Page 17 of Hijack! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #1)

All the species on this cruise were morphologically compatible for the best chance of the successful match, and most of the species had roughly analogous erogenous zones to jumpstart the dating and mating process.

This Felicity knew from the IDA handbooks that she had studied thoroughly, not to say obsessively.

It was something else entirely to feel what that meant.

One bite reveals the devotion…

So he’d told her. A love bite had overtones and undercurrents of domination and trust, an atavistic claiming that reverberated through her on a primitive level, even though they were on a spaceship.

A hijacked spaceship. With a golden alien pirate captain who’d stolen her very breath.

And yet for some reason, she trusted him implicitly.

Because while she’d fantasized about his broad, furred shoulders, she’d also seen the way he carried the weight of care for the ship; she had no doubts he would treat her with the same significance.

For once, her anxiety could find no paralyzing argument.

All her senses focused ecstatically on Ellix’s teeth at her throat: his big hand tightening in her hair, the musky scent of his fur wrapping her in satin.

Distantly, she was aware of the harmonic distortion returning, flaring in time with her heartbeat pounding through her body, as if the surges and outages that had plagued the ship were coalescing into one signal.

But when Ellix crowded her gently and inexorably toward the couch to sink together to the luxe cushions, she forgot even that, tuning exclusively to his hungry exploration of her space. When she wrapped one arm behind his wide shoulders, he tumbled her backward.

She should’ve felt caught and crushed under him, but instead the new position left her more free to do some exploring of her own.

She tangled her fingers in the longer strands of his mane, holding his ravening mouth to her throat.

The hungry pressure on her pulse echoed inward as well as out, igniting a heavy pulse in her core.

As if her body had been hijacked too, her knee came up alongside his thigh, and she clamped her heel around his backside, drawing him closer.

Oh, that was definitely a growl against her skin, tingling all the way through her.

She moaned something, not in any language she knew, but judging from his satisfied growl, he knew what she was asking.

With the hand not buried in her hair, he unfastened the upper seal on her uniform tunic.

When she’d been first handed her ship uniform, she’d been impressed with the pockets and how seamlessly the jumpsuit had integrated all necessary support garments as inner layers. Very convenient.

Maybe even more so now, as his big hand delved into the opening with no pesky bra in the way.

Unlike the IDA guests, he would’ve had no reason to familiarize himself with the erogenous idiosyncrasies of his fellow passengers, and yet his paw cupped her breast with instinctive aptitude for pleasure.

Maybe the same way he knew the words to say at a cocktail party, or how to attack a pirate ship.

His claw circled her nipple, never quite making contact, until she was writhing beneath him to align the aching point with his touch.

When he finally squeezed the swollen nub, she let out a strangled cry, arching into the caress, wordlessly thrusting her hips into his weight.

Abruptly, he reared back, his mouth parting from her carotid with a soft sucking noise. She would be bruised, marked… His hand wrenched the opening of her tunic wider, and he stared down at her, his golden eye wild and shining.

“Ellix…”

The weight of his lower body pressed into her pubic bone, his presence like a promise, and when he shuddered… She knew she wanted more.

“Felicity.” His voice cracked.

She gripped his shoulders with both hands, her fingers sinking into the plush fur as if she could take control of the alien muscles hidden there. Maybe it was shamefully inappropriate, but she bowed up again in wordless entreaty.

Apparently wordless wasn’t enough for him. “Say what you want,” he growled.

“You,” she growled back. “This. Now.”

His nostrils flared, widening the sweep of his whiskers. “You must be certain.”

Had she ever been sure of anything in her life? She always had doubts, concerns, questions, and a spreadsheet of pros and cons.

But she was on a hijacked spaceship speeding out of control into the unknown, so…

“I demand it.”

Opening her legs wide around his waist, he tucked her up beneath him.

He dipped his head to her breast, his paw pumping up the tender flesh.

When he closed his teeth on the swelling bud, exquisitely calibrated somewhere between gently and not quite a bite, she cried out at the pleasure of it.

It had been too long. And not just because of relativity.

Yes, she wanted this. More, she needed this.

He curved around her like he would protect her from everything in the universe—or like a predator guarding its kill. Such power in his body and his commands. And she had him in her hands.

Oh, but his hands… He split her uniform seal right down the center, as if he were cutting her loose from an old cocoon, and reached between her legs.

When he rocked his palm against her mons, she gasped, grinding onto him, and he adjusted instantly with more pressure, more friction, more of what she wanted. More…

“So demanding,” he murmured.

With a breathless moan, she clutched his shaggy head to her breast, silencing him—except for a deep groan of his own—as she pumped her hips recklessly toward her release. He responded with all the long fingers on his big paw and…

The orgasm seized her like another hijacking, and she bucked hard enough to lift him a little off the couch. His grunt of surprise vibrated through her nipple, sparking a crosscurrent of pleasure that rolled through her, reverberating down every nerve.

The radiant bliss could’ve been an actual explosion and she wouldn’t have been able to respond or even particularly care as the aftershocks rolled through her along pathways she’d worried she’d forgotten.

