Chapter 6 #2
I needed her. She was part of me now. Part of my personal storm. My energy field. Her mind brushed against mine. Her emotions had begun to sync with mine — flashes of knowledge in my head. Her desire threatened to drive me mad. I knew when she studied my body. When she wanted me to touch her.
I also knew with aching clarity that her mind and her body were at war. I couldn't afford to take sides. I needed her to choose me. To touch me. I would never dishonor the storm's choice by forcing her hand. She was alien. She didn't understand the bond. She needed time.
Logic knew this truth. My hard cock and burning nodes were not so understanding.
I held her.
I breathed.
"Sorik—"
"Be still." My voice came out rough. Stripped of the level quality I'd maintained all day. Something raged underneath it that I had no capacity to restrain right now — something done being patient. "Let me hold you."
She stilled. Her eyes moved to my shoulders. My neck. She watched the currents run under my skin. Her expression was the one she wore when she hid behind her job — analytical, contained. Her hands had closed into fists, one pressed to my chest, one behind my neck. But she didn't remove them.
Her heart raced. I had no idea if my pulse reacted to her, or if her body synced to mine. Didn't care. We were one.
Her heartbeat ran fast and bright and loud in the enclosed space.
Each pulse resonated in the nodes that tried desperately to match her frequency.
I had listened to it for hours. I knew its resting rhythm the way I knew the planet's baseline charge.
This was not its resting rhythm. This was something else entirely.
Desire.
I pressed my back harder into the obsidian.
My body needed to claim her — an ache in the nerve clusters, a pull in my palms, a biological imperative to exchange energy with my mate the way we were meant to.
The stone felt wrong. The temperature felt wrong.
Every nerve cluster in my skin had a very strong opinion about what would feel right.
She was in my arms. She breathed too fast. "Sloane. We are safe in here."
Her emotional spike was pushing the edges of my control. I needed to take care of her.
"I'm fine," she lied. "Why can I feel your heart beating? Why is my heart trying to match it?"
"The bond." I didn't need to explain. She was an intelligent female. She would figure it out.
Silence.
"Do you need to put me down?" she asked.
"No." But… "Do you wish to be released?" I would find the strength. Somehow. Storm save me.
"No." Her response was immediate and I nearly crumbled in relief. I wasn't sure I had the strength to stop touching her. Not with her pulse racing and the storm raging outside.
Lightning streaked the sky. White and immediate, it threw itself across the cave entrance in a stuttered pulse that lit her in fragments — her throat as she swallowed, the smooth line of her neck, the precise rise and fall of her breath.
Too fast. Too shallow. The breath of a body that worked hard to remain calm. I looked away. I said nothing.
"How long will the storm last?" she asked.
"An hour. Perhaps two." The energy in my nodes pressed outward through my back and into the stone. The stone couldn't carry it, couldn't receive it the way a mate would. But it helped. The ache of the bond had become something I would need to address in very short order.
One hour. In this cave. Sloane in my arms. The Skybond ran so hot through my system I felt it like a separate thing — a creature all its own, impossible to reason with or control.
"Is this dangerous for you?" She settled her cheek against my chest, her voice barely a whisper. Thank the storm she didn't ask to be set down. I needed the contact to ground me. To convince my body she was real. Close. Mine.
Her voice had changed. No longer in the professional register.
Care. Concern. She asked about me. Not her mission, or the storm crystals, or the seventy-two-hour clock.
Her concern cracked something open in my chest — an emotion that went deeper than the Skybond or the automatic connection my nodes created. Her mate.
Perhaps she would learn to care for me. Fall in love with me. Choose to stay.
"Not dangerous," I said. "The energy needs to move.
In a normal storm I would discharge through the ground.
Through movement—" I stopped. Swallowed.
Her face did something that made it impossible to finish speaking — a softness at the corners of her mouth, open and attentive and entirely unguarded, her walls down in a way she hadn't noticed yet. "Through other methods."
