Chapter 10
Caught
Jazil
I carry her to my cabin.
Not because she can’t walk. Because I need her in my arms. Because the hunt-instinct has narrowed my world to the weight of her against my chest and the warmth of her soaking through my skin and the sound of her heartbeat against my sternum, and I am not ready to put her down.
I may never be ready to put her down. The instinct has a feeling about this and the message is never let go.
My cabin is small. The bunk. The head. The locker.
HORATIO has done something — the sheets are fresh, the ambient light is warm amber, the temperature adjusted to the midpoint between Skiveth cool and human warm.
My ship is conspiring with my AI to get me laid, and I cannot even be annoyed about it because the female in my arms just kissed me in a dead-end corridor and said, don’t stop twice, and I will not stop.
I set her on the bunk. She sits on the edge. My sheets. My pillow behind her. Her hair against the fabric I have slept on for nine years and the sight of it — her warmth on my cold sheets, her scent sinking into the place where I sleep — does something to the base of my spine that is not civilized.
She looks up at me. I am standing over her, and she is sitting on my bed and the height difference from this angle is considerable. She tilts her head back to hold my eyes and the tilt exposes the full line of her throat and the freckle, and I can see her pulse and the pulse is fast.
“Every promise,” she says. Quiet, brave.
I kneel. Between her knees. My face level with hers. My hands on the edge of the bunk, one on each side of her thighs. Claws retracted.
“Every promise.”
I start at the throat.
The freckle. My tongue on it. Both tips finding her pulse and the pulse jumps exactly the way I said it would — a kick against my tongue, her heartbeat slamming — and I press both tips flat against the jump and hold.
Tasting. Her skin is salt and warm-sweet, and underneath both of them the base note that my biology has classified as hers — unique, unrepeatable, the taste I will know from three levels away for the rest of my life.
Her hands go to my hair. She pulls. I told her she would, and she does, and the pull sends a current down my spine to the ridges, and the ridges flare dark under the gauze.
I stay at the freckle until she’s pulling me lower. Not gently. The pull has urgency in it. She wants me to move, and she is not being polite about asking, and the not-polite is everything.
Lower. The side of her neck. My teeth grazing the tendon — fang on skin, the pressure calibrated to the edge of sharpness without breaking. She gasps. Arches. Her hips come forward off the bunk and press against my chest.
“Again,” she says.
Again. Slower. My teeth dragging down the side of her throat to the juncture of neck and shoulder, and I find the muscle there — the one that has been flexing under the lucky top every time she reaches for something — and I press.
The fang dimpling the skin. Not cutting.
Holding. The threat of sharpness without the follow-through.
She makes a sound that I feel in my chest.
Lower. The collarbone. Both tips of my tongue tracing the bone from shoulder to center and back.
The dual-track sensation makes her squirm — she can feel the two points moving independently, and the independence is the thing, the difference between a human tongue and mine, the difference she is discovering in real time.
The lucky top is in the way.
I pull back. Look at her. One claw extends. The tip finds the neckline. I pause — a question.
“Do it,” she says.
I slit the top from neck to hem. One clean line. The fabric peels back, and she shrugs it off her shoulders, and she is bare from the waist up and —
My forehead drops against her sternum. I need a moment.
The reality of her is so far beyond the galley fantasy, the corridor promises, the incident report daydream.
The reality is — she is warm and soft and her chest is rising and falling and the skin between her breasts is flushed pink, and she smells like want and tea and mine and I need one second to recalibrate before I —
“Are you good?” She is laughing at me. She is sitting on my bunk half-naked and laughing at the male who just hunted her through his ship because he is pressing his face against her chest trying to remember how breathing works.
“Give me a minute.”
“Take your time.”
My mouth finds her. The curve above her breast. The tongue tracing the swell of her — tasting, mapping — and both tips find her nipple and her back arches so hard her hands leave my hair and grip the sheets behind her.
I work her. One side, then the other. Tongue and lips and the light scrape of teeth that makes her gasp and grip harder. She is sensitive here — very sensitive — and the sensitivity is making her hips rock forward against my chest with a rhythm that is involuntary and getting less subtle.
