Page 64 of Fought and Found

She does not say I’m sorry. She takes my hand and presses my palm flat over her heart and holds it there, and the purr finds a register I did not know it had. The one that soothes.

“Next time,” she murmurs, already half asleep, “the tail participates.”

“Logged.”

She falls asleep in my arms, claimed and claiming, her body marked with my bite, my fingerprints, and the evidence of how thoroughly I have filled her.

On the shelf beside the berth, my earpiece pulses blue. Once. Twice.

I do not answer.

What remains is her.

18

Home

Flossie

HeisasleepandI am pretending to be and my body is a map of everywhere he has been.

The bite mark on my shoulder pulses with my heartbeat. The bruise across my ribs — tail-shaped, dark already, tender when I breathe — aches in a way that sends warmth spreading outward instead of pain. My hips are sore. The specific soreness of a woman who took more than her body was built for and would do it again immediately and without hesitation. Between my legs I am swollen and tender and when I shift against the sheets, the friction sends a low, sweet throb through me that makes my breath catch.

His arm tightens. In sleep, his body registers every movement I make. My shift becomes his pull — his hand flattening against mybelly, drawing me back against his chest, and his cock stirs against my backside. Not hard. A thickening. The ridges pressing through the fabric of whatever he pulled on while I was drifting, and the sensation of them against the curve of my arse makes me bite my lip because my body is insane and it has been three hours and I want him again.

His purr changed while he slept. I noticed the shift — a deepening, the frequency dropping to something more vulnerable. The awake-purr says she's here. The sleeping-purr says something he would not authorize if he were conscious. Something that sounds like please don't leave.

I press my hand over his. His palm covers my belly from hip to hip — the span of him, the scale, my hand resting on the back of his like a small thing on top of a large thing, and the feeling behind my sternum resolves.

It is not formless anymore.

The feeling that has lived there since day one — the one I couldn't name, the one that flared when his purr came through the wall and when he read my notebook at three in the morning and his hands shook — has found its shape. His heartbeat. Physically. His heart pressed against my spine, the rhythm synced with the purr, and I can feel it in my sternum. The formless thing was never formless. It was the shape of what was missing.

Through my eyelashes I watch him sleep. The jaw unlocked. The combat tension drained. In sleep the weapon casing peels back and beneath it is the male who smiled three times and promised more. His claws retracted even in unconsciousness — the gentleness chosen so deep it's structural now.

The sheets smell like both of us. Sex and pheromones and peppermint. I press my face into the pillow that smells like his fuzz and breathe and the scent goes straight between my legs.

I was flying alone with an empty co-pilot's chair. Was. Past tense.

Morrison is going to kill me.

I grin into the pillow. Worth it.

He makes tea and I nearly lose my mind.

He is shirtless in my galley. The markings visible from collar to waist. My scratch marks on his shoulders — four parallel lines on each side, pink against crimson, the evidence of my nails during the second round when he circled his hips and the knot ground against the spot and I stopped being a civilized person. He carries two mugs in one hand because his hands are large enough to do that. He has made my tea perfectly — strong, milk, half-spoon of honey, exact temperature. He learned this without being told.

I am standing in the galley doorway in the blue cardigan and the thin shirt and nothing else and watching a seven-foot alien who was inside me three hours ago make tea in my kitchen and the domesticity of it combined with the scratch marks and the memory of the sounds he made is producing a response in my body that is frankly unreasonable.

I want to push him against the counter. I want to climb him. I want to wrap my legs around his waist and feel the ridges against me through the fabric and bite the marking at his throat until his purr rattles the mugs off the shelf.

I take the tea instead. Sip it. Perfect.

"Thank you, lovey."

His eyes track from my face to the bite mark visible above my collar. Down to my bare legs. Back up. His nostrils flare — the scent response, my arousal in the morning air, the male who can smell exactly what looking at him shirtless does to me. His tail unwinds from his calf and finds my hip. Not a wrap. A stroke. The tip tracing from my hip to the curve of my waist through the cardigan, slow, possessive, a good-morning that speaks his language.

"You are staring," he says.