Page 174 of Tracked and Taken

“Tael.”

“Face down.”

I look at him.

The half-grin is at the corner of his mouth. Under it, hunger.

“I have watched the way your shoulders carry the day. Tonight, I am going to take it off you. Then I am going to put my mouth on you until you forget the deputy. Face down. On the bed.”

“Tael—“

“That was not a request, Natalie.”

The half-grin holds.

I go to the bed. I get face down. The pillow under my collarbones, my arms loose at my sides, the blanket pushed off the bed entirely because his hands are going to require access. I am already wet enough that I can feel it on my inner thighs when I settle.

He kneels at the side of the mattress.

His hands settled on my shoulders.

I have registered Tael Vosk’s hands at every operational angle a Draelith’s hands can be in: the cache, the airlock, the chamber, the cockpit, the bunk on Helia’s Reach, the morning at his quarters. This feels new.

He spent nine years as a Tier 2 tracker, nine years training his hands to read bodies. Other species’ bodies. Operational bodies.

Tonight, the body in front of him is mine. His thumbs find the muscle at my neck. He presses. Not gently. Not roughly. At the exact pressure the muscle has been begging for since 0830. I make a sound into the pillow. Not composed.

“Mm,” he says. “I thought so.”

“Tael.”

“Quiet, sweetheart. I am working.”

He works.

His thumbs at the muscle along my spine, working out from the center. His palms at my shoulder blades, heavy then light then heavy. His knuckles at the knot beside my left scapula, which has been with me since I made Head of Security four years ago. He finds it in forty seconds.

“Mm.”

“It is going to take some weeks, sweetheart.”

“All right.”

“I am going to enjoy taking the weeks.”

The half-grin is in his voice. The purr. The mark on my throat, pressed into the pillow, warms as if his mouth is already there.

He works the knot. Not breaking it. Loosening. The bonded purr runs through the mattress into my ribs. I get wetter against the sheet. He can smell it. His breath changes. His tail comes up off the floor as if it were waiting for the order.

It starts at the back of my calf. Slow. Heavy. The full length of him laying itself along the back of my leg, five degrees warmer than I am. Ankle. Calf. The back of my knee, where he pauses and strokes once, just to feel me twitch.

Then it keeps going.

The back of my thigh. The crease where my thigh meets my ass. The tail tip, thick, dexterous, deliberate, slides to the inside of my thigh and does not ask.

It finds how wet I am. I make a sound into the pillow that is not a briefing sound.

“Mm,” he says, above me. His thumbs at the scapula have not paused. “Four minutes. I had given it six.”