“We feel everything.The ground.The sky.The storm.The trees.Friend and foe.All life is energy.”
“Is that how you found me so fast?I was only on the ground for a few minutes, and you were already here.Like you were waiting for me.”
“I followed an unusual electromagnetic disturbance when your craft came down."
"Your nodes."She began to understand."They responded to the crash?"
“No.Not to your ship.”I looked at her steadily."They responded to you."
Her lips parted.A small thing.A barely-there thing.The sound she made I wanted to hear again and again, when my cock was buried deep.When she begged me for more.Shock.Surprise.
Want.
"Beforeyou saw me?"
"Before your craft entered the valley," I said."I felt the change in the energy field as soon as your ship reached the mountains.I followed it.I did not understand what I tracked until I found you standing at the edge of your crash site."
The air between us heated.My nodes flared with light.I could feel the heat of her from two feet away — human body temperature, which I already knew was cooler than mine.My skin ached to fix that discrepancy in ways I would not yet allow.
I barely — barely — held the reins.
"I'm not going to apologize," she said carefully, "for not immediately accepting a phenomenon, a bond, I have no framework for.I’m not from this planet.I’m not bonding with you."
"Truth does not require your acceptance," I said.“Truth simply is.”
"Then what do you require?"
I looked at her.At the set of her jaw and the guardedness in her eyes.The way her body did exactly what mine did — leaning fractionally, involuntarily, toward the source of the pull she refused to acknowledge.Toward me.
"Seventy-two hours," I said."Give me that.I'll help you repair your ship and find your crew, and when it's done—" I held her gaze and let her see the full weight of my certainty, everything I had not yet said aloud "—you can make whatever choices you need to make.If you choose to leave Soltharra, I will not stop you."
A long silence.The pre-storm winds moved through the canopy outside.I heard the stormglass trees begin their low electric song, the sound they made when the atmosphere started building charge.In twelve hours, the surges would intensify.In thirty, the cliff approach would become genuinely lethal.In seventy-two, everything would change.And then, the cycle would begin again.
"Fine.Three days.”Her words were not warm.They did not contain any of the desire I could feel gathering under her surface like a storm building behind glass.But she agreed.For now, she would not attempt to leave me or order me from her side.
Relief flooded me as she turned back to her screens and pulled up crystal formation data.She asked me precise, technical questions about extraction methodology.What tools she would need.The best route to the caves.
I answered them.All of them.Completely.In a normal voice.
And the whole time, the storm nodes along my spine blazed silver-white, pumping more energy through my system than I had ever in my life been forced to contain.My hands locked around the edges of the crew chair rather than where they wanted to be.Touching her.
Seventy-two hours to seduce her.To gain her trust and win her heart.To convince her to stay on an alien world.To stay with me.
Storm help me.She was alien.Stubborn and beautiful.I had a feeling I would need every moment.
5
Sloane
I didn't sleep.
That wasn't unusual for me in the field.But the field had never previously included a crashed shuttle on a forbidden storm planet with a seventy-two-hour countdown running like a live wire in the base of my skull.I lay in the emergency bunk, stared at the cracked ceiling and told myself I was running logistics — crystal extraction, reactor stabilization, crew beacon triangulation — and for approximately four minutes, I believed it.
Then I stopped believing and faced reality.
Because the thing keeping me awake was not the countdown.The crash.Or worrying about my crew.
It washim.His eyes.His voice.The way he looked at me.The waves of heat that seemed to radiate off his body as if he were a small sun.