Page 87 of Claimed By the Wraiths

He kissed me. Six months of practice and he still kissed me like he was finding something new.

I’d thought the urgency would fade. It hadn’t. It had changed shape.

The desperation was gone but the want was deeper, lived-in. Constant. The background condition of our life together.

I pulled at the hem of his shirt. He helped: arms crossing, fabric over his head, dropped on the counter behind me. I ran my fingers down the central trace on his sternum and he shuddered.

The reaction was the same. I knew this map.

I knew every line and junction and where they led and what happened when I followed them. I didn’t need to trace the whole constellation. One touch and the rest of it answered.

His hands went to my waist. He lifted me onto the counter.

Protein blocks behind me and I didn’t care. I wrapped my legs around his hips and pulled him in.

“The galley.” The word landed between our mouths. A question and not a question.

“The galley.”

“Solren is going to sterilize every surface.”

“Solren sterilizes every surface anyway.”

He laughed. I felt it in his chest against mine.

I’d spent years watching this man not laugh and now I collected every one. Hoarded them.

Knowing exactly what I had was the only way I’d ever learned to hold steady, and what I had was him.

His mouth moved down my throat. I tipped my head back and let him. His hands slid under my shirt, warm palms against my ribs, thumbs tracing upward.

He knew what he was doing. He’d gotten very good.

“Off,” I said.

He stripped my shirt off. His mouth found the spot below my collarbone that he’d discovered in the second week and had been deploying against me ever since. I gripped his shoulders and made a sound that would absolutely show up on Zevik’s tally.

I ran my fingers down his sternum again. I watched the light brighten under my hand and felt the quiet satisfaction of knowing exactly where to touch and exactly what it would do.

Not discovery. Expertise.

His hands found the fastening of my pants. I lifted my hips.

He pulled them down and off. I was sitting on a galley counter in nothing but my underwear while the man I loved stood between my legs with light bright against brown skin and I thought: this is my life. This is the life I built out of a fake name and a salvaged ship and a crew of broken people who refused to stay broken. This.

“You’re thinking,” he said.

“I’m always thinking.”

“I know.” His fingers traced the edge of my underwear, light, deliberate, the same maddening patience he’d used since the third night. The discipline applied to driving me out of my mind. “You’re thinking something warm.”

“I’m thinking I love you.”

He went still. Not the old stillness, the controlled kind, the captain-in-briefing kind. Something undefended.

“I love you,” I said again, because it was true and because watching his face when I said it was the best thing I’d ever seen.

Light blazed off his skin. Bright enough to cast on the underside of the cabinets above us. His whole body’s response to three words that shouldn’t have been a surprise anymore and were, every time.