Fear was a reasonable response to a bond this powerful.I had felt it too — in the moment the bond formed and my entire understanding of my own life reorganized itself around am alien female, a human woman who had fallen from the sky.
But I had looked at everything the universe had to offer.
I had made my calculation.Made my choice.She was mine.I would not let her go.
I was waiting for her to make hers.
"The vein at your right hand," I called up."Two meters ahead.Don't use those holds."
She looked down at me.
Those dark eyes found mine through the charged air.My awareness of her bypassed every other sensory input.I sighed in relief when she moved to her left.She tracked to the crystal vein threading through the rock face to her right.Adjusted her route without debate.
"The deposit layer starts here," I yelled.The wind had increased enough that I needed to raise my voice."Watch the surface.The crystal matrix runs through the obsidian in veins — the rock around each vein holds static charge.You'll feel the pressure build before your hand makes contact."
She pulled herself up another hold.
Her breath was controlled and even.The morning light moved across the planes of her face — the strong line of her jaw set with concentration, the dark intelligence of her eyes reading the rock three moves ahead, the marks at her collarbones pulsing their warm luminous rhythm in the pre-storm light.
My marks.
On her skin.
I wanted to do this for her, leave her safely in our sleeping cave.
Stubborn, sexy female had refused.We’d argued about it last night until her face turned a dark reddish pink and her heart raced so fast, I’d feared it would burst.
I was Commander of the Storm Guard, accustomed to instant obedience.My instinct to protect my female, to force her compliance on this issue, was nearly overwhelming, yet I refused to force an alien female to obey me, especially not the one gifted to me by the storm,.I had sensed in her mind that if I had tried, I would have lost her trust forever.She was alien, a female from a strange world with stranger ways.I made the decision to adapt.
Then I had fucked her until her limbs trembled and her eyes were so glazed with pleasure she could barely move.
Much better use of my time.
At this moment, with the wind attempting to tear us both off the side of this cliff, I considered the possibility that I had miscalculated.I should have tied her up and left her in the cave, retrieved the crystals she needed on my own.
My hands tightened on the obsidian until the rock edge bit into my palms.
Good.
The pain was useful.The pain was something to hold onto that wasn't her.
"This looks good."She tucked her scanner into a pocket on her suit.
Her hand hovered two inches from a crystal-laden section of the face.Not touching.Even from here I could feel the energy field radiating from the deposit.Noted the slight tension in her wrist where she held herself back — the careful precision of someone who had learned, efficiently and not without cost, to respect what this planet could do.
Something moved through my nodes that had nothing to do with the crystals as I watched my mate—her careful hand, her attention, the competence and caution she held in perfect balance—and understood this was not simply admiration.This was something deeper.More intense.
Sloane had fallen from the sky onto a planet that should have killed her.She had survived and adapted and climbed and learned.She had refused to remain behind.Insisted she was capable.She carried my marks and the planet's marks and still believed she was leaving.
She was extraordinary.
I stayed below her.Watched every move.And burned for her.
She’d put distance between us.I tracked every movement she made with the complete, helpless focus of a man who accepted that he was incapable of doing anything else in that moment.
She moved through the pre-storm air above me with a grace that made the cliff look like it had been designed just for her.As though this rock had been waiting.As though the planet had known she was coming long before the storm brought her down.
Perhaps it had.