Chapter 11
JUNIA
His mouth crashes into mine like a thunderclap.
No warning. No gentle preamble. One second I'm watching green runes pulse across the canyon wall of his body and the next his hand is cupping the back of my skull, rough palm against tangled curls, and his lips are on mine with the full devastating weight of six feet seven inches of Orc who has been holding his breath for weeks.
I grab his shirt.
That stupid, beautiful, thrift-store tee shirt. My fingers twist the faded cotton into a knot at his sternum and I pull. Pull him closer, pull him down, pull until the trellis bites into my shoulder blades through my overalls and his body is a wall of furnace heat pinning me against the cedar.
He groans into my mouth.
Deep. Guttural. The sound vibrates through my teeth, my jaw, my collarbone, settles somewhere south of my navel and detonates.
His other hand finds my hip, fingers spanning the entire width of it, thumb pressing into the dip above my waistband hard enough to leave a green-tinted bruise I'll admire in the mirror for days.
I bite his lower lip.
He makes a sound that is not human. Not remotely.
Some pre-language noise from whatever ancient battlefield his ancestors carved their names into, and his grip on my hip tightens and he lifts me clean off the ground.
My boots leave the dirt. My back drags up the trellis, rough wood catching the fabric of my tank top, and suddenly we're eye level.
Eye to glowing eye. His irises have gone full molten amber, no pupil, just light.
"You're going to break the trellis," I whisper against his mouth.
"I'll build another one."
His teeth find the hinge of my jaw. The soft skin below my ear.
He drags his mouth down the tendon in my neck with a precision that would be surgical if it weren't so feral, and the cedar behind me splinters and cracks but we don’t give a single solitary damn because his tongue hits the hollow of my throat and my legs lock around his waist like they've been rehearsing this in secret.
Soil smears between us. His shirt, my overalls, the potting dust that lives permanently on my skin mixing with his sweat into something earthy and raw.
He carries the scents of fresh-cut grass and cedar shavings and the ozone tang of activated runes, and I bury my face in his neck and inhale and my fingers rake down his back and the shirt rides up under my nails.
Muscle. Everywhere. Thick slabs of it layered over a frame that could benchpress my entire greenhouse.
My nails drag. He hisses.
"Do that again."
I rake harder. His hips buck against mine and the trellis gives up the ghost entirely.
The vertical beam behind my left shoulder snaps with a sharp crack and we lurch sideways into the garden bed.
His combat-trained reflexes fire before gravity does.
He twists mid-fall, one massive arm cradling my skull, and takes the impact on his shoulder blade.
We crash into the freshly turned soil of Phase Three: the pollinator meadow bed.
Loose dirt explodes around us. Dark loam and shredded mulch rain down. I land on him with a thud that knocks my breath loose and he grunts and his back leaves a Flynn-shaped crater in my carefully raked seedbed.
"My meadow."
"Worth it." His hand slides up my spine. Buries itself in my hair. Pulls my mouth back to his.
We kiss in the dirt like two people who have been starving.
Messy. Desperate. His tongue tastes like black coffee and the spearmint gum he chews when he's stressed and something underneath both of those things that is purely, irreducibly him.
I plant my palms flat on his muscles and push myself up just enough to see his face.
Glowing runes. Amber eyes. Dirt in his hair. A smear of potting soil across his cheekbone.
He's perfect.
He's an absolute disaster. A meticulous, rule-obsessed, cargo-shorts-wearing disaster spread-eagled in my flower bed with his shirt rucked up to his armpits and half of Phase Three's topsoil in his hair, and the rigid line of his jaw has gone slack, and his breathing sounds like he just sprinted a mile, and his hand on my hip is trembling.
Trembling.
This man caught a falling tree with his bare hands and his fingers are shaking against my skin.
I press my forehead to his. Our breath mingles. Hot, fast, desperate.
"You just destroyed my trellis AND my seedbed."
"Filing a citation in the morning."
"Against yourself?"
"Laminating it tonight."
I laugh. His thumb traces my cheekbone. Gentle now. The rough pad of his finger catching every freckle like he's memorizing them.
"Junia."
"Flynn."
"Phase Fourteen needs a revised timeline."
"We just obliterated Phase Three."
His arms tighten. Drag me flush against him, my chin on his collarbone, his heartbeat hammering through the thin cotton between us.
"Good. We'll replant it together."
We don't move for a long time.
The soil is warm from the afternoon sun.
