one who’s going nuts and needs serious reassurance.”
Bash stares at me like the two of us can’t be compared. “Isla, you haven’t seen how the other males look at you—”
“I’m extraordinarily average. There isn’t anything about me that can hold a candle to—”
Bash’s intense frown is not one of outrage but confusion and it has me rephrasing.
“Hold a candle: can compete with your lover,” I explain.
“NOT my lover,” Bash bites out. “Love wasn’t what Cessilla kept me for. Any feelings that developed were my own, not shared by her—”
I find that hard to believe. If she chose Bash, she must have felt something for him. Lust, surely. And how could there not be affection? Heck, how could she not fall in love with him? I bet he didn’t used to be near this grumpy, back when she had him. Him being this surly is the only way I’ve known him, and I’m crazy about him. What would he have been like before he was jaded and closed off and prickly?
“—and she’s had nothing of me in a very long time.” His claws touch either side of my chin when he takes hold of it. “And Isla, she will have nothing from me now, not ever again.”
“You say that, but Bash, I’m concerned. Here I am, wearing an iron-clad deterrent against extramarital affairs, but you…
“I would never take another female,'' he vows, his voice clear about the depth of offense he considers this. His wild eyes say the same thing. “Would you have me wear armor to soothe your concerns?”
“I’m thinking about it. But my fear is that the type of prevention we’d need doesn’t exist. There isn’t an iron cock cage big enough to fit you, and there is no iron diaper to prevent emotions. You are employed by this woman. She has access to you in ways I can’t possibly guard against. And when it comes down to a nobody human named Isla and an entrepreneurial wonder-alien named Cessilla, there’s no contest.”
“You are right. Between that female I once knew and my mate that I cherish—a fetching female who always smiles, who makes the best of things when her whole life is uprooted, a sweet female who saw something in me worth befriending, an alien woman who was brave enough to love me—you love me Isla. It’s healing just to know that. And I. Love. You. There is no contest,” he vows to me, earnestness beaten into every word like the eternal-steel head of a newly forged hammer. His eyes beseeching, soft and velvety as the double-thick frosting on a three-tiered cake of reassurance. He draws his rough-scaled knuckle along the side of my face. “Now that I know what it is like to be wanted, truly wanted by someone, I don’t even feel the sting of the old rejection. Not even the sting. She no longer even gets my feelings.”
I poof out a breath. “Well… that’s good. Reassuring. Okay.” I wiggle my arm until my hand is free between us. I form a fist and tap my knuckles against Bash’s groin, making him jump.
He eyes me in confusion. “That’s not how you touch me,” he informs me.
“I’m not touching you. There’s a human saying—”
Bash nearly rolls his eyes.
“—where we make a statement, and then we knock on wood.”
He frowns down at me. Confused or unimpressed or both.
I run my knuckles against his dick, up and down. Up and down. “We call this ‘wood’ when it gets hard—oh, oops—just like this.”
Bash’s lips slash into a what I think of as his hidden-smile, and then he’s bending low, taking my mouth and murmuring against my lips, “You are the most alien creature I’ve ever met. So completely, maddeningly teveking alien.”
“But you still love me,” I say against his lips.
Forcing a hard kiss on me, he draws back to declare, “I’ll be keeping you anyways, for always.”
“Good,” I manage before he melds our air options.
When he pulls away enough for us to grab oxygen, I pant, “Is this stall clean?”
He glances around us and sniffs, one side of his nostril scales bunching. “Yes.”
“Are we going to christen it?”
He captures my hair in his fist, pulling my head back roughly in a way I like. A lot. “If that phrase means that I bend you over something and mount you as if I’m your salkell, then the answer is yes.”
For the very alien word salkell, my translator flashes me the image of a sweat-frothed stallion.