Page 31 of Alien Healer’s Mate

Sitting back on the bench, he pulled her into his lap, guiding her around so her back was against his chest and her thighs straddling his. He held her in place as he thrust back into her again, slow and deep. He surged up, filling her all the way, and she gasped again as she took him easily, slick from her climax.

He gripped her waist, thumbs rubbing slow circles into her skin, and took her with a lazy, possessive roll of his hips, his breath hot against the nape of her neck.

“Mine,” he rasped.

His hand slid around, and his fingers found her clit, working her in rhythm with the roll of his hips. She clung to his arm, the friction inside and the pressure outside driving her up and up until there was nowhere left to go.

The second climax hit harder than the first. Her back arched, her head fell against his shoulder, her voice broke on a cry as she came.

At the exact moment she shattered, he roared against her neck, his whole body rigid as he buried himself to the hilt. He spent himself inside her. Rope after rope of his thick, hot seed bathed her inner walls, his cock jerking with each pulse as she shuddered around him.

She blinked, trying to bring the steamy shower stall around them into focus, and then went still.

She loved him. She was completely, head over heels for her handsome, bossy alien doctor.

8

Kellat had performed more than a few mating claims in his time on Devan Station and trained all his staff on them, so he could have recited the protocol in his sleep if he needed to.

He sat in the small office nook in his quarters and did not look at the protocol. He didn’t need to. That was the problem. He’d ignored the protocol file. He knew what a claim was supposed to look like, what steps a warrior was supposed to complete to secure his human mate, yet he had followed none of them.

A warrior was supposed to court his mate. That was the shape of it, old as the empire. A warrior declared his intent, openly, so the female knew what he was and what he wanted. Then he provided, proved himself… his clan, his rank, his worth, and laid all of it in front of her so that when she chose, she could make that decision with her eyes open. The choice was the whole point. Everything else, the gifts and the formality and the endless draanthing ceremony, existed to protect that one thing. Her informed, uncoerced yes.

But he hadn’t done that. He hadn’t even told her that was what he was supposed to do. Then he’d taken all her choices away from her in a shower.

No. Before that. Dragging a hand down his face, he forced himself to admit the truth. He’d taken her choices against a wall, with her hair fisted in his hand, less than an hour after another male had put his mouth on her. He’d growled Mine at a female who had no idea the word carried legal weight in his culture. At the female who had no idea they were already matched and there were things he should have done that he had not done.

She’d looked up at him with her heart in her eyes and begged him for his touch. She’d thought she was answering a lover in the heat of the moment.

She had no idea that by accepting him into her body, she’d accepted a mating claim. His claim.

The truth sat heavy in his gut, making him feel ill.

He’d built the whole thing on rationalizations, and he’d known they were rationalizations even as he stacked them up. One: she was recovering from catastrophic trauma. Two: her neural remapping was unexplained, and the stress of a claim could destabilize it. Three: telling her would be cruelty.

Fine words. Clinical words.

And then a boy pilot had leaned in too close at a wake, and every clinical word he owned had burned away. He’d dragged her to his quarters and claimed her on the back of jealousy… the cheapest, most common failing an unmated male could have. The one he’d watched on the station countless times since they’d found humanity. The failing that had put warriors into challenge circles for just looking at the wrong female, while he healed what was left of them.

He’d thought himself above it. He should be above it. He was Lead Healer for gods’ sake; he knew better than this.

But he wasn’t above it. Turned out he’d just never had anything he was afraid to lose.

He’d had all night and most of the morning to find the worst of it, lying in the dark with her small, warm weight against his chest. The worst of it wasn’t the claim.

It was that she’d been grateful. He’d seen it. Every time he touched her as if she mattered, something in her face came apart with surprise. He frowned. It was as if she were waiting for him to realize his mistake. He groaned and dropped his head back. A female like that deserved a male who laid the truth at her feet and gave her all the time in the galaxy to decide what to do with it. A male who gave her the galaxy if she wanted it.

Instead she’d gotten him.

A male who lied to her and gave the impression this thing between them was organic… had grown between them. When in fact, they’d been matched. And he’d kept that from her every day since she’d woken up.

He’d even called her kelarris. It had slipped out of him before he’d realized. She’d been all soft and sleepy, so she hadn’t noticed. Hadn’t asked what the word meant, but he did. And he’d lain there holding her in his arms, listening to her breathing slow, and let her fall asleep not knowing what she’d been called.

If a junior healer had come to him with this—had withheld a diagnosis from a patient, taken what he wanted, and dressed the whole thing up as clinical caution—Kellat would have stripped the braids off him there and then.

His comm chirped. Laarn’s channel, a text-only update: the Vorrtan delegation had arrived ahead of schedule. Full medical contingent headed by an actual warlady. His eyebrow winged up. That was unprecedented.

He read it twice, and he straightened. The warlady. He’d read what little the empire had on warladies… Vorrtan command structure ran matriarchal, their elder council run by eleven senior warladies, and their word was law. Which meant that if anyone could open a door to Vorrtan regenerative data, it was her. Charlotte Mason’s file was still sitting in his encrypted queue, the Scorperio damage carved deep through her nervous system, and the answer to it might be standing on Itash-Vetan-4.