Page 79 of Claimed By the Wraiths

There was enough room to do it without either of us hitting a wall.

Luxury.

I kissed the scar at his thumb, the one Mairuke had left. Then the center of his chest. Then lower, taking my own time because two could play this game and because the sound he made when I did was still one of my favorite discoveries.

He closed his eyes.

“Still going to tell me you don’t make that sound?”

“No.”

“Progress.”

His hand found mine and pulled me back up to him before I could get too smug.

We stopped talking for a while.

There was nothing frantic in it this time.

No need to prove we were alive. No promise waiting to be kept.

Just the pleasure of having time and using it badly.

We changed positions twice because we could. Laughed once when his elbow caught the wall shelf and knocked a datapad onto the floor.

“You didn’t fit in the maintenance conduit either,” I said.

His face dropped against my shoulder.

I felt the laugh move through his whole body.

“That remains irrelevant.”

“It remains funny.”

The laughter turned back into kissing.

By the time he moved over me again, neither of us was laughing.

He went slowly because that was what we had chosen, not because anything was stopping us.

I wrapped my legs around him and let the rhythm build without chasing it.

There would be another night.

And another.

That knowledge changed everything.

I could ask him to slow down and he did.

I could pull him closer and he came.

I could close my eyes without listening for footsteps on the other side of the door.

When pleasure finally broke through me, it came without panic attached to it.

Serak buried his face against my shoulder and followed a few breaths later.