Page 134 of Tracked and Taken

“Like I am in your blood.”

“Yes. Like you put your mouth on my cock. Like you put your mouth on every nerve I have. Natalie—“

She kisses the mark again. Slowly. Then sucks, soft, then harder, and my tail cinches her thigh and slides higher, and the tip of it strokes over soaked cotton and presses, and my mouth opens against her temple.

“Fuck.”

Her mouth curves against my throat.

She has, in the last twenty seconds, located a register in which she can dismantle me at will, and she is smiling about it, and I feel the smile through the bond before I feel it on my skin. She licks the mark once more purely to watch what it does to my face.

Nine years of being the male who reads the room. My mate has the room. She is going to have it for the rest of my life and I would not take it back off her at gunpoint.

“Sweetheart?”

“Mm.”

“You are smiling.”

“I am.”

“At what?”

“At the fact that I have just registered that I get to do this for the rest of my life.”

“Yes, Natalie.”

“And the fact that I get to do it slowly.”

“Yes.”

“And the fact that you are going to let me.”

“I am going to let you do anything you want for the rest of our lives.” My mouth goes to her ear. “And then I am going to do what I want. You walked in here wet for me. Don’t think I can’t smell it. Don’t think the bond isn’t feeding me every filthy thing your body just decided.”

Her hand goes to my buckle.

“Off.”

“All right, sweetheart.”

I get out of the rest of my clothes and she watches, and being watched by her is its own event.

Then I take the rest of hers. My mouth at her hipbone as the soft pants come off. My mouth at the inside of her thigh at the moment they leave her ankles, and I breathe her in there, open, shameless, and the sound that comes out of me is not for her benefit.

“You came to my door like this.”

“Yes.”

“Soaked.”

“Yes.”

The under-layer. Then plain cotton, not the silk from day one. She is braced for a comment.

She is not getting one because the cotton is what she was wearing under everything when she decided, in a room by herself, with nobody watching and nothing to prove, to come down one floor and give me my life back. I lift it off her the way I would lift a thing out of an evidence bag. Her underwear is wet through. My pupils do something. I set it on the bunk beside us rather than on the deck.

“Tael.”