He nodded.
“Convenient.” She grinned, flashing the entire mouthful of her square white teeth. “We do that, then.”
Yes! Torek sat up to breathe into her neck. Again. Finally.
She leaned down to breathe into his, or so he thought, until her face veered left and their foreheads collided.
“Oh!” She rubbed her forehead, scowling at him. As if he had veered into her forehead.
The inappropriate urge to laugh bubbled up, but he had the good sense and experience to suppress it immediately. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” she hissed, still rubbing her forehead.
“Should we try again, then?” he asked.
She continued glaring but didn’t resist when his hands urged her closer. He leaned in again, much slower this time, and Delaney didn’t move. She was no longer using her hand to rub her forehead but rather using it to cover the spread of her grin.
Torek burrowed his muzzle in the curve of her neck and breathed her deep into himself. She was clean and fresh, with the scent of his soap still clinging to her skin and hair. Beneath that was a sweetness he couldn’t identify, something that would be smooth and soft on the tongue, refreshing and quenching but addicting. Nothing on Lorien smelled like that. Torek wondered if the scent was singular to Earth or singular to Delaney. He breathed out to clear his scent receptors and filled his lungs with her again.
Her skin puckered against his lips. It shriveled into small bumps that he knew meant she was cold. And indeed, she clung to him and shivered, but the low moan that escaped her throat was scorching hot. Her scent in combination with her sudden embrace and that moan went straight to his head and then immediately to his cock, leaving him breathless and dizzy. A surge of heat rushed to his groin. He bucked, rubbing himself shamelessly against her smooth skin, matching her moan with his.
Rak, he could breathe her in all night. He’d suffer for it—his cock could not possibly swell any larger, and they hadn’t even properly begun—but it was torture he’d gladly endure for the pleasure of her essence inside himself.
He nuzzled her a final time, wondered distantly why she wasn’t nuzzling him back, and eased away to ensure his instincts were right about the source of her trembling.
She leaned in, finally. He stilled in anticipation and then in astonishment as she veered toward his face again instead of nuzzling. Her lips landed with uncanny accuracy over his lips.
He jerked back, trying and likely failing to mask his shock.
Her eyes opened. She was flushed and suddenly confused as she blinked at him. With a leap of insight—two in as many minutes, he was on a roll—he realized that touching mouths must be part of human intimacy. And he’d interrupted her.
He imagined if she’d pulled away as sharply and vehemently as he’d just done while he’d been nuzzling her. No wonder she looked confused and embarrassed.
“I—” she began.
He placed his hands on either side of her face and silenced her with his lips.
Her eyes fluttered closed, and she groaned deep in her throat, affirming his suspicions. Her lips were soft and coaxing as they moved against his, brushing back and forth. Pressing and licking. Nibbling.
For a moment, he forgot that this was her mouth, filled with saliva and bacteria and food particles, and allowed himself to be swept away by her enthusiasm. The spike in her scent was like a physical blow. He staggered from its hit and the answering need it triggered within him.
He applied his own gentle pressure to her lips.
She groaned in immediate response, angled her head, and deepened her movements. Her arms around his shoulders tightened—when had they moved from his scalp?—and she scored his back with her blunt little claws.
He growled into her mouth. Her tongue took advantage of the opening and plunged inside, a mimicking precursor of how he longed to plunge into her. Her hips bucked in rhythm with her tongue’s dance, and he lost what little control he’d managed to maintain.
Torek gripped her shoulders, jerked her mouth from his and rolled her beneath him. Careful of his weight and claws and fangs—Lorien help him, her tongue had made him forget about his fangs!—he propped himself on his left elbow and reached between them with his right hand. His knuckles skimmed across her upper thighs, past her patchwork scars—she stiffened on a caught breath—and eased his fingers inside her.
Her canal was slick with juices, slicker than anything he was accustomed to. There wasn’t much texture to navigate, nothing to indicate whether he should be caressing one area instead of another. Nothing but a cushion of suction. He envisioned his cock within that greedy pressure—two fingers fit, but barely—and shuddered in anticipation.
