Page 31 of Hijack!
“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, buthishands… 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 instantlywith 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.”
