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She comes to him slowly, her steps uncharacteristically hesitant. “You heard what the crew was talking about.”
Captain Vane sits alone in the sand, a little down the beach from the bonfire the crew had constructed for their night of carousing. He’s facing the waves, one arm propped up on his knee, the other braced over a bottle. He lifts his eyes to her, a glimmer of softness in his rugged face, and doesn’t move another muscle. “I did.”
She stands there awkwardly, the toe of one boot digging a hole in the sand. She’s made up her mind, but she’s still daunted at the thought of asking.
“You want to talk about it some more?” Vane asks, lifting a brow and his bottle to her.
It had been mortifying. Of course she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. She grabs the bottle and drops her butt unceremoniously to the sand. She sighs, rather than answering his question.
“Aren’t women usually proud of that sort of thing?”
She peers at him sideways while taking a pull from his bottle. It’s rum, strong stuff, and she instructs herself not to sip too deep. “I suppose it has been an achievement, to remain chaste so long, among so many sailors.” She passes the bottle back to him, and tries to decide if his thin lips are laughing at her. “But the crew talks like…” she grimaces. “Well, they said a lot of things. But they make it sound like I’m missing something. Some essential experience of a free life. Even Anne seemed to pity me.”
Vane releases the bottle from his lips with a satisfied little sound that warms something in her belly. “I’m inclined to agree with them.”
She flushes. It’s what she wanted to hear from him, and yet it still embarrasses her, makes her dig her toes deeper into the sand rather than turning to him. “I suppose I just… haven’t had much opportunity. Yours is the first crew I’ve been with where I haven’t had to pretend to be a boy.”
Vane grunts, offers the bottle back to her. Because she doesn’t dare to look at his face, she can’t tell if he’s listening, or just hoping she’ll leave him alone soon.
She’s usually more courageous than this. First one up the ropes, first one over the side in the vanguard (behind Anne of course), always pressing forward and proving herself more than competent. But this, to open herself to rejection, to failure of an entirely different kind, how does she do this?
“I’m sure you’ve had offers.” Vane’s throaty voice carries the conversation forward for her.
She rolls her eyes. “Tonight, sure, you heard the kind of crudeness those fuckers were spouting. How could I resist?”
“Everyone puts on a show. There are men that would be gentler once you were alone.”
That gets her attention, pulls her to finally look straight at Vane, to see if there’s even a chance he might be amenable to what she came here to ask. One side of his face is lit warmly by the bonfire up the beach, the other is colorless and angled more coldly by the light of the waxing moon. “Not those men.”
His face softens with a playful quirk of his brow. “Maybe not those men. Though I’ve known some of them to go sweet on a girl, from time to time.”
“Can you be sweet?” It’s out of her mouth before she can stop it, and now she has to ride out whatever comes next.
Vane looks startled; he tilts his head and looks at her somehow more… deeply. Then an arrogant smirk covers whatever else might have been stirring in his mind. “I know how to treat a lady.”
She looks down the neck of the bottle, forgotten between her hands. “Not sure I’m one of those.”
Vane grunts. “You think your only option is to be treated like a whore. No wonder you don’t want to go to bed with anyone.”
“I want to,” she protests, cheeks heating up. “I know it’s not always like the whorehouses.” Now’s the time for another swig of that strong rum. “I’ve heard…heard Jack and Anne together…” they only spare one cabin on the Ranger for the female crew members to have a measure of decency to themselves, and so she’s been subjected to many a sleepover by her bunkmate. “And sometimes, when they think I’m asleep, I’ll confess I’ve watched.”
Vane’s eyes are lighting up, in amusement at least. “You never asked to join?”
Scandalized, she covers her face with her hands. “It’s not like that!” She lifts them away and glares up at her captain’s sparkling eyes. “I’m just saying, I know I want it. To feel that. I’m tired of putting it off, and waiting… I know I’m ready, if I can just find a chap that cares enough to…”
Vane finishes when she trails off. “To handle you carefully?” He leans a little closer, and her heartbeat starts to race.
She nods.
“You don’t want it to be Jack. But you want someone you can trust.” His raspy voice, pitched so low, sounds almost like the purr of a cat, and she finds herself mesmerized by the look in his eyes. He takes the bottle from her fingers without looking and sets it somewhere in the sand off to the side. “So you came to me.”
