Chapter 10 #2
Something moved through my nodes that had nothing to do with the crystals as I watched my mate—her careful hand, her attention, the competence and caution she held in perfect balance—and understood this was not simply admiration. This was something deeper. More intense.
Sloane had fallen from the sky onto a planet that should have killed her. She had survived and adapted and climbed and learned. She had refused to remain behind. Insisted she was capable. She carried my marks and the planet's marks and still believed she was leaving.
She was extraordinary.
I stayed below her. Watched every move. And burned for her.
She’d put distance between us. I tracked every movement she made with the complete, helpless focus of a man who accepted that he was incapable of doing anything else in that moment.
She moved through the pre-storm air above me with a grace that made the cliff look like it had been designed just for her. As though this rock had been waiting. As though the planet had known she was coming long before the storm brought her down.
Perhaps it had.
I watched and burned and calculated and held my warrior’s discipline in place with a will stronger than the storm itself.
She reached for the next hold. Her body blazed with heat, with pre-storm light. My nodes answered with a pulse so strong my teeth ached.
Seductive. Maddening. Distracting.
Enough to make my skin sensitive, my cock hard, my heart race.
Not enough.
Never enough. Not anymore. Not since the cave. Not since I had learned what enough actually felt like.
Control. I needed to regain control.
I looked out over the valley.
Breathe, I told myself. Just breathe.
I tried to see the dark violet jungle canopy spreading out below us from her perspective.
I knew nothing of her world beyond what she’d shared with me.
Our bond was getting stronger, but she had a great capacity for pushing her emotions aside, for staying focused on rational data and solving problems. Soon enough I would be able to see past the last of her walls.
Until then, I was left wondering if could she see the beauty of my world, or only the danger?
The stormglass trees caught the pre-storm light and threw it back in scattered violet.
If she didn’t already feel the essence, the life beating within every tree, could she still recognize their dark beauty?
Was the fungi, still pulsing their faint, glowing rhythm far below, fascinating to my mate?
The crystal formations in the cliff faces to either side blazed cold fire in the atmospheric charge — electric blue-white, brilliant and cold.
My home.
Every cliff face, storm path and crystal formation I had known since I was born.
Known. Defended. I had stood on this ledge before — in other seasons, in other storms, alone or with warriors who knew this valley the way I knew it.
As territory. As responsibility. As the weight of a thing I have chosen to protect.
I closed my eyes and expanded my senses. Opened myself to the storm. To my mate.
I saw my world through her. With her.
I was awestruck. Every color, every sound and smell, I experienced as something new. Wonderful. Alien. Extraordinary. This was my home, yet I’d never fully seen it. Not as I was seeing it now.
Could she learn to love something so strange? So different? Could she learn to love my world? To love me?
I opened my eyes. Everything was unchanged and different at the same time. My heart swelled. I could never let my mate go now. The bond was nearly complete. If she chose to leave, I would have to follow. I no longer had a choice.
Breathe, I told myself again. Just breathe.
"This formation is perfect," she yelled down at me.
She brought her scanner up to the crystal deposit at eye level.
Precise. Professional. "Three meters across, matrix depth approximately forty centimeters.
The center cluster has the highest electromagnetic coherence.
" She ran the scan. Ran it again. Once more.
"The central node — twenty centimeters in — conductivity profile within range of what the stabilizer coil requires. "
She had already mapped the extraction path — the gaps in the matrix, the obsidian bridges between deposits, the routes that wouldn’t disturb the higher-charge formations guarding the center cluster. Her focus was total.
She was stunning. That focus. The way she gave herself to a problem completely — the same way she gave herself to everything she decided was worth her full attention. The same way she had given her body to me.
I watched her work and felt the complicated pride of a man watching someone I cared about do something extraordinary, and the devastating frustration of not being allowed to touch her while she did it. I climbed higher. Closed the distance until I could reach out and touch her boot.
"Six inches of clearance here and here." She indicated two points on the surface with her free hand, not touching. "If I can get in without contacting these outer formations—"
The ledge shuddered.
