Chapter 9
Sloane, The Next Morning
I woke before him.
The slow crawl back to consciousness in a body that was fundamentally altered.
Not wrong — that was what confused me the most. Nothing about this felt wrong.
I lay against the chest of a man I'd known for less than twenty-four hours on a planet that had nearly killed me, with luminous marks on my collarbones that hadn't existed yesterday.
It had been more than a day. I hadn’t eaten, but I wasn’t hungry. The bumps and bruises I’d had in the crash were completely, totally, weirdly healed. Gone. I’d had sex with an alien. A lot of sex.
Zero regrets. I was sore. My pussy ached and pulsed, the need to touch him growing stronger the longer I was with him.
I’d had him naked. His cock deep. All night.
The weird, alien energy of this planet moved back and forth between us like hot bathwater swaying from one side of the tub to the other.
Each wave a crest of pleasure. Each ebb a moment to feel him.
His heart. His emotions. His obsession. His devotion.
Conviction that I was his mate. His perfect match.
Not just any female, but one chosen by the storm itself.
He was an alien. The corporation would send out search and recovery teams. Maybe even military scouts. I couldn’t protect him, or this amazing planet, if I stayed here.
I really fucking wanted to stay. To be his. To give him what he wanted. To feel the bond move between us like magic every time he touched me. Good god, the orgasms alone should be illegal. I’d never even dreamed such a thing was possible. Every cell in my body felt the release. Every. Single. One.
A full body orgasm was the cherry on top of the double-chocolate, scoop of alien sex Sundae.
I was never going to get over having his big, hard cock inside me as my entire body went up in flames.
His lips on mine. He didn’t play games. He fucked me raw.
Made me scream. Gave me everything I asked for without doubt or apology.
He was perfect.
Hell. Even thinking that made every rational instinct I had send up emergency flares.
The rest of me refused to see them. No one was coming to save me or talk me out of this.
No one was going to make him make sense.
Nothing about this made sense. The planet wasn’t actually alive.
It wasn’t conscious. The storm was just a storm.
It didn’t make choices. Didn’t shoot down ships so the sexy, walking circuit-board on the ground could get laid.
Right? All of that was insane. Made zero sense.
So why was I still lying here with my head on his shoulder? His arm around my waist? My leg thrown over his as if he really was mine? I was snuggled up against him like he was my personal teddy bear.
Damn it. What the hell was I doing?
I didn’t move. I took inventory the way I always did. Methodically. From the outside in.
His arm lay across me. Heavy. Warm. His heat soaked through my jacket in a way that went past warmth into something my skin had been craving since the moment he'd first stood close enough for me to feel it. The weight of it was enormous and careful at the same time. I felt everywhere our bodies touched with a longing that left no room for pretending I didn’t want him as close as possible.
His heartbeat drummed under my ear. Slow. Deep. The rhythm of a man who slept without conflict. His skin was warmer than human-normal — a heat I'd first catalogued as data. Now that heat was something I needed to feel safe.
I studied the hollow of his throat. The hard plane of his chest. The place below his jaw where his pulse ran fastest when I touched him.
The storm nodes along his spine pulsed beneath him. I felt the energy surge under my cheek. Soaked it in. I recognized his unique energy now. The current that had moved between us in the dark like a language we'd both spoken without knowing we knew it.
I thought about the beacon on my ship. What I knew of the salvage crews. Seemed cruel to contemplate exactly what I was about to lose in the same moment I realized I never wanted to live without it.
Our heartbeats had synchronized. Beat for beat, in perfect lock-step. I didn’t know how that was possible between two members of different species who had just met. I could not tell which pulse was mine. They were the same.
I rested my palm flat against his chest. Just for a moment.
Kissed his shoulder because I could. Because right now, he was still mine.
Because I needed to do something true before I had to stand up and start pretending to be someone else.
Someone I didn’t want to be anymore. Someone I had to be to protect him.
His people. This valley. The entire planet.
There was no place for sentiment in my logic. If I didn’t get the crystals to the ship, it would explode and everyone in his village would die. If I didn’t leave him and return to base with the entire crew, my employer would send more people. More ships. More weapons.
