“Look at me,” she whispered. “Watch me want you. Watch me take you.”
He opened his eyes, and the raw need there was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. And when she lifted her hips and took him in, just the thick first inch, his eyes flared wide and his hands tightened on her and he did exactly what she’d asked—he watched her.
He watched her face as she took him deeper, inch by slow inch, the thick shaft of him stretching her, filling her, a shivery, burning edge of pain and pleasure mingling into something entirely new, entirely theirs, until he could go no farther.
“Now take me,” she whispered. “Take all of me.”
He gave a groan that sounded like a prayer and obeyed. He took her with all the strength she’d always known was in him, but he took her in a way that left no room for fear—only the overwhelming sensation of being completely and utterly possessed by someone who would never, ever hurt her. She arched up into him, her hands in his fur, her legs wrapped around his waist, and she took him back with equal hunger, with joy and trust and no hesitation at all.
When she cried out at last it was his name, and when the great shuddering groan tore out of him in answer, it was her name on his lips as he grew suddenly, impossibly larger, sending another shockwave of pleasure through her, and he spilled inside her, hot and thick, and she realized that he’d held back even that, until this moment.
They came down together in a tangle of limbs and furs, panting, shaking, their bodies locked together the same way their hearts had been all along. She pressed her face into his chest and felt his heart hammering against her cheek, and her own tripped and stumbled to match its pace.
“It’s real,” she said, incoherent with happiness and exhaustion. “We’re really doing this. It’s real.”
“It’s real,” he rumbled beneath her cheek, his voice thick and slow and utterly content. “You are mine, little one. In every way there is. My love. My mate.”
“And you are mine. Say it.”
“Yours.” His arms tightened around her, and the rumble of his low pleased laugh moved through her. “I have always been yours. Since that first moment when you looked up at me, and I knew. I knew you were my mate.”
“Even then?” she asked, her voice soft and wondering. She’d been half out of her mind with fear and pain. She couldn’t imagine anything but desperation in her own eyes that day.
“Even then.”
“And you’ve been waiting all this time.”
“I would have waited forever.” He shifted so that he could look down at her, his big hand smoothing the hair back from her face.“It was enough that you were alive. I was willing to take whatever part of yourself you wanted to share.”
“And now?”
A slow, brilliant smile curved his mouth. “Now I get to have all of you.”
“Good.” She yawned hugely, sagging into him, warm and safe and happy. “Because I’m keeping you.”
“Now sleep, little one. I’m here,” he whispered, his hand on her back, holding her close, the way he always would.Forever.
And forever, she finally understood, was a word that had never belonged to fear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“That one.” Baralt jerked his chin towards the far end of the landing field, where a squat, weathered freighter sat with its cargo ramp lowered into the churned grey snow. “Glasach’s boat. I’ve flown with her twice. She’s honest, which is rarer than sothiti out here, and she does the Sherae run every third cycle.” He hesitated. “The male you were worried about shipped out two days ago on a Verix hauler. Gone. Off-world. I checked myself.”
Njkall watched Tess’s shoulders come down half a hand’s width at that news, though her jaw stayed tight and her wary brown eyes kept sweeping the crowd the way they always did, cataloguing every threat, trusting nothing. He understood that. He’d stopped taking it personally weeks ago.
“You’re certain,” Tess said.
“I don’t say things I’m not certain of.” Baralt’s fangs showed in the faint dry curve that passed for his smile. “Costs too much to be wrong in my line of work. I would have hauled him in but he was already gone.”
Beside Njkall, Polly stood close the way a mate stood, her shoulder brushing his arm, her small hand tucked warm into his where their fingers had laced somewhere back near the market braziers and never come apart. He felt the bond between them like a low steady hum under everything, a warmth in his chest that had not once stopped glowing since the night she’d chosen him. He kept expecting it to fade into ordinariness. It hadn’t. He suspected it never would.
“Come on,” Polly said gently. “It’s cold standing still.”
They crossed the field together, the three of them, past a knot of Vhal traders haggling over crates and a spindly grey mechanic cursing at a fuel line, and the noise and stink and chaos of the port broke around Polly like water around a stone. A year ago this place had reduced her to a shaking, wordless wreck pressed into his side. He remembered it too clearly. Now she walked through it with her chin up and her eyes open, and if her grip on his hand tightened when a shuttle screamed overhead, neither of them pretended it was anything to be ashamed of.
A short, plump female in a crisp blue-and-white uniform came bustling down the freighter’s ramp to meet them, blue fur bristling in the wind, a datapad tucked under one arm. She was barely taller than Polly, round as a well-fed pikka, and she looked the three of them over with shrewd eyes that missed nothing.
“You’ll be my passenger, then.” She addressed this to Tess directly rather than Njkall as the largest and most obviously dangerous person present, which earned her a mark of approval in his estimation. “Glasach. This heap is mine. You’ve paid through the Hothian, so we’re square on credits, and I run a clean boat. No cargo I can’t name on the manifest, no passengersI can’t vouch for, and nobody touches anybody who doesn’t want touching. That understood?”
