Page 173 of Tracked and Taken

I’m not sure what to do with my hands.

Tael takes my hands.

“Eat first,” he says.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You ate at 1230. That was nearly seven hours ago. You are hungry.”

“Tael.”

“Sit.”

I sit on the small couch by the window because he has, with the same hand he took mine with, walked me to it. He goes to my small kitchen alcove. SENTRY brings the lights up to thirty percent for the alcove only. He opens the cupboard he should not know the layout of.

JINX, on the public room speaker, dry: “I gave him the layout this morning.”

SENTRY, dry: “I noted that.”

JINX: “Sentry.”

SENTRY: “JINX.”

JINX: “Domestic coordination.”

SENTRY: “Domestic coordination, JINX.”

I lean my head against the back of the couch and I close my eyes.

Tael comes back to the couch with a bowl of the noodle leftovers from my kitchen, heated, and a glass of the cold barley tea I keep in the second drawer for nights I can’t sleep. He puts the bowl in my hands, sits beside me but doesn’t speak.

I eat.

I had not, until I started eating, known I was hungry.

He waits until the bowl is empty. He takes it from my hands. He sets it on the floor beside the couch.

“Stand up, sweetheart.”

I stand.

He does not, in the next several minutes, ask me to make a single decision.

He gets the uniform jacket off. Hands at my collar, methodical. Slow enough that his knuckles brush the mark when the fabric clears my throat, and the brush is not an accident. The boots come off, his hands at my ankles, one and then the other, thumbs stroking the bone like he is already thinking about where his tail is going. The under-layer goes over my head. My nipples tighten in the cooler air. He looks at that. He does not touch yet. The pants go. The cotton bra. The cotton underwear, which is already damp, which he registers with a breath through his nose that is not polite.

He folds each piece as it comes off and sets it on the couch where the bowl is no longer.

He looks at me.

Naked in my own quarters. Mark warm. Cunt already wet from nothing except his hands taking my clothes off and the way he is looking.

His silver eyes do a slow scan, top to bottom. He has been doing the scan since the morning of day one and he has, in six days, gone from a male doing it without permission to a male doing it because the mate it lands on is, by every part of her body, going to let him.

I have not said no to him since Helia’s Reach. I always say yes to him.

He knows it. I know he knows it. The standing yes is the standing yes we have, in six days, built between us.

“On the bed, sweetheart.”