He glanced down at her face. Her gaze was heavy lidded. Her breath was ragged, and her cheeks still flushed. She wasn’t not enjoying it, but… “Am I… Is this right?” he asked, his voice hoarse and breathless.
“Yes, kind of. I enjoy it higher. But okay, we can just—”
He pressed his fingers in deeper. “Like this?”
She winced.
Nope. He eased back. “Where higher?”
“You are not…I can—”
Torek bent down and nuzzled her neck. Intoxicating. “Lorok have a specific place they touch to find pleasure. It’s here.”
He rubbed his fingers inside the back of her canal and grinned as her skin puckered. The fine hairs along the slope of her neck stiffened as if shocked, and her entire body shuddered beneath him.
“You like this, but if I found the specific place you prefer, I think you’d like it more.” He breathed the words against her skin.
She turned her head and sealed her lips over his mouth. He matched her movements—pressure against pressure, bite for bite, tongue to tongue—and when a flood of her juices once again coated his fingers, he pulled away to try again.
“Is it in your canal?”
“My what?” She licked the curve of his throat and blew on it.
He shuddered. “Fekok! Just—”
She blew again, and he fell into her neck, breathing and growling.
“Your place of pleasure!” he gasped out. “Is it in here?” He wiggled his fingers inside her.
“My…oh.” She frowned. “So they say.”
A thought occurred to him that gave him pause. His logic had never leaped so far or so readily as it had during his time with her. She’d warned him in a way, but maybe he’d misinterpreted her meaning. “Is this your first time? Ever?”
She jerked back, scowling.
Nope. Wrong again.
“What makes you say that?”
“I—” How to recover? “You don’t seem to know your place of pleasure. But that’s okay.” He grinned, sure of himself this time. “We’ll find it.”
Her eyes rolled. “I know my place of pleasure. I make sex before. I just…” She sighed. “I never maikluv before.”
Torek blinked. “Maikluv?”
“It’s two words: make love. My heart never ‘beat as one.’ I-I never feel much pleasure before.” Her cheeks burst into color. “But I want to feel it.”
Ah. “Then let me give it. Show me where.”
Her color deepened. “Whyisthisohard?” she grumbled nonsensically.
He pressed his lips to hers, and she moaned into his mouth. He led the union of their lips. He set the pace. He licked her tongue, and in his exploration of her, discovered something new—although not entirely surprising—about himself.
He enjoyed conquering her will. Not just being the aggressor or being in control or being the dominant partner. He’d always enjoyed that. For whatever her reasons, Delaney was somehow resistant to pleasure. He assumed by her shy enthusiasm that she wasn’t resistant to him—not all of him, anyway. And she wanted their hearts to beat as one. She’d made that clear. But despite everything she said she wanted, she still seemed resistant to the pleasure that he could give her.
Breaking down that resistance and witnessing her unravel
was the greatest pleasure he’d ever experienced. He was seducing her, right now, this very moment with his tongue and lips and fingers and body and breath, and its success was seducing him.
“Here?” he asked, trying the back of her canal.
She shook her head and nibbled his ear.
He gritted back a gasp, refusing to be distracted. He withdrew and caressed her entrance. “Here?”
She blew on the lobe of his wet ear, and he nearly spent himself.
Lorien save him!
He flicked her earlobe. “Here?”
She paused in her pursuit to drive him to insanity. “You serious?”
“No, but without direction or encouragement, I may as well be.”
“I give no encouragement?” She wedged her hand between their bodies and gripped his cock.
His blood surged. “Not. Fair.”
She stroked the length of him in her clenched hand, and he saw stars.
Giving up his pursuit in favor of blind, aching lust, he ground himself against her. His cock rubbed between the folds of skin above her canal, and she closed her eyes on a guttural moan.
He stilled—Ah, ha!—and then experimentally ground himself against her again.
