Page 133 of Tracked and Taken

Her mouth at the hollow of my throat.

Her tongue finds it first. Slow. The whole of my body goes rigid, and she registers that, and she does it again, unhurried, because she has just discovered she can.

Then she bites.

Human teeth. Blunt. They cannot pierce me, and both of us know they cannot pierce me. A Draelith female sets a mark by mechanism. My mate sets one by deciding to. There is no anatomy doing this. There is nothing but a woman with her mouth on my throat and her intent behind it, and the intent goes through my skin as if my skin were an administrative formality.

She nips. She sucks. She drags her tongue over the place she has bitten and does it again, messier, because I told her whatever shape her mouth made, and the shape her mouth wants is hungry.

The bond snaps into place.

Everything arrives at once.

My pulse finds hers and locks. Not the handshake, not the drift my overlay has been reporting for five days, and JINX has been logging under headings I muted him for. The lock. One rhythm in two bodies, and I am going to be on it for the rest of my life, and the rest of my life is a quantity that exists again.

Then her.

Her want comes into me like a door opening in a wall I did not know had a wall. Five days of tracking with this woman’s pulse and scent and the quarter-inch of a shoulder, five days of building the best model of her a male has ever built out of pure observation, and the model was a chalk outline. She wants me at a volume that would have embarrassed her an hour ago and does not embarrass her now. She is proud of what her mouth just did to me. She is frightened somewhere underneath, but fear is not about me.

The sound out of my chest is not the purr I have been running at her since Velarkis. It has dropped to a register I have never produced, and it is not a performance, and it is not something I could stop, when the arrangement it has been failing to find for five days closes.

Her eyes are wet.

Mine are, by whatever is happening at my face, not dry.

“Natalie.”

“I felt it.”

“Yes.”

“I felt it snap.”

“Yes.”

“Tael.”

Very still, above her, with my throat marked and her pulse in my chest, I say the thing I said once in a lab with another male’s compound in the air and my teeth locked out of her skin.

“I love you.”

Slowly. Eyes open. Nothing in the room but us, and no refusal wrapped around it. A male gets to say it once as a wound. He should be allowed to say it again as a gift.

“I know,” she says. “I heard it the first time. I am glad to have a clean copy for the record.”

The laugh gets out of me before I can decide about it, low and unguarded, against her throat.

Then she puts her mouth back on the mark, and the laugh breaks into something else entirely.

White heat. Straight through the middle of me. My hand plants on the mattress because my arm has stopped being reliable.

“Oh,“ she says. She has felt it arrive in me.

“Yes.”

“You can feel my mouth on the mark.”

“Yes.”