Chapter 9
Mab had never been carried before.
She had walked everywhere she'd ever gone, her own two feet on stone and dirt and kitchen floor, and if she was tired or hurt or sick, she walked anyway because no one was going to carry her.
Varek carried her like she weighed nothing.
One arm beneath her knees, one behind her back, her body tucked against his chest as he shouldered through the door of the lady's chamber.
His breathing hadn't changed. His stride hadn't slowed.
He'd lifted her in the kitchen yard and walked the entire length of the servants' passage without a single grunt of effort.
The door swung shut behind him with a heavy thud. Varek crossed the room and set her down on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping beneath her weight.
Then he stepped back.
Mab blinked up at him. The distance felt wrong after the heat of his chest against her side, the iron band of his arms around her. She started to reach for him.
"No." His voice was rough. "Stay there."
She stayed.
Varek stood at the foot of the bed, arms loose at his sides, and looked at her.
Not at her face. At all of her. His gaze moved from her bare feet to her knees to the place where the nightgown had ridden up around her thighs, and then higher, slower, tracing the curve of her belly through the thin linen, the swell of her breasts, the rapid rise and fall of her chest.
"I've been thinking about this since I pulled you out of that hole," he said. "What you'd look like spread out on a bed. What sounds you'd make when I got my hands on you."
Mab's breath caught. Her fingers curled into the bedding.
Varek's hands went to the laces of his tunic. He pulled them loose without looking, his eyes still fixed on her body. "I told myself to wait. Give you time. Let you choose."
His tunic hit the floor.
Mab couldn't look away.
She had seen him in the hall, felt the breadth of him beneath her hands, but she hadn't seen this.
The green skin stretched taut over muscle that looked carved from stone.
Scars everywhere, pale lines and puckered ridges that mapped a lifetime of violence across his chest, his ribs, the hard plane of his stomach.
A dark trail of hair ran from his navel down beneath the waistband of his leathers.
He was enormous. Not just tall or broad, but built on a scale that made the lady's chamber feel small around him.
"You chose," Varek said. "In the yard. You looked at me and told me what you wanted."
He stepped closer. The bed frame creaked when his knee pressed into the mattress.
"Now I'm going to give it to you."
His hand closed around her ankle.
"I'm going to take this nightgown off you," he said.
His voice was conversational, like he was explaining how to truss a haunch or bank a fire.
"I'm going to look at every part of your body.
And then I'm going to put my mouth on you until you scream.
" His thumb traced a circle against her ankle bone.
"After that, I'm going to work you open with my fingers.
One at a time. Until you're wet enough to take me.
" His hand slid up her calf, pushing the nightgown higher.
"And you will take me, Mab. Every inch. I'll make sure of it. "
The words landed somewhere beneath her ribs and stayed there, pulsing.
She should be afraid. Some distant part of her brain was cataloguing reasons for fear: his size, his strength, the casual way he'd just described taking her apart.
The scars on his chest. The hands that had killed men she had once known.
But the fear wouldn't come.
What came instead was a heat that started low in her belly and spread outward, pooling between her thighs. Her skin felt too tight. The nightgown felt like a cage.
His hand had reached her knee. His thumb pressed into the hollow at the back of it, and her leg fell open.
"Good," Varek said. "Just like that."
She had spent her whole life learning to take up less space. To press her knees together, tuck her elbows in, shrink herself down to fit the corners she'd been assigned. And now this orc was spreading her open with one hand and telling her it was good.
"Sit up."
She sat.
His hands found the cracked leather belt at her waist and worked the buckle loose. Then he gathered the nightgown in his fists and pulled it up over her head in one motion.
Cold air hit her skin. Mab crossed her arms over her chest.
Varek caught her wrists. "No," he said. He drew her arms down to her sides and held them there. Then he stepped back far enough to see all of her.
Mab had never been naked in front of a man.
