15. The Exploration
The Exploration
Flossie
We are both a mess, and I am going to put my hands on him if it kills me.
Out of the corridor. Drask’s deadline ticking.
Saar locked in the cargo bunk with a splinted knee.
A night’s run to Junction One on autopilot.
All of this is important and none of it is louder than the fact that I kissed this male in a corridor and his hand was on my breast and his body was pressed against mine and I have been wet since, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
His tactical suit is torn in three places.
Blood dried along the tears, almost invisible against crimson.
He hasn’t mentioned it. He won’t. He’ll sit at the co-pilot’s station running threat assessments until his body heals itself because that is what he does—bleeds quietly, fixes nothing, needs nobody.
Not on my ship.
“You should clean those.” I nod toward his ribs. Practical. Morrison-voiced. As if the wanting isn’t sitting between my hips like a fist.
“The wounds are superficial. Xarthian tissue regenerates at—“
“Shower. Now. Both of us.” I hold up a hand before the noble objection arrives. “The controls are on the left wall, which you can’t reach without dislocating something. You need me in there. Logistics.”
“The shower unit is not designed for a Xarthian.”
“Nothing on this ship is designed for a Xarthian. Get in the shower, Xor.”
He gives me the look. The tactical assessment that weighs compliance against vulnerability and keeps finding that I am not playing the game his training prepared him for.
“I do not require assistance.”
“And I don’t require your permission to help you. We’ve covered this.” I walk past him. Don’t look back. Morrison’s trick—give the order, walk away. “Sprout, shower status.”
“Operational. I am adjusting temperature to accommodate Xarthian dermal requirements.” The orb dims to deliberate amber. “I am also reducing environmental monitoring to external threats only for—however long this takes. Some data is better left uncollected.”
“Sprout.”
“Don’t break anything.”
The orb goes dark.
The shower is small.
With a seven-foot Xarthian inside it, the word small becomes architectural satire. His horns nearly brush the ceiling. His shoulders touch both walls. His tail has nowhere to go except around his leg or around me.
He is standing in my shower in his trousers because he will not take them off.
“You can’t clean the rib wounds through fabric.”
“The rib wounds are accessible through the tears.”
“Xor.”
“The removal of clothing in this environment would create—“ he pauses, jaw locking, “—complications.”
The complications are pressing against the wet fabric with a visibility that makes my mouth go dry.
I have felt them—the ridges, the hard length of him against my backside in the bunk, against my belly in the corridor.
I know the shape through cloth. The prospect of the shape without cloth is making it difficult to maintain the Morrison voice.
“Complications noted.” I step into the shower.
The space contracts to almost nothing. His heat fills it—amplified by the steam, dense and close, and I am in a tank top and knickers because I am forty-two years old and this is my ship and my shower and my choice and my choice is to stand mostly undressed in front of a male whose pheromones have been making me clench since the bunk.
The water hits my shoulders. Warm. Not enough. I want his temperature—the 103 degrees of him, the furnace heat that I pressed myself against in the bunk and have been cold without since.
“Shirt off. I need to see the ribs.”
He pulls the undershirt over his head.
I have seen his skin—through tears, at the shoulder gap, the nape where my fingers buried. Pieces of him. Not this. Not the whole map at once.
He fills the shower. Crimson skin and black geometric markings converging at his sternum, branching down his ribs like a diagram of something sacred.
The fuzz covers the skin between the lines—dense at the centre of his chest, thinning toward the waist, disappearing into the waistband where the markings continue and the rest of him continues and the waistband is the only barrier between my composure and its complete destruction.
Water runs over him. Down the channel of his spine, catching in the fuzz, darkening it. The combat wounds across his ribs—three shallow slashes, mineral dust glinting. His shoulder reopened through my thermal thread. Blood and water in thin pink rivers.
My hands are steady. My hands are always steady. Between my legs is not steady. Between my legs has been running its own agenda since the corridor.
“Turn. Hands on the wall.”
He turns. The view from behind is the broad span of his back, the fuzz trailing his spine, the markings branching over his shoulder blades, the tail locked against his leg with rigid discipline. Every muscle in him vibrating with the effort of standing still.