Nervousness spikes and she can’t help but babble. “I don’t know if you would even want to, I don’t know the things the whores know, or—” she cuts herself off before saying Eleanor’s name; nobody mentions the Guthrie woman if they want Vane’s mood to remain pleasant.
Vane picks her hand up and threads his fingers between hers. “You really think that I wouldn’t want you.”
She tries not to tremble at the rush that goes through her entire body at his touch. “I’m no courtesan. I’ve seen the kind of women you choose at the brothels. I’m not—”
He cuts her off by raising her hand to his lips, pressing a kiss between two of her knuckles. “I’m your friend,” he answers her. “I’m happy to help you out with this sort of thing.” He tugs at her hand, drawing her to lean a little closer to him. “How about I kiss you, and we’ll just see what happens after that.”
She looks up at him, her captain, respected and feared, and one of the most handsome men she has ever seen. His stony brows have softened, and those lips that she has imagined pressing her mouth to a hundred times part in anticipation. She can barely believe he’s really saying this.
She lifts her chin. That’s all he needs. Vane tilts his head and melds his lips against her own, a sweeter kiss than she had ever thought the ferocious pirate would give. The sounds around them, the roll of the waves, the barking laughs of their drunken crewmates carried on the breeze down the beach to them, those sounds start to fade away as her awareness favors the sound of his breath, and her own, intermingling while their lips explore how many ways they can combine together.
He covers her cheeks with his hands, guiding her to lean in, to let him lead the kiss. She’s nervous to touch him, but she wants to. A tentative grasp just above his wrists leads her to slide her hands up his arms, following the corded muscle along to his broad, solid body. His hands grasp around the back of her head as his tongue flicks, lazy and tantalizing, inside her mouth.
She’s done this before, kissing, back home before she put on a pair of borrowed trousers and ran away to the sea. She hadn’t liked it quite so much last time as this, and never let that boy do what Vane was doing now, tracing his lips across sensitive skin behind her ear while his arms pull her in tightly to rest more and more of her weight against him. Her body starts to feel heavy, thick with something that must be called lust, an energy that slows her and quickens her both at once. When his lips come back to her own she opens to him eagerly, her tongue ready for his next lesson.
There’s a heat building between her legs. She doesn’t know what to do with it, a pleasant aching that bids her to relax but not to stay still, either. Vane’s strong arms pull her in closer against his body and a sudden urge to spread her legs and rub her sex against him makes her moan a wanton little sound into his mouth.
She’s embarrassed to hear herself like that, but a pleased sort of rumbling answers her from the back of her captain’s throat, and his arm pulls tight around her waist. “Come up into my lap,” he suggests, and though it makes her cheeks burn hot at the impropriety, she finds herself bold to straddle her leg across his hips and sit astride him like she’d seen many a whore do at the tavern.
He is a solid, tantalizing heat between her thighs. Now when she kisses him her head is higher, he is the one lifting his chin, and yet with one hand buried in her hair and the other running heavy up and down her back, underneath her jacket, Captain Vane is still the one firmly in control. “There’s a good girl,” he breathes when he lets her come up for air. No one talks to her that way, not here, not since her hands were callused by rope and salt, and yet to hear it from Vane only melts her further.
She presses her belly against him, curling herself into him as tightly as she can while still being able to reach his mouth for increasingly frantic, hungry kisses. The more she touches him the more she wants of him, his body all coiled power and surprisingly welcoming heat.
Her breath catches when his hand slides under her shirt, rough palm gently scratching at the tender skin of her flank. She kisses him deeper, too shy to find words of encouragement, only hoping that he will feel the way her body flushes as she finally experiences the touch she’s been dreaming of.
He strokes her like he’s just as eager as she, to make this connection, to know what she feels like underneath her clothes. His gentle sucking at her lips slows, both their attention fading to the conquest of his hands across her virgin skin.
He finds her breasts and she sits up straighter, sucking in air like she’s about to go over the side. His thumbs run slowly along the fullness at their very bottom edges, and he watches her face closely with eyes that glitter with reflected starlight. “Not too much for you already, is it?” he asks, and the phrasing is a challenge but his tone is soft and steadying.
She remembers to smile, enjoying the rush of this, and tosses her head. “I like it. I want you to keep going.”
