Page 56 of Fought and Found

I tip my head back and a sound comes out of me that I will deny until I am dead. Low and unguarded and helpless—the sound of a woman who has not been touched like this, like she is worth the patience, like the tangles are worth the time, in years beyond counting.

“You’re very good at this.” Into his chest. My forehead against the fuzz.

“I am good at everything.” The arrogance. Even now.

“Unbelievable.”

“Also true.”

I laugh against his skin and the vibration meets his purr and the harmonic goes deeper and his hands still in my hair. The shower is too small. His thigh is between mine—not deliberate, geometry, the only way two bodies fit in this space—and the pressure of his thigh against me through the soaked cotton of my knickers is direct and firm and my hips roll into it before my brain signs off.

His breath catches.

I do it again. Not an accident this time. A slow grind against his thigh, the friction through wet fabric hitting me exactly where I need it, and the pleasure is sharp and bright and I grip his ribs and press harder.

“Flossie.” Rough. A warning that sounds like begging.

“I know.” I stop. Pull back. Not because I want to—I could come like this, on his thigh in the shower with my face against his chest, and the temptation is staggering. But I want something else first. “I know. But I want—“

His mouth lands on my neck.

Not gentle. Hot and open, his lips against the tendon below my ear, and his teeth—blunt, the front edges, not fangs—scrape down the column of my throat and the sensation rips through me like a wire being pulled. My hand flies to the back of his head, fingers digging into the wet fuzz, and I pull him closer and his mouth finds my collarbone and the purr vibrates against my skin, against the bone, into my chest.

His hand slides from my hair down my side. Ribs, waist, the curve of my hip. His palm is enormous—spanning from hipbone to the small of my back—and he pulls me flush against his thigh and holds me there and the pressure between my legs is perfect and deliberate and his mouth is on my throat and I am going to—

I grab his wrist. Stop his hand before it goes where every nerve in my body is screaming for it to go.

“Tonight.” Breathless. His mouth on my collarbone. My hips pinned against his thigh. “That’s for tonight. Right now I want—let me—“

I look down between us.

He followsmy gaze.

“Can I touch you.” Not a question. Nearly not a question. My hands on his waistband.

“The anatomy is—there are differences that may—“

“I know about the ridges. I know about the knot. I’ve carried enough Xarthian medical cargo to have read the literature, and I read every word of it.” My thumbs hook the waistband. “I’m not asking about the manual. I’m asking if you want my hands on you.”

His forehead drops against mine. The horns frame my temples. His eyes close. His hands are shaking in my hair.

“Yes.”

I ease the waistband down. He shifts his hips. Wet fabric drags. And then—

I look.

The xenobiology file was accurate and completely inadequate. The shaft is the same deep crimson as his skin, thick, the ridges spiralling from base to tip—raised bands of dense flesh, each one slightly thicker than the last, flushed a dark wine-red that deepens as I watch. Responsive. Alive under my gaze. The fuzz thins and disappears here, the skin smooth and slick with water and heat. At the base: the knot. Already half-swollen. Dense, wide, a thickening that the clinical file described in measured terms and that in practice is making my inner walls clench around nothing.

“Oh,” I say. My voice is wrecked and I haven’t touched him yet.

“The anatomy is—“

“Gorgeous.” Because it is. Because the last person who catalogued his body did it in a threat file. “You are gorgeous.”

His head hits the shower wall. Horn cracking tile. Eyes shut. The purr shaking water off both of us.

I wrap my hand around him.