by Nalini Singh
The clan's joyous celebration was background music, shouts and footsteps all part of the larger whole.
Then came the tug of small fingers on her leg.
Startled, she looked down to see the Barnacle; he was dressed in dark blue jeans and a black shirt that was--as yet--unstained with food. "May I have this dance?" he asked with such perfect politeness and enunciation, she knew he was repeating the exact words someone had taught him.
Though Silver wanted to drown in Valentin, to build a lifetime of memories in a moment, not wounding a child's heart took priority. She'd have made the same decision in Silence, though then, she'd have justified it by saying the child was more vulnerable and needed attention.
"I'm afraid," she said to the bear who'd hold her forever if she asked, "I have a better offer."
Valentin scowled down at the tiny interloper. "You trying to steal my girl, Dima?"
Throwing out his arms, the three-year-old did an excellent imitation of a bearish bellow. Laughing in an open pride that had Dima strutting, Valentin released Silver. "I'll be back to reclaim what's mine, Starlight."
The promise rang with the power of an alpha.
A second later, he was tugged into a dance by a clanmate holding a glass of champagne, and Dima was gripping Silver's hands as they "danced." And Silver heard whispers from the trees far beyond the thumping noise of the Cavern.
Not yet, she told her brain. Give me a little more time. Just a little more. Enough to build memories that would have to last her through the coming decades of Silence.
Chapter 31
Dear Aunt Rita,
I'm about to share intimate skin privileges with a highly dominant bear for the first time. Any advice?
~ Excited Non-bear
Dear Excited Non-bear,
Cancel all your engagements for the forthcoming week and hold on for the ride.
~ Aunt Rita
--From the February 2080 issue of Wild Woman magazine: "Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication"
IT WAS MIDNIGHT by the time Valentin could get away, and by then, his gentleman tendencies had worn so thin, he'd have been terrified of scaring his mate--if that mate weren't Silver Mercant, who was as tough as steel and who said a firm yes when he asked her if she was ready for a night of wild debauchery.
Then she patted his ass again.
Cock threatening to snap in two if he didn't feel her possessive fingers on his skin soon, he took her not to his room but to hers. So she'd be comfortable. So she'd permit him to do even more naughty, sexy things to her.
He had plans to devour her from head to toe then go back for seconds.
Shutting and locking the door behind him, he rid himself of his boots and socks, began to unbutton his shirt. Silver's eyes followed his every movement, and then she was there, parting the sides of his shirt and pushing it off his shoulders. It fell to the floor in a soft murmur of sound he barely heard over the pounding of his heart.
"I love the way you feel." Silver ran her nails through his chest hair, the light scratch like a red rag to a bull. Grabbing her up into his arms, he strode to the bed, threw her down on the mattress. He didn't say she could tell him to stop at any time--if Silver Mercant wanted him to stop, she'd make it head-ringingly clear.
"I want these off," he said, and pulled off her boots, throwing them over his shoulder.
Eyes on him, Silver sat up and lowered her hands to the bottom of that thin sweater with sparkles in it. It was gone a second later and he could see her bra. It was plain black, no frills, and it set him afire. Crashing onto the bed, he took her down--careful to make sure his weight and strength didn't hurt her.
He was a bear, not a goddamn savage.
"You have amazing tits," he said, his filters all off and one hand on a creamy globe cupped by the black of her bra.
She arched under his hand. He squeezed harder. She shuddered, her eyes going black. But since she didn't tell him to stop, he figured that, this time around, the obsidian was a good sign. Gripping her jaw with his free hand, he pressed his mouth to hers, his kiss all tongue and demand. Silver gave back as good as she got, wrapping her arms and legs around him and lashing her tongue against his.
Groaning, he ground his erection into the vee between her thighs. "I'm going to fuck you so hard, Starlight."
Silver's response was to bite down on his lower lip.
Her filters, too, were clearly off.
Chest rumbling in pleasure that his mate was as mad for him as he was for her, he lifted up, breaking her hold so he could rip off her jeans. He did literally rip them off, the fabric shredding under his claws and harsh pulls. Her panties were black, too. He left them for the moment because he liked how the black framed her otherwise creamy flesh.