She had her elbow anchored behind his neck, his hand caught between her thighs, as if she’d never let him go, and even her merciless inner critic couldn’t feel any awkwardness about it.

Easing up his weight, he angled his body to the cushions, opening a little space between them. With gentle strokes, he brought her down from that impossible orbit, and when she finally dragged her eyes open, she couldn’t help but smile up at him.

The smile wavered when she caught his fleeting expression of panic. Of all the times to decide she could read the grouchy captain’s expressions…

His gaze was averted, and when she followed the direction down to her bared breast, she was shocked to see the imprint of his mouth around her nipple. She’d held him so tight, the parentheses of his long incisors had dented her skin. God, she could have smothered him.

At least he would’ve died doing what she loved.

“It’s gone,” he said quietly. “The anomaly.”

She wanted to hold on a little longer—and not just to her admittedly probably crackpot concept of coaxing another surge or crash…

Ellix’s comm pinged, and when he toggled it, Griiek’s urgent voice crackled through the quiet room. “Captain? Sensors picked up an energy surge in the salon.”

“It really was that good,” Felicity murmured, stretching like a cat-lady herself, when she probably should be writhing in horror at remembering the whole universe might’ve just watched her come.

“Say again, Captain? Since you have privacy enabled, access to your location is limited. Were you able to see anything?”

Ellix rolled his eye toward her, then down at her gaping uniform, but she only grinned unrepentantly. “Saw something, but only intermittently,” he drawled as he slowly refastened the seal on her uniform and tugged her upright. “You caught a reading this time?”

“Only indirectly by its effects on our systems. And just for a moment before returning to baseline. It appears to be a discreet tessellation within our power system—coherent, cyclical, organized—and it seems to be moving intact anywhere there is a wired grid congruent with its waveform. Captain, we may be dealing with something somehow alive.”

“We made a connection, and then we lost it,” Felicity mused. “Somehow, feelings tune the connection.”

Ellix cleared his throat. “Director Rowe believes amplifying localized energy fields may bring the anomaly into a focus we can perceive.”

Suvan scoffed across the shared comm. “Just how did you amplify the field?”

As if the chief engineer hadn’t asked, Ellix continued, “I want a wavelength that will focus and then isolate the distortion out of our systems.”

“Isolate it?” Felicity gripped his elbow. “That won’t hurt it, right?”

“It’s hijacked our ship,” he reminded her.

“If it can’t perceive us any more than we can perceive it, or just barely, it may not even realize we are here, or that we are trying to reach it.”

“A moot question, like love, that we’ll reserve for when we are not out of control.”

He’d told her before that the IDA’s mission meant nothing to him, and of course she agreed they needed to regain control of the ship asap. Still, his offhand rejection stung.

And she wasn’t going to examine too deeply why the captain’s attitude bothered her so much.

When his datpad chimed, it sounded almost disapproving. “Med scans complete,” he said. “Although neither of us seem to have suffered any aftereffects”—he didn’t even glance at her when she choked faintly; no aftereffects really?— “consider all further contact with the anomaly prohibited.”

“Er, Captain?” Griiek gulped. “Just to clarify. According to the med scan, Director Rowe’s vitals were elevated above Earther norms, to be expected from this stressful situation. But so were yours?”

Still not looking at her, even though she tried to catch his eye with a sly grin, Ellix growled, “A passing weakness. I’m over it now.”

She stiffened, barely hearing Suvan’s grumble. “We’ll have to modulate frequencies on the spot to manifest the distortion. Whether we can isolate and contain it—” The rest of the speculation was lost in the goblhob’s screeching.

“Keep me updated,” Ellix said. “Other than the hijacking”—everyone on the comm made derisive noises appropriate for their species—“how are we faring?”

“Engines are holding even at the higher output.”

“Ship systems are all in standard range.”

Delpine answered distractedly. “I’m still plotting possible destinations along this trajectory. I’ll have something for you soon.”

“Good,” Ellix said. “Stay on high alert. Griiek, keep monitoring for any reappearance of the anomaly. We need to calculate which frequencies and modulations will counteract the distortion.”

When he closed the comm, they sat for a moment in an uneasy silence.

“A passing weakness,” Felicity murmured.

Finally, he slanted his gaze to her. “Indeed.”

It took everything she had to dredge up her smile, one she’d perfected over years of managing other people’s emotions, a faked expression to hide her own uncertainties that she’d thought left behind for good on Earth.

“Back to captaining then,” she said brightly.

His gold eye narrowed, and she was pitifully thankful the feelings button was in her pocket. “Back to making everyone else happy,” he rumbled.

Tossing back her hair—which had completely escaped her last scrunchie—she winked at him. “Oh, I got mine too.”

Before he could answer that, she shoved to her feet, fumbling at the neckline of her uniform to seal it higher. With her datpad clutched to her chest for extra protection, she fled from the salon.

Away from the lion-man pirate captain who—if he looked too deep with that one eye—might see everything else she wanted to say.