He doesn’t take his eyes off her face as he slides his fingertips up over the peaks of her breasts, circling back down to find her nipples, tracing them carefully until he’s drawn them into stiff, needy peaks. She has to close her eyes before he’s even close to through with it, the unexpected pleasure stealing her breath and sending pulses of arousal straight between her open legs.
“Fuck, you’re sweet,” Vane curses under his breath, and her eyes fly open to see the edge of rapture in his eyes that she had heard on his voice. “How could you not think I’d want to see you like this, to be the one to do these things to you. First.” His fingers tighten, only slightly, plucking at her nipples, drawing a soft moan from her throat, so he does it again, harder the second time. “To show you what—” he cuts himself off as his fingers flick across her peaks, bending his ear to better hear the swallowed little cries she can’t help making under his expert handling.
She’s burning up. Her own hands scramble uselessly over Vane’s shoulders, his neck, his scalp, the open edge of his shirt. She doesn’t know what to do with them. She doesn’t know what she needs, and yet it seems that her body does, tensing and bridging her hips in closer to his warmth.
His head ducks into the crook of her neck, lips scrambling across whatever bare skin he can reach. “Can’t wait to get my mouth on you,” he murmurs, the movement of his hands across her breasts showing where, exactly, he means. “Come with me to my tent?”
“Mhm!” She moans in the affirmative, already aching for what they’ll be able to do when they have real privacy. Her awareness comes back to their position on the beach, the flickering light of the bonfire maybe twenty paces away, and she wonders if anyone noticed them yet. If any of the crew saw her with her legs wrapped so wantonly around their Captain out here in the sand. Her face grows hotter.
Vane’s hands are still moving along her waist, rubbing back and forth under her shirt, waiting for more of a response from her.
“Yes.” She’s loathe to separate her body from his, though. They probably hadn’t been seen, not yet, since they had not been interrupted by jeers and catcalls. But that would be coming; there was no way they’d make it up the beach and into Vane’s tent without being noticed by the revelers. She gives her about-to-be-lover a nervous smile and moves to dismount him.
His hands trail somewhat reluctantly out of her clothing as she recedes from him, then he’s following to stand up from the sand as quickly as she is. She feels awkward, standing on the beach beside him, but while neither of them are saying anything the heated look in his eyes says everything. Then his fingers are twining between her own and he’s pulling her toward the firelight.
Her face is still burning in apprehension of the comments she’s about to face. But it feels good, too, to know that Captain Vane is not trying to hide what he’s doing with her, that he’s evidently proud for his choice of bedfellow to be known. This “favor” that he’s doing her is not a secret he will try to hide and deny.
Faces turn at their approach, drunken smiles lighting up at varying paces as some of the crew are quicker on the uptake than others.
“We wondered where you disappeared off to,” one of the gunners leers. He’s sitting on a log next to Jack and Anne. “I was about to go looking for you myself, offer you some help with your little problem.” Anne turns to him with furrowed brow.
Jack interrupts, speaking a bit hastily. “It appears the Captain has that situation well in hand.”
Vane’s grip around her fingers squeezes tighter, and he barely slows his strides past the gossiping crew.
The gunner’s grin is wide and ugly. “Make her squeal loud enough for all of us to hear, Cap’n. Some of us—”
Whatever foul thing about to come out of his mouth next is smashed back into his teeth by Anne Bonny’s fist. The blow is hard enough to make the gunner slump off the back of the log. She scoots down, occupying the space she had just made him vacate, and pulls a wicked hunting knife out of her belt. “It’ll be a lot worse for anyone I catch creeping around the Captain’s tent tonight,” she announces to no one in particular, using the knife to start paring down one of her fingernails.
Well then. That’s about as close to privacy as any lady could expect on this beach. She flashes a grateful smile at Anne as Vane tugs at her to keep on walking past.
But Anne’s not done. “As for you, Captain,” she barks from under the brim of her wide hat, her one visible eye fixing him with a baleful glare, “you better make it good for her.”
Vane tucks the blushing virgin in against his side, his hand grasping broad against her waist. “If she has any complaints after,” he growls toward the protective Anne, “she should feel free to tell you.”
And then he’s steering her decisively up the beach, away from the fire and into the makeshift neighborhood of tents that houses the crew on the shore of Nassau town.
She can’t see much in the filtered moonlight when Vane ushers her into his tent. It’s low, not really any bigger than anyone else’s on the beach, but as she ducks inside she’s able to make out a collection of carpets, cushions and blankets arranged into an enticing bed.