She arched back, gouging his shoulders in an unseeing, uncaring fever grip and groaned louder.
“It’s outside the canal,” he said, drunk on his prowess and discovery.
She nodded. “And above the—yes!” Her hips bucked as he replaced his cock with his more dexterous finger pads.
Her eyes rolled back and closed. Her back arched off the bed. Her claws raked across his back. Her mouth opened on an impressive growl, having been produced by her human throat, and she slapped her hands over her mouth to muffle the sound.
Pride swelled through him, as powerful an aphrodisiac as her scent. She was magnificent! So responsive. So genuine. So…
So Delaney.
He eased her hands from her mouth. “Don’t cover your pleasure. Let it out. Let me in, and let it out.”
Her eyes flicked to the door.
After a week of shouting arguments, now she worried about discretion. Ha! “Our walls are thick. They can’t hear us.” He nuzzled her neck. “Let me hear you.”
The swollen nub and retracted hood beneath his finger pads was precisely what he’d been searching for; hers was just positioned differently: outside instead of within. But now that he’d found it, he plied it with every experience-tested weapon in his arsenal. He circled above it, spread her wide and tapped it, rubbed at its base and over it. He was gentle and quick and mercilessly relentless, and soon, he’d driven her completely mindless. She was bucking off the bed with abandon, gasping and muttering nonsense. His fingers were soaked in her pleasure. His back was scored by it. His ears rang with it. His scent receptors reveled in it.
“Pleezimredypleez!”
He suspected that she didn’t even realize she was screaming at him in her native language. And he’d done that. He’d driven her so over the edge of thought and reason that she was confusing her tongues.
He shifted himself over her, aligning the head of his cock over the base of her canal. He could barely grip his own cock, he was so wet. Even combined with her own juices, a novel and intriguing prospect, he wasn’t sure of her body’s capacity to take him without tearing. She was physically much smaller than him, her skin softer, more pliable—so she might stretch rather than tear—but the possibility was chilling. So he eased in slowly. Progress was minimal. The sensation was torture, but he was a patient lor. He could do this and only produce pleasure for her. He could—
“Jezusfukingkryst, Torek,” She groped for an ass cheek in each hand and bucked her hips. “Pleez!”
She wanted this. She really wanted this.
She wanted him.
He eased all the way into her canal until his pelvis touched hers. He was seated to the hilt within her body, her milking, grasping canal as greedy and wet and soft and as perfectly excruciating as he’d hoped it would be.
He withdrew. She arched back on a gasp. He thrust back inside. She scraped her claws down his arms. He withdrew again and gritted his teeth against sensation. He wouldn’t be overwhelmed. It had been so many seasons—four long, lonely, brutal kair—but he refused to be overcome by his own pleasure.
He dipped his head down, bending nearly in half to reach her neck. He nuzzled her, breathing her in, and then captured her mouth the way she liked. He thrust inside her, again and again, focusing on her ragged breaths, her nipping teeth, her grasping hands. Anything but the raging fire she’d ignited within him.
Twenty-Six
She hadn’t known. She was partly to blame because of her bad taste in men, her low self-esteem, and her tendency toward self-punishment, but mostly, she simply hadn’t known. And how could someone seek out and strive for something she hadn’t known even existed?
But now she knew, and she was ruined. A woman couldn’t unknow something like this. Even as it was happening, she recognized that this was it: this was the experience by which she would judge all future experiences. And she had a sinking suspicion that this wasn’t normal. This was something unique to Torek, maybe unique to them, and without Torek, without this, what was the point?
He was drinking in her scent in long, savoring draughts—Thank God she’d just bathed!—as he stroked in and out of her. And it was truly stroking more than thrusting or bucking or humping. He entered hard but withdrew in an angled slide that caressed nerve endings she hadn’t known existed. Which shouldn’t be shocking because she apparently didn’t know anything—not about sex, not about herself, nothing—but it was, and every time he hit that magic nerve deep inside, her body sang like a live wire, simultaneously catching fire, melting, and drowning all at once.