She knew what she looked like. The soft roll of her belly, the dimpled flesh of her thighs, the breasts that had never fit properly into any bodice the household provided. She knew what men saw when they looked at her. When they looked past her.
Varek was not looking past her.
His gaze moved over her body like a hand. Down from her throat to her breasts, lingering there, watching the way they rose and fell with her breathing. Lower, to the curve of her waist, the swell of her belly, the dark hair between her thighs. His nostrils flared.
He dropped to his knees at the foot of the bed.
The thud of it shook the frame. Varek on his knees still put his head level with her chest, his shoulders broader than her entire body, his hands settling on her thighs, pressing them apart. Mab's hands knotted in the sheets. She could feel herself shaking.
Varek leaned in. His breath was hot against the inside of her thigh, and then his nose pressed against the crease where her leg met her body, and he inhaled.
The sound he made was obscene. A groan that rumbled up from somewhere deep in his chest, vibrating against her skin.
"You smell like wanting," he said. "You've smelled like this since the hall.
Since I put you in my lap and ground you against my cock.
" His thumbs pressed into her inner thighs, spreading her wider.
"Do you know what that does to me? Sitting in a room full of my men, and all I can smell is your cunt getting wet for me? "
His mouth was so close she could feel the heat of his breath against her folds. His tusks grazed the sensitive skin of her inner thigh, dragging over flesh that had never been touched by anyone.
"Varek." His name came out cracked.
"That's it." His thumbs spread her open, and she felt the air against her slick heat. "Say my name. I want to hear it when I make you come."
His tongue touched her.
Mab's hips jerked off the bed. His hands clamped down on her thighs, holding her in place, and his tongue dragged a slow line through her cunt.
She had never felt anything like it.
His tongue was broad and hot and impossibly thorough, licking into her like she was something to be savored. His mouth sealed over the swollen bud at the apex of her thighs and sucked.
Mab's back arched off the bed. A sound tore out of her throat, something between a moan and a sob, and her hands flew to his head. Her fingers found the coarse strands of his hair, the thick braid at the back of his skull, and held on.
His tongue circled her, then flattened, then circled again.
He was learning her. Mapping her responses the way she'd once mapped the kitchen, every surface and corner and hidden space committed to memory.
When she whimpered, he pressed harder. When she gasped, he slowed down.
When her thighs tried to close around his head, his hands forced them wider and his mouth grew more insistent.
One hand left her thigh. She felt his finger trace through the wetness his mouth had left, sliding down to her entrance and pressing in.
Mab's breath locked in her chest. His finger was thicker than anything she'd imagined, and it slid into her slowly, so slowly, giving her body time to adjust around it.
"Good," Varek said.
His mouth returned to the swollen bud above, sucking while his finger worked in and out of her in a rhythm that matched the pulse pounding in her ears.
The pressure built. Not gradually, but in waves that crested higher each time his tongue circled and his finger curled. Mab's thighs were trembling, her fingers twisted in his hair, her breath coming in ragged gasps that didn't sound like her own voice.
"That's it." A second finger pressed against her entrance. "Breathe."
She breathed. The stretch burned, a sharp edge beneath the pleasure, and she heard herself whimper. His mouth never stopped moving, tongue working her in relentless circles while his fingers stretched her open.
"When I get my cock inside you," Varek said, "you're going to feel this everywhere. Every ridge. Every inch. And you're going to take it because your body was made for this. Made for me."
Her hips bucked against his mouth, chasing something building at the base of her spine and spreading outward like fire through dry kindling. His fingers drove deeper, and his mouth sealed over her swollen flesh and sucked hard.
Mab shattered.
The sound that came out of her wasn't a scream.
It was something rawer than that, torn from somewhere deep inside her she hadn't known existed.
Her thighs clamped around his head despite the hands holding them open, her back arched off the bed, and her body clenched around his fingers in waves that went on and on.
Varek didn't stop.
His tongue kept working her through it, drawing out every spasm until she was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. His fingers stayed buried inside her.
"Again," he said.