Chapter 5 #3
His hands — I noticed distantly — still curled into fists at his sides.
Not gripping me. Not turning. Completely, rigidly still.
Every muscle in his back locked. The storm nodes blazed against my cheek.
He smelled of heat and lightning and the dark-metal scent that had done things to my nervous system since last night.
He was so warm. So impossibly, intensely warm.
The thing that pulsed between us since the moment our eyes met?
It locked onto me now — hard and direct.
No subtlety. My fingers curled slightly at his sides, trying to anchor me. To hold on. I didn't tell them to.
Then he stepped forward.
Out of contact. Controlled. Deliberate.
He turned to face me. His eyes blazed silver-white — not the slow pulse of the resonance I'd watched for hours last night, but something raw and immediate and barely leashed. Every node on his spine burned as brightly as I’d ever seen them.
His jaw locked so hard I saw the muscle working. His hands—
Still in fists.
"Stay closer to the center of the path," he said. Each word precise. Each word assembled with care, the way you assemble something fragile under pressure. His eyes held mine a beat too long — silver and hot and not quite steady.
"Right." My hands still felt the shape of his sides. My cheek still felt the heat of his nodes. My entire left side, where I'd pressed against him, felt the absence of him with an acuteness that was frankly, alarming. "Yes. Understood."
He turned back to the path.
I followed him on legs that were steadier than they deserved to be. I didn't touch my face to check whether it was as warm as it felt. I already knew the answer. I was flushed and hot, head to toe. My entire system was in meltdown mode for this man. This alien.
What the fuck would happen to me if I actually gave in and let him really touch me?
Fuck me? Claim me like he said he wanted to?
At least, I assumed that’s what claiming meant on his world?
Naked bodies. Kissing. Touching. His hard cock buried deep, thrusting in and out of me like he’d never get enough.
I was a mess. A horny, discombobulated freaking mess.
This wasn’t me. Was. Not. Me. I did not lose control over a man.
Any man. No matter how fucking hot he looked with tiny arcs of light moving under massive muscles, or how the taste of him on my lips—fuck me, yes, I licked them—almost made me groan.
He tasted good. A hint of salt, exotic spices and man.
Totally unique. Addictive. I wanted more.
We walked.
The silence between us was not the comfortable kind anymore.
It was charged with sexual tension. I wondered if he was angry that I’d touched him.
If he had felt my lips against his back?
I wondered if I was driving him as insane with want as he was driving me.
The jungle suddenly seemed thicker around us.
The air heavier. The electric hum louder in a way I suspected had less to do with the approaching storm and more to do with whatever flowed between us in the two feet of space we both maintained with careful, deliberate effort.
When the silence had become something I needed to break before it broke me, I risked talking to him. "The pulse reed discharge — is that going to get worse as the storm approaches? Are there a lot of those reeds on the way to the crystals?"
"Everything that stores energy will discharge more frequently.
" He scanned the undergrowth as he spoke, continuous and automatic.
The movement of his eyes across the landscape was so thorough and so practiced that I understood without being told that this was not attention.
It was guardianship. He tracked every variable in this environment with the focus of a man who had decided something was worth protecting and acted accordingly.
I watched the line of his jaw as he scanned.
The steadiness of it. The way his attention moved like something trained and deliberate and completely unhurried.
I felt the safety of being inside that protection like a physical thing — warm and welcome and very difficult to dismiss.
"The intervals will shorten. The surges will intensify. "
“In your body as well? Do you need to let off energy?
Like the reeds?" His biology was fascinating, but the real reason I asked was the pressure building inside me.
Uncomfortable. Crackling. Like the build-up to a scream, or an orgasm.
Rising and rising inside me where I had no control and no way to release the energy moving through my system.
I felt both more alive and in extreme danger.
What would happen to my body when the storm arrived? What would happen to his?
He glanced at me sideways. Just a glance. A fraction of a second of silver and heat before his eyes moved back to the path. My pulse registered it before my brain did. "Discharge. Yes."
I focused on a point directly ahead of me and asked the question I'd built toward for three miles of jungle path. "When the storm arrives, what happens to you? To your body?"
Silence. Different from the ones before it. This one had weight and heat and edges.
"The pre-surge atmospheric charge typically begins many hours before the storm itself," he said. His voice stayed very even. Too even. The evenness of a man afraid to say too much. To scare me? Warn me? "The biological need for energetic release is — proportional to the severity of the storm."
"If the storm is strong, how do you release energy?”
