Page 130 of Tracked and Taken

“Then come here.”

She closes the distance and pulls my face down to hers.

The kiss is the one with nothing in it. No cover. No compound off a ceiling manifold. No male standing between us with his hand in her hair, and no eighteen months standing between us with mine. Her mouth opens under my mouth and her tongue finds my tongue and takes, and my hand goes into her hair at the back of her neck and angles her the way I have wanted her angled since a briefing table on day one, and my other hand goes to her hip and then lower and I take the curve of her and drag her against me, and there is nothing left in the configuration that lets either of us pretend she cannot feel what I am carrying for her.

She makes a sound in my mouth. Not composed. Not the Head of Station. My canines want to drop, and I hold them because they are going to be needed shortly and needed properly, and if I let them go now, the next part goes badly.

The kiss goes filthy anyway. Her teeth at my lower lip. Her tongue at a canine that has not dropped and would very much like to. The sound I make into her is undignified, and I do not care about my dignity, and this is a new position for me, and I am adjusting to it at speed.

I break it. My forehead against hers. Breathing like I have run down a corridor.

“Tell me again.”

“I have decided. I want to do it now.”

“On the bunk?”

“On the bunk. I want your mouth. I want your teeth. I want you inside me when it sets. I want it to be messy and I want it to be ours.”

“Sweetheart.”

It comes out scraped.

“Take your shirt off.”

I take my shirt off.

Her eyes go over me and I stand and let them, and the rosettes flush under the looking without being asked to, saturating at the sternum and the shoulders in the pattern my species runs when it is being appraised by the one appraisal that matters. Her pupils widen. Her pulse goes to ninety-four. The scent registered at her throat opens up two full notches, and my whole nervous system leans toward it like a compass needle.

She puts her hand on my chest.

Palm flat at the sternum rosette. Skin to skin. The rosette releases at the contact, a small warm delivery of chemistry into her, and her hand stays where it is, as my heart tries to get out through it.

Her palm drags down. Slow. Over the stomach. To the buckle, where her knuckles rest and open nothing, and I kick against her wrist through the fabric like an untrained animal.

“Are you ready?” she says.

The half-grin arrives late, and I let it arrive, because it is mine and it is the honest one.

“I have been ready since you went pink above your collar in the briefing on day one, when I stretched the SRS shirt and your eyes dropped to my forearms for exactly half a second and snapped back to my eyes as though you had not, in that half-second, done anything.”

Her hand on my chest does not move.

Her mouth does.

“You clocked that?”

“Mm.”

“You put it in your file.”

“I put it in my permanent memory. I have, since then, taken it out and looked at it some number of times I am not going to count for you. I have thought about putting you on that briefing table. I have thought about your mouth. I have thought about what you sound like when you stop being an officer.”

She slaps my shoulder.

It does not meet the operational threshold for a slap. It is the strike of a female whose composure has just been removed from her by four sentences and who has to put the removal somewhere. My hand catches her wrist and puts her palm back on the rosette and holds it there, so that whatever she has decided to feel about it she can feel it against the evidence.

“You are the most annoying male I have ever loved.”