Chapter 9 #3
I come around the turn.
She is there.
Back to the wall. The dead end behind her. Stained lucky top. Wrecked hair. Gauze at her temple. Flushed from her cheeks to the neckline of the top. Breathing hard. Her eyes — hazel, wide, blazing in the amber light — find mine and hold.
Her chin is up.
She is not afraid. Not one trace of fear in the air. What is in the air is want so dense I can feel it against my skin like heat from a furnace, and this heat does not make me want to fight. This heat makes me want to drop to my knees.
I cross the distance. Slow. Each step is placed.
The courting walk. She watches me come. She does not flinch.
She does not look away. She has been hiding her whole life, and she has chosen to stop.
She has chosen to stand at the end of a dead-end corridor on a sealed ship and let a Skiveth male walk toward her in the dark, and the choosing is the bravest thing she has done today, and she calmed a Vrennak today.
I stop. Three inches. The temperature difference filling the space between us. Her warmth radiating into my cool. The boundary where her heat ends and my cold begins is a physical line in the air, and I can feel it on every inch of exposed skin.
My hands go to the wall. Flat. One on each side of her head. The claws extend — just the tips — pressing into the metal. The soft scrape makes her pupils dilate. Not from fear, but from the sound of a predator planting himself around her and choosing not to close the last three inches.
“I have you,” I say. Low. Against her hair.
She is shaking. Not fear. Her hands are trembling at her sides. Her pulse is visible at the freckle. Her body deciding between reaching for me and holding still.
I lean in. My mouth close to her ear. The heat of her skin against my lips without contact. The scent of her this close — it is not a scent. It is a language. It is her body telling mine everything her mouth hasn’t said yet, and my body is fluent.
“Tell me to stop. Any point. And I stop.”
“Don’t stop.”
“Lorri —”
“Don’t. Stop.” Her chin tilts up. Her eyes on mine. Hazel and bright and certain in a way that goes through me like her hands on the ridges. “I’m not saying stop. I’m saying don’t.”
“I’ve never done this.” The words come out raw. Stripped of everything — the cockiness, the dry humor, the calm. What is left is a male with his claws in the wall and his mate between his arms and a truth he has never said out loud. “The instinct. The hunt. Any of it. I thought I was —”
The word is defective. The word has been jammed in my throat for my entire adult life.
She reaches up. Her warm fingers find my jaw. The touch is light and certain. It says I see you and I mean it and the combination of those two things at this distance with her scent in my lungs and her warmth three inches from my skin —
“You’re not broken,” she says.
Three words.
Three words and everything I have built on top of defective — the route, the schedule, the competent, reliable fine — shifts. Gives way. Like ice in spring. The entire surface moving and underneath it something that has been frozen for a very long time starting to run.
She said it and she meant it, and she is looking at me with the calm certainty of a female who has just told a truth that she knows is true and does not need me to confirm it.
I kiss her.
The kiss is not gentle. For half a second I mean it to be. Then her mouth opens under mine and her fingers slide from my jaw into my hair and she pulls and the half-second burns up and what’s left is us.
My tongue in her mouth. Both tips. Tasting her. She makes a sound — low, desperate, from the chest — and the sound goes through me, and my hands come off the wall and find her waist and her neck, and I pull her into me, and she moves.
Full length. Warm against cool. Soft against hard. The temperature difference multiplied by every inch of contact, and we both make a sound, and neither of us breaks the kiss.
My teeth graze her lower lip. She gasps into my mouth.
My claws retract. My hands are in her hair, on her jaw, tilting her head, finding the angle, and she is kissing me back with the same nerve she used on the Vrennak — all fight, no hesitation — and it is going to wreck me, and I am going to let it.
I pull back. Fractionally. My forehead against hers.
Both of us are breathing hard. Her eyes open.
Mine open. Three inches again. The same three inches from before, except now they are filled with the taste of her mouth and the ghost of her sound and the knowledge that everything I promised in the dark is about to happen.
“Every promise,” I say. Against her mouth.
“Every promise,” she says back.
I pick her up.
“Captain.” HORATIO. Barely a whisper. The most restrained I have ever heard him. “I have taken the liberty of preparing the cabin. Clean sheets. Ambient temperature adjusted. I will not be monitoring the cabin for the foreseeable future.”
A beat.
“Thank you, HORATIO.”
“You are welcome, Captain. You are very welcome indeed.”