Flynn's breathes beneath my cheek in a rhythm that slows by degrees, the frantic hammering settling into something steady and deep, like a drum buried underground.
His arm stays locked around my waist. Possessive.
Immovable. The other hand remains tangled in my hair, fingers absently working through a knot near my temple with a patience that borders on devotional.
"You've got a beetle wing in your curls."
"Keep it. Trophy."
He shakes with a silent laugh. His thumb works the wing free and flicks it into the ruined seedbed. Somewhere in the wreckage of the trellis, a cricket starts singing. Bold little creature. No sense of timing.
The light shifts. Gold melts to copper melts to the bruised purple that means evening in the subdivisions, and the automated sprinkler system three houses down kicks on with a hiss that carries across the stillness.
Flynn's body tenses at the sound, some ingrained reflex cataloging the threat, then relaxes when his tactical brain identifies it as irrigation.
"We should get up."
"No."
"The soil moisture level in this bed is going to be completely compromised by morning."
"Don't care."
"Your Phase Three germination window closes in nine days."
"Flynn."
"Mm."
"Shut up about Phase Three."
He shuts up about Phase Three. His fingers resume their slow exploration of my scalp, tracing the spiral architecture of each curl like he's mapping topology.
His forearm dimmed to a faint emerald glow, pulsing with the lazy tempo of his heartbeat.
Fireflies blink to life along the fence line, little gold sparks drifting between the slats.
Eventually the ground gets cold. Not the pleasant cool of evening dirt but the bone-deep seep of moisture wicking through denim and cotton, and I shiver against him. His arm tightens.
"Tarp."
"What?"
He sits up. I slide off him like a cat pushed off a warm radiator, catching myself on my elbows in the mulch.
He's already on his feet, brushing loam off his shorts with brisk, efficient strokes, scanning his garage with narrowed eyes.
Thirty seconds later he returns with a heavy canvas drop cloth folded into a perfect rectangle. Military corners. Naturally.
He shakes it out across the flat stretch of lawn between Phase Two (the perennial border) and the ruined crater of Phase Three. The canvas snaps and settles, crisp and clean, a pale rectangle glowing in the last of the twilight. He smooths a wrinkle near the edge with his boot.
"Flynn, that's a paint tarp."
"Clean. Washed and dried on high heat last Tuesday. Thread count irrelevant but structural integrity confirmed."
"You wash your tarps."
"You don't?"
I stare at him. Green skin gone dark in the fading light. Soil on his cheekbone. "A handprint of potting mix smeared across the W. Cargo shorts riding low on his hips. Military-pressed drop cloth at his feet.
He extends one enormous hand.
I take it.
He pulls me up like I weigh exactly nothing and guides me onto the tarp with the careful formality of someone ushering a guest into a ballroom. My boots hit the canvas. Clean. Sturdy. Still warm from being folded in his garage.
"Shoes off."
"Excuse me?"
"Canvas integrity."
I kick off my boots. He removes his, placing them side by side at the tarp's edge with their toes aligned to the weave. My boots go next to his. They look absurd together. His size fourteen steel-toed workboots. Mine, paint-splattered garden clogs with a daisy print.
We lie down. The canvas is stiff against my shoulder blades, nothing like a mattress, nothing like comfort, and it's the most comfortable surface I've ever touched because he's beside me.
His arm curls under my head. My cheek finds the shelf of his bicep, the muscle hard beneath warm green skin, and his other hand settles on my stomach.
Palm flat. Fingers spread. Covering the entire space between my hip bones.
Above us, stars. Actual stars, visible despite the subdivision's light pollution, scattered across a sky the color of spilled ink. His breathing slows. Mine matches it. Syncopated at first, then aligned in tandem like two instruments finding the same key.
"Your trellis is firewood."
"Mm."
"Need to rebuild it before judging."
"Tomorrow."
"Six AM."
"Eight."
"Seven."
"Done."
His thumb moves against my stomach. One slow circle.
Another. His breathing deepens. The runes go dark entirely, just faint green lines under his skin, dormant and satisfied.
His jaw unclenches. The permanent furrow between his brows smooths out and ten years of warband tension drain out of his face.
I turn my head. Press my lips against the inside of his bicep. Salt and grass and copper.
His arm tightens around me. A reflex. An anchor. Already half-gone, his consciousness sinking into the deep black water of genuine, uncomplicated sleep, and his face in the starlight looks younger. Unburdened. A little foolish. A lot beautiful.