Page 39 of Tracked and Taken

“He was establishing presence,” I say. “He knew you’d pull them. He was writing them for you to find clean.”

“He wanted me to clear him before I noticed he was missing from somewhere he should have been.”

“Yes.”

I hold the position three beats longer than the datapad requires, and her face is four inches from mine, and I am not leaning away. The proximity is deliberate, like the heat between us. I am letting her feel the size of the space I am occupying and the fact that I am not giving it back.

She does not move. Neither do I.

Then I pull back. Six inches. Eight. My left side, which has spent eight seconds receiving the warmest input my body has had since Bay Seven, feels the loss the way a male feels the loss of a thing he had not been promised. The ache of withdrawal is sharp and specific.

Torres sets the datapad on her knee.

“You leaned.”

“I did.”

“Professionally.”

“Extremely professionally.”

“Your professionalism has a secondary feature.”

“Does it.”

“Don’t make me say it twice.”

“I won’t.”

Her pulse does not come back down. Mine does not either. The secondary feature is still hard against the front of my pants, and I do not hide the knowledge from myself.

Seventh hour. She stands.

“Head.”

She goes aft.

I wait for four seconds then I follow her, because my kasa is cold, and the thermos is in the galley, and that the walk will put me at the galley hatch exactly as she reaches the head door is a coincidence I’m prepared to ignore. My body has been waiting for an excuse to stand up for two hours, and the cold kasa is the excuse my brain negotiated with the rest of me to take. The real reason is the need to put myself in the same narrow corridor she is occupying and see what happens.

She’s at the head door. I’m at the galley hatch.

The head door doesn’t catch. The mag-seal has been sticking on cold mornings for six months and I have been meaning to fix it, and the door bounces off the jamb, and Torres, tired, seven hours in, her pulse low for the first time all day, steps back to reset her grip on the handle.

One step.

Into me.

Her back hits my chest, and every rosette on my torso wakes up at once.

She is warm. She is smaller than me in every dimension that matters. Her shoulder blades are against my sternum and her braid is across my collarbone and the loose strand at her temple is two inches from my jaw, and the scent under her jaw is a direct intravenous line into every part of me that was ever wired for tracking and has now been repurposed for this. The full length of her body is pressed to mine for one catastrophic second, and my cock, already half-hard from seven hours of proximity, goes fully rigid against the small of her back through two layers of cloth.

My hands come up.

I do not tell them to. My right palm hovers at her waist, not touching, not yet touching, six millimeters of air between my hand and the cardigan at her hip, and the six millimeters are the only thing standing between this being an accident and it being something else. My left hand plants on the bulkhead beside her head, caging her in the way my body has been wanting to cage her since the airlock. The position is pure alpha: larger male, smaller female, the wall, the exit blocked by the width of my shoulders. I am not moving.

She stops breathing.

Not a flinch. A hold. The breath she chose not to finish because finishing it would have pressed her further into my chest—and further onto the hard line of my cock.