“I love you,” he says.
Right there. In the middle of it. In a voice I’ve never heard him use.
He drives in hard and holds. He throws back his head and lets out a thunderous roar. I feel him let go inside me, and theheat of it triggers something that rolls me straight into a third mini orgasm that I did not authorize and cannot survive.
And then we fall down together in the grass, exhausted and sweaty.
It’s the best sex of my life.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Scar
She’s asleep on her side with her back against my chest and my bare claw spread flat across her stomach. My offspring already grows under my palm.
I don’t have to be told and I don’t have to wait for a med tech.
I have slept in this bed beside this female for nine moon cycles, listened to her breathe through every one of those nights. I have felt her hand land on my arm in her sleep and every single one of those times there were two layers of regulation fabric between her skin and mine. I would come in off shift and pull on clean gloves and get into a bed with a female I was in love with, and lie six inches from her, and keep my hands covered all night in case she rolled over.
I put her boots on with covered claws. I held her hair off her neck on a bathroom floor while she was sick and I did it with a glove on. I have carried her home asleep from the compound more times than I can count and there has always, always been cloth between us.
And now I’m lying in that same bed with my bare hand flat on her bare stomach and my mouth against the back of her bare shoulder, and there is nothing between us anywhere at all.
I can put my claw wherever I want on this female. My lips can kiss her mouth, I can suck on her nipples and lick on that wonderous clit that brings her so much pleasure.
And there’s the soft skin of her hip. The dip of her waist. The line of her spine. She makes a small noise in her sleep every time and doesn’t wake, and I lie in the dark like a fool touching my mate’s back because I’m allowed to.
Meanwhile, my finger still hurts. I refused to go to the med lab because I want to be able to show it off amongst my crew and at the mine. It’s splinted, Leah did it in the kitchen when I first arrived home.
The bite on my shoulder has crusted over. There are four claw-lines down my chest that sting whenever I move, which is constantly, and a split lip from where my Bride punched me in the face in a fake forest.
I have never been so pleased about anything in my life.
Lucas is across the hall.
Leah and Hook have had him since yesterday.
Four diurnals of nothing but this female.
She wakes slowly.
I feel it before she moves, a change in her breathing, then a stretch that presses her whole length back against me, and then she goes very still as she remembers.
“Cayzor?” she breathes. She rolls over. And that’s the first time I see my Mara’s face in the morning as my mate, in our own bed.
She’s got a mark on her throat I put there. Her hair is a catastrophe. There’s a scrape along one shoulder from the grass.
“You’re staring,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Have you been staring long?”
“Some hours.”
“Cayzor.”
She reaches up and puts her bare palm flat against the ruined side of my face, and neither of us says anything for a while.
