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In a moment of weakness, he lets her guide his position over her, his member straining against the fabric of the tight-fitting clothing he wore for her. Her heat sears through him as she wraps her legs around him. Belatedly, he realizes he has released the restraints at her ankles.

“Fuck me,Cassiel. I mean it this time.”

It would be so easy to drive himself into her, lock their bodies together, claim her and seal their fates. It takes every ounce of free will to hold himself back.

“What is it?” A strange look crosses her face. The small hands that grasped his shoulders now stroke over his skin, come up to cup his face with a tenderness that almost breaks him. “If your equipment is…you know, different…I don’t care. I swear. I told you, if we’re going to do this, we shoulddoit. I don’t want to go home without knowing what it’s like to fuck…” She stops, biting her lip.

“What?” he grates out, from the edge of his control. “An alien? A monster?Say it.”

“You.”

He can’t help it. He drops his head into the curve of her shoulder, breathing in the wild scent of her, his life’s elixir, the overwhelming cocktail of pheromones screaming at him that she’s ready, willing, and wanting. That she literallyasked for it.

But she doesn’t know what she’s asking for. She’s not asking for eternity, to be taken away from everything she’s ever known, to become his goddess, his purpose, his world. She only wants to try this body out before she leaves him in the dark forever.

“I can’t,” he whispers. “Wecan’t. Please, don’t ask it of me.”

“Why not? You said you wanted to mate.” Her legs tighten around his waist, and the heat at her center scalds him and soaks through to the cock she’s begging for.

“No.” The effort in that single word almost breaks him. Dimly, he can hear the uproar of the colony mind. The rest of him doesn’t understand what he’s waiting for. “Trust me on this. You don’t want this. You just think you do.Don’task me again.”

He’s out of synchrony, at cross-purposes with himself. As an individual, this body was made with a singular purpose: to love her, to protect her with his very life. He knows what this life will hold for her. Even if letting her go means the colony’s end, or another few millennia floating senseless in the dark, he can’t claim her like that.

But he won’t have the will to hold back any longer if shebegshim for it.

“I don’t understand.”

He pulls away from her. His chest aches, and the lungs designed to breathe her atmosphere seem determined to malfunction. This body isn’thim,not really. If she saw the rest of him, she wouldn’t look so bereft and so eager all at once.

“There would be no going back,” he says. “You’d bemine,if I entered you like that. Neither of us would have a choice, then.”Not a meaningful one, at least.His lost love had chosen certain death over eternity with him. She’d taken a part of him with her into the void when she went.

“You don’t want me.” Her voice comes out small, and pain tightens in her face.

“Kat.No.Every part of me wants to make you mine. But it would…change you. Change both of us. It would bind us, permanently.”

“Oh.” She goes still, silent, wide eyes searching his. “Then…”

“I willnotdo this,” he says softly. “I promised to take you home. But I am more than happy to have you in other ways. I’ll give you as many orgasms as your body can take, until we’re back within your planet’s orbit, safe and sound.”

Her expression shifts. She nods, but mischief sparks in her eyes, and her mouth curves slightly as she says, “I said I wanted you everywhere. It seems like you have more than enough ways to be inside me. I didn’t saywhathad to go where.”

“What…?”

“Come here,” she says, and then when he still doesn’t move, she scoots down lower on the bed. She tugs at his waistband, pulling it down his hips until his cock springs free, hard and throbbing, pre-ejaculate beading at its head. “How much of that dream of mine did you see, Cassiel? What do you remember?”

His voice almost doesn’t come, and when it does, it’s a rough rasp, nearly a growl. “All of it,” he says. “Kaitlyn, I remembereverything.”

It wasn’thim, in the dream she means, not exactly. Hormones and electrical stimulation stimulated her brain to create a fantasy that justified her unconscious arousal. But the information he gleaned from it gave him plenty to work with. He never thought that she would remember it, much less like this, her pupils wide and dark with unbridled lust as she drinks in the sight of him bare before her.

“Fuck my mouth like that,” she says. “Let me taste you. Please? That wouldn’t be the same as you…” Her breath catches and her small pink tongue sweeps across her lips. She swallows hard. “Matingwith me, in the way you said before.”

She’s perfect. She’s everything he could want, even if he can’t have her, not like that. But she’s giving himthis.

A groan rises in his chest as he looks down at her, spread out on the mattress for him. Eyes heavy-lidded, she opens her mouth and tips her head back, tongue curling up with anticipatory eagerness.

He can’t resist the invitation. When he drives his cock between her lips, her choked moan makes his hips jerk forward further. Carefully, he thrusts further into the wet warmth. His girth stretches her little mouth open farther than he imagined possible, and he pulls back before he pushes her gag reflex too far.

“Please,” she says, when he withdraws, her lips still brushing him. “I can take it. Let me try, at least.”