Of course, the most alluring thing about it is knowing who sleeps there. Vane has started working his boots off, and so she follows suit, sitting beside him on the edge of a carpet. Their arms brush in the darkness, then their shoulders, and then his hand finds her face and pulls her in for a kiss before she’s finished wriggling the last boot over her ankle.
He breaks the kiss to pull his shirt over his head, and his fingers scramble at the hem of hers before he forces himself to slow down, breathing hard. She looks at him in the dim, the skin of his bare shoulders almost glowing as it reflects the thin light that filters in through the tent walls. She runs her palms across his broad, chiseled chest. She’d already memorized the look of it, as her captain had a propensity to parade about without his shirt, and his impressive physique has favored heavily in her more sinful thoughts. And now, now she gets to touch it.
The firm muscle beneath her palms is warm and solid, and it twitches as Vane raises his arms to embrace her, pull her in tighter against his fast-beating heart. His lips seek hers and then he is drawing her down, pulling her to fall against him into the nest of cushions that make his bed.
Her heart races faster than it did on the beach. There is something more sinful, more real, about lying on her back in the dark, the length of her body being pushed flat and open by the weight of a man, than anything else that had come before. But she knows she really is ready for this because the thought only enhances her pleasure, draws out her own eagerness for the experience.
As he continues to kiss her, he works the bottom of her shirt up, while his knee plants more and more firmly between her legs. She lifts her torso to help him undress her.
The ends of his long hair hit her bare skin first, as she lays back into the pillows, naked from the waist up, and Vane bends his head over her. She feels his breath next, hot and heavy, and then his devouring mouth. They’re not quite kisses, not quite bites as Vane works his lips and teeth across her chest, starting at her collarbone and making his way down to more tender flesh. One strong hand scoops up her breast, his thumb flicking her nipple once before the heat of his mouth envelops it.
She listens to her breath, already panting in the darkness. She listens to the soft, wet noises of Vane’s mouth traveling along her body, the occasional rumbling sound of his own enjoyment, and encouragement. She realizes his leg has reached her sex, that she’s rubbing herself against it, and pleasure blooms when she angles her hips and crushes some sweet, tight spot of herself against his powerful thigh.
His mouth comes back to her lips and he rolls his thigh between her legs while kissing her deeply. He plants his knee in the blankets and brings his hand to the outside of her hip, encouraging her to rock herself into him however she likes. “There’s nothing more enticing than an eager woman,” he purrs along her cheek. “Show me how you want to ride.”
She’s sure that she doesn’t understand the nuances of what he’s talking about, but she moves against his solidly planted knee anyway, wrapping her legs around his wide thigh and rolling that sweet spot at the front of her hips in tight little bucks that send wave after wave of joyful heat through her entire core.
His face is hovering over her own, and when she opens her eyes she can barely make out a glittering satisfaction in his eyes. It’s still awkward, and she can still barely believe she’s doing this, with Captain Vane of all people, but the moment is turning into something now that feels absolutely, terribly right. She parts her lips, looking up at him with abandon, and he bends to kiss her with steady passion.
The pleasure between her legs feels incomplete. Riding just behind the enjoyment is a screaming, clawing need, a hot and bewildering feeling that something else is supposed to happen, something that the man above her is keeping from her, and her eyes sharpen, her hands clamber and scratch along his shoulders and his broad back. He slides his own hand down her body, caresses her belly, is stopped by her belt.
“Trousers,” she pants, finally realizing the problem. “Off.”
Vane chuckles against her skin and pulls his knee back to make room for her furious scramble to loosen her belt and strip off the clothing that suddenly feels so oppressive to her. He rocks away further and she hears him shedding the last of his own clothes in the dark.
But the air is cold without him pressing against her, and some of the rush drains away from her head as she works her trousers down off both of her legs. This is it, now. With both of them naked in this little tent, it’s really going to happen.
He reaches for her in the dark. Kisses her again, taking his time with it, before touching her in any other way. Waits for her to melt her body back into his, by slow degrees, until the heavy trance of skin on skin takes over, and she pulls him down to lie flat beside her so she can better indulge in that feeling of so much bare skin touching all at once.
