Wild Invitation

he’d asked her to teach him her pleasure points, his wild sensual mate who denied him nothing. “Is this better?”
    Her body tightened then broke in a shocked ripple of ecstasy, her muscles clamping down on him. He gritted his teeth to hold back the urge to rush—he wasn’t in a rushing kind of a mood tonight—and then, when she softened beneath him, he kissed her with languorous sensuality, petting her down from the peak.
    Heavy lids lifted to reveal eyes gone nightglow. “I guess,” she murmured, kissing his throat, “this patience is a side effect of the control you had to maintain in the PsyNet.”
    He held her to his throat, sucking in a breath as she licked out at a particularly sensitive spot. “Possibly.”
    A smile against his skin. “Lucky me.”
    Looking down into her pleasure-drenched expression, he whispered, “No. I’m the lucky one.”
    He held her gaze for every long, deep stroke, luxuriated in the touch of her hands down his back as she tried to bring him impossibly closer, gloried in the secondary wave of pleasure that turned those wolf-bright eyes hazy…and took him under in a passionate storm that short-circuited his every nerve.
    •   •   •
    HE came to, collapsed beside his mate’s body, his thigh pinning both of hers and his arm over her breasts, his face turned toward her own on a single shared pillow. Breathing was an effort, but since Lara seemed to be having the same problem, he was content to lie there, hot and sweaty and happy.
    Happy.
    It was the wrong word to think tonight, the wrong key to turn after the flash of memory at the dinner table.
    Fingers against his nape, rubbing at the sudden rigid tension. “Walker?”
    The past shoved at his defenses, and it took all of his strength to fight the urge to let it spill out. “I don’t want to taint us with what was.”
    Lara nudged at him until he shifted his body enough to allow her to turn to face him. “We’re stronger than memories, stronger than hurt.” A luminous smile. “We’re a mated pair, a family.”
    So simple, so powerful, her words smashed the dam inside him. But it took him time to speak, time to think past the violent crimson haze incited by this particular fragment of the past. Lara didn’t shove, didn’t attempt to force. No, his mate simply nuzzled close and held him, as if she knew he needed her touch at this instant more than ever before.
    “The day the rehabilitation order was authorized,” he began at last, his voice a harsh rasp, “when I came home to find Yelene packing because she didn’t intend to let her genes die out withmine”—the reason she’d aborted their unborn child with cold-blooded callousness—“I discovered she’d put in a call to pull Marlee and Toby out of school.” Jagged, brutal, the words cut at his throat, made him bleed.
    “It’s okay,” Lara said, her distress open. “You don’t have to tell me if it hurts.”
    He fisted his hand in her hair, anchoring himself in the warmth and heart and wildness of her. “No, I need to tell you.” Needed her to accept him in spite of the terrible mistakes he’d made and the pain those mistakes had caused. “Yelene had every intention of telling both children to pack up their belongings for donation to charity, because they’d be vegetables after the brainwipe of rehabilitation, with no use for any of it.”
    Horror colored Lara’s eyes. “That’s not Silence, Walker, that’s cruelty.”
    Walker stroked his hand down her side, felt the rage that vibrated through her. “It was as if she had never been their guardian,” he said, the insight making no more sense now than it had then, “never vowed to care for the children.”
    A growl came out of Lara’s throat. “Healers might have trouble with killing, but if that woman ever ends up in front of me, I will carve out her heart without anesthetic.”
    Shifting his position so that he was braced over her, he rubbed his cheek against her own and spoke the worst truth of all. “
I
was the one who chose Yelene to be my co-parent.” He’d been so careful, had read through multiple PsyMed reports on each candidate, done a deep background and personality check before he settled on Yelene.
    And still he’d failed to protect the vulnerable lives under his care.
    “I will never forgive myself for that.” Regret spun razor-sharp blades in his gut. “The way Marlee looked when she realized her mother had abandoned her—so small and broken; the way Toby