“You are welcome, Captain. You are very welcome indeed.”
10
Caught
Jazil
Icarryhertomy 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 isnever 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 melaid, 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 stoptwice, 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 ashers— 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 andher chest is rising and falling and the skin between her breasts is flushed pink, and she smells like want and tea andmineand 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.
