Page 77 of Claimed By the Wraiths

Then he came to me slowly.

Not because he was hurt. Solren had cleared him for everything short of getting shot again, which I had been told to prevent personally.

He was moving slowly because he wanted to.

That was new.

He braced one hand beside my hip and kissed me once.

Soft.

Then again, longer.

“No alarms,” I said against his mouth.

“No.”

“No patrol rotation.”

“No.”

“Nobody on the other side of the wall.”

His mouth moved at the corner. “I checked.”

I laughed.

He kissed the laugh out of me.

There was room here compared with the Ghost, although Serak still took up most of it. His quarters had a real bed, a wall shelf, one chair with his uniform jacket thrown over the back, the ordinary evidence that this was where he lived when he wasn’t being captain somewhere else.

I liked that almost as much as I liked having him here with nowhere else either of us had to be.

His hand moved under my shirt, warm palm flattening against my side.

He waited.

I lifted my arms.

He pulled the shirt over my head and put it somewhere behind him without looking.

“Very precise,” I said.

“I have excellent spatial awareness.”

“You hit your head on the Ghost wall.”

“That was not a spatial-awareness problem.”

“What was it?”

“You.”

Fair.

I drew him down by the back of the neck.

This time we had room to shift. Room for him to stretch out beside me instead of folding himself around a bunk built for one person. Room for me to turn onto my side and run my hand down his chest without worrying about a bandage.