Page 52 of Alien’s Retrieved Mate

Kel had come out of the room behind me. I made it three steps. My knees folded and he caught me before I hit the floor.

There was no argument about what happened next. He put me in bed, found the outpost medic, and stayed beside me through a scanner check that ruled out organ damage, produced several stern warnings about dehydration, malnutrition, and respiratory inflammation, and confirmed the long-acting barrier remained active after the shower. Then I slept for nine hours so deeply that even the bond went quiet.

When I woke, there was another tray of grain cakes and broth waiting. Kel did not touch me until I had eaten every bite, kept it down, and let the medic clear me for something more strenuous than walking across the room. My hands had steadied. A second dose of salve had taken the heat out of the rash. I still looked gaunt, but my body no longer felt like it was losing an argument with the atmosphere.

After a quick second rinse, I walked back into the room wrapped in a fresh towel.

Kel was sitting on the edge of the bed. He'd removed his armor and was wearing borrowed civilian clothes — dark, simple, and fitted. I saw him fully for the first time in normal lighting. Not firelight, not bioluminescence, not the lavender haze of Zha'kari. Just him, in a plain room, in clothes that showed the breadth of his shoulders and the lean power of his frame.

The markings extended further than I'd realized. In the soft room light, I could see them at his collar, along the backs of his hands, tracing the line of his jaw. They were a low, warm glow. Not dim. Not blazing. Just... present. Steady. He looked up at me and the glow brightened, and I felt the resonance do the thing, the warm, pulling thing, and my clean, clear head went fuzzy.

"You look—" he started.

"Like a person who's had a shower for the first time in ten days?"

"Beautiful."

He said it simply. Without emphasis or qualification. Just a statement of fact delivered in his low, resonant voice, and it hit me harder than any line from any movie or book or poem I'd ever encountered.

"Kel."

"Yes."

I dropped the towel.

His pupils blew wide. Blue-white light swept over his markings in a full-body cascade, and through the bond I felt his response like a shockwave. Want. Raw, unfiltered, long-suppressed want.

"Bed," I said. "Now."

He was off the bed and across the room in a stride that I barely tracked. His hands were on my waist, lifting me, and my legs wrapped around him and my mouth found his and the bond between us opened like a floodgate.

The bed. A proper bed. With something approximating a mattress and sheets that weren't thermal blankets. The luxury of it, horizontal surface and privacy, a door that locked, made everything more intense. The first time had been desperate and new. This time was urgent and knowing. I knew what his hands could do. I knew the sounds he made when I touched the markings on his ribs. I knew the way his breathing changed when I whispered his name.

He pressed me into the mattress and kissed down my neck and I arched into him and his markings were so bright the whole room glowed and through the bond I could feel exactly what I did to him — every touch amplified, every gasp translated, the feedback loop building and building until I couldn't tell whose pleasure was whose.

"Kel—"

"I'm here." He braced over me, one arm holding his weight, the other hand tracing down my body with a deliberateness that was going to kill me. "I'm right here."

He took his time. The urgency shifted to something slower, more thorough, as if the first time had been the flood and this time was the deep current underneath. His mouth everywhere. His hands mapping me with a precision that was half warrior, half worshipper. The healing warmth of his markings against the newest bruises and scrapes — the ones two more days of hard trail had added after he'd repaired the rest — leaving comfort in their wake.

When he finally entered me, slow and deep, I felt the bond sing like a struck bell and I made a sound that I would have been embarrassed about if I'd had any capacity left for embarrassment. I did not. I was beyond embarrassment, beyond thought, in a place where the only thing that existed was his body and mine and the light between us.

Later — I'd lost track of time in a way that had nothing to do with alien clocks — I pushed him onto his back and took my turn.

He went. This enormous alien warrior who could probably bench-press the escape pod let me push him down into the mattress and lay there looking up at me like something the universe had issued him without instructions. I took my time. I traced the markings on his chest with my mouth and learned which ones made him gasp, which ones made him say my name in that wrecked, harmonic-heavy voice, and which one — low on his hip, where the pattern spiraled — made every muscle in his body lock and the light in his skin stutter like a power surge.

"Taylor." A warning. A plea. He was hard and heavy in my hand, radiating that impossible internal heat, and I stroked his cock slowly and watched his face while the feedback through the bond doubled and redoubled until neither of us could tell whose want was whose.

"I need—" he started.

"I know exactly what you need. Bond, remember?"

I sank down onto him and we both made sounds that the neighbors — if this outpost had neighbors — were going to remember. Riding him was a revelation: that internal ridging at an entirely new angle, the deep pulse of him answering every roll of my hips, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to almost bruise and gentling, every single time, at the last second. He watched me the whole way through. Markings blazing, pupils blown, reverent and ruined. When I came it took him by surprise — I felt his awe crash through the bond like weather — and then he flipped us with that terrifying, effortless strength and finished what I'd started, deep and relentless, my name on his lips when he followed me over.

After, we lay tangled in sheets that were probably meant for a species with different limbs. He was on his back. I was sprawled across his chest, tracing the marking that ran along his sternum. His hand was in my hair, slow and rhythmic.

"Tell me about your life," I said. "Not the mission stuff. Your actual life."