Page 156 of Tracked and Taken

“I have been thinking about those forty-three since I left your door.”

She does not react.

The throat above the open collar goes pink. The mark sits in the pink. I want my mouth there. I eat a noodle instead.

“Tael.”

“Sweetheart.”

“Stop.”

“Mm.”

“You are doing the voice.”

“I am eating noodles.”

“You are doing the voice while eating noodles. It is a combination the universe should not allow, and yet here we are.”

“Here we are.”

She drags a noodle. The pink does not retreat. My tail squeezes. Through the bond, I get the wash: water, my fingers, her forehead on my chest, and my canines want to drop under the table like I am an animal.

I do not let them.

She knows I felt it. She eats another noodle as if she did not just put her morning in my mouth.

“Eat, Vosk.”

“I am eating, sweetheart.”

“You are watching me eat.”

“I am doing both.” I look at the open collar. At the two small scars I put in her. “You left it open.”

“Morrison saw it.”

“Good.”

The word comes out rougher than the table deserves. She hears it. The pink deepens.

“I like looking at it. I like that the station can look at it. I like that it is mine.”

“No,” she says, and the word has heat under it. “You are not Morrison.”

She drags a second noodle. My cock hardens. The minx.

I am having lunch with my bonded mate at a noodle stand on her station, and I am, at this minute, the most domestic predator in the sector, and the male I was six days ago, the male who walked into Flossie’s office for the briefing on the Torek case with a 94% success rate and the conviction that the rate was the entire content of his personality, would not recognize the male sitting at this table.

That male is dead.

The male sitting at this table is going to be insufferable and is making his peace with that.

She tells me about her morning.

She tells me JINX sent SENTRY a treaty.

“He sent her a treaty,” I say. “Of his own design. After six days of Sentry quarantining his packages in Inappropriate: Archived.”