"Through contact." Not a question.
I looked at her steadily. "Yes."
The lightning pulsed outside. One long, sustained illumination that caught her face fully and held it.
What I saw moved through me like the storm — fast, total, impossible to name as anything other than what it was.
Her lips parted. Her eyes had gone past the scientist. Past the wall.
Past all of it. She looked at my hands where they touched her, wrapped around her body.
I felt that attention the way I felt changes in atmospheric pressure — in the nodes first, in the nerve clusters of my palms.
"The nerve clusters," she said. "In your palms. Every time the lightning flashes, I feel—"
"Me. Our bond. I am sorry. I cannot let you go. It would be dangerous." The words came out rough. Uneven. "During a surge, we need the energy exchange—"
"We?"
The cave went silent except for her heartbeat.
I went still. Not from control —I was at the edge of a precipice from which there would be no return. The air shifted with the same pull I'd felt on the path. Stronger now. Concentrated by the cave walls, the storm outside, proximity, and sustained exquisite pressure.
"Sloane." I could not speak of it and resist the need to show her exactly what the storm would feel like between us.
"You said the energy exchanges through contact.
" Her chin came up. That lift. That precise, devastating, infuriating lift I had watched her aim at every hostile thing this planet offered.
Up close it was nearly impossible to resist. The pulse at her throat, fast and visible.
The color across her cheeks had nothing to do with exertion.
She held herself very still as if afraid to startle a wild animal.
"If the buildup creates pressure, and the mechanism for discharge involves contact—.
" Her dark eyes found mine. Held. Didn't waver.
She licked her lips. Stared at mine. "Show me."
Science. She made the request as if the Skybond was a research project.
Part of her meant that, genuinely. The rest of her — the part I heard in her pulse, saw in the color high across her cheeks, felt in the air between us — that part wasn't asking for data. She needed this thing between us as much as I did. She just didn’t know what it was. Yet.
I pushed off the wall and allowed her body to slide down against mine, reveling in the friction, until her feet touched the ground.
She didn't move away. Didn’t pull back. Didn't rebuild her mental wall. Didn't retreat into the scientist. She stood her ground with her chin up and her dark eyes on mine. Her heart hammered its fast bright rhythm in my ears. Heat radiated off her skin.
I stopped fighting my own needs. I sent it directly into my mate instead. Held nothing back. She needed to know. To understand.
The heat from my nodes hit her first. I watched it happen — the small shiver that moved through her body, involuntary and immediate.
Her sharp intake of breath. The way her fingers tightened on my forearm, then released.
Surrendered. The scanner dropped to her side. I watched her decide to let it go.
I raised my hand. Slowly. Every movement deliberate, telegraphed, every moment given to her so she could stop this, name it something else, choose differently.
My palm moved through the charged air between us — so thick with energy that moving my hand to her face was like pushing through warm water.
The Skybond pulled me closer. The storm pushed me toward her.
My nerves pulsed with life. With need. With a song so perfect my heart ached with the sound rising between us.
I pressed my palm against her cheek. She leaned into my touch. Skin to skin. She opened herself to me, to my energy, to this thing blazing to life between us.
The discharge was instantaneous. Mutual. And nothing — nothing — like anything I had experienced in all my years on this planet.
My nerve clusters detonated. Not painfully.
Like a door thrown open. Pressure that had built for hours found release in a single moment of pleasure.
The energy flowed between us, alive — from my palm to her cheek, back into mine in a current that cycled and built on itself, a resonance loop unlike anything I had ever felt before.
Normally when I touched the ground, energy left me. This was different. She changed what I shared with her and gave it back. Her influence was feminine. My power flowed for battle. For war. For the hunt.
Her touch unmade me. Dulled my sharp edges. Soothed and offered comfort. She was everything I was not. If I was death, she offered life. My darkness basked in her light. The gentle flow of energy unlike anything I'd ever felt — even from my own mother when I was a child.