A single deep vibration transmitted through the cliff face into the shelf beneath our feet. A crystal vein at lower elevation released charge into the obsidian. I felt it in my nodes half a second before my feet registered it. The sharp electrical spike of a discharge working through the rock.
"How much time do we have?" she asked. Steady voice. Unsteady pulse.
"Forty minutes." I assessed the sky. The violet cloud systems had thickened and darkened overnight, their cores deep purple-black with the mass of what built above us. The light coming through them was wrong in the way that meant the main storm front was no longer a distant concern.
Something had changed. The storm was moving too fast.
I assessed the cliff face. The wind. The crystal veins. The charge building in the rock beneath our feet.
"In a few minutes, this cliff will become too dangerous, regardless of technique."
"We have enough time."
"Sloane—"
"We can’t leave." She looked at me. “We can’t leave without the crystals. The ship will explode.”
In her eyes was the thing I'd seen in the cave. Not stubbornness — something cleaner than that. Determination. The resolve of a person who had calculated the risk and accepted it. Who intended to finish what she started no matter the cost.
I assessed the situation again, hoping I was wrong.
My calculations ran cold and precise until my heartbeat synced with hers.
She was on this ledge. The rock beneath her boots had just moved.
The forty minutes we should have had was not going to be enough.
I could not leave this cliff without her, regardless of what the storm did, or what my mate wanted, or what the broken pieces of her ship demanded.
Her courage moved through me like a second storm surge.
Beautiful, brave, stubborn fucking female.
When I got her off this cliff, I was going to fuck her senseless.
"I need to clear the outer crystals by hand. They're too delicately fused for tools without fracturing the whole matrix."
I looked at her hand. At the precision in her fingers. At the marks pulsing at her throat — warm and steady and entirely indifferent to her schedule.
I looked at the cliff around us. At the pre-surge charge building in the crystal veins. At the narrow ledge between her and a fall that would surely kill us both.
Every warrior instinct I possessed raged at me to get her off the cliff. Take her somewhere safe. Ride out the storm with her riding my cock.
The instinct was not rational. It was not something I had felt before — not with this intensity. The rage in my mind threatened all logic. All reason.
We needed those crystals or my village would be destroyed — but the stormbound male within me did not care about anything but her.
The fire burning through my body was not the protectiveness of a warrior for his territory.
This was complete and utter madness. I warred within myself as I fought the compulsion of a bonded male to protect his mate.
I needed to drag her away from danger. My need was primal, enormous and entirely without interest in my opinions about it.
I refused to give into it. I was not a primitive animal.
I would honor her choices, her duty to her crew who were all still in the valley.
It was not just my people who would suffer if we did not acquire the crystals.
Whether or not I liked the fact, my mate was not a thing to be locked away from danger.
She was a pilot, an explorer and a scientist. She had also, somehow, learned to read rock faces faster than warriors I'd served beside and elders who understood crystal deposits with a precision that took most warriors many cycles to develop.
The instinct to wrap around her and never let go was mine to manage.
Not hers to accommodate.
"Then I'll hold you," I said.
She turned her head.
The silver of my eyes met the dark of hers at close range. "The ledge is narrow," I explained. "You'll need to lean into the face to reach the depth of the central cluster. I'll anchor us both."
It was true.
It was also the only legitimate reason I could give her to put my hands on her. I was not above using it. I felt no shame about that.
I moved into place behind her. Fully. My chest against her back. My left arm around her at the waist, gripping a hold in the cliff face. And the contact—
The contact was everything.
The whole morning's effort collapsed into this single point of truth. Her spine against my chest. The back of her head just below my jaw. My arm across her body at the waist.
I could feel her heartbeat.
Through every point of contact. I felt it quicken.
Then deliberately, consciously steady — the rhythm of a woman who regulated herself under pressure, who held herself together by force of will, training and the extraordinary discipline of a person who had been holding things together her whole life.