I had patrolledthe outer valley for eleven years.I had tracked lightning beasts across the obsidian cliffs in the black hour before dawn.I had stood inside a full storm surge with nothing between me and the sky because the settlement needed its commander to hold his ground.I had faced rival tribe warriors on the ridge paths in the dark and carried injured men home on my back when the fight was done.Not once — not in eleven years of storms, and blood, and the relentless work of keeping people alive on a world that was always, always trying to kill them — had the sight of a person stopped me in my tracks.
My female was small.That was the first thing my mind registered, the automatic tactical cataloguing of a warrior who assessed everything within thirty paces as a matter of survival.Small and dark-haired, built slight and fine-boned in a way that made something deep and animal inside me go very quiet and very focused all at once.She had dried blood at her temple that had most likely been what attracted the beast.I saw her standing near her ruined craft with her chin lifted and her arms loose at her sides.Her soft, feminine features held a scowl as if she had already lost an argument with the planet but was determined to win the next one.
My storm nodes detonated the moment I saw her.Not the gradual brightening of an approaching electrical front.Not the slow accumulative charge I felt when a storm was still hours away.This was instantaneous.Total.Every node along my spine ignited at once — from the base of my skull straight down to the small of my back — and the surge was so violent, so complete, that I felt the light pour out of me before I understood what happened.Heat cracked open in my chest like a fist striking the sternum from inside.My vision edged white.My cock grew hard, ready.
I had never carried this much energy in my life.Not in a storm.Not in combat.Not during the worst electrical surge I had ever survived on the ridge cliffs ten years ago, when a direct strike had left me unconscious for half a day and burned the lightning scars across my shoulders that I still carried.Nothing had ever felt like this.
My hands — I became aware of them distantly, the way one becomes aware of a part of oneself only when it is doing something you haven't instructed it to do — wanted to reach.Toward her.The instinct was so powerful I locked my arms at my sides with deliberate force and breathed through the surge until it became something I could contain.
This female was small.Alien.If I touched her, she would run.I would not frighten my mate.And she was mine.
The storm has chosen.
She turned and saw me.Her eyes were dark — dark brown lit from within by something fierce and watchful and searingly intelligent.The moment they met mine the resonance in my chest did something I had no word for.It locked.Like a frequency finding its match across impossible distance, like a circuit completing, like the planet itself released a breath it had been holding since before either of us was born.The heat behind my sternum intensified until I could feel my own pulse in my teeth.My cock ached with the need to claim her.
She stepped backward.I made myself go still.Every warrior's instinct I possessed screamed at me to close the distance, put myself between her and the jungle, between her and the dark and the cliff shadows and every hungry thing that moved in this valley after sunset.The need to cover her, to shield her, to get my body between her and anything that might threaten her was so acute it was nearly indistinguishable from pain.But she didn't know me.And a frightened mate was not a safe mate, and keeping her safe was the only thing that mattered.
So I stayed still.And I burned.And I watched her look at me with those extraordinary dark eyes.I catalogued everything about her with the helpless compulsive attention of a man who has just understood that some part of him will catalogue this particular face for the rest of his life.Her too soft skin, smooth and unbroken by nodes or energy lines.The color was unique, stunning and alien all at once.I wondered what that skin would feel like under my fingertips.What she would taste like.She had full, soft lips.I could not see all of her, but her alien suit flowed over curved hips.Rounded breasts.She was utterly foreign and shockingly beautiful, like the delicate petals of a flower not yet marked by the storms.
The dried blood at her temple made me rage to be near her, check her for other wounds.Her blood was red, not blue.Another oddity I found intriguing.The precise set of her shoulders — not tension, exactly, more like a leashed readiness, the body of someone accustomed to emergencies, made very clear to me that she would not allow such intimate attention.Not yet.The way she breathed: controlled, deliberate, the measured inhale and exhale of a female who managed herself the way she managed everything else.With absolute, uncompromising discipline.
Not surprising.She had crashed on a foreign world.She was most likely military.Perhaps a scientist or explorer.Weak minds did not risk traveling in the dark between stars.
She smelled of scorched metal and something underneath it — something warm and clean and utterly alien, a feminine scent I had never encountered in my life and would never be able to forget.My storm nodes flared with it.The light along my spine pulsed outward in a wave I couldn't have suppressed if I'd tried.
“Hello?”Her voice came out precise and controlled, and I felt it in places voices had no business reaching — a low vibration in my chest that had nothing to do with sound and everything to do with the fact that her voice would live in me from this moment forward whether she stayed on this planet or not.
The storm sent me this one.Stormbound.
Mine.
I kept my body still.I did not let her see what happened inside my skin — the way the storm energy that had lived quietly in my nodes for thirty years suddenly moved, surged, pressed at the boundaries of my control with the insistence of a tide that had found its shore.She would not know that my cock grew hard and heavy.That I ached to claim her here.Now.With the storm as witness.
When I stepped closer, she went taut — I watched the change move through her, the slight sharpening of her breath.Her chin lifted in defiance and that small act of defiance crashed through my body like an avalanche.Instinct demanded I touch her.Claim her.Protect her.Because some part of me already knew she was mine.
“Hello?Do you speak English?”She tilted her head back and rubbed the back of her neck in frustration.“Of course not.That’s stupid.You crash landed on an unexplored planet, genius.No contact.Of course he doesn’t speak your language.”
She was adorable, rambling to herself.No, I did not speak her language.Did not need to.Words, language, although we did have them, were unnecessary for my people.We had evolved beyond them eons ago.So, I spoke to her in the old way.Soltharra, the planet of my people, would transform mywords into images and thoughts she would understand."You fell from the sky, female.Are you hurt?”
Sloane
I heard him.His voice was low and deep and resonant.It moved through me the way the planet's hum did — through bone and tissue, landing directly in my core.I felt his presence in my teeth.My nipples hardened to painful peaks.A jolt of fire raced from my clit to my spine.I felt his voice in places I didn’t want to examine or analyze.
My mind went blank.My spine vibrated with his tone.I couldn’t think.All I could do was stare at his bare chest.His shoulders.His thighs.His lips.Wonder what he tasted like.What he would feel like fucking me into oblivion.Would his cock be as hard and smooth as glass?Was his skin warm to the touch, or cold?Did his muscles move the way a human’s did?What would his hands feel like on my skin?
Get a grip.I was a scientist, for god’s sake.Not a hormone addled teenager lusting after the hottest guy in school.
I cleared my throat, the sound echoing oddly inside my skull.
"I’m fine.”My headache was annoying and every muscle ached from the impact, but I was alive.Not inside that creature’s stomach.That’s all that mattered.“My shuttle's stabilizer coil was destroyed by the electromagnetic surge in your atmosphere."I made my voice crisp.Precise.I was a researcher with years of experience collecting data on strange worlds.I should be able to stay professional, no matter what this place was doing to me, or how strange I felt.
"I need to replace or substitute the component before the next ion storm.I have approximately seventy-two hours before the next storm hits.If I don’t fix it before then, my ship will explode.”And obliterate half this valley.And my crew somewhere out in this jungle in their escape pods.And his village.Details he didn’t need to know right now.
Something moved through his expression.Not surprise.He must already know about the storm clock.He was too calm, like he knew something I did not.
"The next storm arrives in exactly seventy-two hours," he agreed."You are correct about that."
“How do you?—”