Page 70 of Shielded in the Shadows

I didn’t need to open my eyes to know who’d curled up against me with her nose and mouth pressed to my sternum as if she could burrow inside my ribcage. Keela’s scent and her now-familiar weight had drawn me back to consciousness like a tether. Her little breaths caressed my skin.

As the effects of the sedation faded, a sharp ache remained in my chest. It took me a moment to realize I was feeling her pain and not my own. My own body had no complaints, not even a twinge in my horn. Physician Kel’parigan clearly knew his business. I’d expected nothing less from the doctor Byx had recruited to provide his mate and offspring the best of care.

I wrapped my arms and tail around Keela, and after taking a moment to ensure we were secure in a private room in the outpost’s medbay, I wrapped my wings around us as well.

For these stolen moments, nothing and no one existed but us.

Keela let out a shaky breath. “Jarrix.”

Now that we were in private, there was no reason to hold in my coo. The low, sweet sound poured out of me. My chest grew warmer as well, as if my body knew my mate needed as much comfort as I could give her. Keela melted against me, the tension seeping from her like a tide going out. It was a heady and humbling kind of power being able to provide this for her. Far more so than any material thing I might have obtained on her behalf.

I could not yet remove Orqiel unha’Feste from her life, or assist with whatever she’d learned from the Kurutan N’vera, or quiet the ghosts of her past, but I could do this.

I set my own grievances aside as well, preferring to focus all my hearts and soul on my mate than waste these precious minutes of peace thinking about the tracker Gitto had put inside my body without my knowledge or consent, or worrying what form her vengeance might take. There would be time enough for those thoughts later.

As I stroked her back and cooed, Keela’s breathing evened out. The pang in my chest that was her pain faded to a dull, distant ache. I needed to tell her I could sense some of her emotions, but I would wait until she was ready to talk and we’d spoken of more pressing matters. I would rather slice off my own wings than disturb this moment.

She stroked my chest, tracing the contours of my muscles and my collarbone with maddening slowness. My rumble grew, and my tail tightened around her leg. The aroma of her arousal bloomed in the cocoon made by my wings. My cocks stirred immediately beneath what felt like the same loose-fitting pair of medbay patient pants I’d donned prior to the surgery.

When Keela wriggled carefully up my body so she could meet my gaze with her own, her eyes were full of desire, hurt, grief, determination, and that fire that had drawn me in from the moment I’d first glimpsed her. I drew her close so I could press my mouth to hers.

Her kiss didn’t feel like the blazing inferno of our first such touch, or the sweeter demand she’d made after dinner in the arboretum, but a plea for comfort and touch.

“Mate,” I murmured against her lips. “I dreamed of you.”

“Did you?” She pressed kisses along my jaw toward my ear, where her teeth closed on one of my piercings and tugged. “What did you dream?” she whispered. The puff of breath in my ear sent a shudder of need through me. My cocks leapt against her thigh, already beading with lubrication.

“I dreamed I took you flying through the skies of my homeworld.” I cupped her perfect ass with one hand and squeezed. “It was a good dream. One of the best I’ve had in a long time.”

“It may be some time before we visit Fortusia.” The tip of her little tongue glided over the ridges of my ear, making me shiver hard. “But there are other ways of making me fly,” she said, and blew across the areas she’d moistened with her tongue.

I wrapped my arm tightly around her and flipped us on the bed. From somewhere beyond the curtain of my wings, medical monitors beeped in a symphony of alerts before falling silent.

“Making you fly is one of my great purposes in life.” I trailed my fangs carefully down her throat. They left tiny red marks on her skin and a few drops of what I now believed was mating fluid that I longed to share with her.

She moaned, her body arching up against me and her leg hooking over my hip in a blatant demand. “Oh, it’s so warm,” she breathed. “It feels so good. I want more of that, whatever it is.”

I returned to that beautifully plush lower lip and pricked it gently with one fang, injecting a single drop of mating fluid before pulling away.

She gasped and writhed beneath me. She was so beautiful, even with the dark hair and brown eyes and the maroon jumpsuit with Shaw emblazoned on the upper right chest.

“I need you,” she said, one hand pulling my hair so tightly that it hurt in the best kind of way. Her gaze was full of desire and pleading now. “It’s all too much,” she said with a shudder of her own that belied all the inner torment she carried. “I don’t want to think for a while. Take me flying, Jarrix.”

Surely all the gods above and below would damn me if I refused her plea.

I left the bed just long enough to secure the door and return, leaving my pants on the floor on the way back.

She laughed when I leapt onto the bed with a flap of my wings, landing with my knees straddling her hips. Wide-eyed and chest heaving, she watched as I gripped the front of her jumpsuit in my claws.

“Yes?” I asked.

She held my gaze and licked her lips, making my cocks throb and my knot ache. “Yes.”

The nearly orgasmic sound she made when I ripped her collar made spurts of precum land on her clothes.

As methodically as if I were sharpening a blade or calibrating my newly acquired crossbow, I tore her jumpsuit down the front, baring her beautiful breasts with those perfect pink nipples that begged so sweetly to be sucked. I paused in my destruction of her clothing to take one in my mouth and pinch and roll the other.

“Jarrix.” She pulled my hair until I reluctantly raised my head. Her eyes searched mine. “I want you to pierce my nipples.”