Chapter Ten #2
Not like the forest, desperate and adrenaline-scorched and tasting of survival.
This was slow. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that started as a question and answered itself.
His mouth found hers, and the mate bond detonated in his chest like a star going nova, not painful, not overwhelming, just right.
The way a key felt turning in a lock. The way coming home felt after years of performing for strangers.
Harper’s fingers curled into his shirt, pulling him closer. He went willingly, one hand cradling her face, the other sliding to the small of her back. She was warm through the Georgetown sweatshirt, warm and real and pressing against him with an urgency that matched his own.
“Stay,” she whispered against his mouth. “Drake, please stay.”
He pulled the sweatshirt over her head. She wore nothing underneath it, and the sight of her, bare from the waist up, her fair skin glowing in the firelight, her breasts full and round with pink nipples already peaked from the cool air, made his blood roar so loud he could hear it in his teeth.
“Gods,” he breathed. The word came out in orcish, guttural and worshipful.
She reached for his shirt. Drew it up over his head, her fingers trailing across his stomach, his chest, the ridges of green-gray muscle that marked him as something other than human.
He braced himself for the hesitation, the flicker of unease, the moment when the reality of what he was overrode the fantasy.
It didn’t come.
Harper pressed her mouth to the center of his chest, right over his hammering heart, and kissed the place where his orc physiology was most visible, the thicker skin, the denser muscle, like it was sacred.
His orc instincts warred with his human restraint.
He was bigger than her, stronger, built from a biology that expressed desire in a register that could be overwhelming.
He’d spent his whole life calibrating himself down, and now, with her mouth hot against his skin and her hands working at his belt, the calibration was failing.
A growl built in his chest. Low, involuntary, the sound an orc male made when the bond demanded completion. He froze, the sound was too much, too raw, too alien,
“Don’t stop.” Harper’s voice, fierce against his skin. Her hands on his face, pulling him back to her. “Don’t you dare stop.”
He lifted her. She gasped at the ease of it, one arm beneath her thighs, the other banded around her back, and her legs wrapped around his waist. The new position pressed the hard ridge of his cock against the heat between her thighs, only two layers of fabric separating them, and they both groaned at the friction.
He laid her down on the bed and knelt above her, drinking in the sight. Her fair skin against the dark furs. Her hair fanned around her. Her chest rising and falling fast, nipples dark and tight, her eyes wide and wanting.
He bent and took one nipple into his mouth.
She arched off the bed with a cry, her hands flying to his head, fingers gripping his hair.
He groaned against her breast, sucking the stiff peak deeper, rolling it against his tongue, then grazing the underside with the smooth flat edge of his tusk.
She writhed and gasped and he felt her hips roll up against him, seeking friction.
He moved to the other breast, giving it the same slow, thorough attention, licking, sucking, testing the scrape of his tusk until he found the exact pressure that made her thighs clamp around his waist and a string of breathless profanity leave her mouth.
“Your mouth,” she panted. “God, Drake, your mouth, ”
He kissed lower. Her ribs. The dip of her navel. His hands found the waistband of her jeans and he looked up at her. She was propped on her elbows, chest heaving, nipples glistening wet from his mouth.
“Yes,” she said before he could ask. Her hips lifted and he peeled the jeans and underwear down her legs in one smooth pull.
She was naked beneath him and the scent of her arousal hit him like a physical blow, rich and musky and so perfectly her that his cock strained painfully against his remaining clothes. He could see how wet she was, her inner thighs slick, her folds swollen and glistening in the firelight.
He shoved his own pants down and kicked them off, and her eyes dropped to his cock. The reaction he’d feared, shock, alarm at the size, didn’t come. What came instead was a slow, deliberate lick of her lips and a murmured “oh” that made his cock jump visibly.
He was big. He knew that. Even among orcs he was above average, thick and long, the green-gray skin flushed dark with blood, the head broad and slick where he was already leaking.
The sight of her looking at him with naked hunger instead of apprehension made something primal and possessive surge through him.
He settled between her thighs, his broad shoulders pushing them wide, and pressed his mouth to the crease of her hip. She shivered. He kissed the other side. Her thigh. Her inner thigh. Slowly, deliberately, everywhere except where she needed him.
“Drake,” she growled. “If you don’t, ”
He licked a slow, flat stripe up the center of her, from her entrance to her clit, and her entire body jolted.
The taste of her flooded his mouth, salt and musk and heat, and the groan that left his chest was barely human.
He licked her again, slower, pressing his tongue flat and wide against her swollen flesh, and felt her thighs tremble on either side of his head.
He explored her with ruthless patience. Learned the exact spot that made her hips buck, just to the left of her clit, the swollen bundle of nerves that twitched under his tongue with every pass.
Learned that if he sealed his lips around it and sucked gently while flicking with the tip of his tongue, she made a sound somewhere between a scream and a sob.
Learned that two fingers slid inside her, thick orc fingers that stretched her in a way that made her gasp and clench and rock against his hand, turned the pleasure from sharp to deep, a bass note under the treble of his mouth.
“More,” she gasped. “Another, I can take it, ”
He added a third finger and felt her body resist, then yield, stretching around the intrusion with a moan that vibrated through her whole frame. He curled them upward, pressing against the spongy spot on her front wall, and stroked in rhythm with his tongue on her clit.
Her hands fisted in the furs. Her thighs clamped against his ears. Her back arched so sharply her shoulders lifted off the bed. She was close, he could feel it through the bond, her pleasure spiraling tight in his own gut, a shared frequency building toward detonation.
“I’m going to, Drake, I’m, ”
He sucked her clit into his mouth and pressed hard with his curved fingers and she shattered.
Her inner walls clamped down on his fingers in rhythmic, pulsing contractions, her whole body shaking, a cry ripping from her throat that echoed off the stone walls.
He groaned against her flesh and worked her through it, slower now, gentler, easing her down as the aftershocks rippled through her.
When her hands unclenched from the furs and her breathing slowed from ragged to merely wrecked, he pressed soft kisses up her body. Belly. Ribs. The valley between her breasts. She hauled him up by the shoulders and kissed him, open-mouthed and fierce, tasting herself on his lips.
“I need you inside me,” she said against his mouth. No hesitation. No negotiation. A statement of fact as clear and direct as any she’d ever printed.
He settled over her, his weight braced on one forearm, and reached between them. She was so wet that when he dragged the head of his cock through her folds, coating himself in her slickness, they both shuddered. He nudged against her entrance and paused.
“You’re big,” she said. Not a complaint. An observation, made with the same analytical interest she brought to everything. “Go slow.”
He pressed forward. Just the head, thick and broad, stretching her open. She gasped, a sharp, startled sound, and her nails bit into his shoulders. He froze.
“Don’t stop.” Her voice was strained but certain. “Just, let me adjust.”
He held himself still, every muscle in his body trembling with the effort.
She was impossibly tight around just the tip of him, hot and wet and clenching, and the sensation was so intense his vision blurred at the edges.
Through the bond he felt what she felt, the stretch, the fullness, the ache that was pain and pleasure braided together so tightly she couldn’t separate them.
She exhaled slowly. Rolled her hips. Took another inch of him and made a sound that went straight to his spine.
“More,” she breathed.
He gave her more. Slow, controlled, sinking deeper one inch at a time.
She was taking him beautifully, her body opening around him, her breath coming in short, rhythmic gasps, her hands gripping his arms like anchors.
Halfway in, she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled, and the sudden slide of three more inches made them both groan.
“Fuck,” she whispered, and the profanity in her precise journalist’s voice was the most erotic thing he’d ever heard.