Page 138 of Tracked and Taken

“What was the number.”

“It does not resolve any more. She has moved every variable I had.”

“…Goodnight, Tael.”

The channel closes.

Her field jacket is on the shelf where I moved it to make room for her head on the pillow. Her mark is warm under my mouth. My mark is warm under hers. My tail finds her ankle and settles and keeps.

Seventeen months and twenty-four days.

The number has nothing below it. What there is instead is a woman asleep on my chest who came down one floor with her boots back on to tell me she had decided, and a quantity of time I have not been issued a figure for, and the unfamiliar problem a mated male who is going to have to work out what to put on a shelf.

I sleep.

21

The Open Collar

Natalie

I wake under a ceiling that is not mine.

For three seconds my body runs the drill fifteen years of MP postings trained into it: inventory, exits, threat. Strange bunk. Strange bulkhead. Air running warmer than station standard, because the male generating it runs five degrees above station standard.

Then the rest of it arrives. The chest under my cheek. The purr, so low it is more foundation than sound. The scent my nose has only filed since last night: home. Sex. Him. The salt-heat of a Draelith who spent the night inside his mate and has not, by the evidence currently against my thigh, recovered from the fact.

I am naked. He is naked. My leg is thrown over his hip, so that even sleep was not a sufficient reason to stop touching him. His cock is a hard, ridged line against the inside of my thigh, and it has been there long enough that the skin is warmer on that side.

His pulse is under my palm, my pulse now, the same rhythm at two throats, and it is running a fraction quick for a male pretending to be asleep. My mouth is at the mark on his throat, which I appear to have set up camp on during the night and never struck. I can taste him. I can feel, through the bond, the exact second he realizes I am awake, because a want that has been sitting in him for twenty-five minutes spikes so hard my clit throbs in answer.

He has been holding still on purpose. The chest under my cheek hasn’t moved more than the breath he can’t help.

I do not lift my mouth off the mark. I drag my lips across it, slow, and feel his whole body lock the way it locked last night.

“How long have you been up.”

“Twenty-five minutes.”

“Tael.”

“You looked good, sweetheart. I was reading.”

“You weren’t reading.”

“I was reading my mate.”

The word lands somewhere south of my sternum and detonates quietly. I do not react. I am a Head of Station Security. I do not flush in an alien male’s bunk at 0612 because he used a single domestic noun.

His thumb finds his mark on me and runs a slow circle.

The circle shorts out roughly forty percent of the higher cognitive functions I rely on for every part of my professional life. The other sixty percent is currently occupied because I am wet against his hip and he can feel it, and because the bond is feeding me his patience, which is not infinite. He has been hard for twenty-five minutes with my mouth on his claiming scar, and he has not moved, because I look peaceful.

I am not peaceful now.

I lick the mark. Once. His cock kicks against my thigh. A sound comes out of his chest that is not a purr. Lower. Frayed.

“I have a 0830 with Morrison.”