The certainty of him was a physical thing.A wall between me and the darkness of my fears — solid and immovable and entirely without doubt.The same certainty he brought to everything.The same certainty that had saidI have youon a cliff face and meant it with his whole body.He’d saved my life on the cliff.
A shudder passed through me as the shadow of death whispered down my spine.I almost died today.
As if he could sense my distress, his arms tightened around me.
I felt the security in that embrace everywhere — across my back, my shoulders, through every point of contact between us.Through the bond as well.The focused intensity of his protectiveness.Taking me in.Making me his.With the same calm absolute certainty.
I breathed in.
His scent.His warmth.His heartbeat under my cheek, steady and slow and entirely certain.The arms of a man who had never once made me a promise he didn't intend to keep.
I breathed out.
I let my doubts go.
I let myself believe our bond was real.That I was his and he was mine.That the storm he believed in really had chosen me to be in his arms and sent a lightning bolt to knock me out of the sky and into his arms.Insane?Undoubtedly.I didn’t care anymore.
I pulled back enough to look at him.
The crystal light illuminated his face with an intimacy that broad daylight never permitted.The silver eyes, steady and warm, saw everything without flinching.My tear-streaked face.My undone composure.
He looked at all of it.
Nothing shifted in his expression.He looked at me the way he always looked at me — complete, unhurried, making no pretense of anything else.
Like I was extraordinary.
Like the tears were part of the extraordinary.Not a departure from it.
I looked at the marks on his collarbones.Blazing gently in the crystal light.At the nodes running their deep warm rhythm along his spine — brighter now than this morning, brighter than the cliff, deeper than the cave last night.The bond visible on his body the same way it was visible on mine.The planet's claim written in both of us in the same language from different directions.
We were written in the same hand.
I kissed him.
He was careful with me.
That was what I hadn't anticipated.Not tentative — nothing about Sorik was tentative.The certainty was in every movement.Careful.Deliberate.Unhurried in a way that was almost unbearably intimate.
I was not accustomed to that.I had absolutely no defense against it.
His hands moved to my hair.Slowly.The warmth of his palms against my scalp sent the nerve endings firing and the marks on my collarbones flared in response — warm and bright and certain, the bond recognizing his touch and responding with everything it had.The discharge moved through me in long slow waves.
Not the violent surge of the cliff.Not the wild urgency of unfiltered need.
Something that had the quality of deep water.Sustained.The kiss of a man who knew he had time and was not in any hurry.
I leaned into it.
Into him.Into the warmth of his hands and the steady rhythm of his heartbeat and the devastating reality of being held by someone strong enough to hold all of me.Without strain.Without effort.Without asking me to make myself smaller to fit the available space.
I stopped thinking about the ticking time bomb that was my ship.Stopped thinking.Just stopped thinking.I didn’t want to think.I wanted to feel.
The cave.The crystal light.The warmth of him surrounding me.His hands moving over me with deliberate, completely focused attention.The Skybond circuit running its deep warm current between us in slow resonant waves — nowhere to be, all the time in the world to get there.
The marks on my collarbones blazed.
His answered.