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Both shafts were harder than I could recall them ever being, so engorged that the flesh felt uncomfortably taut as they arched toward my abdomen. Lubrication beaded along their lengths, and blue-tinged precum welled from both heads to drip down the shafts toward my aching balls.

And speaking of aches…

My upper cock, the one through which I could sire offspring, was swelling near the base, forming the knot that would lock inside my mate. It was one of many physiological changes my body was undergoing in Keela’s presence, and I reveled in it despite the discomfort.

“You’re a masterpiece,” Keela said, her breathless voice almost unrecognizable. “Gods, you are a gorgeous menace.”

Had I better control of my faculties, I might have chuckled. Did she not realize the only masterpiece here was herself?

“I think this dress needs to go next,” she said, sliding it slowly up her legs. “Would you like to help with that?”

“Yes.” I knelt beside her, raised her body with one arm, and helped her draw the gown up and over her head without catching on her hair or any of her jewelry. Unlike my own clothes, which I’d set aside without thought, I carefully draped the gown over a nearby bench.

Keela was naked now except for the gold on her ears and around her neck and wrists. And the end of my tail, which had coiled around her calf without me realizing it.

Her beauty left me speechless.

Keela’s body was toned by training and bore many scars that testified to a lifetime of being a warrior. To my medic’s eye, some scars were minor, and some signified injuries that might have been fatal had medical help intervened even minutes later.

I drank in every inch of her, from her ten tiny, clawless toes to that vibrant red hair. The curve of her hips, the perfect strength of her thighs, her small breasts with their pretty pink nipples that would fit so naturally between my lips.

The tantalizing patch of red hair at the apex of her thighs glistened with the same slickness that dripped down the lips of her cunt. The scent of her arousal banished every other thought from my head.

Eyes half-lidded with desire, Keela raised her knees and spread them wide, revealing all of herself to my admiring gaze.

“Jarrix,” she murmured, and reached for me with a hand as unsteady as my own. “Beautiful bat, I want you. I need you. I need my mate.”

My hearts thundered in my ears. My mate.

Gods above, Keela Wren, ship captain and warrior, had claimed me.

CHAPTER 14

KEELA

Jarrix moved.

One moment, he was kneeling at my feet, his glowing gaze locked on my face in some combination of disbelief, wonder, and all-consuming hunger.

And the next his head was between my thighs, his tail drawing my calf up and onto his shoulder to make room for his enormous torso. He ran his nose and mouth along my inner thighs, kissing and licking a trail from behind my knee all the way to my hip. When the tips of his fangs scraped lightly over my skin, I shuddered hard, my hands flying automatically to his horns without me needing to think about what to do.

I would hear the guttural sound he made when I grabbed his horns in my dreams.

As Jarrix caressed me, his touch sparked softly as if he carried a low electrical current in his body. Given how he’d manipulated and even fried equipment aboard Ghira Station, I supposed it wasn’t impossible.

And then he delved that long, sinuous, hot tongue between my folds, parting them so carefully that I felt delicate for the first time in my life. I nearly levitated off the silks.

For all the almost-feral hunger in his eyes, he licked me slowly—slower than he’d moved while removing his trousers, slower than the coalescing of a new star—from the sensitive skin below my opening to the already throbbing bundle of nerves at the top of my slit.

My cry made him rumble deep in his chest. The vibration traveled through my own body, igniting everything it touched.

When he circled my clit with his tongue and then sucked gently in rhythmic pulses, I writhed and gripped his horns more tightly. “Jarrix,” I moaned. “Yes.”

With a groan, he retracted his claws before reaching down to stroke himself.

“My lubrication is an aphrodisiac for my mate,” he grated, showing me his gleaming fingers. “It will help prepare you for my cocks. May I?”

I shivered at the heat and raw want in his eyes. “Yes.”