His hands move. Down my jaw, my neck, my shoulders. He finds the hem of his stolen shirt and pauses.
“This is mine,” he murmurs against my lips.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
“I wasn’t talking about the shirt.”
Desire pools low in my belly, liquid and heavy. He pulls the fabric up and over my head in one smooth motion and I’m standing in front of him in nothing but underwear, skin prickling with goosebumps that have nothing to do with temperature because the warmth radiating off his body is a furnace, a sun, a vow.
His eyes drag down my body. Slow. Thorough. The yellow brightens—pupils blown wide, irises practically glowing in the dim quarters. His bioluminescence cascades in patterns I’ve never seen, racing across his chest and arms like lightning captured under skin.
“You’re—” His voice fractures. He swallows. Tries again. “I have spent days calculating the probability of this moment, and none of my models accounted for—” He stops. Shakes his head. “You break every equation I build.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“It’s a confession.”
He kneels. Drops to his knees in front of me like gravity reorganised itself around the curve of my hips, and presses his mouth to my stomach. The kiss is open and hot and reverent and I gasp, my hands flying to his hair—thick and dark with those teal highlights catching his own glow.
His hands circle my waist. Thumbs stroking soft skin above my hip bones, fingers splayed across my lower back, claws retracted. He mouths across my belly, my ribs, the underside of my breast, and every point of contact burns hotter than the last because his body temperature is climbing—radiating, turning his skin into a source of fire that sinks into my muscles and loosens something deep and wanting.
“Off,” I manage, tugging at his waistband. “I need—off, now, please—”
He stands and strips. Efficient. No hesitation. And I—
Oh.
I’ve felt him through clothes. Grinding in the corridor, pressed against me on the filing cabinet, the rigid line of him unmistakable even through layers. But seeing him is different. His cock stands thick and flushed darker than the rest of his teal skin, curving slightly upward, and along the underside—
The ridges.
Five raised nodes spaced at quarter-inch intervals, swelling from base to tip, the basal one thickest. They’re pronounced now, engorged with blood, each one a distinct ridge of textured flesh that twitches as I stare. A bead of slick gathers at the tip—his natural lubrication, faintly luminescent, catching the light from his markings.
He’s big. Not intimidating-monster big—proportional to his frame, eight inches of heat and texture and alien biology I’ve been craving since I got here.
“You’re staring,” he says, and there’s a thread of vulnerability under the roughness.
“I’m admiring.” I reach out. My fingers close around him and we both stop breathing.
He’s hot. Scorching. The ridges swell under my palm—responsive, reactive, each node thickening further at my touch. The texture is extraordinary—smooth skin stretched over raised nodes creating friction unlike anything human anatomy could replicate. When I stroke upward, each ridge catches against my fingers, and the noise he makes isn’t a word in any language. His bioluminescence detonates. Gold light races across his body in erratic pulses, bright enough to cast our shadows sharp on the wall.
“Dove.” My name comes out shattered. “If you—I need—”
“Show me,” I whisper. “Show me what they do.”
His control fractures. Not all at once—in stages. First his hands, which stop being gentle and grip my hips hard enough to bruise. Then his mouth, which finds the spot below my ear and bites—not the claiming bite, not yet, but teeth and pressure and a growl that vibrates through my skull. Then his body, which lifts me and carries me to the bed and lays me down with a combination of precision and desperation that shouldn’t coexist.
He strips my underwear off. Settles between my thighs. Looks at me the way a scientist looks at a miracle—like every law of physics rearranged to accommodate this.
His hand trails down my stomach. Lower. And I feel it—the barest scrape of claw-tips tracing the crease of my inner thigh. Not cutting. Skating. Five points of razor-fine pressure dragging along the softest skin on my body, close enough to danger that my lungs stall and my hips roll toward him instead of away.
“You like that,” he says, and his voice is dark with wonder. Not a question.
“I like knowing you could wreck me.” I spread my thighs wider. Let him see what he does to me. “And you won’t.”
A noise tears out of him—low, guttural, barely leashed. His claw-tips trace higher, skating along the outer edge of where I’m slick and swollen, and the scrape of danger against the most vulnerable part of me makes me clench with a want so sharp it borders on pain.
“I want to taste you,” he says, and the harmonics in his voice reach inside me and pull.
