Then I kiss her.
I’m still new to this, always wanting to try this thing I’ve seen between mated pairs, but never getting to experience with Mara, until now. I kissed her last night, during the claiming but that was rough and frantic. This time is deep and careful, exploring what she feels like and how she tastes.
I kiss her until she’s breathless. I kiss her when she pulls back to say something and doesn’t get it out. I kiss the corner of her mouth and her jaw and the place under her ear that makes her shiver and then come back and do it all again. She gets both hands into my braids and holds on.
At some point she’s on her back and I’m braced over her.
“Nine months.” Her eyes are wet. “We wasted so much time.”
“No.” I put my forehead against hers. “We were waiting. It’s different.”
And I go back to kissing her and learn her body in the daylight. She has a line down her belly, low, a faint dark seam that wasn’t there before Lucas. And a silvery scatter of marks across her hips and the outsides of her thighs where her body stretched to make him.
She goes tense when I find those. “Don’t,” she whispers.
“Don’t what?”
“They’re not pretty. I know what they are, you don’t have to be nice about it…”
“You made an entire other person inside your body.” I look up at her. “Why would I want them gone?”
And then her small hand reaches down and wraps around my hard, leaking cock. And she’s stroking me how she knows I like.
The fever’s gone — properly gone, burned out in that forest — and what’s left is a male with all his faculties in a bed with his Bride, which is a different thing entirely and, I discover, considerably more dangerous.
Because last night I was an animal.
This morning I have tochooseeverything. Every place I put my hands. Every degree of pressure. The fangs, which I keep away from her skin with an effort she has no idea about. The claws, which stay curled.
And she leads. This morning is hers, and she is entirely unembarrassed about it. “There,” she says. “Slower.Slower, gods — like that.”
I do exactly what she tells me.
She puts her hand over mine and moves it where she wants it. She tells me what to do with my mouth in language that would make my brothers proud of her. When I get something right she makes a sound and I file the sound and the position and the pressure, all of it, because I intend to be extremely good at this and I have the rest of my life.
When I finally push into her she’s already come twice and she’s soft and open and swearing at me. She’s still too small. That doesn’t change. I go slowly and she takes me anyway, inch by inch, both hands flat on my chest.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you.” I can barely get it out.
She starts to shudder and cry out, her orgasm racing through her body. And then I’m coming inside of her again, so hard it almost hurts, spilling so much seed inside of her it starts to run down her inner thigh.
Afterward Mara lieswith her head on my chest and her leg thrown over mine and traces the claw-marks she left, which have started to itch.
“I’m staying with Minecorp,” she tells me.
“I know.”
“No, I mean officially. I sent it yesterday morning, before all of this happened. I accepted the position of permanent systems engineer for the whole Minecorp umbrella, based on Timbur.” She shrugs against me. “Every holding they’ve got runs on Illibrium infrastructure and now every one of them runs through me.”
“You’ll be off-planet?”
“Sometimes. Not much. And I’ll come back to a male who I’m certain is going to be the new head of the Miners’ Union, so I imagine you’ll beveryinterested in what I find out at the other sites.”
I chuckle, remembering how in fact I did recently put my name on that ballot.
We continueto talk for a long time after that.
