Star Bright (Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides #22)

Chapter 13

Vash let her lead. His beast twisted restlessly at the restraint, wanting all of her right now. It wanted their hands in her hair, making knots, their teeth on her skin, staking a claim, their name in her mouth as she gasped out a last breath before she lost herself in pleasure.

Ruthlessly, he controlled himself.

Because after a hundred years, what was one step at a time? So what if they never made it another step out of the doorway?

He forced himself to unwrap his strangling arms. And she was still clinging to him, which mollified the beast somewhat. He framed her face with his hands, holding their unsteady breaths between them. Like they were soaring on erratic winds, a thrill and a danger.

Because when the winds stopped…

Right here, right now, she’d said. Step by step.

He could do what she needed, even though her lips were so sweet and her stroking touches sent lightning through his blood. It had been a hundred and five years since he’d felt anything like this primal fire.

When she broke the kiss, he almost moaned at the loss, like a fledgling denied a treat. But he let his hands drift over her shoulders and away. Wasn’t he too ancient to be so undone by a kiss?

She gazed up at him, the small sconce light by the door turning her brown eyes to a churning molten gold. “I admit, I didn’t read the entire handbook on draklings. It seemed…rude, considering I wasn’t a contracted bride.”

It took more strength than launching into the sky to keep his voice neutrally curious. “What do you want to know?”

Hectic color chased over her cheeks. “I get that we’re supposed to be, uh, physically aligned in terms of, um, parts, but sometimes even Earthers aren’t compatible in other ways, so…”

His beast writhed sinuously within him, wanting to just show her all the ways they might fit together.

“One step at a time,” he murmured.

She gave him an uncertain glance, obviously wondering if he was teasing. Which made him realize she was right to go slow. To break the bonds of gravity, draklings and spaceships needed to launch with force. But that was not what this moment needed.

Tangling his fingers with hers, he drew her across the room to the curve of windows. Though the transparent plasteel was stronger and more shielding than Earther glass, the Montana winter night still reached through with its silent chill. But above, the stars sparkled all the brighter for it.

“On Skyearth, the constellations we’d see would be completely different. But with maps and some time—though sometimes it takes more time than we’d like—we can find our way through the void to each other.” He tilted his head, watching her. “Maps and time and desire, of course. We have to want to find our way together.”

“I want this,” she whispered. “I want you, but… She held up their hands between them, and he felt the tremor in her. “Why am I scared?”

He tucked their hands to his chest, half closing his eyes. “Can you feel me tremble too?”

When she tilted her head down, the gust of her breath warmed the space between them and touched the glass next to them in a ghostly swirl. Even as he watched, that little sign of this moment between them faded. That was the shattering reality, he knew: that it all might disappear.

He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until she reached for him again, enfolding him in a comforting embrace that erased the lingering chill. “I don’t have to know everything now to be happy,” she whispered.

He wondered if she realized she was speaking any more than he had. When she looked up at him again, the stars shimmered in her eyes, silver and gold, she boosted herself up to her tiptoes to kiss him with a passionate urgency as if time was crashing down around them.

He felt it too, the hunger, the yearning for another’s touch in the dark, to know there was someone else who cared enough to reach back.

He pressed her against the window, his palms braced on the chilly glass, trying to find some balance between his burgeoning need and the determination to make this a shared gift, for both of them.

They kissed until they were both gasping, and her lower half had melted against him, fitting her curves to his. The beast rumbled, their body throbbing with the ferocious need to take the next step. But he kept his hands on the glass until he thought he might sear his way right through, and if he did, he would set the snow and the night itself on fire.

“Vash,” she gasped against his mouth. “Please.”

Heaving in a sawing breath, he rested his forehead against hers. “What next, my verikai?”

“I want…” Words seemed to fail her in any language. “You. Just you.”

The beast was in his low growl when he said, “Just so you know, I did read the entire handbook.”

He swung her up into his arms. The weight of her in his arms was lush and perfect, and the beast roared its satisfaction. Since that seemed somewhat premature, Vash tamped down the sound as he carried her to the bed, which was big enough for a drakling in beast shape, making his chuff in bemusement. He laid her down in the nest, admiring the shape of her. She gazed up at him, eyes wide, then he could hold back no longer and fell upon her.

This time it was an all-body kiss, gravity assisted, full contact. She wrapped both arms and one leg around him as if she would never let go. The kiss went on, and if the night had stopped there, time ending, he thought whatever remained of the atoms that were his would stay imprinted with the memory of that kiss, vibrating into eternity.

With the leverage of her free leg, she urged them into a roll, and he surrendered with utmost delight, reveling in her strength, in the hunger in her eyes as she stared down at him from above. His Earther female had a hunter in her too, the beast reflected smugly.

