“But I haven’t even touched you there yet, Khar.”
He opened his mouth to answer, but Lily was faster. With one decisive movement she freed him from his clothes. Khar’s breath caught hard as Lily’s warm lips closed around the sensitive tip, her tongue tracing slow circles over every raised ridge along his length. His hips jerked involuntarily, and he gripped the pilot’schair to keep from losing full control. His entire focus contracted to that small, red mouth, his salvation and his ruination.
“You know,” Lily murmured between strokes, pulling him out of the haze for a heartbeat, “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to get you on your knees…”
“It seems to me,” Khar began with his usual pride, “that I am not the one kneeling right—”
A single, precise touch silenced him.
Her fingers brushed the base of the small horns nestled along the underside of his shaft, structures that brought Lily so much pleasure when they were joined, but now served as a treacherous weakness of his own.
“I realized I was approaching it all wrong,” Lily whispered, trailing her tongue between the textured ridges. “I kept thinking of you as if you were a human man, when you’re so much… more. And that’s where the key is. These little things that bring me so much pleasure… they’re the very things that will bring you to your limit too. Just not in the way I expected.”
She was right. For Khar, the raised beads along his length, and the new, delicate horns that had only ever appeared because of Lily, were his undoing. He took pride in how long he could last with her, in how their orgasms intertwined until he lost count. But now he understood: he’d walked straight into the trap of her brilliant, wicked mind. It was terrifying what she could do when she focused on something with her extraordinary determination.
As Lily explored him with growing confidence, Khar unraveled into a trembling, taut creature held together only by the thinnest threads of will. He needed, needed, to release into her sweet mouth or he would come apart entirely.
“Lily…”
If he had thought his love was merciful, he was catastrophically mistaken. Lily slowed her pace, keeping him poised just shy of oblivion.
“I think, Khar,” she said softly, “you should ask nicely.”
She squeezed the base of him just above his heat, and Khar’s head fell back with a strangled sound. Dignity meant nothing. There were battles worth losing, and this was one of them.
“Lily… please.”
Khar would never forget the look of satisfaction on her face, nor the way the climax tore through him so violently he briefly forgot what chrono-century he lived in, what his name was, even how he had come to exist here at all. Only one truth remained: the miracle who had granted him this gift was the one he would follow anywhere.
By the time he came back to himself, Lily was already on her feet, leaning casually against the control console as if she hadn’t just destroyed him. Khar’s pulse surged. Now it was his turn.
He lunged for her, kissing her until she gasped against his mouth. His lips moved to her neck, her breasts, her shoulders, her stomach, every inch he could reach, until Lily grabbed fistfuls of his dark hair, wordlessly begging him to go lower. But Khar refused to surrender so easily.
He stripped the last remnants of clothing from her body and deliberately diverted again, kissing down her calves, her knees, the delicate skin of her thighs. When he paused a breath away only to withdraw once more, Lily smacked his shoulder.
“For the love of… Khar!”
“I do not know what that means,” he replied, voice low with wicked satisfaction. “But soon you will learn something very important: do not tease a predator.”
He lifted her onto the console and, in one fluid motion, slid into her. Lily came with a sharp cry, and Khar set a relentless rhythm, instinctively seeking every point inside her that made her dissolve. He was merciless. She might be magic incarnate when her lips were on him, but now he would not stop until she had shattered several times in his arms.
He loved her through the control room, in her cabin, in the shower, and finally collapsed with her on the bed, both breathless, both undone.
There was no doubt who had won their duel.
When they lay tangled together afterward, Khar’s last conscious thought before sleep claimed him was simple, quiet, absolute.
At last.
Everything in this universe had fallen into its rightful place.
All it had taken was the arrival of the one being his life had been waiting for.
* * *
Epilogue
“How do deep-space jumps even work?” Lily asked.
