Page 49 of Shellshock

All she knew was, Caligher was incredible, she wanted him, and she would never have him.

Not after lying.

Caligher let the door slide shut, descending into her cockpit. She took note of the way his muscles shifted when he walked. It made a twinge of instinctive fear line her senses… which in turn got mixed up in her tumultuous desire.

He came to a stop before her, his enormous presence setting every nerve in her body on fire. She sat, rapt and silent, unable to rip her eyes away from him.

“You’re Lucca,” he said flatly.

“Yes,” she whispered. “And you’re Caligher?”

His mouth thinned and her fear spiked. The steadiness of his eyes grew more disapproving. She hated having that expression pointed at her, especially from him. Her face heated with shame as a nasty feeling collected in her chest.

Don’t cry. Don’t fucking cry.

This moment was her fault.

Only when she thought she could speak without bursting into tears did she try.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Sorry I lied.

Sorry I’m not like you.

Her apology drew his eyes to her face. They narrowed, hard and foreboding.

So. Much. Disapproval.

Then he moved.

He was so fast. One second she was in her chair. The next, she was hauled over it, crying out. Large hands captured her arms, yanking them behind her.

She heard metal springing. Clicking. Felt the chill of it on her wrists—oh holy shit holy shit holy shit—felt his broad palms and fingers incinerating everything he touched. Her arms. Her back. She burst into a blaze of heat. More than a year had passed since she’d shared the room with another person and Caligher had to be the most physically intense person in all of existence.

Wrists secured, he hauled her right into him. Into his body.Ah god. She could feel his chest lining up with her back—the stone armor and his strange definition. Sickly, excited, miserable freneticism buzzed in her stomach, dumping her senses upside-down and out.

“Did you enjoy my handiwork?” he asked, incongruously mild, noting the shipwreckage featured on her screen.

She was too flabbergasted to answer. She wasreeling, her chest heaving rapidly. His warmth bled into her, like sinking into a hot bath.

Then his mouth neared her ear and she broke out in a goosebump-riddled sweat. Hot breath skittered over her cheek, the shell of her ear, the hammering pulse on her neck. “Where do you keep your spacesuits?”

Her brain was mud.

This was worlds apart from what it had been when he’d been contained. He was elemental chaos—and his rich, musical voice was already deep inside her.

She shook her head, staring blindly ahead, her mind as wonderfully empty as the void of outer space.

“You don’t have spacesuits?” he asked.

More head shaking earned a resentful-sounding grunt from his chest. His tone iced over. “I don’t believe you. You must have something.”

“Why,” she managed.

“To move between ships.”

His arm slipped away from her and she collapsed against the chair, letting it compress all the air from her stomach. He circled the chair as she watched him warily. Caligher bent over the console to move the cameras—and Lucca’s eyes wandered down the contours of his back, over his thick tail. Between layers of lava-rock armor, she studied the strange dipping musculature of his body.

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