My heart thudded.Perhaps she already had a mate?
I had not asked.I did not want to know.Whatever male had claimed her before was irrelevant.She was here, on my world, synced to my nodes.The Skybond flowed wild and strong between us.If I had my way, she would never leave my side.Any male from her past should have cared for her, protected her.
If she were mine, she would never fly to the dark reaches of space alone, to explore dangerous worlds she didn't understand.If she had a male in her life, he was a fool who didn't deserve her.Didn't protect her.Placed her in danger.
No.Fuck any male who tried to claim her.She was mine now.Mine to protect.Mine to seduce.Mine to ride the storm.
Rage at the inept alien male who may have placed her in danger struck the air.My loss of control mixed with the charge in the valley around us.The air spiked.Rose to dangerous levels.I'd created this storm because of her.
My nodes went white.We were out of time.
"We need shelter," I said.
Her head came up.Her eyes found mine immediately, read the urgency in my face before I said anything else.She didn't question it."How long do we have?"
"Not long enough."I moved, scanned the cliff base ahead — not the upper deposits, still twenty minutes out, but the lower formations where centuries of water and lightning had carved the obsidian into hollows.There.A cave mouth, left of the main crystal vein, shadow-dark against the pale rock."Forty paces ahead.Do you see it?"
"The overhang?—"
"It's a cave.Deep enough."My hand went to the small of her back.Not a question.Not a negotiation.Pure instinct — my body protected hers before my mind finished the thought.My palm spread wide.Her warmth hit my nerve clusters through the material of her suit like a brand, immediate and unlike anything else — not the storm, not the cliffs heated by our star.Nothing I had felt before.
The storm took on her frequency; her unique life force mixed with mine.Every node along my spine pulsed.Her power moved through me like a single, sustained wave of light I couldn't have suppressed — or ignored — if I'd tried.It changed me.Owned me.Made my blood hot and my cock swell with the need to claim her."Now.Move quickly."
She moved.
I kept my hand at her back and failed — tried, and failed, and tried again — not to focus my entire being on the width of her hips.The curve of her shoulders.The soft skin at her suit's collar.Raw desire poured from my nerve clusters into the nodes, into the sustained, desperate resonance that had challenged my control all day with the patience of a force that knew it would eventually win.
She smelled warm and feminine, like exotic flowers.Every moment of careful distance had been a futile exercise in resistance, had stolen a small piece of my sanity.My control.
The sky above the canopy turned yellow-green in warning.
Then the atmospheric saturation hit us — not lightning yet, but the pressure wave that preceded it.The full-body electrical charge that heralded every serious strike.My nodes answered with a surge so violent it drove the breath from my lungs.The energy slammed through me like a fist.The nodes that had run hot since I'd found Sloane reached for the new charge with a hunger that stripped away every pretense of control.
I should have directed the energy away.Instead, it consumed me.The storm demanded release through the Skybond.Through my mate.My instincts, the most primal and feral parts of me, demanded I honor the bond.Claim her.Make her mine.
My vision went white at the edges.I didn't need to see — my entire body overflowed with awareness of every rock and reed and tree.Awareness of her movement.Her exact location.The energy that flowed through her called to me with the power of the storm itself.
I didn't break stride.
"Almost there."My voice came out even.I was unreasonably proud of that.
"I can see it?—"
The first strike hit the cliff face twenty paces to our right.
Not sound — force.A concussive crack that hit my chest like a physical blow and turned the world white.Stole all sound for one ringing second.Sloane's whole body jerked.A sharp, involuntary sound left her — brief and unguarded, the sound of someone caught off guard.Something in me responded with a ferocity that had nothing to do with the storm.
Then my hands were on her.Both of them.One at her back, one under her knees.I lifted her off her feet, cradled her against my chest, and ran.The reality of her — warm and solid and close, her hair against my jaw — brought my aching cock raging back to life.She held on without being asked.The pressure of her grip moved through me like a secondary charge, sensual and deliberate and hers.
I wanted her fingers digging into my flesh.Her cries of pleasure.Her wet heat wrapped around my cock so tight I would never recover.I wanted to taste every inch of her.Touch her.Make her beg.Give her release.Do it again.And fucking again.
Power streaked through my nodes.I ran to safety, relieved when the cave mouth swallowed us whole.
The darkness inside held absolute for one second.Then my eyes adjusted.Light from my nodes threw pale silver across the obsidian walls and lit the deep, narrow space.The ceiling stood just high enough that I could stand once we passed the entrance.The walls ran smooth and warm from the heat stored in the cliff face above.No animals.No other danger.We were alone.Safe.The air sat still and close, saturated with the mineral smell of rock and the electric charge that built in the valley outside.
And her.
In the enclosed space, her scent hit me like the first breath after surfacing from deep water.Warm.Feminine.Mine in the way my nodes had decided the moment I'd seen her.Mine in the way the planet had decided before either of us was born.In the confines of this cave, her scent had nowhere to go except directly into my bloodstream.I breathed it in once, deliberate and slow, the way one takes inventory of something they aren't sure they'll ever experience again.Then I stopped breathing through my nose entirely, because the alternative was losing the last of my control.