“Normally, we become one with the storm and the energy fields around us. We are grounded by the stormglass trees or the ground. But now—”
Now he was linked to me. He didn’t need to say it. I could feel it. “What happens to the Skybond during a storm?”
"The bond intensifies.”
“What if you are not with your mate? Does it hurt?” I was already uncomfortable, trying not to touch him.
That brief contact we’d shared had been like melting into a hot bath.
I couldn’t trust my body when it just surrendered like that.
No fight. No resistance. No freaking hint of self-preservation. None.
"Yes. Our need for contact will grow stronger."
Fuck me. My need for contact was already driving me insane.
I really needed to know if this strange buildup of energy could kill him.
Or me. Resisting him was miserable enough already.
But I knew nothing about this bond. Could it actually kill me?
Or would I just touch a tree or the grass and shoot lightning bolts out of my ass?
No freaking way I was asking that, but at least I still had a sense of humor.
I breathed. In. Out. Decided I needed to get the crystals, find my crew and get off this fucking planet before I made a huge mistake. Huge. An I-let-him-touch-me and I-fell-in-love-with-an-alien huge.
The air between us ran hot in a way that had nothing to do with the climate.
I noticed every inch of the space that separated us — two feet of jungle air that felt like a chasm.
A space we both observed by mutual agreement that grew more difficult to justify with every step.
The heat that radiated off him reached me despite the fact that we didn’t touch.
His energy was constant. A lure. Bait. His presence something my skin had already filed under a category my brain refused to name.
His arm was two feet from my arm. His hand two feet from my hand.
My body had made its preferences very clear since the moment he'd put me behind him and I'd learned what it felt like to press against him — the solidity of his back, the way his heat had soaked into me at every contact point, the dark-metal smell of him that still hadn't left my memory or my nervous system. All the scanner data in the world couldn’t address my central problem. My body had decided what it wanted and now ran a very determined campaign to talk me into doing something I shouldn’t do.
This is just the Skybond, I thought. This is a biological mechanism. This is electrochemical. This is—
"Sloane."
My name on his lips stopped everything. My name. Low and direct. I heard it with both my ears and my mind. He’d spoken the sounds deliberately.
I looked at him.
He was already looking at me. Had been looking at me, I suspected, for longer than I realized.
His silver eyes held steady. Blazed as if he had read my mind and perceived entirely too much.
The storm nodes along his spine pulsed with a long, slow wave of light that moved from his shoulders to the small of his back like a tide responding to something.
I felt the energy. In my chest. An answering pull that crested and held and did not recede.
The light of his desire, silver-white and rhythmic, caught the corner of my vision.
I didn't look away from his face. Didn’t dare watch the desire pulsing through his flesh.
"Yes?" My voice came out lower than I intended, sounded like an invitation, even to me.
He stayed quiet for a moment. The jungle breathed around us.
Something distant cracked — pre-storm lightning, miles away.
The sound moved through the charged air and through my body.
I felt it in my teeth, in my sternum, in the palms of my hands — the same palms that still remembered the exact texture of his sides, the exact geography of him under my hands in the moment before he'd stepped away.
"We are on dangerous ground." His jaw tightened. Was he talking about my animalistic lust or the actual plants and creatures around us? "Pay attention. Watch the path."
I tried to watch the path. The best I could do was watch him. He walked ahead of me. My gaze devoured every curve and hollow, every shadow, every muscle movement as if my life depended on it. I argued that it did, even as my pulse ran wild with want.
The cliffs rose ahead of us, dark and immense.
The crystal formations caught the morning light in cold fire.
The sky above the valley had begun to change — the violet cloud systems thickened at the edges, the light went strange and heavy with the weight of what built overhead.
I smelled the storm. Metallic and clean and enormous, the smell of electricity in a quantity that dwarfed anything my nervous system had a baseline for.
And underneath that smell, constant and distinctive and refusing to be categorized as anything other than what it was, I smelled him.
The path became steep. Perilous. Rocks shifting under my feet. Twice I reached for him to steady me. Both times, he was already there. Holding on. Ready to catch me.
The moment I could, I let go. Stepped back.
Tried to put some distance between myself and ultimate temptation.
The smell of him had been doing things to me since last night.
Proximity hadn't helped. Hours of walking the jungle path hadn't helped.
My body conducted its campaign to be closer to him.
My skin won the argument with my brain by attrition, inch by slow, inevitable inch the space between us disappeared.
Significant, undeniable trouble, I'd told myself this morning.
I hadn't known the half of it.
I kept walking. Moving closer. Almost—almost—touching. Why? I guess I just fucking loved torture. I was a masochist. Who knew?
Guess we both were. Neither of us moved away.