Not acceptable. My heart had no business wanting things when the stakes were so high.
Clinging to him like a pathetic weakling wasn’t going to help.
I sat up.
He woke the instant I moved. Eyes open fully, immediately — silver and completely alert. They focused on me before I could get fully upright.
"Sloane." One word. Low and rough from sleep, carrying the full weight of the night between us. The sound of it moved through me, affected me the same way his hands did.
My chest resonated like a struck bell.
I wanted to press my fingers to the marks on his chest. I wanted to press my mouth to his throat. I needed to walk out of this cave before I did either one and couldn't find the strength to stop.
"The storm's been over for hours.” My voice came out crisp. Possibly aggressive. The voice of fear wearing competence as a costume.
If we stayed in this cave I would have him naked and inside me before the sun rose. Fact. I could not afford another night like last night. Another memory that would haunt me when I left. Another reason to miss him. "We need to get going."
He sat up.
The sight of him naked, awake…mine, hit me somewhere low and hungry.
The morning light caught him, traced every line of his perfect body; the impossible breadth of his shoulders, the pale branching of the lightning scars I had traced with my fingertips in the dark, the storm nodes pulsing their quiet dawn rhythm up his spine, the abdominal muscles that made me want to lick every dip and valley, take his cock into my mouth.
I want to make him lose his fucking mind.
I looked at the cave wall. It didn’t talk any sense into me. None. Not enough distraction. I looked at my scanner instead. My hands were steady. I was proud of my hands.
"Your marks," he said.
My hand moved to my collarbone before I finished processing the words. I touched the faint luminous branching that followed the lines of my collarbone in patterns I knew mirrored the geometry of his. "I'm aware of them," I said.
"They'll strengthen. As the bond develops."
I made myself lower my hand. I had already analyzed the data — repeated electrical exchange, progressive nervous system adaptation, entirely mechanistic, entirely explicable. The way they pulsed when his eyes wandered over my skin was a detail I did not incorporate into the model.
Because if I incorporated it, I'd have to incorporate everything else.
"We're losing the morning window." I was already reaching for my clothes.
I tugged my suit and jacket on as quickly as possible.
“You said it was too dangerous to be up here in the afternoon.” I took my scanner and walked out of the cave into the cold sharp air without waiting. Without looking back.
Because if I looked back, I would see his face. I wasn’t foolish enough to believe I was ready for what I would see written on it. Feeling it was already bad enough.
He followed.
The morning air hit me like cold water.
Good. I needed something between me and the gravitational pull of the man two feet behind. The alien whose heartbeat I could still feel in my chest as if it were my own.
The valley spread out before us in shades of violet, blue and gray around me.
Pre-storm atmosphere building above the canopy.
Violet cloud systems thickened at the valley’s edges.
The stormglass trees refracted pale dawn light in ethereal prisms across the jungle floor.
They shimmered, black and ethereal. Stunning in their dark beauty.
The air smelled of ozone, soil and cold obsidian.
And underneath that I picked up another scent. It drifted to me from my own chest. From my suit. From my own skin. Warm and addictive. A drug I would never get enough of. Him.
I walked faster.
The silence between us was nothing like the previous day’s. Yesterday it had been potential energy, charged and building. This silence was denser. The silence of choices made. The silence of intimacy and difficult truths. Of destiny and things that could not be undone.
I felt him behind me the way I would gravitate toward a heater in a cold engine room.
Without looking. Without needing to. My body already tuned to his presence with an accuracy that made the scanner in my hand feel redundant.
I felt the ground. The grasses blowing. The waking awareness of the stormglass trees as energy moved through them from roots to canopy, the leaves themselves trembling with excitement. Energy. Life.
He moved through the silence between us without effort. No apparent uncertainty. No morning awkwardness. The same contained, certain ease he brought to everything. As if he already knew all the answers and was just waiting for me to catch up again.
But he didn’t know what I knew. How relentless and greedy my people could be. How easy it would be for them to destroy everything magical about this place.