Her skin was warm. Alive. Real under my hand. Her bioelectric signature ran faint and human and uniquely hers. It met the current that ran through my palm, felt the moment my nodes surged, and she marked me as surely as I marked her. Claimed me as her own.
She made a sound.
Small. Bitten off. One I imagined she would make when I feasted on her wet heat. When my cock was buried deep. When I made her mine.
Her eyes went wide and dark and shocked as the energy flowed between us — me to her, back again in a link I had no desire to break.
What I felt in that current was not only electrical.
It was her. Her surprise, and her wanting, and the thing she had hidden from me all day.
All of her confusion, need, fear, and desire broke through in a cascade.
Everything within her reached back through the current and grabbed me, pushed into my system with a relentless, shockingly powerful force.
My chest contracted around her feminine energy like a fist. I felt her.
Not her skin, not her temperature, not her bioelectric signature.
Her. There was nowhere for either of us to hide.
The ruthless honesty of the Skybond didn't deal in pretense or lies.
The storm accepted only truth. Right now, the truth was we both needed this.
Contact. Pleasure. A merging of energy. Of our very souls.
"What are you doing to me?" she gasped.
"It is not me. It is the storm. The Skybond." My voice was barely sound. "It is our way."
My thumb moved. Slowly. One stroke across the curve of her cheekbone.
I laced my fingers with hers and stroked her palm because I needed to touch her.
Tiny arcs of electricity followed the path of contact — blue-white sparks that traced my thumb's passage across her skin, visible and delicate and unavoidable.
She watched them with dark eyes, her expression raw and unguarded and devastatingly real. Her gaze followed my touch, the arcs of energy beneath her skin. I saw the moment she decided they weren't frightening. Something in her face went quiet and certain. The decision made. The argument over.
"We are linked now? You can't do this with anyone else?" If jealousy lived in her voice, it didn't register as such. Did she want me to touch another? Claim another female? I could not. The storm had chosen her, struck her ship, pulled her from the sky itself to be mine.
"The storm has chosen. You are mine and I am yours. Our energy will not bond with another."
"Forever? Is it reversible?"
"Until we die. And no, there is no way to reverse the bond."
"I don't understand how this could happen.
I'm not from here." She looked up at me and for the first time, I saw fear in her eyes.
Vulnerability. "I don't look like you. I'm sure your women are different.
I must seem ugly to you. Strange. I'm so sorry.
I didn't mean for this to happen. You probably don't want me. "
Was this why she held back? Why she didn't respond as most Skybonded mates did? Why she avoided my touch?
How had I not anticipated this? Instead of pursuing her as I should have, I had held myself apart. Resisted touching her when I should have offered reassurance. Maintained a distance that had apparently hurt us both.
I was an idiot.
Every controlled thing in me let go at once. I set her on her feet and took her face in both hands. Cupped her jaw with a tenderness I had never felt before. "You are beautiful. I did not wish to frighten you with my needs."
She trembled. Licked her lips. Every cell in my body focused on the movement of her tongue. "What, exactly, are your needs?"
I reached down and pulled the covering from my body, bared my aching cock to her eyes.
Awaited my fate. Judgment. Damnation or salvation.
My life was in her hands. "I need to kiss you.
Touch you. Taste every part of you. Fill you with my cock.
Give you pleasure. Listen to the sounds you make when you come. "
"Oh…" She lifted her hands and flattened her palms against my chest. Not to push me away. To explore.
My nerve clusters blazed at the contact. Energy moved between us in sustained arcs I felt in my spine, in my chest, in the backs of my knees. My entire body existed in that moment for her. There was nothing else. Only her scent. Her skin. Her eyes.
I held her beautiful face in my hands, studied the delicateness of her jaw, soaked in the warmth of her skin against my palms, and tilted her face up for my kiss.
She didn't wait for me to come to her. She rose onto her toes to close the distance. When her mouth met mine the charge between us didn't flow.
It exploded.