Chapter 5
Sloane
I didn't sleep.
That wasn't unusual for me in the field.
But the field had never previously included a crashed shuttle on a forbidden storm planet with a seventy-two-hour countdown running like a live wire in the base of my skull.
I lay in the emergency bunk, stared at the cracked ceiling and told myself I was running logistics — crystal extraction, reactor stabilization, crew beacon triangulation — and for approximately four minutes, I believed it.
Then I stopped believing and faced reality.
Because the thing keeping me awake was not the countdown. The crash. Or worrying about my crew.
It was him. His eyes. His voice. The way he looked at me. The waves of heat that seemed to radiate off his body as if he were a small sun.
He was here, inside my ship. He’d insisted.
Hell, he was probably sleeping on the floor outside my door. He had that dominant, protective streak thing going that I had no way to argue against.
Would have been easier to stand strong if I wasn’t scared. Hurt. Alone on an alien world I didn’t understand. If I hadn’t seen large creatures moving around on the ship’s scanners, creatures with huge teeth, claws and hard exoskeletons that looked more like monsters than flesh and blood.
If I was alone right now, thinking about hiking into that jungle tomorrow, I’d be terrified. But I wasn’t alone. I was with him.
Sorik was right. My body could feel things it shouldn’t.
The ground beneath the ship seemed to pulse, like it was alive.
The trees were singing. Not like a rock band, but with a haunting, ethereal tone I couldn’t turn off.
And they were getting louder as the hours passed.
Almost like they were building up to a grand finale, a crescendo of sound that somehow was in sync with the planet’s storms.
Everything here was wilder. More powerful. More alive.
The memory of Sorik’s body heat, his hand on my cheek, had me tossing and turning.
The waves that had come off his body in the closed in space of the cockpit — not aggressive, not invasive, just present, had become my new obsession.
His heat was steady and enormous, like sitting too close to a fire.
I didn’t believe he had any intention of burning me, but he somehow warmed every cold place in my body whether I wanted him to or not.
I lay in the dark and felt the ghost of his presence against my left side where I'd sat nearest to him. My body kept trying to turn toward it the way a compass needle turns toward north.
Stop it, I told myself.
My body ignored me like a stubborn little wench. A horny wench. If anything, my entire system betrayed me. Longed to be closer to him. Wanted more contact. More everything.
I thought about the way his hands had looked locked around the edges of the crew chair. About the tenderness in his touch when he’d cleaned the blood from my temple. The hint of him I’d tasted when he put the leaf in my mouth.
I wanted to suck his fingers into my mouth and swirl my tongue around the tips. See what would happen to those silver eyes when I did.
He’d taken care of me, when he did not need to. How had he known I had a headache?
Weird, alien telepathy? The bond? The same way I knew his body was powerful? That his muscles could tear through the forest like a bulldozer destroying everything in its path? Somehow, I felt him. It was bizarre and sexy at the same time.
How the hell was I supposed to resist an alien who thought I was his destined mate when I could literally feel his honor?
His strength? His determination to protect me?
His lust? Fuck me, the need radiating off him was about to kill me.
Or make me have an orgasm just from standing too close.
How the hell was I going to resist his absolute conviction that I was his?
I couldn’t give myself to him. I couldn’t give myself to anyone, mate or not.
I didn’t even belong to myself anymore. I’d signed my life away.
I had a contract with NFI. I owed Nova Frontier Initiative five more years.
That was the deal. Ten years exploring, working for them, bringing back new plants, new technology, new species to study.
The crew? We were paid very well, were able to see new worlds and retire without ever having to worry about money again.
If we survived.
I had no doubt NFI had received the distress signal from our ship. They probably had a salvage crew on the way.
What would they do to Sorik or his people if they discovered the truth? That this planet was inhabited? That the people here could somehow interact with lightning? With storms?
Could Sorik control them? Summon them? What a terrifying—and powerful—skill. The military leaders at NFI would want to harness that. Study it. Replicate it in their genetic labs. Try to make soldiers who could fling lightning bolts like the mythical Thor with his mighty hammer.
