"Is this dangerous for you?"She settled her cheek against my chest, her voice barely a whisper.Thank the storm she didn't ask to be set down.I needed the contact to ground me.To convince my body she was real.Close.Mine.
Her voice had changed.No longer in the professional register.Care.Concern.She asked about me.Not her mission, or the storm crystals, or the seventy-two-hour clock.Her concern cracked something open in my chest — an emotion that went deeper than the Skybond or the automatic connection my nodes created.Her mate.
Perhaps she would learn to care for me.Fall in love with me.Choose to stay.
"Not dangerous," I said."The energy needs to move.In a normal storm I would discharge through the ground.Through movement—" I stopped.Swallowed.Her face did something that made it impossible to finish speaking — a softness at the corners of her mouth, open and attentive and entirely unguarded, her walls down in a way she hadn't noticed yet."Through other methods."
"Through contact."Not a question.
I looked at her steadily."Yes."
The lightning pulsed outside.One long, sustained illumination that caught her face fully and held it.What I saw moved through me like the storm — fast, total, impossible to name as anything other than what it was.Her lips parted.Her eyes had gone past the scientist.Past the wall.Past all of it.She looked at my hands where they touched her, wrapped around her body.I felt that attention the way I felt changes in atmospheric pressure — in the nodes first, in the nerve clusters of my palms.
"The nerve clusters," she said."In your palms.Every time the lightning flashes, I feel?—"
"Me.Our bond.I am sorry.I cannot let you go.It would be dangerous."The words came out rough.Uneven."During a surge, we need the energy exchange?—"
"We?"
The cave went silent except for her heartbeat.
I went still.Not from control —I was at the edge of a precipice from which there would be no return.The air shifted with the same pull I'd felt on the path.Stronger now.Concentrated by the cave walls, the storm outside, proximity, and sustained exquisite pressure.
"Sloane."I could not speak of it and resist the need to show her exactly what the storm would feel like between us.
"You said the energy exchanges through contact."Her chin came up.That lift.That precise, devastating, infuriating lift I had watched her aim at every hostile thing this planet offered.Up close it was nearly impossible to resist.The pulse at her throat, fast and visible.The color across her cheeks had nothing to do with exertion.She held herself very still as if afraid to startle a wild animal."If the buildup creates pressure, and the mechanism for discharge involves contact—."Her dark eyes found mine.Held.Didn't waver.
She licked her lips.Stared at mine."Show me."
Science.She made the request as if the Skybond was a research project.Part of her meant that, genuinely.The rest of her — the part I heard in her pulse, saw in the color high across her cheeks, felt in the air between us — that part wasn't asking for data.She needed this thing between us as much as I did.She just didn’t know what it was.Yet.
I pushed off the wall and allowed her body to slide down against mine, reveling in the friction, until her feet touched the ground.
She didn't move away.Didn’t pull back.Didn't rebuild her mental wall.Didn't retreat into the scientist.She stood her ground with her chin up and her dark eyes on mine.Her heart hammered its fast bright rhythm in my ears.Heat radiated off her skin.
I stopped fighting my own needs.I sent it directly into my mate instead.Held nothing back.She needed to know.To understand.
The heat from my nodes hit her first.I watched it happen — the small shiver that moved through her body, involuntary and immediate.Her sharp intake of breath.The way her fingers tightened on my forearm, then released.Surrendered.The scanner dropped to her side.I watched her decide to let it go.
I raised my hand.Slowly.Every movement deliberate, telegraphed, every moment given to her so she could stop this, name it something else, choose differently.My palm moved through the charged air between us — so thick with energy that moving my hand to her face was like pushing through warm water.The Skybond pulled me closer.The storm pushed me toward her.My nerves pulsed with life.With need.With a song so perfect my heart ached with the sound rising between us.
I pressed my palm against her cheek.She leaned into my touch.Skin to skin.She opened herself to me, to my energy, to this thing blazing to life between us.
The discharge was instantaneous.Mutual.And nothing — nothing — like anything I had experienced in all my years on this planet.
My nerve clusters detonated.Not painfully.Like a door thrown open.Pressure that had built for hours found release in a single moment of pleasure.The energy flowed between us, alive — from my palm to her cheek, back into mine in a current that cycled and built on itself, a resonance loop unlike anything I had ever felt before.
Normally when I touched the ground, energy left me.This was different.She changed what I shared with her and gave it back.Her influence was feminine.My power flowed for battle.For war.For the hunt.
Her touch unmade me.Dulled my sharp edges.Soothed and offered comfort.She was everything I was not.If I was death, she offered life.My darkness basked in her light.The gentle flow of energy unlike anything I'd ever felt — even from my own mother when I was a child.
Her skin was warm.Alive.Real under my hand.Her bioelectric signature ran faint and human and uniquely hers.It met the current that ran through my palm, felt the moment my nodes surged, and she marked me as surely as I marked her.Claimed me as her own.
She made a sound.
Small.Bitten off.One I imagined she would make when I feasted on her wet heat.When my cock was buried deep.When I made her mine.
Her eyes went wide and dark and shocked as the energy flowed between us — me to her, back again in a link I had no desire to break.What I felt in that current was not only electrical.It was her.Her surprise, and her wanting, and the thing she had hidden from me all day.All of her confusion, need, fear, and desire broke through in a cascade.Everything within her reached back through the current and grabbed me, pushed into my system with a relentless, shockingly powerful force.