Throwing the shreds of the jeans aside, he ran his hands up her thighs. Eyes dark and mysterious, Silver spoke. "Take off your pants." It was a demand. He liked it.
Playing with her, he braced himself on his arms above her and bent down as if doing a push-up. "Make me," he dared against her lips.
Silver scissored her legs, surprising him onto his back.
"Where did you learn that?" he asked, happy to be bested because it meant her hands were now at the waistband of his jeans. O Bozhe! Silver's fingers were brushing his engorged cock as she worked.
Making no attempt to hide his desire, he just watched her.
"Simply because I'm not a physical person doesn't mean I don't know how to defend myself should the need arise," she said, the cool words at odds with the flush on her skin, the scent of her arousal thick in the air.
"Oh, I think you're a very physical person, Starlight." Without Silence, Silver Mercant was a bear under the skin.
As she proved when she tugged off his pants to reveal the black boxer briefs he wore underneath. He let her get the pants off and drop them over the side of the bed before he retook control, flipping her onto her back and nuzzling a wet kiss to her neck. Her response was nails digging into his back. "You like my tongue, moyo solnyshko?" he asked with a stroke of his hand down her body. "Let me show you what else I can do with it."
Taking off her bra with more care than he'd shown her pants--he liked that bra, liked how she looked in it--he threw it aside and filled his hands with the bounty of her breasts. Her nipples were a deep pink, and they made his mouth water. Not one to resist temptation when that temptation was Silver--his Silver--he lowered his head and feasted. Her cry was sharp, her hands gripping his hair tight and her body twisting under his.
Sucking not just her nipple but part of her breast into his mouth, he drew up with his teeth scraping her flesh, then flicked his tongue over the tiny hurt. When he repeated the caress on her other breast, his hand squeezing and petting the breast he'd already wet with his mouth, Silver said, "I want to bite you." The words were breathless.
"Good." He returned to his pleasurable task. "You taste even better than I imagined. I want to eat you up."
Silver's nails scored his back.
Making a deep, rumbling sound in his chest, he bit lightly at her nipple in mock punishment. She jerked . . . and pulled hard at his hair. He laughed against her. Yes, his Starlight knew very well how to deal with her bear mate.
Kissing his way down the center of her body, he licked a line along the waistband of her panties. It took him a second to remove that impediment. Two rapid claw swipes and he was done.
"I don't have that many clothes," Silver reminded him as he drew one of her thighs over his shoulder.
"Stop wearing panties. Problem solved." Before she could respond to his very sensible suggestion, he gave in to the compulsion to taste the erotic musk of her and, pulling her other leg over his shoulder, buried his face in her pussy.
Her jerk all but arched her off the bed this time.
But she didn't tell him to stop.
Thank God.
Valentin licked and sucked and petted and drank her in. She was liquid need and delicate softness and so intoxicating, his head spun.
By the time he attempted to slide a finger into her sheath, she was wet enough that he had zero trouble. Except for one fact. "Chert voz'mi. You're too tight." He looked up with a scowl, saw her looking down.
Licking her lips, her breath coming in gasps, she said, "I didn't plan on having sexual intercourse with an overendowed bear or I would've stretched myself out."
He growl-laughed, delighted with her. "Yes, I am overendowed. Glad you noticed." His bear swaggered, full of himself. "Now let's make sure you can take me over and over and over again." Dipping his head, he proceeded to do his best to drive his mate deliriously insane. So insane that maybe she'd lower the shields that kept them from mating.
He was wide open to her in every possible way.
Her thighs quivered, her pussy clenching on his tongue and the thick intrusion of his fingers, and her scream of pleasure loud enough to please his primal heart. But he was just getting started. Rising back over her deliciously limp body, he kissed every inch he passed, rubbing his stubble against her to mark her all over. He fondled her breasts because he could, kissed her already swollen mouth hot and deep.
"I can taste myself on your lips."
