23. Claimed
Claimed
Xor
The transit berth door closes, and she is on me before the lock engages.
Not tentative. Not careful. The full-body impact of a five-foot-four woman who has been sitting in a cockpit for two hours watching my hands on her flight controls and apparently reached the absolute outer limit of professional restraint approximately ten minutes ago and has been counting down ever since.
Her mouth crashes into mine. Hot. Open. Hungry.
Tasting of the peppermint tea she drank during the descent and something sweeter and darker underneath.
Her hands are already at my collar — not fumbling, not uncertain, nails scraping skin, the hands of a woman who has learned the map and is now navigating with the confidence of a twelve-year veteran courier who knows every route.
"You," she says against my mouth, "have been doing that tail thing for two hours."
"What tail thing."
"The ankle thing. The slow circles on my ankle under the console while you were flying my ship and being competent and having forearms."
"Having forearms is not a deliberate provocation."
"It is when you roll your sleeves up. It is when the fuzz catches the fairy light.
It is when you're adjusting the nav display and every muscle in your forearm moves and I can see the —" She bites my lower lip.
Not gently. Then sucks it. "The forearms are a weapon, Xor.
You have been deploying forearms at me for two hours, and I have been wet since the first hour, and I am done pretending I don't want to lick them. "
"You want to lick my forearms."
"I want to lick several things. The forearms are the appetizer.
I want my tongue on your ridges. Your knot.
I want that perfect tail exactly where it's been threatening to go all day while you purr loud enough to rattle the hull.
" She pulls back. Grins at me. Brown eyes bright and dark and certain and the grin is the most devastating thing I have ever seen on a human face because it is not seduction.
It is joy. Uncomplicated, undiluted, the expression of a woman who wants me and is happy about it and the happiness is worse than the wanting because I have no defence against someone being happy that I exist.
"Sprout," she says, without breaking eye contact. "Privacy mode."
"Privacy mode engaged. I am not monitoring anything inside this room.
Outside this room, I am monitoring everything — the scope is clean, and it will stay that way on my watch.
I am absolutely not logging biometric data for posterity.
Goodnight." The orb dims to almost nothing near the ceiling.
"Soundproofing in this berth is rated for industrial equipment.
I mention this for no reason whatsoever. "
"Thank you, Sprout."
"You're welcome. I hate this. Goodnight."
The first time was desperate.
The first time was the corridor and the berth and the shower and the fury and the terror of wanting something this much and the rough, shaking, barely-controlled collision of two people who had been denying every instinct for days and finally broke.
The first time I could not speak. My hands shook.
The bonding chemistry was a flood and we were drowning in it.
This is not the first time.
This time she pushes me onto the berth and climbs on top of me and she is laughing.
The laugh undoes me more completely than the first kiss.
More completely than the corridor, the bonding instinct, the biological imperative that rewrote my endocrine system.
The laugh is the sound of a woman who is not afraid.
Who is not performing. Who is sitting on my hips with her hands on my chest and her hair falling forward and her brown eyes full of delight and she is laughing because she wants me and the wanting makes her happy and I have no defense against someone being happy that I exist.
"Hi," she says. From above. Her weight on me.
"Hello."
"I have you pinned."
"You have me pinned. I outweigh you by approximately ninety kilograms. I have disarmed Tier 3 operatives from this position in under two seconds. This is an illusion of control."
"And yet." She rolls her hips. Once. Slow. The pressure grinding directly along the ridge of my cock, which has been hard since she bit my lip at the door. "You're not moving."
"I am assessing the situation."
"You're being sat on by a woman half your size and you look like you've forgotten how to breathe. That's not assessment, lovey. That's surrender." She rolls her hips again. Slower. Filthier. "Say surrender."
"Xarthians do not —"
She grinds down. Hard. Precisely where the ridges are most sensitive through the fabric. My hips flex up involuntarily and a sound leaves me that could generously be classified as a grunt and cannot be classified as dignified.
"Sorry, what was that? Xarthians don't what?"
My tail wraps her thigh. High. Then higher — the prehensile tip slips beneath her waistband, finds bare, soaked skin, and rubs one slow, deliberate circle over her swollen clit. Two can conduct an interrogation.
