Page 33 of Crash Landed with My Weredragon

"Are you going to catalog every difference between our species, or are you going to come into this pool with me?"

She stepped out of the rest of her clothes and into the water. The pool was perfect: warm without being hot, deep enough to submerge to the shoulders, the mineral-rich water silky against her skin. Toren followed, shedding his trousers at the edge, and she had a moment to appreciate the full scope of what she was getting into. He was large. Scaled from shoulder to ankle, the rose-gold plates shifting in the water, his musculature visible beneath them in the golden light. His tail curled behind him in the pool; the spiked ridges carefully angled away from her. Wings folded against his back but twitching at the edges with a restless energy that she was learning to read as desire.

He pulled her close. The sensation of his body against hers in warm water; scales and skin, his heat and hers, the slide of wet surfaces finding each other, made her gasp. She could feel every plate of his chest armor against her breasts, every shift of his muscles, the steady double-beat of his hearts pulsing against her body. Two rhythms, slightly offset, like a song with harmony built in.

She wrapped her legs around his waist, and the closeness was so complete that she could feel his breathing change against her chest. His arms came around her, and his hands on her back. His scaled fingers on her bare skin, sent cascading warmth down her spine.

"Marina," he said. Her name in his mouth carried a quality she'd never heard from anyone. Tenderness was layered with desire layered with something that sounded like disbelief. Like he still couldn't accept that this was happening.

"I'm here," she told him. "I'm real."

"I know. I just want to remember saying your name while it's happening."

She touched his face. The scales along his jaw were flushed copper, warm under her fingertips. His blue eyes were darker than she'd ever seen them, pupils dilated, the color deepened by desire and the golden light.

She guided him. Showed him what she wanted, where to touch, how to move. He learned with the attentive precision he brought to everything by watching her face, listening to her breathing and adjusting when she adjusted. When his hand found her breast, his touch was careful, exploratory, and she gasped and he held still, checking, making sure.

"Don't stop," she told him.

He didn't stop. His mouth moved from her lips to her throat to the hollow of her collarbone; each kiss deliberate and thorough. She could feel the dual heartbeat in his chest accelerating against her body. When they came together, the sensation was overwhelming. The heat of him, the texture, the closeness. They were different geometries finding each other, adjusting, fitting together in ways neither species had imagined possible.

She held onto his shoulders and breathed through the intensity. He held onto her and breathed through it with her. Their foreheads pressed together, and his wings opened wider behind him, and the golden light turned their bodies into something that transcended biology and entered the territory of meaning.

They moved together slowly, learning the rhythm and finding the places where two different bodies could speak the same language. She whispered his name, and he made a sound she'd never heard from him before. It was low, raw and completely unguarded. A sound that contained everything he'd been holding back since the day they met on Ceylara, and the release of it was more intimate than anything physical.

Something began to hum in her chest.

Low at first; barely distinguishable from her own heartbeat. She might have attributed it to the intensity of the moment, except that it grew independently of her breathing, her pulse, her arousal. It was a separate frequency, a vibration in her sternum that pulsed in time with something that wasn't her body. His heartbeat. She was feeling his heartbeat through a connection that had no physical source. The secondary heart, the deep one near his spine, beating in a rhythm she could feel in her bones.

He felt it too. She knew because his eyes widened and his arms tightened and his voice; rough, barely a whisper, said, "The bond. Marina, the bond is …"

"I feel it."

"You can feel me?"

"Both heartbeats. And something else; warmth, but inside. Like you're in my chest."

"You're in mine." His forehead pressed against hers. The water moved around them. The golden light held them. "I can feel what you feel. I can feel that you're not afraid."

"I'm not afraid."

"I can feel that you're…" His breath caught. His eyes went bright. "You love me."

"You needed the bond to tell you that? I said it in a hallway hours ago."

"Hearing it and feeling it are different things."

She kissed him. Through the bond, she felt what the kiss meant to him; not just physical sensation but emotional significance. The boy who'd watched a whale jump over a wall, who'd taught himself English from a children's book, who'd spent his life believing that humans were worth knowing, was being kissed by a human who loved him. The validation of everything he'd ever believed, delivered through the warmth of a mouth against his.

The intensity built with the bond as its amplifier. Every sensation doubled. Hers reflected in him, his reflected in her. The feedback making the pleasure sharper, deeper, impossible to separate. When it broke over them, it was simultaneous, the bond making it so, and for a moment there was no distinction between where she ended and he began.

She pressed her face into his neck and breathed. He held her in the warm water, his wings curved around them like a shelter, his scales slowly shifting from copper back to rose-gold as his breathing steadied.

"That was the bond?" she asked. Her voice was rough.

"The beginning. It builds over time. If both people choose it, it becomes permanent. Shared emotion, shared awareness, shared heartbeat. Always."

"If both people choose it."