Chapter Ten #3
He bottomed out. Fully seated, his hips pressed flush against hers, and the sensation of being completely inside her, surrounded by her heat, gripped by her body, connected through the bond in a circuit that ran from his chest to hers and back, ignited something he hadn’t known existed.
The mate bond flared to full, blazing life.
He felt it lock into place like a key turning, the click, the certainty, the sense of coming home to a place he hadn’t known existed until this woman kicked open the door.
Harper gasped and he knew she felt it too.
Two frequencies merging into a harmony that vibrated in bone and blood and soul.
“Fuck me,” she whispered. “Please, Drake, fuck me…”
He drew back slowly, almost all the way, until just the head remained inside her, and thrust forward in one smooth, deep stroke.
She cried out, her back arching, her nails raking down his arms. He did it again.
And again. Long, deep strokes that dragged every inch of him against her inner walls, the friction so intense he could feel her pulse around him.
“You feel incredible,” he gritted out, his forehead pressed to hers. “So tight. So wet. Just so right.” The orcish word that left his mouth had no English translation. It meant something like the place my body comes home to.
She rolled her hips up to meet him, changing the angle, and when his cock hit the spot his fingers had found earlier, her whole body seized and a sound left her that was half scream, half prayer.
He memorized the angle and hit it again.
Again. Each thrust punctuated by the slick sound of their bodies meeting and the low growl building in his chest.
“Harder,” she gasped, her heels digging into the backs of his thighs. “Give it all to me Drake.”
The last thread of his control didn’t snap. It dissolved.
He reared up on his knees, gripped her hips in both hands, and drove into her with the full force of his orc strength.
She screamed, not in pain, in fierce, blazing pleasure, and braced her hands against the headboard to keep from sliding up the bed.
The new angle was deeper, harder, his thick cock hitting her so deep she could feel him in her belly, and each punishing thrust sent shockwaves of pleasure radiating through her core.
“Yes,” she hissed through clenched teeth. “Right there, don’t you dare stop, ”
He was lost. The diplomat, the prince, the man who measured every word, gone.
What remained was orc: snarling, possessive, driving into his mate with single-minded ferocity while the bond blazed between them like a signal fire.
He shifted one hand from her hip and pressed his thumb to her clit, rubbing in tight, fast circles that matched the brutal pace of his hips.
Harper’s orgasm hit like a detonation. She arched off the bed, her inner walls locking down around him in contractions so fierce his vision whited out, her scream shattering into his name and a sound beyond language.
He felt every pulse of it through the bond, her pleasure crashing through his nervous system like a wave, amplified, reflected back, an infinite feedback loop of shared sensation.
Two more thrusts. He buried himself to the hilt, his roar shaking the walls, and came so hard his whole body locked rigid. He spilled inside her in hot, wrenching pulses, each one wrung from somewhere deeper than muscle, and the bond blazed so bright he couldn’t tell where he ended and she began.
She held him through it. Arms around his back. Legs locked around his waist. Her body still fluttering around his softening cock in gentle aftershocks that made him twitch and groan against her throat.
Afterward, they lay tangled together in the firelight. Her head on his chest. His arms around her. His heartbeat slowing against her ear, the rhythm of it becoming the metronome of a new world.
She traced the line of his jaw with her fingertip, the strong orc bone structure softened by his human genetics, the place where his tusk emerged from his lower lip.
He caught her hand and pressed his mouth to her palm, and the tenderness of the gesture after the ferocity of what they’d shared made her eyes sting.
“That was, ” she started.
“Off the record,” he said.
She laughed. Really laughed, full-throated, warm, a laugh with no performance in it and no armor.
It was the most beautiful sound Drake had ever heard, and he filed it in the part of his memory where he kept the things that mattered: his mother’s photographs, his father’s voice, the first time the settlement appeared through the trees when he was coming home.
Harper fell asleep in his arms. Drake watched the fire die and felt the bond humming between them, steady, permanent, the architecture of a shared future being built one heartbeat at a time.
He knew, with the clarity the bond provided, that this woman was his future. He also knew that her story, their story, might destroy everything he was fighting for.
He held her tighter. He chose not to think about tomorrow.
Tomorrow would come anyway. Tonight, they were home.