The huskiness of her voice was a band around his cock that squeezed mercilessly. "You taste like the best kind of honey," he said before making his way back down.
This time around, he was all about the main course.
He used his teeth on the delicate folds of her pussy, pushed in his fingers with a little more force, spread them inside her to prepare her for the intrusion of his cock.
She came again in a screaming rush, two of his fingers inside her, the pads pressing on a spot he'd made it his business to learn as a young man who was big enough that even bear females gave him a jaundiced eye. It had all been for this, to make sure he could pleasure his slender mate with her tight internal muscles and her eyes gone midnight and her pussy that was so, so wet for him.
Getting up onto his knees after a last possessive lick, he managed to tug off his briefs, then lifted up her legs, her knees hanging over his arms, and said, "Ready?" The eager head of his cock nudged the scorching heat of her.
Fuck, he was going to lose it.
Silver raised her arms above her head, her breasts taunting him . . . and smiled. "Do it."
Valentin's mind short-circuited. The only thing that kept him from just rutting into her like a caveman was the knowledge that this was her first time. Shoving her thighs wide, he pushed in, slow but relentless. The instant he saw pain whisper across her features, he froze. "No?"
"I said," she growled, "do it!"
Rumbling back at her, he did, pushing in hard and deep. Her gasp was lost in his loud groan of pleasured pain. "Your pussy is like a vise around my cock."
She squeezed her muscles even tighter.
"Mean, mean Starlichka." Dropping her legs, he shifted so that he was braced over her.
She wrapped her legs around him. "I read an article in a magazine I found in the Cavern that said men like it when women do that during sexual skin privileges."
"This man does, except when he's about to blow his nut on a single stroke." Kissing her, he drew back an inch, maybe two, then thrust back in. And the mean, mean woman in bed with him squeezed him tight again.
Valentin was only a bear. He lost it, pulling out and shoving back in in two hard, fast strokes before his spine locked and he exploded inside her in a gush of wet heat.
*
SILVER had made a conscious decision to deliberately breach the final walls of Silence and face the consequences. She'd known going in what those consequences were likely to be--especially after the earlier overload. Yet despite her foreknowledge, it still felt as if her mind had exploded outward, bloody shards digging into her.
It didn't matter.
Not when she could feel Valentin's heart pounding against her, his body a heavy weight. She could barely breathe and still it made no difference to her. Because she understood now, understood that it wasn't the sex that complicated things.
This, what she'd done with her bear, it had had nothing to do with a simple physical interaction.
"Solnyshko moyo." A kiss to the dampness of her neck as he roughly spoke words whose meaning had deepened to raw intimacy with a simple change in order.
Sun of my heart. Sunshine of my life.
The passionate, romantic words from her brawny, blunt bear hammered her straight to the soul, made her search for words to give him in return. She wasn't like Valentin, didn't always know how to show her love. "Valyusha," she said, then got stuck, the power of what she felt for him choking her throat.
But he lifted his head and smiled. "Say that again. I like it."
"Valyusha," she said, her next words coming from deep in her psyche, words that crashed through all reason and sense. "My Valyusha."
Eyes wild amber in unhidden delight, Valentin rolled off her, breaking their intimate connection. The aloneness was sudden, startling, but fleeting. He was drawing her up against his chest almost before she'd felt it. She shifted until she was on top of him, could look down into his face. His eyes were heavy-lidded, his skin flushed, his lips curved. "You pack a punch, Starlight."
"And consider," she said, "I'm only at the beginner level." Her lack of experience was an ache between her thighs, an intriguing ripple of pleasure and pain that made her feel used--in a way that felt right. Because she'd used Valentin, too, but none of it had been done to cause pain or to take more than was freely given. An even exchange where neither one of them was keeping score.
Valentin had focused nearly exclusively on her pleasure.
"I plan to learn to drive you to the breaking point as you did me." She'd have to advance at light speed, time spilling from her cupped hands like water.
"Starlight, you do that by existing." Valentin slid his hand down her back, lower. "You have one fine ass. Have I ever told you that?"
