Chapter Twenty #2
“You’re dripping,” he said against her ear, his voice a rasp of orcish-accented English. “You’re so wet I can hear it. Is this from the fight? From watching me in the council chamber? From thinking about what I was going to do to you tonight?”
“All of it,” she gasped, rocking against his hand. “All of it, you arrogant, insufferable, beautiful, ” She lost the sentence when he added a third finger and thrust deep.
He stroked her until she was shaking, until her face was pressed into the pillow and her hips were working against his hand in desperate, rolling circles. Then he withdrew his fingers and she whimpered at the loss, a sound Harper Stone, investigative journalist, would never admit to making.
He gripped her hip with one hand, positioned his cock with the other, and pushed inside her in one long, relentless slide.
She screamed into the pillow. Not pain, they’d done this enough times now that her body knew how to take him, but the angle was different from behind, deeper, the thick head of his cock pressing against her front wall in a way that lit up every nerve ending she had.
He felt her stretch around him, felt the squeeze and flutter of her inner walls through the bond, and the dual sensation, his own pleasure layered with hers, made his vision narrow to a single bright point.
“Mine,” he snarled against the back of her neck, pulling out almost all the way and slamming home.
The word was orcish, it meant more than possession, it meant the one my blood chose, the one I will protect with my last breath, the one whose pleasure is my sacred obligation, and the weight of it resonated through the bond until she could feel the meaning even without knowing the language.
“Yours,” she gasped. “Now prove it.”
He proved it.
He fucked her with the ferocity the bond demanded, deep, punishing strokes that rocked her forward on the bed with every thrust. His hand fisted in her hair, pulling her head back, exposing the long line of her throat.
His other hand gripped her hip hard enough to leave fingerprint bruises on her fair skin, and she wanted them.
Wanted the marks. Wanted to look at them tomorrow and remember that the man who presented a measured, reasonable face to the world had come apart for her like this, savage and desperate and completely unmasked.
She braced herself on her forearms and pushed back to meet every thrust, their bodies colliding with a force that would have been violent if it hadn’t been so precisely what they both needed.
The sound of skin against skin filled the room, wet, rhythmic, punctuated by her sharp cries and his guttural orcish.
“Harder,” she demanded. “I want to feel this tomorrow.”
He gave her harder. Reared up on his knees, both hands gripping her hips, hauling her back onto his cock with every forward snap of his hips.
The angle was merciless, the head of his cock dragging against that spot on every stroke, and she could feel her orgasm building like a fist clenching, tighter and tighter, the pressure coiling at the base of her spine.
“Touch yourself,” he commanded, his voice wrecked. “I want to feel you come on my cock. I want to feel your body squeeze me so tight I can’t breathe.”
She slid her hand between her legs and pressed her fingers to her clit, and the added stimulation on top of the relentless depth of him, the thickness stretching her, the head battering her deepest spots, the raw possessiveness of his grip, was too much.
The orgasm hit her like a wall. Her whole body seized, her inner walls clamping down on him in fierce, rhythmic pulses, and she buried her face in the pillow and screamed his name, not the prince, not the diplomat, Drake, just Drake, the man she’d broken open and found gold inside.
He followed her over the edge with a roar that seemed to rise from the mountain’s roots, no human throat could have made it, ancient and primal and claiming.
He slammed deep and held, his cock pulsing inside her as he came in hot, endless surges, filling her while the bond blazed between them so bright she could feel it in her bones.
He collapsed over her, his weight pressing her into the mattress, his breath ragged against the back of her neck.
She could feel his heartbeat hammering through his chest into her spine.
His cock still buried inside her, softening slowly, their bodies still joined in the most fundamental way two people could be.
He rolled to the side, pulling her with him, still inside her. Spooned around her, his arm across her waist, his face buried in her hair. She could feel his hand shaking where it rested on her stomach.
“Are you okay?” she whispered.
“I just, ” His voice cracked. The diplomat. The prince. The man who always had the right words. “You make me feel like being myself isn’t a liability. Every version. The orc and the human and the mess in between. You make me feel like all of it is enough.”
She turned in his arms, dislodging him, and cupped his face. His eyes were bright with something that might have been tears if he’d been a man who admitted to them.
“You are enough,” she said. “You were always enough. The world was just too stupid to see it.”
He kissed her. Softly this time. And then they were quiet.
Harper lay against his chest, tracing the pattern of bruises from the trial that were slowly fading from his skin. “I’m publishing the story,” she said. “All of it. Including the part about us.”
Drake went still.
“The prince and the journalist,” she continued, her voice steady with the particular calm of a woman who had made a decision and found peace in it.
“An orc who loves a human who loves him back. It’s the heart of the story.
It’s what makes people care about the politics and the conspiracy and the legal arguments.
Without the love, it’s just data. With it, it’s human. ”
“Orc,” he corrected softly.
“Both.” She tilted her face up to his. “It’s both. That’s the point.”
He closed his eyes. The fear was still there, the diplomat’s instinct to control, to protect, to manage the narrative.
But beneath it, stronger now, was the certainty the trial had planted and the mate bond had watered: the truth was their best weapon.
Their only weapon. And the woman in his arms was the one person in the world he trusted to wield it.
“Then tell it true,” he said.
“I always do.”
He kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes. Outside, the mountain held its breath, and inside, two people who had spent their lives building masks lay together without a single wall between them and decided, together, to trust the world with the truth.
* * *