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)
“So are my scars,” Soleil said, touching the one on her face. “Does this make me defective?”
He shifted the car into manual drive mode, and wrenched one of the controls back hard. “It’s nothing the same.” No snapping, his voice even … and his jaw as hard as titanium, while inside her mind shimmered a web of silver flame gone rigid.
The man was in no mood to listen.
Well, she wasn’t a cat for nothing, she thought as he parked at a loading zone near his apartment and jumped out to quickly grab a few of his things. As Lucas had said, cats knew all about sneaking through small gaps, and finding new ways to get into locked places. She’d find her way through this locked gate, too.
God, he was gorgeous and infuriating, she thought as he emerged from the apartment with a duffel bag in hand. She wasn’t the least surprised when a woman across the street literally stopped walking to just look at him. He, of course, was oblivious to the carnage he left in his frosty wake.
Dropping his bag in the back with her stuff, he then returned to his position in the driver’s seat. He pulled away from the curb in silence. Oh, this definitely wasn’t his usual control. This was tightly contained fury.
A growl rumbling in her chest, she settled back in her seat. Then she poked at the bond between them. Ivan hissed out a breath, his hands tightening on the steering wheel as he pulled out onto the main highway.
As they shot down it at high speed, he gritted out, “What are you doing?”
“Testing our bond. Need to see where the issue is.” She knew exactly where the issue was; the problem was in getting him to not only accept it, but accept that this bond was going nowhere and he might as well surrender to it.
Until then, she was happy to aggravate him so he couldn’t ignore it.
Yes, she was a cat.
A quick glance from Ivan before he put his eyes back on the road. “No, you need to find a way to cut it.” A stony order. “My mind is built to suck the minds of others dry. Do you have any idea what that means? I could take everything you are, everything you have the potential to be.”
His breathing was just slightly uneven. “That little boy you saw today? Mercy’s pupcub? One of the younger cohort of my cousins, someone I was meant to protect, was that small when I took control of his mind without warning. He wouldn’t wake up one day, no matter what anyone tried. He couldn’t. Because the spider had him in its grip and it knows only to feed!”
She snarled at him, really snarled, in a way she’d never before done at anyone in her whole life. “You were a child at the time, too! One who had no idea what was going on!” A pointed finger. “And as far as I can tell, you’re not the one sucking anyone dry in this relationship. I’m the one who took your energy to keep me alive.”
He didn’t answer for long minutes. When he did, it was with a grudging acceptance in his tone that was the first crack in the wall of frost. “Our bond does seem to function in an unexpected way.” Stiff words. “That doesn’t mean the spider can’t grab hold of you—it did that outside the HQ. Threads of power, of control. Never forget that.”
“You’re fooling yourself if you think you had me under any sort of control,” she said with a laugh that held only anger. “And, sweetheart, if you were in control of yourself, I’ll eat my shoe!” Soleil was in no mood to be gentle with him when he kept on treating himself in a way that aggravated every ounce of her nature.
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.