"You may tell me that at any time," she said, just to see his eyes fill with laughter, even as her own heart ached. She'd never known the organ could do that through the sheer weight of emotion. It hurt.
Valentin's laughter faded before her greedy gaze. "Talk to me. What's got you sad?"
Sad.
Such a simple word. Such a powerful word.
The ache in her heart grew deeper, harder, darker. "I don't trust easily."
"I figured that out after the eleventh time you gave me that blank do-I-know-you face when I turned up to say hi."
Her lips wanted to curve. Why should she have that physical reaction to a feeling of amusement? Not that it changed anything. She couldn't cup her hands tight enough to hold the rapidly passing seconds. "But," she whispered, "I've learned something about you in the time since we first met."
"What?" A rumble of sound against her, his hand still on her buttocks and his heavily muscled body a wall of searing heat full of a primal power that would never be turned against her.
She met the intense dark of his eyes. She could read those eyes now, read them so clearly that she wondered why she'd ever thought them impenetrable. What she saw, it made her own eyes burn in another inexplicable emotional response. "I've learned that my Valyusha does not lie to me. Sometimes, he won't tell me things, and other times, he'll tell me only a little, but he won't lie."
A scowl. "Do I look like a durak? Of course I'm not going to lie to my mate."
She didn't dispute his claim; she felt it, too, the sense she was the lock to his key. Or perhaps it was a case of two keys mutually unlocking each other's souls. "Do you know how extraordinary that makes you in my world?" He was a gift beyond comprehension. "I trust my family, but I trust only Grandmother and Arwen never to lie to me."
Lines carved into his forehead. "But your family is about loyalty."
"We are shadows in the Net. Lies are a part of our lexicon."
Valentin's scowl grew deeper. "You don't lie to me, Starlichka." It was an order. "Not even by omission. Not anymore."
"Never," she promised, touching
her fingertips to his jaw. "I vow this."
Silver gave her word as rarely as her grandmother did, and for the same reason--once she gave it, she wouldn't break it. As long as her memory remained, as long as her mind worked, she would keep her word . . . even if she could no longer understand why she'd given it. "I will not lie to you, Valentin. Not so long as I live."
Valentin made that deep rumble in his chest that had her hand vibrating where she'd placed it against his skin. "Tell me what you aren't saying," he demanded. "I will fight all your monsters beside you, solnyshko moyo. You just have to point them out."
Beside her, not for her. Yes, this alpha bear understood her as no one else had ever done. And she was about to break that huge heart of his--because this monster, not even her bear could fight.
"People talk about Psy gifts, Psy powers." For over a century, the rulers of the Psy race had made sure that when others thought of the Psy, they thought of power. "Even after the outbreaks when Psy became mindless killers, most people just believe we got hit with a mental virus. Bad luck, but not enough to diminish the aura of Psy power."
How could it be otherwise when Kaleb was a living symbol of that power, when the Arrows were heroes using their violent abilities to help rather than harm, when the M-Psy continued to diagnose countless illnesses and the Es opened their hearts to all who needed them?
"What's the other side?" Valentin fisted his hand in her hair, a big predator who'd die for her. "That's what you're trying to tell me, isn't it, Starlichka? That it isn't only about gifts and powers."
"Yes." Silver wondered if he knew she'd not only die for him; she'd kill for him. Mercants had few boundaries when they loved. But that fierce woman, the one who felt the passion of her ancestors, would soon be erased from this earth. "What no one ever talks about are the curses in amongst the gifts."
Chapter 32
Even so young, it's clear that Silver has the intelligence, spirit, and strength to lead this family after I am gone, but she can't do that if she's dead. I have to find a way to keep her alive.
--Personal diary entry by Ena Mercant (March 7, 2057)
VALENTIN RAN HIS hand over her hair, his attention a dominant wave.
There was no more time to delay, no more time to hope for a miraculous reversal of her personal curse. "Do you know what Nova is doing right now? She's talking to Chaos about how Dima took off his pants and ran around half-naked this morning just because it was fun. Every so often, he'd stop and do a 'butt dance.' Nova couldn't catch him because she was laughing too hard."
