Page 71 of Tracked and Taken

“Ship, Vosk. Now.”

“Copy.”

He walks a half-pace behind me. I hit the airlock cycle. The outer hatch closes. Fifteen seconds of decompression.

He is a foot away. Pupils blown. Jaw loose. The claws have retracted on the walk. He is breathing through his nose in measured, counted intervals, his control deciding how to address the female in front of him.

He addresses me.

“Torres. That was reckless.”

“It was three station thugs, Vosk—“

“Three. Armed. In a sealed corridor, in a configuration they set up while we were on the lift. Three men who were going to put a knife in you for whatever they thought you were carrying.”

“They were not going to—“

“You walked toward them alone. You told me to wait, Torres. You did not ask. You did not check. You did not consult the partner whose biology has mapped you as the female he is going to be putting his body between and any threat for the rest of his operational career, and you walked alone at three armed men with your hand in your pocket and your sidearm holstered and—“

I kiss him.

For one full second, he does not move. The most operationally aware tracker in the Velarkis sector goes still, the tense outline of a lecture which has been interrupted by a kiss he did not authorize from a female whose competence he has just spent forty-five seconds itemizing.

The next second is different.

His hands come up to my face. Not gentle. His grip discipline has been holding for days and has, in the last second, taken a structural injury he is no longer interested in repairing. His thumbs at my jaw. The purr goes from audible to loud, and the loud transfers through skin contact into my ribcage, and my body does the thing it has been preparing to do without consulting me.

His mouth is warm. Warm in the way no human mouth has ever been warm, the architecture of a Draelith jaw at the corner of my mouth, a canine I can feel with my tongue, and the heat goes through my sternum and down between my legs in one fast electric line my nervous system has stopped pretending to file. I make a sound in his mouth. He swallows it.

His pulse, under my palm where I have braced on his chest, is fast. Mine is faster. I feel them adjust. I feel my heart find his frequency and stay there, and my whole body does something I do not have a word for.

His tail finds my waist. Light. Then tighter. A wrap, settling at the small of my back on the line his hand took at the wake-up. The muscle that has been reaching for me involuntarily for days is finally where it wants to be. He uses it to pull me flush against him, and I feel him, hard, through two layers of kit, pressed to my hip. The sound I make is not professional.

I press closer. Grind once, deliberately, because I am done pretending I do not know what I am doing. His breath catches at the press, a low rough intake the purr does not cover, the sound of a male whose discipline has stopped being the dominant operating instruction of his nervous system.

“Fuck,” he says against my mouth. “Natalie.”

His canine grazes my lower lip. The graze is a question. The answer is a sound I have not made in four years. I open for him. His tongue is in my mouth, and his hand is in my hair, and I am kissing him like I have been starving for it, because I have.

He makes a sound back, the gravel at its deepest register, and his hand slides from my jaw down my throat and stops at my collarbone. Not lower. The stop lasts half a second. Then his palm flattens over my breast through the kit, thumb finding the silk underneath it, and he groans when he feels it.

The stop was discipline but his discipline breaking is hotter.

I pull back an inch. Forehead on forehead. His thumb at my jaw. The purr synced to my pulse. The tail at my waist. His cock hard against my hip and neither of us pretending it isn’t.

“This doesn’t mean yes.”

“I know.”

“To the larger question. I haven’t decided.”

“I know, sweetheart. “Whatever you decide.” His voice is wrecked. “But if you kiss me like that again I am going to put you on the nearest flat surface and find out if you are wearing the lace too.”

I look at his mouth. I look at his silver eyes and I kiss him a second time.

Slower. His response is immediate; his mouth opens for me, his thumb at my jaw tightens a fraction, and the only things that change are the purr, which locks a half-register deeper, and the sync, which settles into something my ribcage reads as a permanent configuration. I bite his lower lip. He swears into my mouth.

The interior hatch cycles green. The decompression check clicks complete. Neither of us moves. Three more seconds. His hand is still on my breast. My thigh is between his.