2. Chapter 2 #4
"I'm." The stranger looked down at himself.
Knees in the dirt. Bare feet. Soil-smudged hands.
He looked back up and his eyes were bright and his cheeks were burning and his expression was caught in a war between mortification and amusement that amusement was decisively winning.
"I'm on my knees in the dirt talking to a flower and you're flirting with me. "
"I am."
"You don't even know my name."
"I don't."
"I could be anyone. I could be someone very important and you're being. You're being very forward."
"I've never seen anything more beautiful in my life," Valdyr said.
The words fell out of him like stones from a broken wall.
Unplanned. Unstoppable. True in a way that went past honesty into something raw and dangerous, and he meant them with every fiber of his being and he did not apologize for them, because he had never apologized for the truth and wasn't about to start.
The stranger stared at him.
His lips parted. His eyes went wide. His scent surged, not the controlled modulation of an omega managing his response but a helpless full-body bloom, biology recognizing something and answering with a certainty that bypassed everything conscious.
Sweet and warm and honeyed and wanting, and beneath it, threading through it like heat through honey, the unmistakable wet-green scent of slick, and Valdyr's cock jerked so hard against his laces that his vision tunneled.
Wet. The omega was getting wet. Standing here in the dark with dirt on his face and no shoes and his shirt sliding off his shoulder, getting slick for Valdyr, his body opening up with a directness his words hadn't reached yet, and the knowledge of it hit Valdyr's hindbrain like a fist and the word mate beat through him so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
"Oh," the stranger said, very softly. And then, with a breathless little laugh, "Oh, that's. You can't just say that to someone."
"Just did."
"Yes, but I have dirt on my face. I'm not wearing shoes. My hair is. I've been in a garden."
"I noticed."
"Those aren't typically the conditions under which someone says." He gestured vaguely, a fluttering motion that took in Valdyr and the air between them and the general concept of what had just occurred. "That."
Valdyr looked at him and wanted to put his mouth on his throat and breathe.
Wanted to press him into the dirt and cover him with his body and taste the skin behind his ear where the scent ran strongest. Wanted to find out exactly how wet he was, wanted to slide a hand between those pretty thighs and feel the slick on his fingers and hear what sound this sweet filthy-mouthed omega made when someone touched him where he was aching for it.
He wanted things he had never wanted in his life. He wanted them with a violence that should have frightened him and didn't.
He changed the subject, because if he didn't he was going to do something that would terrify the most beautiful person he had ever seen, and whatever Valdyr was, he was not that.
"Tell me about the flower," he said.
The stranger blinked. The pivot caught him mid-blush, and Valdyr could watch the recalibration happen, the is he still flirting mixing with relief at being handed room to breathe. And then he lit up.
"Oh. Well. She's a belladonna lily, like I said. They're not actually true lilies, they're Amaryllidaceae, that's the amaryllis family, but everyone calls them lilies and I've given up the fight, because the argument is taxonomic and nobody has ever enjoyed a taxonomic argument."
"I'd rather be stabbed than have a taxonomic argument."
"You see? That's a perfectly normal reaction.
You're already ahead of several scholars I've met.
" His hands moved when he talked, expressive, animated, dirt and all.
"She's a bulb. Goes dormant in summer, drops all her leaves, looks completely dead.
And then in late autumn, just when you've given up on her, she sends up this bare stem and blooms. No leaves.
Just the flowers. All on stored energy. She's been underground the whole time, preparing, and then she just." He opened his hands, fingers spreading.
"Arrives. Gorgeous. Every time. Even when nobody's been watching. "
There was something underneath the enthusiasm. A resonance, a hum of personal recognition, as though the flower were not entirely the subject.
"She's tough," the stranger said, quieter now, his fingers returning to the lily's stem with a gentleness that made something in Valdyr's chest ache like a bruise. "Doesn't need much. Good drainage, a warm spot, and someone to notice she's there. She'll do the rest herself."
Valdyr said nothing. The omega stroked a petal with his thumb, and the tenderness of it was almost obscene in its simplicity. This man touched everything as though it mattered, as though even a half-dead flower in a neglected garden deserved his full attention and his gentlest hands.
