13. Chapter 13
Valdyr was barely down on the blankets before Lorne's arms were around his neck.
The contact was total. Lorne pressed himself against him with a force that was need and relief and weeks of restraint coming apart all at once, hands fisting in the back of Valdyr's jerkin, face buried in his throat, his whole body arching toward the warmth of him.
His scent came wide open, and the bond went off between them, every week of careful distance collapsing into the shockwave of finally.
Valdyr caught him. One arm around his back, one hand at the back of his head, and for a moment they only held on.
Lorne was trembling in long continuous waves and his skin was burning through his clothes and his scent was a storm, and Valdyr breathed and let the bond settle between them like a river finding its bed.
Then Lorne pulled back far enough to see his face. His eyes were glassy with heat and present behind it, the man Valdyr knew still there underneath, the beekeeper, the gardener, the one who talked to flowers and remembered every servant's name. The heat was an overlay. It had not erased anything.
Valdyr took his face in both hands. Careful, the way he had in the greenhouse.
"You're sure."
"I told you before you touched me," Lorne said. "Ask me a hundred times if you need to. The answer was made in a garden."
He answered the rest of it by kissing him.
The kiss was not soft. It was not the slow deliberate thing from the narrow bed. It was deep and desperate and consuming, Lorne's mouth opening under his, his hands hauling Valdyr closer with a strength the heat had lent him, and Valdyr's vision went white at the edges.
The taste of Lorne in heat was the garden scent concentrated down to liquid, honey on the tongue and sweetness in the throat and underneath it something darker and richer.
Everything his body had refused to make for the king, and it was pouring out of him now, every note of it amplified.
Valdyr's hands tightened on his jaw and he kissed him back with a ferocity he had been holding for weeks and that came through now like water through a broken dam.
Lorne made a sound into it. Not a whimper. Something lower, that started in his chest and traveled down the bond and struck Valdyr at the base of the spine.
That was the end of his restraint.
His hands moved. The jerkin first, Lorne already pulling at the buckles with fingers too unsteady to manage them, and Valdyr took over and had it off in seconds. Then the shirt, soaked through and clinging, and Valdyr peeled it away and stopped.
Lorne. Bare to the waist. Skin flushed in the candlelight, warm brown gone pink with heat, the elegant line of the collarbones, the narrow chest, the soft curve of his stomach.
Valdyr had known he was beautiful since the first night in the garden.
Knowing and seeing were different animals, and this, bare-skinned and burning and reaching for him with shaking hands, was going into the permanent record of his life.
He pulled his own shirt over his head, and Lorne's hands were on him immediately, palms flat to his chest, fingers spread over the scars, exploring with the avid tactile curiosity that was the whole of him even now.
They found the edges where the scales came up off his forearms onto his shoulders, the darker plates that armored his upper arms and the sides of his ribs, and traced them with something between hunger and reverence.
"You're extraordinary," Lorne breathed.
"I'm a demon."
"I know. You're extraordinary."
Valdyr pushed him down onto the blankets.
Not roughly. A hand on his shoulder, guiding, and Lorne went with it and folded back into the pile with his hair spilling around his head. Valdyr came down over him braced on one arm, covering without crushing, and the full length of the contact went through the bond hard enough to rock them both.
Lorne gasped. His hips rolled up, seeking, and Valdyr felt the wet heat of him through what was left of their clothes.
"Off," Lorne managed. "I need. Valdyr, I need."
They got through the rest of it badly. Boots and trousers and Lorne's soaked underclothes and Valdyr's laces, and Lorne's hands were shaking too hard to be any use and he tried anyway, pulling at the ties with a determination that was endearing and unbearable in equal measure.
Valdyr caught his hands and pressed a brief rough kiss to the knuckles and did the laces himself.
Then they were bare.
Lorne's body in the candlelight was a country Valdyr intended to learn by heart.
Every line of him. And the freckles, scattered across his shoulders and his chest in the same faint pattern that crossed his nose, as though somebody had thrown a handful of stars at him and not bothered to aim.
Between his thighs the evidence of the heat was devastating, slick shining on the inside of his legs, his body open and aching.
"Don't stare," Lorne whispered. But his voice was unsteady and his thighs had fallen wider, an invitation his mouth was still too shy to issue.
"I'm going to stare." Valdyr's voice was wrecked. "I'm going to stare at you for the rest of my life."