I couldn’t let that happen. Not to Sorik. Not to the people under his protection.
No. The only way to keep the salvage crews and greedy corporate overlords away from this place was to fix my ship and get the hell out of here. Gather the crew, file some false reports—reports that recommend never, ever coming back to this planet—and move on.
I needed Sorik to help me get the crystals and fix the ship. I would just have to resist whatever this pull was between us. Resist. Fix the ship. Leave Sorik, his people and his planet behind. Untouched. Unrecorded. Protected.
So, now I was on a rescue mission. I had a crew to save. A village, no, an entire civilization to protect. An explosion to prevent.
Yet all I could think about was his heat.
His hands. His muscles. Those fucking silver eyes that looked through me, that made me want.
His voice—sounds and images—creating the most intimate, sensual glide of masculine power I’d ever felt.
Just his presence made my entire body want to surrender to his touch.
His kiss. His hard, hot cock heating me from the inside.
“Stop it.”
I gave up on sleep at first light and headed outside, profoundly grateful to have something useful to do with my body.
Sorik was already outside. Of course he was. No rest for the wicked, and the wicked was my relentless pussy and aching breasts. The images chasing themselves around and around inside my mind of wrapping my legs around his hips and begging him to fuck me as hard and fast as he could go.
He’d probably break me, make me scream. I wasn’t sure I cared. Control was overrated. Just once in my life, I’d like to be so blind with passion that I lost it. I’d had human lovers. None of them made me want to walk away from my crew. My job. The freedom I had exploring new worlds.
I had a feeling I could spend a lifetime exploring this place—and Sorik’s body—and be perfectly content.
Fucking dangerous thought.
I came through the hatch into the violet pre-dawn and found him crouched at the tree line with one broad hand pressed flat to the ground and his head tilted, listening to something I couldn't hear.
The storm nodes along his spine were banked to a soft ember-silver in the low light — present and steady, pulsing with a slow rhythm that I recognized because it somehow matched the beat currently living in my own chest. In my core.
In every cell. I felt like a tuning fork and his presence kept hitting me, keeping me on edge.
Body humming. Too aware of him. This—this place—was too much. He was too much.
He turned to look at me before I'd made a sound.
The sight of him in full daylight, without the disorientation of the crash and the alien dusk doing anything to soften the reality of him — hit me like a physical gut punch. Actually painful, like a fist squeezing my chest. I had to fight for air. For logic. Control.
I was so screwed. This was not normal. I needed medical scans. Something. Something was wrong with me. My reaction, my need for him, was not normal. So not fucking normal.
He stood, the morning light falling across the broad lines of him in a way that made the word enormous feel newly, wholly inadequate.
Not brutal. Nothing about him was brutish, despite his size, despite the pale branched lightning marks across his shoulders that spoke of energy I didn’t fully understand.
He was made for this world in a way that was almost incomprehensible.
Every line of him belonged here, in this valley, in this exact color of electric light.
He was part of this world the same way the stormglass trees belonged, and the obsidian cliffs, the pulsing ground and the charged air.
He inspected me with those silver eyes that had been living in my sleepless skull all night.
"Your heart rate is elevated," he said.
"I didn't sleep well."
Something moved across his face. Too fast to name. "No," he said. "Neither did I."
He let that sit between us for exactly one second, and then he turned toward the jungle and said we should move. I told my heartbeat it needed to behave itself, grabbed my pack and followed him into the trees.
The jungle swallowed us whole.
Daylight in the stormglass forest was nothing like night.
At dusk it had been eerie and still. In the morning it was alive — light bending through the fused trunks in fractured prisms of violet and copper, the bioluminescent fungi still glowing soft blue at the root systems despite the dawn.
The air hummed with constant electric frequency in a way that pressed against my skin from all sides like a warm current of flowing water.
I was intensely, helplessly aware of Sorik moving through the forest beside me.