"You know a lot about flowers," Valdyr said, because he had to say something or he was going to say something else, something along the lines of who the fuck are you and why does every cell in my body think you belong to me.
"I know a lot about growing things. Flowers, herbs, vegetables. And bees."
"Bees."
His face did the thing again. Whatever guard he kept over it came off entirely the moment bees entered the conversation.
"I keep bees. I'm a beekeeper. I have. Had.
" Something flickered across his expression, quick and aching.
"Eight hives at home. Blues and yellows.
Painted them myself. They've never stung me. "
"Never?"
"Not once. My mother says it's because I smell like the hive. Honey and wax. I think it's more that I'm calm with them. Bees are perceptive. They can smell fear, they can smell intent. If you come to them steady, they'll walk right over you."
"And if you don't?"
"Then you get stung. And frankly you deserve it."
Valdyr huffed. It wasn't a laugh. He didn't laugh. But it was closer than most sounds he made, and the stranger heard the difference and his scent pulsed warm and pleased, and the bond hummed in Valdyr's chest like a plucked string.
"What about you?" the stranger asked, tipping his head. "You're not a gardener, I'd wager."
"What gave it away?"
"The hands." He nodded toward them, and his gaze lingered, on the dark scales, the scarred knuckles, the size. "Gardener's hands are rough in different places. Yours are rough everywhere."
"I'm a soldier."
"I thought so. Something about the way you carry yourself. Very purposeful. Like you're always heading toward something that needs hitting."
"Usually am."
Another smile. Warm and open and devastating. "And the horns? Are those. I'm sorry, is it rude to ask?"
"Not rude."
"I've never seen them up close. We don't have many demons in Aelholm.
" He said demon the way he said lily, with bright genuine interest and no fear whatsoever.
None of the morbid curiosity most people brought to the question, the what are you, are you dangerous, how hard is it to kill you running under every word.
Just warmth. Just wanting to know. "Can you feel anything through them? "
Valdyr looked at him. The omega's eyes were wide and earnest and his body had tilted toward him, unconscious and total, his scent reaching, and the question was innocent and the answer was not going to be.
"I can feel everything through them," Valdyr said.
His voice dropped. He didn't make it drop, or maybe he did, maybe there was no longer any distinction between what he intended and what this omega pulled out of him.
His tongue traced the edge of a fang, slow, deliberate.
"Pressure. Temperature. Vibration. They're more sensitive than my hands. "
The blush came back. It swept up from the collar of the linen shirt and flooded his throat and his cheeks and the bare skin of his shoulder, and his scent went thick and warm and honeyed with want, and the slick note deepened, richer now, and Valdyr could smell it as plainly as he could smell the rosemary and it was destroying him.
The omega looked away. His teeth caught his lower lip and worried it, and the gesture was so unconsciously, devastatingly sensual that Valdyr's claws bit into his palms hard enough to draw blood.
Then he looked back. Steady. Layered now with something not innocent at all, something warm and dark and deliberate underneath the sweetness.
"Everything?" the omega said.
"Everything," Valdyr confirmed, and his voice was gravel.
The silence between them went taut. Not uncomfortable. Charged. Their scents thickened the air, and the combination was extraordinary, complementary in a way that felt designed, as though the two of them had been made to fit and had been waiting for this specific collision.
They were too close. Valdyr knew they were too close because he could count the freckles across the bridge of the omega's nose.
Seven. There were seven, and he was going to remember that number for the rest of his miserable life.
He could see the gold flecks in those green eyes and the flutter of the pulse at the base of that throat, and the dominant note in the air was desire now, thick and obvious and so saturated with slick that his mouth watered.
He wanted to put this man on his back and spread his thighs and lick him open until he screamed.
He wanted the slick on his tongue and his fingers and his cock.
He wanted to bury himself in this body and stay there until neither of them could remember their own names.
The wanting was not a suggestion. It was a mandate, biology speaking in the only language it knew, absolute and unambiguous.
This is your mate and you will have him or you will die incomplete.
"You're staring," the omega whispered.
"Yes."
"You should probably stop."
"Probably." He didn't stop.