, the stronger the spider becomes.”

He could feel his twisted power growing, stretching, readying itself to strike. “It’s not a case of if but when it’ll take over—and I refuse to become that creature, but more, Irefuseto take you with me.”

“Okay, let’s forget about whether you’ve thought of all possible options to deal with your ability if it does break out, and look at the situation through a different lens,” Soleil said in a reasonable tone of voice that immediately made him wary. “What if there’s a massive earthquake tomorrow and I fall into a crevasse and break my neck? Boom. The end of Soleil Bijoux Garcia.”

He’d have braked to a screeching stop if he hadn’t been so experienced a driver, his motions almost automatic. “What are you talking about?” he managed to get out past his thumping heart.

Instead of answering his question, Soleil said, “My parents died without warning, after twelve years with each other, years drenched in love.” Her voice trembled. “We don’t have the choice of knowing what the future holds—but we have a choice in how we live our present.

“I choose to live mine with you, regardless of what may come.” No hesitation in her, nothing but a depth of commitment that sang in their bond. “I don’t want to besafe, Ivan. I want to be with the man who is my mate because you are the greatest gift of my life, the one gift I never ever thought I’d find.”

A shaking breath. “The thing is, I’ve just realized I can’t steal your choice from you. That would make me as bad as the people who did it to me. So if you truly don’t want me, I’ll do what I can to break the bond—I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’ll try.

“But Ivan?” The barest touch of fur brushinginsidehim. “Don’t you dare do it with the idea that you’re saving me. Because you won’t be. It’s too late for that. It was too late the day we met.” No tremor now, nothing but passionate conviction.

“You’re my mate. Losing you would destroy me. I would rather have a single perfect day with you than a lifetime without you.” Emotion turned her voice rough, but she kept going. “Only ask me to break the bond if you don’t want me.”

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