Page 17 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

The sound he made was nothing the translator could render. Low and rough and reverent, a groan that vibrated through his chest and into mine. He sucked again, harder, and more warmth flowed, and he shuddered as if he were the one coming.

"Keth?"

He lifted his head. His eyes were wet.

"You produce," he said. His voice was wrecked. "Mara. You produce."

I looked down at myself. A thin trickle of white was leaking from my nipple where his mouth had been, pale, almost translucent, nothing like what I'd imagined milk to look like. My body was making something new. Something that mattered to him in a way I didn't fully understand.

"Is that…” I swallowed. "Is that good?"

"Good." He laughed, a rough sound. "It is–" The word failed him. He tried again in Khorreth, something I didn't know, then came back to my language. "Sacred. You are sacred. You are–"

He lowered his head to my breast again, and I let him. His mouth sealed around my nipple, gentle now, drawing out the thin warmth with slow, steady pulls. The feeling was strange, not quite pleasure, not quite pressure, something between the two that made my whole body go liquid and loose.

I'd expected to hate this. I'd expected to feel used, objectified, reduced to a function.

Instead, I felt…

What I felt instead, I couldn't have said aloud. The way he held me, so careful. The sounds he made against my skin, grateful and awed. The wet on his face when he lifted his head to look at me.

This meant something to him. This meant everything to him.

I didn't know what to do with that.

The knot took nearly an hour to go down.

We lay tangled on the pallet, his cock still seated inside me, his arms wrapped around me to keep our weight distributed. He was heavy, but not unbearably so; he'd rolled us onto our sides at some point, holding me against his chest, his hand splayed across the small of my back.

I should have felt trapped. I didn't.

My body was quiet. For the first time since the heat hit, that burning need had faded to something I could manage, still there, a low simmer under my skin, but no longer screaming. I was exhausted. Wrung out. My thighs were sticky, my breasts were tender, and there was a pleasant ache between my legs where his knot still held me open.

"It will happen again," he said quietly. His mouth was near my ear, his breath warm against my hair. "The heat comes in waves. This was only the first."

"I know."

"I will tend to you. Every time. For as long as it lasts."

Part of me wanted to argue. To point out that I hadn't asked for any of this – not the serum, not the heat, not the ship. But I'd said stay, and I'd said do it, and I'd meant both, even if I didn't want to look too closely at why.

I was too tired to untangle it anyway. Too tired, too warm, and for once not alone. Some worn-out part of me just wanted to lie here in the dark with his arms around me and let someone else take care of things.

That was the most frightening part of all.

"Okay," I said.

His tail curled around behind us, and I felt him smile against my hair.

The heat would come back. I knew that. And when it did we'd do this again, and my body would respond exactly the way the serum had built it to respond, and I'd come apart in his arms because that was what I was now.

I knew all of that. I knew it was engineered, my heat triggering his rut triggering my deeper heat, a feedback loop neither of us could turn off.

My body didn't care.

My body was quiet and warm and finally, finally satisfied, and I let my eyes close and my breathing slow and my mind stop fighting.

Just for now. Just for a little while.