Page 303 of Commander’s Mate

When I finally lifted my mouth from hers, she kept one hand at my collar and slid the other between us. “Fuck me,” she whispered. “I really need you to fuck me now.” Her palm closed over me through my clothes, and the scent of her desire cut cleanly through fatigue, pain, and every unfinished thought I had carried out of Breskaa.

I searched her face once—not because I doubted her words, but because I had learned the difference between wanting Harper and presuming on her. She answered by dragging my shirt open. “Zared. Now.”

We reached the bed with more urgency than grace. I meant to slow us down; Harper had no interest in being managed. She pulled me over her, opened for me, and met the first thrust with a broken sound that stripped the last of my restraint. After that there was only heat, her hands on my shoulders, my name in her mouth, and the hard, relentless rhythm she demanded every time I tried to ease it.

Her first climax tightened her around me hard enough to nearly end me. The second left her laughing breathlessly against my throat. I held on until the third took her, then let myself follow.

She locked her arms and legs around me as I spent inside her. “Mine,” she said against my ear, fierce and certain. “You are mine.”

Something in my chest gave way. Not command. Not instinct. Something quieter and far more dangerous.

“Always,” I said. “And you are mine.”

“Always.” Her answer softened against my mouth as I kissed her.

Neither of us was ready for sleep. We stayed tangled together until desire returned, slower the second time and no less urgent for it.

Later, with Harper warm against me and the wound beneath my ribs reduced to an ache by armor nanites and medication, I understood what had changed. I had survived Breskaa by centimeters of armor and luck. Survival could no longer be merely an obligation to command. I wanted years with her—arguments, missions, ordinary mornings, perhaps children one day if we were fortunate enough to have them. For the first time, caution felt less like restraint than greed for a future.

Harper slept with one hand on my chest. I did not.

Pain was not the problem; the nanites had reduced the wound along my ribs to a deep ache, and Breskaa was finished.

Meya was another matter.

So was Harper.

Her breathing had become something I listened to the way warriors listened to engines—a quiet assurance that the system still functioned, that nothing precious had failed while I looked away.

Her fingers moved.

“You’re doing it again.”

I looked down.

Her eyes remained closed.

“Doing what?”

“Thinking loud.”

“That is not possible.”

“It is with you.”

She opened one eye.

“You get stiff.”

“I am injured.”

“Different stiff.”

I waited.

She smiled.

“Walked into that one.”