Chapter 17 #2
She ended up in his lap, her knees on either side of one massive thigh and her hands fisted against his bare chest. He was so warm and so big.
She’d braced herself for the sheer overwhelming size of him to frighten her, but he held her as if she were fragile and precious, and there was no fear in her at all.
His mouth left hers and found the line of her jaw, her throat, and she tipped her head back and let him, her breath ragged, heat pooling low and insistent through her body.
His hand slid beneath the hem of her shirt, her bare skin under his huge palm. She gasped, and arched into it, and he paused, his fingers just resting against her back, waiting. It wasn’t hesitation. It was permission.
She answered by pulling her shirt over her head, and letting it drop to the floor behind her without a second thought.
She’d been wearing something shapeless and practical, and as it fell away she felt more exposed than she’d ever been.
For a single heartbeat, the old instinct to shrink and cover herself rose up.
Then she met his eyes and the instinct died, burned away by the sheer open desire she saw there.
“Beautiful,” he said again, the same word he’d used after she’d washed her face in the sanitation unit, only this time it was low and rough and dragged from someplace deep inside him, and she believed it completely.
He traced the curve of her waist with a reverence that made her chest ache. His thumbs brushed the underside of her breasts and her breath hitched. He watched her face as he did it, studying every small reaction, and then he leaned in and closed his mouth over one peak.
The pleasure was so sharp and sudden it was almost pain, and she cried out, her hands flying to his horns to steady herself, gripping the hard ridges.
He made a low, rumbling sound and sucked gently, and she felt it everywhere, a current running through her limbs and pooling between her thighs, the slight scrape of his fangs heightening the sensation.
She was panting by the time he lifted his head, and suddenly her small room over the restaurant and the four years of careful invisibility seemed like a life she’d read about in a book, not something she’d actually lived.
Her fingers were still tangled in his hair at the base of his horns.
She tightened her grip, and used it to pull his mouth back to hers.
He followed her lead, letting her take control for a moment before he reclaimed it, one massive hand flattening against her back to press her flush against him.
The thin fabric of her trousers was no barrier against the massive evidence of his arousal, and she shuddered, wanting and not wanting and wanting anyway.
He felt her reaction and pulled back, just enough to look at her and then, without warning, some cold thing in the back of her mind spoke up.
This is how it starts. This is what they always want in the end. This is the price.
She didn’t mean to freeze. Her body did it for her, and she felt herself go rigid against him, her hands flattening against his chest, her breath catching for an entirely different reason.
He stopped. He stopped so fast it was as if she’d thrown a switch.
His hands left her skin and every part of him that had been drawing her towards him released her at once.
He leaned back, putting air between them, his chest heaving and his eyes dark and hot but filled with a concern that cut through everything else.
“Amy.”
“I’m sorry.” The words tumbled out. “I’m sorry, I didn’t… I wanted… It’s not you—” She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, mortified, still straddling his thigh with her heart slamming against her ribs. “I don’t even know why I—”
“Stop,” he said gently. He didn’t reach for her.
He deliberately kept his hands open at his sides, and she understood that it was the same thing he’d done in the cell when she’d hesitated in the doorway and he’d backed away as far as his chains allowed to keep from frightening her.
He was giving her all the space he could. “You don’t apologize for that.”
“I ruined—”
“You ruined nothing.” He said it in a tone that brooked no argument. “Look at me.”
She did.
“I spent a good part of my life having no say in what happened to me. So have you.” His voice was rough but steady.
“I will never be one more thing that happens to you, Amy. Whatever you want, you tell me. Whatever you don’t want, you tell me, and it stops.
” He held her gaze. “There’s no price with me.
Nothing I’m waiting to collect later. There is only what you choose. ”
She stared at him.
She thought about four years of making herself small so no one would notice she was alive.
She thought about Pelloq’s pity, and every alien male who’d ever looked at her like something to be weighed and priced.
She thought about the fact that she was sitting in the lap of the single most dangerous male she had ever met—a being who could crack her spine without effort and who had torn males apart with his hands not a week ago—and that he’d taken his hands off her the instant she tensed, and put them where she could see them, and he was now looking at her like her no was the most important thing in the universe.
She wasn’t afraid of him. That was the thing.
She’d frozen out of an old habit, an animal flinch trained into her by other males entirely, but he’d read it and honored it before she’d even understood it herself.
She sat on the lap of a warrior who could break the world, on a ship going towards people who hunted their kind, fleeing everything she’d ever known—and she felt safe.
Safer than she’d felt anywhere. Safer than the locked room above Pelloq’s restaurant. Safer than she’d felt since a bright ordinary morning on Earth, four years and a whole galaxy ago, before her whole life had been taken out of her hands.
Here. In space. In the lap of an alien. She felt, for the first time in longer than she could stand to count, that she was somewhere she wanted to stay.
“Okay,” she whispered.
“Okay,” he agreed.
She didn’t climb off his thigh. She stayed where she was, and she reached out and picked up the huge, clawed, careful hand that had let her go the instant she asked. She turned it over, and pressed a kiss to the padded wrap she’d tied around his wrist. Then she lifted her eyes to his.
“I’m not saying no,” she said. “I’m saying not yet.”
The rumble started up in his chest again, low and satisfied, and his other hand came up slowly, letting her see it, and stroked a gentle finger along her jaw.
“I can wait.”
“You waited weeks chained to a wall to catch a Grorn priest.”
“I did.”
“Then I’m not worried about your patience.
” She leaned her forehead against his, careful of the swept-back horns, and let out a breath she’d been holding for four years.
“Finish letting me tend to your wounds. Then we’ll find those coordinates and figure out exactly what kind of trouble we’re volunteering for. ”
His other hand rested lightly against her waist, asking, not demanding, and when she didn’t pull away, it stayed, warm and steady and hers to move whenever she chose.