Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
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, I will bite 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’ve never left 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 that might happen.”
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, I refuse to 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.”