She inhales. Sharply. Her whole body jerks.
"The tail is cheating."
"The tail is a tactical asset. And it is currently reporting that you have been wet for considerably longer than one hour."
"The tail is inside my waistband, and it's doing the circling thing directly on my — that is —" She squirms. The squirm presses her harder against my cock and grinds her clit against the tail-tip and the sensation feeds back through both of us. "Cheating. Explicitly. I'm filing a complaint."
"File it with my tail. My tail accepts complaints between the hours of never."
She laughs again. The laugh vibrates through her body into mine and my markings flood dark from collarbone to hip and the biology is telling on me in full color, and she watches it happen with naked, delighted greed.
She undresses me. Not fast — deliberately, with commentary and an audience participation element I did not consent to.
"This goes." The tactical vest, pulled over my horns with practised efficiency — she has memorized the horn-clearance angle.
Her knuckles brush the base of my left horn on the way past and the jolt fires through my skull and my hips buck and she grins.
"Oh, that's interesting. The horns are still sensitive. "
"The horns are — do not —"
She drags one fingertip along the ridge of my right horn. Base to tip. Slow. The sensation is a white-hot wire from skull to groin. My claws extend into the mattress and puncture. Retract. Extend.
"Fascinating. One finger and you just shredded the bedding. Does Morrison charge for mattress damage?"
"I will buy new mattresses for every berth on this station if you do that again."
"Noted. Mattress budget: substantial." She files that away with visible satisfaction and moves to the undershirt, dragging it up my torso.
Her hands skate over the ridged muscle of my abdomen.
She traces each ridge of my obliques with her thumbs, pressing into the grooves between them, mapping me.
"I don't think I appreciated these properly last time.
I was distracted by the situation. I'm not distracted now. "
"You are currently sitting on the situation."
"The situation can wait its turn. I'm exploring." She leans down and drags her tongue along the marking that runs from my hip to my ribs. Slow. Wet. Deliberate. The marking floods so dark it is almost black and the purr erupts from my chest at a frequency that rattles the berth frame.
"Oh, you liked that." She does it again.
The other side. Then she slides down my body, hooks her fingers in my waistband, and negotiates my trousers off — a process complicated by the tail, which is busy and declines to withdraw for logistical purposes, and by my cock, which springs free thick and dark crimson and leaking, the ridges prominent, the knot already swelling at the base.
She stops. Looks. Wraps both small hands around the shaft — they don't close, they never close, and the sight of her fingers straining around the girth of me is a visual filed under permanent.
"Look at you." Her voice has dropped. The banter is still there but underneath it now, riding something rawer. "So hard for me already. This obscene alien cock is going to ruin me tonight, and I am delighted about it."
"That is the general —"
She licks me. One long, slow stripe from the base to the head, her tongue riding over every ridge in sequence, and the sentence dies unrecorded. She hums against the crown — tasting, cataloguing, the same methodical greed she applies to everything.
"Mmm." Her eyes flick up to mine. "You taste like mine."
Then she takes me into her mouth.
Wet heat. Suction. Her tongue working the ridges one at a time while her hands pump the length she cannot swallow — and she cannot swallow most of it, the scale making the attempt obscene, her lips stretched around the head, her cheeks hollowing, the wet, filthy sounds filling the berth in defiance of Sprout's industrial soundproofing.
My hand finds her hair. Not pushing. Anchoring.
My claws stay sheathed by an act of will that deserves a commendation, because every instinct I own is roaring at me to thrust, and I do not, because she is conducting this operation and I have learned what happens to my composure when she is in command.
She pulls off with a lewd pop, lips shining, and looks extremely pleased with herself.
"Hypothesis one confirmed: the ridges are sensitive from the outside too." She crawls back up my body. "Enough appetizers. Clothes off. All of them. I need you inside me right now."
We remove the rest. Not elegantly. Her trousers catch on her boots.
She kicks free. I lift her — one hand, her whole body, because I can and because the look on her face when I move her with one hand is the expression that a man would commit actual treason for, and I have, so the precedent is established.