Page 38 of Starfighter’s Salvation

“I have imagined this,” he said against my skin.

“How often?”

“Every time you looked at me in the simulation.”

My fingers threaded through his dark hair. “That was a lot.”

“I endured a great deal of suffering.”

“Poor alien.”

He nibbled gently at the underside of my breast. “Cruel human.”

The teasing should have made the moment lighter. Instead, it made it intimate, painfully familiar. This was us. The same rhythm we had found during training missions across impossible distance, except now his mouth was on my body and his hands were shaking.

Corvan’s hands were shaking.

That truth did more to undo me than his strength ever could.

I pulled him upright and kissed him. “Don’t stop.”

“I could not if the launch alarm sounded now.” His fingers found the fastening of my uniform pants. He opened it, then paused with his knuckles resting against my stomach.

Something fierce broke loose in his expression.

He pulled me off the table just long enough to strip my pants down my legs. My boots made it awkward, and neither of us had the patience to unlace them. Corvan dropped to one knee, yanked each boot free, then dragged the black fabric away and tossed it aside.

I stood naked in the ship’s medical bay while he remained in his uniform pants, huge, shirtless, and breathing as if he had run all the way from Earth.

His gaze swept down my body. "Mine."

Heat flooded my face as he lifted me onto the table again. The padded surface was cool against my back. Corvan spread my knees and stepped between them, but instead of freeing himself, he bent.

The first kiss landed below my navel.

My stomach clenched.

Another touched the inside of my hip. Then lower. His hands slid beneath my thighs and opened me to his gaze.

“Corvan.”

He looked up. There was a question in his eyes, and I answered by reaching for him.

“Please.”

His mouth covered my sensitive clit. Licking. Sucking. Stroking.

Pleasure flashed through me so violently that my shoulders came off the table. He held me down with one hand across my lower stomach, steadying me as his tongue moved over me again and again. Slow at first. Deliberate. He learned each reaction, each hitch in my breath, then used the knowledge without mercy.

I had imagined this, too. I had imagined his mouth between my thighs in my lonely bedroom back on Earth, where the only version of Corvan I knew was made of light and game code and impossible dreams. None of those fantasies had contained the roughness of his jaw against my sensitive skin, the strength of his fingers around my thigh, or the way he groaned when I opened farther for him.

“Look at me,” he said.

I forced my eyes open.

He held my gaze as his tongue stroked me. The intimacy of it was almost unbearable. I saw hunger in his face, but there was something else beneath it. Something I refused to name when he had refused to name it himself.

I gripped the edge of the table.