I clean the wounds. Careful. The mineral dust comes away and each touch draws a sound from him—not pain.
The sharp inhale of a male being touched with care in a place that expects violence.
His ribs flinch not because it hurts but because gentleness in a vulnerable place is a language his body doesn’t speak.
“When was the last time someone did this for you?” My fingers move from the wound to the unmarked skin beside it. I trace one geometric line from his ribs toward his spine. Not medical. I’m done pretending this is medical.
“The question does not have an answer.”
“That’s the answer, lovey.”
I press my forehead between his shoulder blades.
The wet fuzz against my skin. His purr starting—not from his chest but somewhere deeper, vibrating through his spine into my skull, down through my jaw and my throat and my breasts and straight into the ache between my hips.
The purr is a physical thing and my body receives it like a frequency it was built to respond to.
I press closer. My nipples are hard against his back through the wet tank top and the contact sends a bright jolt from my chest to my clit and I bite my lip to keep the sound inside.
I don’t keep the sound inside.
His entire back goes rigid. He heard it.
The small, involuntary noise I made—not a moan, the precursor, the sharp intake—and his tail uncurls from his leg and finds my hip and wraps.
The water-slick muscle against my bare skin, hot and heavy, and I press my hips into him and the pressure of his lower back against my belly is not enough and too much and I want his hands on me but that is for tonight. Tonight.
“Hair,” I manage. Against his back. “My turn.”
He turns. Elbows, walls, the temperature spiking and correcting. Then we are facing each other in the steam and he is looking down at me with gold eyes that have abandoned every tactical protocol.
I pull the tie from my braid. Shake my hair loose. It falls past my shoulders, darkening in the water. His nostrils flare—the scent response, my arousal in the steam, and the knowledge that he can smell exactly how wet I am sends a secondary pulse through me that makes my thighs press together.
He sees. His eyes drop to my thighs. Back to my face. His pupils are blown.
“Claws in, please.”
They retract before I’ve finished. Both hands. The full chosen gentleness.
His fingers slide into my hair and I close my eyes and his hands cradle my skull and the blunt pads are slow and thorough and he washes my hair with the same devastating attention he gives everything—from my temples to my nape, working through tangles, finding the tension behind my ears and at the base of my skull.
The pads of his fingers press and release and press.
I tip my head back and a sound comes out of me that I will deny until I am dead. Low and unguarded and helpless—the sound of a woman who has not been touched like this, like she is worth the patience, like the tangles are worth the time, in years beyond counting.
“You’re very good at this.” Into his chest. My forehead against the fuzz.
“I am good at everything.” The arrogance. Even now.
“Unbelievable.”
“Also true.”
I laugh against his skin and the vibration meets his purr and the harmonic goes deeper and his hands still in my hair.
The shower is too small. His thigh is between mine—not deliberate, geometry, the only way two bodies fit in this space—and the pressure of his thigh against me through the soaked cotton of my knickers is direct and firm and my hips roll into it before my brain signs off.
His breath catches.
I do it again. Not an accident this time. A slow grind against his thigh, the friction through wet fabric hitting me exactly where I need it, and the pleasure is sharp and bright and I grip his ribs and press harder.
“Flossie.” Rough. A warning that sounds like begging.
“I know.” I stop. Pull back. Not because I want to—I could come like this, on his thigh in the shower with my face against his chest, and the temptation is staggering. But I want something else first. “I know. But I want—“
His mouth lands on my neck.
Not gentle. Hot and open, his lips against the tendon below my ear, and his teeth—blunt, the front edges, not fangs—scrape down the column of my throat and the sensation rips through me like a wire being pulled.
My hand flies to the back of his head, fingers digging into the wet fuzz, and I pull him closer and his mouth finds my collarbone and the purr vibrates against my skin, against the bone, into my chest.
His hand slides from my hair down my side.
Ribs, waist, the curve of my hip. His palm is enormous—spanning from hipbone to the small of my back—and he pulls me flush against his thigh and holds me there and the pressure between my legs is perfect and deliberate and his mouth is on my throat and I am going to—
I grab his wrist. Stop his hand before it goes where every nerve in my body is screaming for it to go.