Page 41 of Fought and Found

The sensation is — I need a moment. The underside of the tail is densely innervated. Second only to the horn base and the — the otherareas. Her thumb drags a slow line from the mid-joint to the tip and the pleasure travels the full length of my spine and pools heavy and urgent at the base of my shaft and the sound I make is not professional. It is not dignified. It is the sound of a male being taken apart by a thumb.

She does it again.

“Flossie.” Her name. A warning and a request and a surrender, all of it packed into two syllables that come out wrecked.

“I know.” Her thumb stills. But it does not withdraw. It rests on the sensitive underside, warm and present, and the purr shakes through the contact between us. “Tell me more. About the frequency.”

She wants me to talk while her thumb is on my tail. She wants me to explain the bonding frequency while the evidence of what she is doing to me is pressing against my trousers and her scent is flooding the cockpit and every nerve in my body is short-circuiting.

“The frequency is —“ Her thumb shifts. Half an inch. I close my eyes. “— produced involuntarily. Once initiated, the bonding response is — the mate recognition is not reversible. The frequency is specific to —“ Another shift. The pleasure ripples through my abdomen. “— to a single individual. I will not produce this sound for anyone else. The biology is —“

“Permanent.”

“Yes.”

“You’re telling me your body has decided I’m yours. Permanently. And it didn’t ask you first.”

“My body did not consult me on any aspect of its response to you. The consultation period ended approximately —“ I open my eyes. She is close. When did she get close? The mineral light catches the amber in her irises and her lips are parted and her thumb is on my tail andshe is less than a foot away. “ — the moment you called me lovey in a cockpit I was trying to rob.”

“That’s very inconvenient for you.” Her voice has dropped. Low. Rough at the edges. The same register she used in the bunk when she said you’re very warm and pressed her body back against mine.

“It is catastrophic.”

“Good.” Her grip tightens on my tail. The pressure shifts from gentle to firm and the sensation changes — sharper, more direct, the pleasure spiking hard enough that my hips buck against the chair and the friction of the fabric against the ridges makes me hiss through my teeth. “I’d hate for this to be easy for you.”

“Nothing about you has been easy.” The words scrape out. She is close enough that I can count the freckles on the bridge of her nose and feel her breath against my chin and her scent is so thick at this range that every inhale rewrites my thermal regulation. “You are the most difficult woman I have —“

“Compliment.”

“It was not a —“

“It was. Take it back if you want. I’ll keep it anyway.”

The corridor hours are the longest of my life. She does not release my tail.

Through the fourth marker. Through the fifth. Her thumb traces idle patterns on the sensitive underside — slow, absent, the unconscious touch of a woman who strokes what she holds — and each circuit sends a pulse of heat from my tail to my groin. I am in a stateof sustained arousal that would have been incapacitating in any other context, and in this context is merely ruinous, because she can see me. The cockpit is dim but not dark enough. Every time she glances at my lap — and she glances, she has glanced four times in the past hour, each look longer than the last — the evidence of what her hands are doing to me is visible through the fabric and she does not look away with embarrassment or alarm. She looks away with a flush that climbs from her collar to her jaw and a shift in her scent that makes my nostrils flare.

She is wet. I can smell it. The same knowledge from the bunk — the thick, sweet-dark note that means her body is responding — except now she is awake and the knowledge is mutual and the air between us is so dense with want that the recyclers are losing the fight.

She talks while she flies. Tells me about Morrison. About the Petal’s name. About the co-pilot’s chair — how she bought the ship secondhand and the chair was already there and she never folded it down because folding it down would mean admitting nobody was going to sit in it.

“Nobody should have let you fly alone for ten years.”

The words are out before I can filter them. Raw. The kind of statement my training would classify as irrelevant and my body recognizes as the truest thing I have said.

I have been ordered to ensure she does not fly anywhere again. The collision between those two facts runs the error a third time. It does not resolve.

She goes still. Her hand tightens on my tail — not a stroke, a grip. The pressure changes and the sensation spikes and my spine arches against the chair.

“Don’t.” Her voice shakes. The Morrison composure cracking. “Don’t say things like that when I’m trying to stay angry with you.”

“The statement is factual. Ten years of —“

“I know it’s factual. That’s why it —“ She stops. Lets out a breath that shakes at the edges. Her grip on my tail softens to something that is worse — tender, careful, her thumb pressed against the pulse that runs the underside. “You can’t just have the emotional range of a brick wall since the day you boarded and then say nobody should have let you fly alone and expect me to —“

She turns to face me.

Close. Closer than the console should allow. She has leaned across the gap and her face is near mine, and she is looking at my mouth.