“I had excellent motivation.” His hand cups my jaw. Thumb tracing my cheekbone. Markings casting warm light across both of us. “Are we done fighting?”
“For now.” I turn my face into his palm. Press my lips against the base of his thumb without thinking. Feel the pad of muscle shift under my mouth, the ridge of tendon, the faint throb of his pulse.
His whole body locks. Not a shudder—a seize. Every muscle going taut at once, his claws extending fully before snapping back, his markings flaring in a pattern I haven’t seen before. Not the steady warmth of attraction or the bright pulse of emotion. This is erratic. Flickering. Like a system overloading.
“Dove.” The word scrapes out of him in harmonics that bypass my brain entirely and land somewhere south of my navel. Warning and want and something raw underneath both.
“I’m stress-processing.” But I don’t pull away. “I stress-bake, but there’s no dough rising, so I’m improvising.”
“You’re improvising by kissing my hand.”
“The alternative was yelling at you more.” I press another kiss to his wrist. Open-mouthed this time, tasting salt and the faint metallic sweetness of his skin. His pulse slams against my lips. “This seemed more productive.”
A sound tears out of his chest—not a word, not a growl. A frequency between both that hums through the air and makes my knees soften. His hand slides from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, pulling the tie loose so the whole mess of it spills over his wrist. The touch starts gentle but his grip firms, tilting my head back until I’m looking up at him and there’s nowhere to hide.
His eyes have changed. The yellow is brighter, almost molten, pupils blown so wide the black nearly swallows the color. I’ve seen him protective. I’ve seen him careful. I’ve seen him controlled.
This isn’t any of those things.
“If you keep doing that,” he says, his voice a low harmonic that rolls through my skull, down my spine, into places I refuse to name, “I’m going to kiss you properly. And I’m not going to stop.”
“Is that a threat or a promise?”
“Both.”
I should step back. We have work to do. There’s an inspection team incoming and collectors on their heels and approximately zero time for—
“I had seventy-three thousand reasons to stay rational.” His thumb traces the line of my jaw. “I don’t care about any of them right now.”
His mouth finds mine.
The kiss starts soft. Careful. The barest pressure, his lips warm against mine, giving me every chance to pull away.
I don’t pull away.
I grab the front of his misbuttoned shirt and pull him closer, and the last thread of restraint snaps.
In him. In me. In whatever we’ve been clinging to for four days.
The kiss turns hungry. His hand fists in my hair and his arm crushes me against his chest and the careful precision evaporates into need—graceless and urgent. The harmonics in his voice shift—I feel it more than hear it, a subsonic frequency that reverberates through his mouth into mine, vibrating against my lips, my teeth, my tongue. Not the gentle courtship tones. These are lower. Rougher. Possessive in a way that bypasses thought and speaks directly to instinct.
I make a sound I don’t recognize. High and needy and nothing like a woman who doesn’t need anyone.
He lifts me. One smooth motion, hands gripping under my thighs—fingers splayed wide, claws sheathed but I can feel the points of them through the fabric, five hot pinpricks of barely-leashed restraint. He sets me on the filing cabinet and steps between my legs and I wrap around him before conscious thought approves the action.
The new angle presses us flush from hip to chest. And I feel him.
Oh.
Not subtle. Not ambiguous. Hard against the seam of my pants where my legs lock around his hips, and even through layers of clothing there’s texture—raised ridges pressing against me in a way that no human male anatomy could replicate. Each ridge a distinct line of pressure, and when I shift—when I breathe—they drag.
My brain shorts out.
Even through clothes, I can map them—count the nodes, imagine what that texture would feel like against bare skin,inside me. The thought hits like a lightning strike and I nearly choke on it.
“This is—” I start. Try to form a joke about terrible ideas. Try to be the Dove who banters her way through everything. But his mouth finds the spot below my ear and his teeth graze and the words disintegrate into a gasp that I couldn’t fake if I tried.
“Tell me to stop,” he says against my throat, and the rumble of his voice on my skin nearly finishes me.
