His markings blaze. I feel his heartbeat accelerate under my cheek — that rapid double-thud that means his biology has overridden his composure. His arms lock around me, and for a moment we just stand there, wrapped in each other and the greenhouse light, while the planet slowly turns green outside the windows.
Then his hand slides down my spine. Lower. Past the small of my back to the curve of my ass, and his grip shifts from tender to deliberate.
I know this shift. Six months of studying it like a language.
“Tavia’s occupied for the next two hours,” he says. The harmonics drop.
“Is that a proposal too?”
“That’s a statement of logistical opportunity.”
“You really know how to romance a girl, Specialist Storm.”
His mouth finds the claiming mark on my collarbone and the response is immediate — heat blooming through the bond, sensation cascading from the bite outward in concentric waves that make my breath stutter. He knows what the mark does to me. He knowsexactlywhat it does to me. And he uses it like a weapon.
“We need to stop having sex in the greenhouse,” I manage.
“You said that last week.”
“I meant it last week.”
“Your biometrics suggested otherwise.”
He’s picked up Pickles’s data habits. I should hate that I find it hot. I absolutely do not hate it.
Here’s the thing about sleeping with a scientist.
Heexperiments.
Six months of learning my body — which spots make me gasp, which angles make me incoherent, which combinations of touch and temperature and those devastating sub-harmonics reduce me to a shaking, begging mess — and Cetus Storm has turned sex into a research discipline. He approaches my orgasms with the same methodical precision he applies to atmospheric chemistry: observe, hypothesize, test, refine.
It’s ruinous. I am ruined.
The greenhouse is warm. Not station-warm —alive-warm, the humid breath of growing things cycling through air he’s spent years learning to build. Condensation beads on the glass panels overhead, and the filtered light of Kepler-7b’s sun comes through tinted faintly green — proof of his work written in the atmosphere itself. It smells like soil and chlorophyll and the sharp sweetness of the engineered seedlings that line the growing stations.
It smells like the life we’re building. And he’s about to fuck me in the middle of it.
“Hands on the table,” Cetus says.
Not a request. The harmonic drops below the range where I process it as sound and into the range where I feel it — a vibration that starts in my sternum and travels down, settling low and heavy between my thighs. He’s learned to do this on purpose. Modulate his voice until the frequency hits the exact resonance point where my body stops asking my brain for permission.
I press my palms flat against the worktable. It’s cool under my hands, the surface gritty with potting medium, and a tray of soilsamples rattles when I lean my weight forward. We should move these. We never move these.
“Good.” His breath against the nape of my neck. Hot. Fifteen degrees hotter than mine, and the contrast against the greenhouse humidity makes my skin prickle. His hands find my hips — those enormous, careful hands, claws sheathed but the roughened pads of his fingers pressing in hard enough that I feel each individual point of contact like a brand.
“Don’t move.” He holds me there — bent over the table, his body caging mine from behind, one hand flat on the worktable beside mine, the other sliding down my spine with the deliberate slowness of someone cataloguing terrain. His size makes the cage absolute. Six-foot-eight of teal skin and furnace heat and controlled power, and I couldn’t move if I wanted to.
I don’t want to.
There was a version of me — six months ago, nine years ago, every version of me before this man — who couldn’t have done this. Couldn’t have surrendered control, couldn’t have let someone hold her in place, because stillness meant vulnerability and vulnerability meant loss.
He knows this. He knows exactly what it costs me to hold still when every nerve ending is screaming. And he handles that trust like it’s the most valuable thing he’s ever been given — which, knowing what he’s accomplished in atmospheric science, is saying something.
His mouth finds the claiming mark on my collarbone.
The bonddetonates.
His pleasure layered over mine — I can feel what the mark does tohim, the feedback loop of his teeth against the scar, the taste of bonding enzymes on his tongue triggering a biochemical cascade that translates through our shared neural link as raw, devastating want. My own arousal amplifying his amplifying mine, an escalating resonance that makes my vision blur.