My claws half-extend. When my hands slide down her ribs, she feels the tips — the scrape of claw on skin, light, leaving pink trails that fade in moments. She gasps at the first scrape. Leans into the second. By the third, she is pressing her body into my hands, chasing the sensation.
A growl comes out of me. Low. From the chest. Vibrating through my mouth against her breast. She shudders.
“That sound. Make that sound again.”
I make it again. Against her stomach. Descending.
My mouth working down her body — tongue, teeth, claw-tips along her sides — and she is trembling and gripping the sheets and her thighs are spreading wider to make room for me between them and the willingness in the spreading is going to be the end of me.
“Lorri.” Against her hip. The bruise from the Vrennak. My tongue traces the edge — gentle, tending, the mate-instinct to heal overlapping with the instinct to taste. “Lie back.”
She lies back. On my sheets. Her hair on my pillow. Her body bare from the waist up, flushed, her chest heaving. She is looking at me standing between her knees at the edge of my bunk, and the look on her face is not shy, and not careful, and not sorry.
“I told you what comes next,” I say. My hands on her waistband. “Yes?”
“Yes.”
I pull her trousers down. Slow. Over her hips. Over the bruise. Over her thighs. She lifts her hips to help and the lift exposes her, and the scent that hits me when the last layer comes away is —
I close my eyes. Both hands on the edge of the bunk.
Claws sinking into the mattress frame. The scent of her arousal — unfiltered, undiluted, inches from my face — is a drug that rewrites my brain chemistry in real time.
I have been tasting this through recycled air and fabric barriers for hours, and the unfiltered version is so far beyond what I was tracking that my tongue flicks involuntarily and both tips taste the air between her thighs and my whole body locks.
She is soaked. She is dripping. And the taste — copper-sweet, warm, complex, layered the way the nebula is layered — is a taste I am going to chase through every corridor of every station for the rest of my existence.
“Spread your legs for me.” Low. A request wrapped in a growl. “Wide. I want room.”
She spreads. Her thighs opening. Her hands gripping the sheets above her head. Her chest heaving and her eyes on the ceiling, her bottom lip caught between her teeth.
“Look at me.”
She looks at me. From the pillow. Down the length of her own body to where I am kneeling between her thighs with my mouth inches from the center of her. Her eyes are dark and wide, and her lips are swollen from the kissing, and she is looking at me, and I hold her gaze and put my mouth on her.
Both tips. First contact. The taste hits my tongue, and a sound comes out of me — deep, raw, the hunting rumble but lower, more guttural — and the vibration of the sound transfers directly into her, and she cries out.
Full-throated. Her hips come off the mattress.
My hands find them — firm, pressing down, holding her open for my mouth.
Both tips working her — one circling, the other pressing, then switching, then both together.
She cannot anticipate me, cannot predict where the next sensation will come from because each tip is finding a different nerve and working it, and the rhythm keeps changing — building, shifting, each new pattern drawing a unique sound out of her.
She can only lie on my sheets and grip the fabric and take it.
“Jazil — Jazil, oh God, oh — both, you can, oh —”
Her thighs lock around my head. Her hands leave the sheets and find my hair, and she grips so hard my scalp burns, and I do not care.
I press deeper. My tongue working her open.
Tasting inside her. The taste here is stronger — concentrated, the essence of her — and I am making sounds against her I cannot control, low continuous growls of a male who has found the thing he was built to taste and is not going to stop.
She is loud. She is exactly as loud as I told her she would be.
Every sound earned. Every gasp and moan and broken syllable of my name, a gift that I am learning not with my brain but with my tongue.
The gasps, the moans are all sweet-deep.
My name — Jazil, Jazil — tastes like the warmth of her pulse, and I want to hear it forever.
“Please —” She is begging. Not because I made her. Because her body has arrived at the place where begging is the only option left. “Please, please, please —”
I give her what she’s begging for. Both tips pressing together on the spot I’ve been circling. Firm. Rhythmic. Relentless. Her thighs clamp. Her back arches off the mattress. Her hands in my hair lock and pull, and the pull goes through me like lightning.