He pulled away from her neck, his movements somehow both lazy and fierce, as if he was drugged. Maybe he was: drugged on her. She grinned at the thought, and the movement caught his eye. He grinned back and sealed his mouth over hers in a moving, nipping, licking kiss that blew the top of her head off.
For someone who’d never kissed before, he caught on quick. She should have known he’d be athletic in every way, not just in ways that benefited his military—the Federation, she thought in Lori. His stamina, discipline, agility, and adaptivity translated from captain of the guard to lover seamlessly, but she hadn’t anticipated other aspects of his personality to translate, adjectives that she’d never associated with sex before: generosity, care, concern.
In her experience—from which she was reasonably knowledgeable—her pleasure had always been a byproduct of the pleasure her partner had sought for himself. She’d enjoyed it at the time, but she’d never had this…this…this—Ah, he nibbled her neck—tempest of relentless determination bearing down upon her. Maybe that was the difference between having sex and making love.
Or maybe that was just the difference between everyone else and Torek.
Even now, between strokes and kisses and long drags of her scent, he was attuned to her. When she moaned, he deepened his thrusts. Finding a particularly sensitive spot—her breath caught on its discovery—he drove into it, wringing every morsel of pleasure from it. She didn’t like attachments and emotions. She didn’t like wanting something enough to worry about losing it, but she’d cared about Torek and been terrified of losing him long before wanting him. Whether she liked it or not, she couldn’t deny it: the man in her arms, inside her, pleasuring her with the intensity and single-minded resolve of a zealot was incinerating her preconceived notions about herself and life and what she wanted from it.
She wanted him.
His hips shifted, and suddenly, his rhythm became frenzied. He broke away from her neck on a ragged gasp and growled deep in the center of his chest. His head dropped down to rest on the pillow above her again, his frown a deep chasm between his brows. He was losing control. This man who literally set his life to a timer, who could run relentlessly and without pause for miles in rough terrain, who had risked his life
for his country for years, who had nearly died saving her life, and who could do all that without losing his breath was winded inside her.
Delaney’s blood surged at the thought, and, combined with the fresh angle of his thrusts, something cataclysmic stirred. His strokes were shorter, but deep and fast and sliding at an upward angle. He hit another something unexpected, something no one else had ever reached.
Something no one else had ever tried to reach.
Her nipples tightened to aching points. Her skin was somehow simultaneously burning and shivering. Her toes curled. Her vagina throbbed. Her breath caught.
She needed more. Harder. Longer. Deeper. Faster.
He complied. Had she spoken out loud? Had he read her mind? Maybe he just felt the same, but however he’d known, he acted. He lifted her thighs up over his shoulders, gripped her hands, and used her legs like a spring to slam into her. Hand in hand, he pulled her back for more, his hips ruthless, driving home toward a destination she’d never reached, had in fact always suspected was heavily fictionalized. The sensations ratcheted higher and hotter, pounding relentlessly into a body too small to contain the amount of pleasure he was pouring into it.
Like a pressure cooker with no outlet for release, her body detonated.
Hot, feral, fantastic sensation erupted from her core, finally. Finally! Every muscle contracted in quivering ecstasy. A scream tore from her throat. Light bursts speckled her closed eyelids, and everything—her body, her mind, everything she knew about life, herself, men, and sex—exploded apart and was completely obliterated. Blinders were ripped from her eyes, and in their absence, the sight of her own ignorance left her raw and exposed. This was real. She might not have had it before, which was a brutal shame. But then, some people never found it.
Her mind eventually fused back together with her body, but even as she became aware of herself again, she didn’t feel like herself. She was lethargic and exhausted and completely spent, lying limply on the pillows. Could a person actually pass out from too much pleasure? Could a body and brain be so completely overcome by another person that it shut down to all sensation?
Beyond the Next Star Page 25