His cock is a solid line pressing into her upper thigh, foreign but not unwelcome. Something she’d been taught to fear, but now finds only fascinating. She lets her hand drift down to find it. Her fingertips trace along the side of it, smoother, silkier skin than the rest of him, and Vane emits a rumbling, encouraging sound and pulls his hips back just far enough to give her more room to explore.
Her fingers curl around it, touch still light and tentative. There is an iron firmness underneath that silky skin, all the way up until the thicker, spongier tip. He moans when she slides her thumb across that head, so she does it again, and he clutches her tighter around the shoulders.
She makes a circle with her thumb and first fingers, running her grip all the way down his length and up again. It just seems so… big. “Will this really fit?” she blurts, unable to hide the apprehension beginning to bloom in her belly.
Vane makes a delicious sound and pulls her hand away, flipping his loose grip on her wrist to push it into the pillow above her head as he moves his body on top of hers. “It will,” he promises, looking down on her with hooded eyes. “After I warm you properly.”
“What—” she asks, cut off by the surprise of Vane’s quick retreat down her body, mouthing his way past her navel and along her hip bone. He pushes her legs apart and settles his body into the blanket between them. His hands run broad and soothing up and down the insides of her thighs. Her face burns as he lays a kiss directly on her mound.
His gravelly voice comes up from the darkness below her hips, where she can no longer really see his face. “Has anyone ever touched you here before?”
“No,” she breathes.
He starts gently, cupping her sex with one hand, letting her get used to the warmth of that, rocking his palm in a soft imitation of the way she had been riding his thigh earlier. Then she feels one finger tickling, sliding up and down the seam of her sex, parting those lips and pressing in between. Her breath catches at the delicious invasion, and he goes no further, only gliding back and forth along the very edge of her.
She lets herself moan, a tiny sound, just to encourage him.
His finger sweeps deeper, bolder, and then his whole hand is angling differently, one finger between her lips becoming two that spread her wider, that dance over hidden folds and rub together around that nub of a sweet spot that makes her pant and moan and catch fire.
And then his mouth, oh God his mouth presses firm upon that spot and the heat of his tongue stokes the fire further, until she no longer feels an ounce of shame in letting her knees fall wide, and her hips buck up to meet him and that glorious tongue. His fingers come back to her entrance and a sweet, crystalline “yes” drops from her lips as he pushes one slowly inside her body.
So this is what makes the whores sing, the sensation that makes Anne pant and whine, clench her teeth and groan. Vane’s finger sinks and sinks and then he works it in a dance that coordinates with his tongue somehow and steals the breath right out of her lungs. There’s pressure as he starts to add a second finger, a tightness that can’t be called pleasure but doesn’t really count as pain, either. His two fingers work inside her, imitating fucking now, and she knows he’s getting her ready for what he really wants to do to her.
She wants it. Oh God she wants to be able to take it for him, that whole thing that even two of her fists probably wouldn’t be able to cover, that his fingers could not possibly prepare her for. But the sense of stretch is easing at her entrance and in its wake is nothing but ecstasy. “I want you,” she moans as she rolls her head back in the pillows. “I want you to take me, Captain.”
Captain Vane makes a guttural sound against her sex, the vibration mixing with the other delicious feelings to make her moan again. He draws his fingers slowly out of her body, spits on them and returns extra wetness to the coating on her sex. He rises, handling himself in much the same manner, and then climbs over her body so that their faces are aligned.
He doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t ask her to repeat herself, or make her beg for it, or question her resolve. He looks down at her with pure hunger, the spill of his hair curtaining them both, and then she feels the blunt tip of his cock lining up with her body.
The difference between that and his fingers is apparent immediately, her entrance stretching wider as he slips his slickened tip in, satisfying the primal craving that had been irking her from the moment her body had started to awaken to him. This was what she wanted, for the man smothering her with his scent and his mouth and his wild eyes to Take Her, to press where no one had ever—
The intensity he reaches when he’s few inches inside shocks her with a burning peak that steals her breath and her thoughts. Her body tenses against him, and Vane drops his lips to her cheek and pauses his progression. “There’s going to be pain,” he murmurs to her, reaching up to stroke her cheek with his fingertips, “no way around that. But it won’t last.”
