Page 59 of Tracked and Taken

“I need to move my arm.”

“Okay.”

His hand presses once at my hip, the waking version, letting me feel the decision before he executes it, and then he moves it, and I sit up on the edge of the bunk with my back to him. The absence of weight is immediate. I hear him sit up. I hear his feet on the deck plating. I hear, and he intends me to hear it, his hand run once through his own hair.

I am going to carry that sound for the rest of my career.

I turn because he is sitting in the position a patient takes, and I have been his field medic twice, and my training requires I check the wound before the day gets away from us. My training.

He is shirtless. Both bandages are in place. The rosettes across his chest catching the amber in the pattern that was, last night, under my hands. His right hand flat on the mattress with the claws retracted, and the rest of him working at full capacity a meter from me.

I reach for the rib bandage to check the seal, and his hand comes up and catches my wrist.

Light. His grip is not stopping me, only getting my attention, and the retracted claws make it warm and blunt in a way I do not have a vocabulary for. The contact travels up my arm before I can file it.

“What are you doing, sweetheart.”

“Checking the bandage.”

“Before coffee.”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you are checking the bandage, Natalie.”

The gravel drops half a register on my name, and my sternum goes warm before my ears register the drop, and my eyes, which had been on the bandage in a professional way, flick to his abdomen before I can redirect. The line of muscle under the bandage. The way the rosettes shift with his breath. I redirect too late.

He sees the flick. Of course he does. The half-grin comes out of storage.

“Are you trying to look at my abs.”

“I am checking the bandage, Vosk.”

“The wound is closed. I checked while you were asleep. The skin has knit. The bandage is decorative. Would you like me to take it off so you can verify, or would you like me to keep it on so you can pretend that was your reason for touching me?”

My face does the thing it has not done in a professional setting in four years. The thing is a blush. The heat settles under my collarbone.

SENTRY, in my ear, at the register of an AI who is logging: “Natalie. Pulse at ninety-two.”

“SENTRY.”

Noted. Quietly.

“Put a shirt on, Vosk.”

“I was going to. You were the one who turned around.”

“I am going to the head.”

“Go. I’ll be in the galley. Your coffee will be ready.”

I leave the bunk to rinse my face for thirty full seconds before I can face a galley with a Korrhai in it. The heat under my collarbone does not rinse off.

Thane is in the galley, dressed, a clean black shirt from the crate with the sleeves rolled, the rock ceiling four inches from his head and his posture the not-quite-ducking of a tracker who has learned to live in rooms not built for him. There is a squat metal pot on the burner plate behind him, throwing cardamom into a room the size of a corridor. He is objectively handsome. The observation files under neutral aesthetic, a category running at reduced capacity because a Draelith tracker has corrupted my ability to look at large attractive males blindly about which specific one is putting a shirt on in the next room. Tael has ruined my taxonomy. I will bill him for the repairs.

“Officer.” He pushes a cup across the counter. “You take it.”

I take a sip. Kasa. A wall of cardamom and something green and bitter my species has not evolved for, and my face, before my training catches it, does a thing. Thane’s gold pupils widen the one notch his species reserves for registering an emotional event.