Page 136 of Tracked and Taken

“Tael.”

“Yes.”

“Now.”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

I push my cock into her.

Slow. The head of me breaches her and the sound she makes goes directly into my spine. The first ridge catches at her entrance and pops through and she swears, and I watch her face because her face is the only data stream that has ever mattered. The second ridge. The third.

“Look at you,” I tell her, and my voice has stopped being a voice. “Taking me. Opening for me. Like you were built for this. Built for me.”

“I was. I am. Don’t you dare stop.”

I feed her the rest of me in increments until I am seated and her hips are flush to mine, and through the bond I have how tight she is around me from her side and how the ridges are locked in the flutter of her and how close I already am, because her pleasure is in my blood now and she is full of me at every register there is. I can feel her registering it.

I move at the rhythm her body sets. Slow. Deep. A male who has unexpectedly gained decades, and is going to take her where she is going at the pace she chooses.

“Harder.”

My eyes meet hers.

“Say it again.”

“Harder. I want the tracker. I want the feral. I want the male who has been smelling me for five days and not taking. Take.”

The thing I have been holding since a bar on Velarkis goes.

My tail cinches her thigh and hauls her hips to the angle I want. The next thrust bottoms out and stays there, and the bunk objects. She laughs once, wrecked, and then stops laughing. My mouth goes to her mark, licking, nipping, not piercing, running the live wire I put in her throat as a second circuit into everything else I am doing to her.

“Mine,” I say into the wound. “Mine. Say it.”

“Yours. I’m yours. Tael—“

“Again.”

“Yours. Your mate. Your good—“

She does not finish it because I find the angle that finishes it for her.

She comes apart under me and I get all of it. Every register at once: her climax arriving in my blood while mine builds in hers, the mark at my throat and the mark at hers and the purr and the rosettes at saturation and the pulse at one hundred and fourteen in two bodies. She soaks me. She bites my shoulder because my throat is already taken and she needs somewhere to put the rest of the claiming.

My rhythm goes. My muscles lock.

“Let me see,” she says.

Her words from the bunk on my ship, given back to me at the moment they cost the most.

My eyes stay open.

I come apart watched, which is the thing I have spent nine years arranging never to be, and the bond takes all of it across to her: the heat, the pleasure, and underneath the pleasure the whole unperformed remainder of what I have been carrying since day one, delivered without editing, because there is no longer a mechanism between us that would allow me to edit it.

“I see you,” she tells me.

I do not pull out. My forehead against hers, still in her, breathing like a male who has been handed his life back and cannot identify which organ to thank.

My mouth finds her throat. The mark. My teeth gentle on it, holding, not piercing.