My chest contracted around her feminine energy like a fist.I felt her.Not her skin, not her temperature, not her bioelectric signature.Her.There was nowhere for either of us to hide.The ruthless honesty of the Skybond didn't deal in pretense or lies.The storm accepted only truth.Right now, the truth was we both needed this.
Contact.Pleasure.A merging of energy.Of our very souls.
"What are you doing to me?"she gasped.
"It is not me.It is the storm.The Skybond."My voice was barely sound."It is our way."
My thumb moved.Slowly.One stroke across the curve of her cheekbone.I laced my fingers with hers and stroked her palm because I needed to touch her.Tiny arcs of electricity followed the path of contact — blue-white sparks that traced my thumb's passage across her skin, visible and delicate and unavoidable.
She watched them with dark eyes, her expression raw and unguarded and devastatingly real.Her gaze followed my touch, the arcs of energy beneath her skin.I saw the moment she decided they weren't frightening.Something in her face went quiet and certain.The decision made.The argument over.
"We are linked now?You can't do this with anyone else?"If jealousy lived in her voice, it didn't register as such.Did she want me to touch another?Claim another female?I could not.The storm had chosen her, struck her ship, pulled her from the sky itself to be mine.
"The storm has chosen.You are mine and I am yours.Our energy will not bond with another."
"Forever?Is it reversible?"
"Until we die.And no, there is no way to reverse the bond."
"I don't understand how this could happen.I'm not from here."She looked up at me and for the first time, I saw fear in her eyes.Vulnerability."I don't look like you.I'm sure your women are different.I must seem ugly to you.Strange.I'm so sorry.I didn't mean for this to happen.You probably don't want me."
Was this why she held back?Why she didn't respond as most Skybonded mates did?Why she avoided my touch?
How had I not anticipated this?Instead of pursuing her as I should have, I had held myself apart.Resisted touching her when I should have offered reassurance.Maintained a distance that had apparently hurt us both.
I was an idiot.
Every controlled thing in me let go at once.I set her on her feet and took her face in both hands.Cupped her jaw with a tenderness I had never felt before."You are beautiful.I did not wish to frighten you with my needs."
She trembled.Licked her lips.Every cell in my body focused on the movement of her tongue."What, exactly, are your needs?"
I reached down and pulled the covering from my body, bared my aching cock to her eyes.Awaited my fate.Judgment.Damnation or salvation.My life was in her hands."I need to kiss you.Touch you.Taste every part of you.Fill you with my cock.Give you pleasure.Listen to the sounds you make when you come."
"Oh…" She lifted her hands and flattened her palms against my chest.Not to push me away.To explore.
My nerve clusters blazed at the contact.Energy moved between us in sustained arcs I felt in my spine, in my chest, in the backs of my knees.My entire body existed in that moment for her.There was nothing else.Only her scent.Her skin.Her eyes.
I held her beautiful face in my hands, studied the delicateness of her jaw, soaked in the warmth of her skin against my palms, and tilted her face up for my kiss.
She didn't wait for me to come to her.She rose onto her toes to close the distance.When her mouth met mine the charge between us didn't flow.
It exploded.
7
Sorik
The Skybond surgedthrough me in a single, enormous wave of power.Something that went to the bone.Deeper.Something I had no defense against.Something that tasted entirely of her.Her energy filled the spaces I had occupied and kept going — past the nodes, past the nerve clusters, into whatever lived underneath my biology.My heart?My soul?I had no name for the core of me that was no longer my own.I was hers.
She kissed me the way I'd watched her do everything all day.With her whole self.No half measures.No hedging.The wall was gone.Her lips devoured mine.Made me forget my own name.My history.The fact that I stood separate from her in a distinct body.I ceased to exist and melted into her.
My hands moved from her face.I buried one in her hair.The dark strands crackled with static around my fingers, alive with the charge that ran between us.She made a sharp, breathless sound — unguarded and immediate and entirely involuntary.It went directly into my bloodstream and took up residence alongside everything else I would carry for the rest of my life.I wrapped my free hand around her waist.Lust echoed inside the oldest, darkest parts of me.My need to touch her pulled a sound from my chest I hadn't known I was capable of making.
Something low.Not language.More primitive than that.Raw and instinctive.
Her hands came up to my chest.Both of them.Palms flat against the nodes that ran along my ribs.The contact — the living pressure of her palms against the most sensitive points of my electrical system, the warmth through my clothing, the deliberate placement of them, there, exactly there — drove every remaining coherent thought directly out of my skull.
I turned.Put her back against the obsidian wall.