Page 56 of Slashed Bonds

She colonizes. It’s how she loves. I’ve stopped fighting it.

Later. Reality first.

I lean in.

Down, since he’s kneeling, until my lips are a breath from his and I can smell the blood on him over the juniper and the mint. His pupils have gone so wide the blue is a rim.

“Now,” I say. “Are you going to use your manners and introduce yourself properly?”

I watch the words go in.

Not all at once. Threads of understanding filtering through those eyes one at a time, like somebody switching on lights in a house room by room. Fuck, I love his eyes. I’ve always loved his eyes. That was the first thing and it’s still the first thing, but now there’s the rest of him to go with it, and I’m not braced for the rest of him.

The freckles.

I’d only ever seen them on his shoulders, in the dark, under my hands. Across his face they’re heavy, spilling over the bridge of his nose, and they make him look younger and more dangerous at once.

The mouth.

The one I’d built in my head for two and a half years and gotten entirely wrong, because I’d given him something sharp and cruel, and what he has is soft, a bruised sort of mouth, ruined at the moment by his own blood and my teeth.

It’s doing dangerous things to me.

Specifically below the belt, and I’ll cop to that.

What I won’t cop to is my heart, which has decided to beat like it’s being paid by the hour.

“Or,” I say, “are you going to be rude?”

He blinks.

Slow. Like a man surfacing.

And his eyes drop straight to my lips.

I smirk. Then I pinch his chin harder, thumb and forefinger digging in on either side of the jaw, and drag his focus back up where it belongs.

“Pay attention, Daddy. Mommy’s talking.”

The lust that bursts across his face should be catalogued somewhere.

Hunger. Total and immediate.

If the tension keeps climbing at this rate, I’m going to get my indecent public act after all, and I’d like the record to show I did not go looking for it.

It came and knelt.

“For fuck’s sake.”

A hand comes down between our faces.

Big. Scarred across the knuckles.

It hangs there, flat, a partition, and I follow the arm up to the man it belongs to.

He’s tall. Taller than the captain, maybe, or built to seem it, all shoulder and forearm, with a stillness that takes up more room than movement would. Short black hair, layered, with the ends tipped in a red so dark and so vivid at once that I wonder for a second whether it glows in low light.

Around his throat is a band of black fabric. Loose. Sitting where a collar would sit.