Page 87 of Storm Echo

Secondly, I suggest leaving the current issue of Wild Woman just lying around when he’s in the vicinity—opened to page 27. You’re welcome.

?Aunt Rita

—From the August 2083 issue ofWild Womanmagazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”

SOLEIL WAS SUNK. Because if this was the sexual education of Ivan Mercant, she definitely didn’t feel like the teacher. “No more.” She tugged at his hair after a second orgasm racked her, her internal muscles clenching over and over.

Another kiss to her thigh before he released her so she could wriggle her way down to collapse over his body. His cock, hard and ready, burned a line of heat against her thigh.

“I’m up for it,” she managed to gasp, “but my muscles seem to have melted.”

A big hand in her hair, a kiss pressed to the side of her face, the scent of Ivan in her every breath as he shifted to a seated position, taking her with him. Then he was somehow on his feet with her in his arms. She kept forgetting how highly trained he was, his muscles honed to an edge.

Placing her on the bed, he came down over her, andmmm, she liked this position, too. His weight on her felt so good, and his eyes were right there for her to look into—and see just how far he was gone. Heavy-lidded, pupils dilated, this was not the Ivan Mercant who kept the world at bay.

This was her Ivan.

Palming her breast, he said, “I need to be inside you first.” And then he was using that hand to nudge her thighs apart so he could explore her with his fingers. He dipped one finger inside her, caught his breath, before pulling out his finger in readiness to slide his cock into her.

He took his time, careful with how much of his weight was on her. She could’ve hurried him, but she was too lazy … and she liked how he looked after her. It made her feel cherished and wanted and adored. She stroked and petted his shoulders, dropping kisses where she could reach because she wanted him to feel the same way.

The blunt head of his cock pushed into her.

She sighed, her pleasured flesh quivering around him. She got her lazy body moving enough to take him deeper, her legs spread wide and her knees raised and it was a gorgeous slide of flesh on flesh, heat on heat, their bodies all sweat and pleasure. Once seated inside her to the hilt, the pressure deliciously intense, he shuddered, then palmed her breast again.

It felt like sweet, hot honey in her veins this time around, a slower and deeper ride, the intimacy all the more for how slow they took it. All the kisses, all the touches. All the whispers against each other’s lips as they learned what brought the other pleasure.

Afterward, they lay tangled together, face-to-face, and talked.

When she said, “Tell me about your family,” he spoke about Canto, the anchor who was everyone’s big brother; about Arwen, the empath who couldn’t help looking after every member of his personal tribe; about Silver, the cool-eyed negotiator who was “Ena in training”; about the younger members the family kept protected from the world—and of course, about his powerhouse of a grandmother.

And she thought:He loves them even if he won’t acknowledge it.It made her happy, that he’d had love in his life, whether overt or covert. Love was love and it altered the pathways of the mind and the heart, taught a person that life wasn’t only pain. Even his mother, she thought, had loved him in her own broken way.

As if he’d heard her thoughts, he said, “It wasn’t only darkness with my mother. One of my earliest memories is of the two of us sneaking into a playground after nightfall, both of us giggling as we crawled under the chain link. She must’ve been taking Jax for her Silence to be so bad, but she wasn’t showing any external effects at that time.

“That night, she pushed me on the swing and we spun together on a merry-go-round. Later, she spotted me while I climbed from one side of the jungle gym to the other. And afterward, I remember that she had food, that we sat at a picnic table and ate and drank and I went to sleep in a warm bed.”

Soleil’s heart ached for that young woman and her son. “Do you know how she fell into Jax?”

“It was hard to get any real information out of her, and I was so young. I don’t even remember if she ever told me any other last name but Mercant—the only clue I have is a ring she said was a reminder of where she came from, but even Grandmother wasn’t able to trace it to a family in the Net.

“It doesn’t have a real emblem on it, just a kind of a swaying line that doesn’t match up with anything in the Net’s archives. I looked, too, once I was older. My mother wore it always, so I’m certain she didn’t lie about its origins, but I also think she took it for exactly that reason—because it couldn’t be traced back.”

“You don’t wear it?”

“I keep it with me, but it’s—” When he hesitated, as if searching for the right words, she said, “I get it. It’s complicated.” The ring was a symbol of pain as much as it was a piece of memory.

Ivan let her weave her fingers through his hair, let her nuzzle at him.

It was several minutes later that he said, “I remember her saying once that she was born into a family of vipers. Jax was an escape to her. She saw it as rebellion. I saw it as giving up.” No anger in his tone, nothing but old memories.

He traced her facial scar with one gentle finger, the same way she might trace one of his tattoos. Because it was part of the story of her life. “What was it like,” he asked, “having a human mother and a changeling father?”

“My normal,” she whispered. “I used to pounce on her in my ocelot form and she’d squeak, then rub my belly and kiss my face and tell me I was the cutest little kitten ever.” The memory hurt but it was beautiful, too.

“Sometimes, she’d catch me when I was being a really naughty cub and tickle my stomach until I couldn’t stop laughing—I liked the tickling, because she never did it when I wasn’t in the mood and because she’d always be laughing, too, both of us in hysterics when my father found us.

“I can still remember him standing there, looking down at the two of us and shaking his head.” Those had been the best days, days saturated in a kind of forever sunshine in her memories.

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