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Rennick caught me just before I hit the floor. “Where are you hurt?”
My body vibrated. Every nerve ending lit, oversensitive. “I’m... I’m not hurt. She showed me what happened. The original crew died. But before that...” longing flooded through me.
“Before? What do you mean?”
“How they lived. How you live when you find a mate to bond with.” I looked up at him. His face was so close to mine, gaze intense as he searched for the cause of my distress.
“What do you need? Let me help you.”
My body still ran on borrowed sensation, the memory of a want so enormous it had outlived the aliens who made it. “Rennick, I need you to move your hands off me or do something with them. The ship ran a Kelvane bonding memory through my nervous system, and I’m not in a place where casual touching will stay casual. Get off me or you’re getting laid.”
His hands didn’t move, but his eyes changed. The color went darker and hotter, and the restraint I’d watched him hold was gone. “Doc, we need a minute. Close the door.”
“Cass, you good?” she said in my comm.
“Nope. But not dying. At least I don’t think so.” How could I explain to her what I felt, when I didn’t even fully understand it myself?
“I know how to fix this. Shut the damn door. I won’t hurt her.” Rennick almost growled out the words.
The door slid shut just as Doc peeked inside, her eyes wide.
“You shouldn’t have experienced that,” he murmured. “The sensation is too intense for anyone but a Kelvane.”
“I felt everything!” I failed not to grind my hips against him, desperate for the ache to fade. “I’m about to explode.”
“Do you need a release?” His voice dropped lower, his gaze hungry as he gripped my shaking thigh.
I grabbed the front of his shirt, pulled him down, and kissed him. My mouth was open against his, and the sound he made when I bit his bottom lip sent heat straight through my pussy. A low rumble that started in his chest and ended in mine.
His hands slid from my jaw to the back of my neck, fingers in my hair, tilting my head where he wanted it, and when his tongue found mine, I stopped thinking in complete sentences.
The ship settled around us like she’d been waiting for this, the vibration in the floor dropping to match my heartbeat, or his, or both.
I pulled at his shirt, and he got the message. It came off over his head, and I got my hands on him. Warm skin over hard muscle, the ridges of alien anatomy I didn’t have a map for yet but intended to learn by feel. Raised lines ran from his shoulders down across his chest, hotter than the rest of him, and when my fingernails dragged across one, he shuddered.
“There?” I traced the line again, slower. “Sensitive?”
“You have no idea.”
I unzipped my overalls to the waist, and his gaze dropped and stayed. “Your turn to catch up. I need your hands on my skin.”
He pulled my tank top up, but his touch was too careful, and made me want to scream at him to stop being gentle, but the look on his face as he peeled fabric off my skin killed the words.
Rennick looked at me like I was something he’d been told he couldn’t have, but there it was, practically begging to be taken and having fuck all shame about it. If I didn’t get him inside me soon, I might just die.
I reached back, unhooked my bra, and let it drop.
His mouth was on my throat before the fabric hit the floor. Open, hot, tasting the skin below my ear. My hands locked behind his neck and my spine arched into him, pressing bare skin against bare skin. The contact detonated through both of us.
“Fuck.” His mouth moved lower. The hollow of my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast, and his tongue traced a slow line across sensitive skin.
He paused there, his breath hot against my nipple. Waiting.
“If you stop now, I will end you,” I whispered.
His mouth closed over my nipple, warm and wet, and his tongue turned my vision white. My back hit the wall. He’d moved me there without me noticing.
I was pinned between the warm, living hull and three hundred pounds of Kelvane who was done pretending to be civilized about wanting to fuck me senseless.
