Chapter 63: The Gentleman Under The Thunder

"Thank you for buying me."

It was weird to say but she wanted to tell him that because this man could have said no and gotten a princess instead. Thank you didn’t feel like enough. She would never be able to repay him.

His throat bobbed once.

"You’re not going to thank me for that, Nova. You’re going to let me get those cuffs off, and then you’re going to forget that sentence ever came out of your mouth."

His eyes dropped to her mouth. The look lasted half a second and contained zero ambiguity. The question wasn’t if. The question was whether she was going to stop him. She was not going to stop him.

He kissed her and jolted immediately upon contact. Again. But he didn’t pull away. The kiss was slow at first, which felt almost like he was fighting himself for, holding back the way you hold a door against a storm. But Nova wasn’t sure.

Then it turned into something else like the world outside the yacht ceased to exist.

She had thanked him for buying her. He told her to forget she ever said it. And now he was kissing her. The emotional whiplash alone should have come with a seatbelt.

She didn’t pull away. She kissed him back, which she hadn’t planned on doing but her mouth apparently had its own agenda tonight. Her chest flooded with something warm and terrifying and nameless. Something that had no business existing between two people who had met tonight, on a night like this, under circumstances like these.

This man had carried her out of a thunderstorm, put her on his lap, and was now kissing her like it was the most logical next step.

BANG.

The door hit the wall.

Nova jumped, trying to stand from Derek’s lap on pure instinct.

Derek’s arms seat-belted her before she got far. "Yeah, no. We’ve done that"

Astra had an injector in one hand and zero patience for the scene in front of her. "I’m going to pretend I didn’t walk in on that." She knelt beside the couch. "Neck, please."

Derek tilted Nova’s head without being asked, exposing the side of her throat.

Nova flinched so hard Derek’s arm tightened around her. Her pulse jackrabbited under his fingers.

"It won’t hurt," Derek said softly.

Astra pressed the injector to Nova’s neck and fired before Nova could overthink it, which was probably for the better. The cold spread fast, chasing the spasms down her body like a reset button. Then the shaking stopped. The absence of pain was so sudden it felt like a sound had been turned off.

"That will hold for a bit." Astra capped the injector. "Get her warm. Get her dry. I need her back here in thirty minutes." She looked down at Nova’s wrists then back up at Derek. "Tell me you know how to remove those. I can treat symptoms, but that is the cause."

"I do. But I’ll need Landon and we’ll need to do it in the Skylounge. And we will need to be at a cruising hover, under two thousand feet because we will be opening a latch."

Astra gave a single nod.

Derek stood with Nova in his arms like the couch had been a pit stop and they were back on the road, like carrying her was the next logical step.

He carried her through the yacht. A corridor lined with dark wood paneling and low recessed lighting that hummed gold. The vessel was larger than she had realized, the kind of large that stops being a vehicle and starts being real estate. She caught glimpses of rooms through open doors, each one nicer than anything she had ever slept in.

She was fading. The spasms had taken something out of her that wasn’t coming back without sleep or a miracle and the miracle budget had been blown hours ago. Her vision softened at the edges. Sounds came through cotton.

Derek shouldered open a door at the end of the corridor and carried her into a room that she assumed was his.

He set her down in a leather armchair. His hands left her slowly, reluctantly, the kind of slow that said every inch of separation was being negotiated internally and the negotiations were hostile.

There was a knock at the door.

An omega wearing a Thunderfang suit held out a folded stack of clothes without crossing the threshold. Derek took them with a nod and the door closed.

He set the stack on the bed. Then he reached behind his neck and pulled the zipper of his suit down in one motion.

The suit peeled forward off his shoulders and Nova’s brain, which had been operating at twelve percent, suddenly found bandwidth it didn’t know it had. Abs was an understatement. He was carved from whatever material the Goddess used when she was showing off and the low amber lighting was treating his torso like a photography project.

Her face turned red. She looked away so fast her neck filed a complaint about the sudden reversal of its retirement.

"You’re allowed to look."

She had nothing. No response. No witty comeback. No polite deflection. Her mouth was a vacant storefront and the management had fled.

"Oh, now she’s shy." He considered his words. "The girl who told Kai Starborne to come get it with his own sword. That girl is blushing."

He yanked a black cotton shirt over his head and stepped into grey sweats with a pure "I definitely didn’t just flex in the mirror" face while his chest had inflated a full two fucking inches.

She felt the warmth of him before she felt his hands. He knelt in front of the chair and his fingers found the collar of her jumpsuit.

She stiffened.

The reaction was instant and total, every muscle locking at once like a circuit breaker tripping. Her jaw set. Her shoulders climbed towards her ears. Her breathing went shallow and stayed there.

He was going to undress her. He was her assigned mate. This was normal. Mates did this. She knew that intellectually but lacked the experience and the gap between those two things was currently the size of the clearing they had just fled.