His Earther…

But then she was stripping her sweater over her head, revealing more of herself to him. Draklings were comfortable with nudity—a not uncommon occurrence when the beast would rip through clothing otherwise—but the IDA handbook had made clear that Earthers had their own ideas individually. He and his beast agreed they were enraptured by both her body and her boldness.

“May I touch you?” With his beast ascendant, his voice grated harshly, and he feared she would reconsider this close encounter.

Instead, she urged, “Touch me anywhere, everywhere,” with a voice almost as rough as his.

With a groan of relief, he skimmed his hands from her hips over the bare curves of her rib cage to her shoulders and out along her arms. Grasping her wrists, he spread her arms wide, admiring the shimmer of her in the snowlight.

“You are beautiful,” he rasped.

With a little growl, she twisted her arms free and tugged at the seal on his tunic. “Let me see you.”

“You saw all of me already,” he reminded her. “In both shapes.”

“I couldn’t really stare,” she complained.

He huffed under his breath. “Is that all you will do? Stare at me?”

“No, I want to do more, much more.”

Such an enticing threat. Almost faster than the speed of sound, before the words could finish clearing her lips, he was naked. As he shucked off his pants, she rode the buck of his hips with one of those Earther laughs, but breathless in a way that seemed to pour into him, as if her pleasure was contagious.

Speaking of which… He clamped his hands over her knees. “The med scan I received here confirmed I am healthy and my fertility management is functioning.”

She nodded. “While I was getting the universal translator implanted, I also got all the recommended IDA inoculations.”

“Then it’s your turn to be naked.”

As she rocked side to side, stripping out of her lower layers, the friction and delightful bouncing roused him unbearably. And when her bare skin was finally flush on his… Ah, he might’ve exploded right then except he had to see what came next.

She settled astride his thighs. The bright flush of blood he’d admired before had spread down her neck, and her breasts swelled with her desire. It had been so long. He wanted to take another hundred years to revel in every breath and sensation, but his beast warned him they didn’t have that kind of strength or patience.

With a firm hand at her nape, he drew her down for another kiss. When he stroked from her neck to the small of her back, she curved upright to meet his caress, like a wing arching into the sky. He would learn her the same way his beast tested the winds—feeling his way through every gasp and shudder, circling higher.

He urged her up so he could take one puckered nipple between his teeth while his other hand cupped her mound, his fingers spreading and probing. Each needy whine from her lips was a tiny gust guiding him toward her ultimate pleasure, aiming his hunt. The alluring scent of her arousal and the slick glide of his fingers was a sensual tempest threatening to overwhelm him. He locked every muscle against the urge to roll her beneath him, to end their mutual torment.

As if she heard him, she flattened both hands on his chest and lifted herself as if she were about to fly away, her eyes dark and wild. “I need you inside me, now.”

Angling his hips obediently, he swelled into her seeking hand, and her eyes went almost black, the pupils blown wide. “Take me,” he told her.

With both hands, she did, engulfing him in her pulsing heat. “Touch me,” she whispered.

He’d already memorized her rhythm with his fingers, and obligingly he returned to it, while from within…

Her eyes flared wide. “Vash!”

“A drakling needs control of every muscle to stay in the sky. Wasn’t that in the handbook?”

He almost regretted his smug comment when she clenched around him, but it felt too good for repentance. And as she rode him, stroking herself on his hard flesh, her fingers splayed across his chest, his beast delighted in her sensual possession. Right here, right now , she’d said, which was exactly what he’d needed, letting go of old grief, refusing new worries. In the quiet of this night beneath the dark Montana sky, they could set down the responsibilities of the day and just be themselves.

He kissed a circle around her other breast, and she sucked in a quickening breath when he nipped lightly at the peak of puckered flesh. Her heartbeat surged against his lips. Ah, she liked a touch of the beast’s fierceness. He sank his fingers into the strain of her thighs, supporting her as she hunted her pleasure.

Since his mouth and hands were busy being full of her, he called upon his beast. It answered with zeal, thrusting up into her, seeking the deepest secrets of her desires. Its ravenous growl was so low and sonorous his bones rattled.

Eyes flaring wide and dark, she stared down at him, but instead of his name, her moan was an answer to his beast, primordial, a callback to whatever common ancestor their species had once shared in the depths of time, even if that was only the atomic building blocks of life or the simplest positive/negative electrical connection of the smallest particles.

“Darcy,” he murmured. “My verikai.”

With a strangled cry, she convulsed around him, her inner muscles clamping him like a fist. He gritted his teeth, resolved to ride out the torment of her release. But her orgasm was too much, like a ferocious wind seizing him in the sky, sweeping him so high he lost up from down—and didn’t mind.

He rolled her under him, crashing into her as if he might fuse them into one being of pure energy. Wrapping her legs around his hips, she cried out again, high and ecstatic, and his beast answered with a roar as he arched into her one last time, shattering apart in a riot of sweat and starlight.

When he collapsed upon her, he wondered how he could ever separate from her again.