She nods, looking up into his eyes, softening at the care and concern she sees in them, which overpowers the needy trance of his lust. She can trust those eyes. Vane starts pressing in again, and the pain transforms, becomes something holy all on its own, a rite of passage perhaps, a glorious experience of submission, of sublimation. The sharpness of the pain recedes, the burn becomes a stretch, a feeling of fullness, one that deepens and deepens until Charles Vane is fully inside of her.
He pauses there, letting her catch her breath, staring down into her eyes. She’s never seen him look so handsome, his face softened, his eyes and his thoughts focused, only on her. His fingers trace down the side of her face again, and then he’s kissing her, a melding of lips that says everything about how much he’s holding back, just to be still for her, just to keep from overwhelming her.
His hips start to move. He reverses the gains he’s made, drawing himself out almost to the tip, then slowly sinks back into her, the slide of every inch almost as intense as the first time, and she tries to remember to breathe against his cheek as he rubs his face against hers in his struggle to keep himself gentle. Every repeat of his conquest inside her hurts a little less, and after repeated strokes the burn becomes a passionate bliss, ache becoming hunger deep inside her body until she finds herself rocking her hips in time with his rhythm, both of them moving faster now, urging each other on.
His grunts in her ear are sounding less restrained. And while his cheek is still pressed against hers, his upper body is pulling away, slightly, repositioning to add more power to his thrusts. Slowly, still; she can feel his intensity raising and lowering in time to the rhythm of her own breaths, to the gasps and tiny cries that his ear is positioned so carefully to hear. His hair is spilled across the lower part of her face and she is suffused in the smell of him. “Charles,” she all but sobs. She is so glad that it is him, showing this to her, taking her now to planes of pleasure she had barely imagined existed.
He makes a pleased noise in response to the sound of his name, pulls back far enough to look at her. He doesn’t say anything back but that’s fine because she’s never seen a smile quite like the one that’s spreading across his face now, something more innocent and joyous than she had ever expected. He leans all his weight on one arm, not stopping the steadiness of his thrusting into her cunt. Thick, heavy pleasure is brewing there between her legs, like a thunderhead rapidly roiling in from the coast. His freed hand spreads her leg a little wider, coaxing her to relax and let him in a little deeper, and then he reaches down to once more rub on that pearl hidden just above where he’s fucking her and makes the storm break.
She throws her head back at the mind-numbing sensation that erupts just a few moments after his fingers began their spiral. She feels like her body is a bell Charles Vane has just struck, and that she might be torn to pieces by the brilliant note he’s wringing from her. She arcs against him, which only deepens the sensation, and vaguely she hears him groaning his approval into her ear as he fucks her right through this dizzying climax. “That’s it, love, oh, such a sweet—” his rambling stutters and then so does his body, cock pressing harder in short little bursts while her pleasure is still ringing its way down in ebbing waves. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and then moans, grinding against her as deep as he can go until his breath and energy run out.
He sinks against her, mindful not to crush her completely, and his fingers stroke softly along her hip. He stays like that for a while, cock still stretching her insides, but much less intensely than when they started. Her pleasure is a shimmering haze, a fog clearing only slowly with every breath, with each tiny movement of their bodies as they settle into comfortable rest.
Charles Vane’s fingers dance up her side, coming to trace along her face and turn it softly toward his. That soft smile is still there on his face, intimate and joyful.
“So that’s what I’ve been missing,” she blurts when the silence between them becomes too much. They both grin.
“Satisfied?” his gravelly voice rumbles, and he finally shifts off of her, settling his weight more comfortably by her side.
She looks up toward the roof of the tent, the little holes where the moonlight is filtering through. Her limbs feel heavy, the heat in her core burning down to banked embers, and everything in her being feels peaceful and slow. “I don’t think I remember how to move.”
Vane lifts his upper body with a soft chuckle, and reaches for something behind him. He comes back with a soft cloth that he wipes slowly between her legs, removing the sticky wetness he’s left behind there. She feels him cleaning himself with it too, and then he’s settling back down beside her, tucking her in under his arm.
The night air is just cool enough for her to appreciate the warmth of his body beside her. She turns in, laying one leg across his thighs, and he shifts invitingly, letting her entwine her limbs with his.
He tips his face to make sure she’s looking at him, his hand stroking along the top of her head. His expression starts fading into that air of command that she is more used to seeing from her captain. “I want you to come to me whenever you need to experience this again,” he orders. They both grin, and he pulls her in closer as their exhausted bodies begin to succumb to sleep.