Lorne's breath caught on something that was half a laugh. "You can't say things like that when I'm..."
"Naked? Wet? The most beautiful thing I've ever seen?"
The words were the same ones he had said in a ruined garden with dirt on this man's face, and they both heard it.
"Valdyr."
"Tell me what you need."
Low and direct, and it went through the haze like a blade through silk. Lorne's eyes came into focus and the real Lorne surfaced.
"You. I need you to touch me. I need..." A wave took him, his back leaving the blankets, a moan tearing out of him. His hand found Valdyr's arm and gripped. "Please. Please."
Valdyr put his mouth on Lorne's throat.
Not the bite point. Not the gland. The soft vulnerable curve where the neck ran into the shoulder, and the contact made Lorne shudder head to foot.
Then lower. The hollow of the throat. The line of the collarbone.
The flat of his chest, where his heart was going hard enough to feel against Valdyr's lips.
Lorne's hands were in his hair, threading through and gripping and guiding, his body restless under Valdyr's mouth. His scent had filled the shelter to the walls.
Lower. The soft curve of his stomach, the muscles quivering under Valdyr's lips. The jut of a hipbone. The crease where hip met thigh, where the scent of slick concentrated into something that took the top off Valdyr's mind, and he put his mouth there and Lorne's whole body came off the blankets.
"Oh."
Valdyr's hand slid between his thighs, and the slick came away warm and abundant on his fingers, and the fact of it settled into his chest with a fierce and tender satisfaction.
This body. The one that had been called defective and broken and worthless by a man who had never once earned a single drop of it.
He slid one finger in and Lorne keened, high and sharp, his hands flying to Valdyr's shoulders. The grip was bruising. The sound was the best thing Valdyr had ever heard.
"More. I can take it, please."
A second finger, and Lorne's body opened for him with a willingness that was staggering, and the sound he made went deeper and rougher.
Valdyr worked him slowly. Not because he needed the preparation, heat-ready and desperate as he was, but because this was Lorne's first everything and Valdyr was going to do it properly if it killed him.
He curled his fingers and found what he was looking for, and Lorne's body jackknifed and his eyes went wide and blind.
"Valdyr, what..."
"There." Gravel, against his hip. "Right there."
He pressed again and Lorne's hands scrabbled at his shoulders and the sound that came out of him was wrecked and gorgeous.
"You're going to come before I even get inside you," Valdyr said, low and filthy, saying the things that had been pressing on his teeth for weeks in the hidden hours while he lay beside this man and held himself still.
"Look at you. So wet. So fucking perfect.
You've been waiting for this. This body has been waiting for me. "
"Yes. Since the garden, I've..."
"I know what you've wanted." His fingers moved steady and relentless. "I've smelled it every time you walked into a room. Every time you looked at me. Every time you left lavender on my pillow and walked away when you wanted to stay."
Lorne was shaking continuously now, thighs trembling around Valdyr's hand.
"I'm going to..."
"Come."
One word, command and permission together. Valdyr pressed deep and curled and Lorne arched off the blankets and came untouched, his cock pulsing against his own stomach, his body clenching hard around Valdyr's fingers, his mouth open on Valdyr's name broken into pieces that did not connect.
Valdyr watched all of it. The arch of the spine, the flush going across the chest, the hands twisting in the blankets, the face going slack and open. He kept his fingers inside him and felt the aftershocks and the bond ran between them with a resonance that was nearly audible.
Lorne came down slowly, breathing ragged, and his eyes opened and found Valdyr's face, and the look on him was stunned.
"That was. I've never..."
"I know."
"I didn't know it could..."
"I know."
His eyes were bright with heat and tears and something that was neither. He reached up and cupped Valdyr's jaw, and the touch had nothing to do with the heat at all.
"More," he said.
Not a demand. A request, made with those eyes and that bruised voice and full knowledge of what he was asking for.
"I want all of it. I want you."
Valdyr withdrew his fingers and Lorne made a small bereft sound at the loss, and then Valdyr was moving over him, one hand on his hip, and they both went still.
One breath. Two.
"Look at me."
Lorne's eyes found his. The bond pulled taut between them, a live wire. The candle guttered and the shelter was small and warm and the world outside it did not exist.
Valdyr pressed in.
Lorne's body opened for him.