"Yes.You did."Still being careful.So controlled.But I felt the hurt in him now.My reaction had hurt him.
"I've been doing that."The words came out slowly.Turns out confessing to being an obtuse idiot was harder than I thought it would be."That’s what I do.I analyze.I assess and study.I write reports.If I can explain the effect, I don't have to—" I stopped.
The cave was very quiet.
His warmth crossed the foot of air between us and landed on my skin.The marks on my collarbones pulsed, and pulsed, and pulsed.I was so tired of pretending I didn't understand every single thing they were telling me.
"Feel it?"His voice was quiet, but his understanding wrecked me.
I looked up at him.
His eyes were very soft.
Not with pity — Sorik was constitutionally incapable of pity.The softness in him was something else.
His hands were still at his sides.
He had not physically moved toward me.He gave me every bit of space between us even though I knew it cost him.I could see it in the set of his jaw and the careful stillness of his hands.The nodes along his spine pulsed brighter than they had this morning, lit up the cave wall behind him like a spotlight.They were brighter than they had been on the cliff, brighter than anything I'd seen since we were naked last night, his cock buried deep.His name on my lips.When the bond between us lit him from within.
That light was desire.Need.He wanted me.
He had wanted me since the moment we met, with an intensity I was only beginning to understand.
12
Sloane
"Yes.I analyze and rationalize so I don’t have to feel… anything.”The admission tore open old wounds.Like ripping the bandage off something raw, needy and vulnerable.I didn’t like it.Not one little bit.But I couldn’t lie to him or myself.Not with the truth pulsing between us in a whirlpool of energy.
The cave breathed around us.Outside, the cascade ran its cycle — lightning moved over the valley in sustained blue-white pulses, illuminating the entrance in stuttered light that caught his face in intervals of brightness and shadow.The storm's light found him the way everything found him — completely, with an intimacy that made my chest ache.The strong line of his jaw.The pale branching of the lightning scars.The silver eyes that never seemed to leave my face.
His hands were still at his sides right now.Carefully.Deliberately.Because he was giving me the choice and would keep giving me the choice for as long as I needed it.
I took my hands from his chest just long enough to set the crystals down, then closed the space between us.Put both hands flat against his chest again.On the alien whose form I had memorized in the dark and recognized now with a longing that made my nipples harden.My pussy flooded with wet heat.
His heartbeat was strong beneath my hands.Synchronized with mine.
“I lied.This is not a physiological response to an external stimulus.”
His hands came up and covered mine.I felt him stop breathing.“What do you believe this is?”
“I don’t know.”The warmth of him soaked into my palms and up my arms and into the marks on my collarbones.They blazed in response — hot.Sensitive under my suit.I knew he couldn’t see them.But he could feel them.Feel the energy flowing through me and into him.The bond recognized my mate and responded.“But I want more.I want you.”
The sound that left him was low and involuntary.
I reached up and pulled him down to me.
This kiss was a choice.My choice.I chose him.
Last night I’d been overwhelmed with the planet, the storm, and the biological urge to mate.This wasn’t just my body or my marks.This was all me.
His kiss was gentle.Still the measured, patient man who had given me every bit of space I needed all day.
Then something changed.
He lifted his hands to cup my face.His fingers curved around my jaw.
The Skybond circuit opened wider.Not the gentle golden hum of the last few hours.Something larger.Hotter.