Page 44 of Tracked and Taken

“Somebody watching from somewhere else.”

“Keeper reports to somebody. Yeah.”

His mouth is still at my ear. He has been on the operational sentence for two beats longer than the operational sentence required, and who is, let the record show, enjoying the notice. The notice makes me bolder than the cover strictly requires.

He leans back. His thumb resumes its circle.

I take a sip of the green drink. I put my hand on his thigh.

His thigh is warm through the dark fabric, and it is not a surface, it is a muscle, long and dense and laid like rope over bone, and the fabric is thin enough that the muscle moves under my hand when he shifts his weight toward the bar. It is a cover move. It is also, for the first time in my career, a hand on a male’s thigh in public. The cover gives me permission.

His purr activates.

Low. Deep. The frequency starts in his chest and rolls out through the bench seat and up through my palm where it is flat on his thigh, and it is, I register this with a two-step delay because my ears were not prepared for it, audible. Quiet. A low thrumming, a patron of this bar might categorize as the ventilation being eccentric.

A patron of this bar would be wrong.

I hear it through my palm and through the bench and through the two inches of air between his chest and my shoulder, and the frequency is in my jaw and my sternum and the bones of my inner ear, and my hand does not move, and neither does his. The purr is not cover. Cover does not vibrate through a male’s body into a female’s palm like that.

He shifts, one minor adjustment of his weight against the bench, and the shift moves my hand with it. Three inches. My palm slides from the top of his thigh inward, along the inside of the muscle, his purr deepens through his skin into mine and then, in the same second, cuts.

He kills it. Fast. Controlled. The clean frequency out of his chest and he will not let it finish its sentence in a public bar.

My hand is now on the inside of his thigh. Three inches from where I put it. Closer than the cover required. Closer than I had planned. I leave it there one full second longer than is strictly necessary because the uncertainty of whether or not he is performing has made me willing to find out what happens if I do.

He leans toward my ear again. Warm breath. And his voice, lower than he has used it with me so far today, dry and rough and absolutely not on the cover sheet:

“That hand’s going to get you in trouble, sweetheart. I’m not going to stop you.”

I take my hand off his thigh, because I am not available to give an answer, and I am going to need a minimum of six seconds with my hand around the green drink to reassemble the part of my operational system he has just put in a drawer I did not know he had the key to.

Six seconds. I turn my head. I meet his eyes. The smirk is deeper than it has been since the airlock. He knows what the hand did. He knows what the second of delay did. He is not pretending otherwise.

“Noted,” I say. Over the rim of the glass.

“Rook.”

“Sweetheart.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“Define this.”

“Do not.”

“Noted.”

On the way up from the bench, he does something I am not prepared for.

His arm comes around my waist from my left side. His hand finds the point of my hip on my right, fingers curling into the dip where the hip bone sits under my skin, and the cardigan has ridden up over forty minutes of bench-leaning and his fingers land on the inch of bare skin between the cardigan hem and the waistband of my pants.

Bare skin. His fingertips. His thumb, once slow, strokes across the strip.

The skin has been held by uniforms, and by medical personnel, and by sparring partners, and by no one, for five years, with intent. Tael’s intent is not subtle. The cover requires contact; it did not require this.

He pulls me half a step toward his side. My hip meets his. My body is walking out of this bar pressed to his flank from ribcage to thigh, and his thumb is still on the bare strip of skin at my hip, and the whole configuration reads to anyone watching as a male taking his mate out of a public room. The reading is correct. Whether the mate is performance or something else is the part I cannot currently resolve.

His mouth comes back to my ear. Warmer this time. My body goes through the same three-step prep it did at the bench; he is going to say something operational; he is going to say something operational; he is — “Let’s go, sweetheart.”