Wild Invitation

back, but Toby smiled the smile of a child who had no doubts about his place in his family’s heart.
    “Goodnight, Uncle Walker.”
    “Goodnight, Toby.”
    Lara was also propped up in bed reading when he entered their bedroom.
    He’d never been a man who hesitated, but he did so tonight, unsure how to read her silence. Lara always talked to him, even when she was angry. Walking to the shower without breaking that silence, he shrugged off his clothing and stepped under the heated spray. Once there, he focused not on the way she’d left him this afternoon, striding off without a backward look, but on how she felt inside him, her love unshaken.
    Shuddering, he pressed his palms to the tile, head bent under the spray.
    His grip on the simple, inexorable truth of her love a bloodless one, he wiped himself off, and hitching the towel around his hips, he walked back into the bedroom. Lara had put down her reader, turned off the light on her side, and lay on her back with one arm above her head…and he saw what he hadn’t earlier.
    She was wearing the nightgown he liked best.
    Everything came to vibrant life inside him as he realized she
had
spoken to him. He simply hadn’t listened well enough. Not a mistake he’d make again.
    Throwing the towel over a chair, he slid in under the sheet,switched off his own light, and reached for her. She came, warm and soft, and
his
. He shifted to enclose her with his body, his forearms on either side of her head. “Did we,” he whispered, “just have our first fight as a mated couple?”
    Lara felt every ounce of tension leach out of her at that quiet question. When he’d gone into the shower without saying a word, she’d almost burst into tears. Now, she nuzzled at his throat, taking the clean, male scent of him inside, her wolf’s fur rubbing up against her skin. “Yes. This is the making-up part.”
    He shifted his weight to settle more intimately between her legs. “In that case, I’m already looking forward to our next fight.”
    He was playing with her, she realized, this man who hadn’t believed he had the capacity for such lightness of heart. Throat thick with emotion, she curved one leg over his hip, stroking her hands across the slightly damp skin of his shoulders—he never dried them properly and she usually had to finish the task.
    “I’m sorry I yelled at you then took off,” she said, feeling terrible about how she’d avoided his touch. It had been an unconscious effort to protect herself from pain, but the instant she’d cooled down enough to think, she’d realized she’d hurt him, hurt her mate. It had killed her. “I didn’t mean to deny you skin privileges.”
    He nuzzled back at her, kissing the side of her temple. “I know. It’s okay.” His jaw, rough with stubble, rasped over her hair. “Will you forgive me, too?”
    Her eyes burned at the unvarnished request. “Always.”
    Lips closing over her own, his kiss a reclaiming, the heat and weight of his body a tactile caress. She gave herself up to it, up to him, loved him as he loved her, their limbs tangled so completely at the end that she didn’t know where she began and Walker ended. And then the pleasure crashed over them, their bodies locked together as they fell.
    •   •   •
    LARA’S cheek was against her mate’s chest when she rose out of the languid haze of desire, his arm around her and her legthrown over his body, both of them slick with sweat, hearts thudding. “You’ll have to shower again.”
    It took him so long to answer, she was half-asleep when his voice cut through the lingering scent of the pleasure they’d found in one another.
    “The shielding, it’s instinctive at this point.” A quiet confession. “I had to learn how to create and maintain it as a young male, when I realized my Silence was problematic.”
    Because, she understood, fully awake, he’d loved his siblings—and later the children—enough to fight for them, enough that he’d gotten through to an Arrow and a young girl trained by a Councilor. “You had to hide even the faintest trace of an emotional response.” It was a truth she’d realized the instant she’d broken the stranglehold of her own overwhelming response.
    A nod she saw in the dark, her wolf’s night-vision acute. “After defection, I knew I had to give the children, Sienna included, the emotional support they needed to thrive, but the fact is, while I can function with that shield lowered during the normal