Chapter 3
The hearing drags by, and I count every second until it’s done. Somewhere between last night and this morning, I decide I’m going to fuck him today. It’s happening. I mean, if we’re supposedly destined for each other, why fight it?
Valdrek is already in the room when I walk in, and I suddenly wish I had sexier work clothes. I’m wearing a plain skirt with a button-down pink shirt, and my hair is up in a bun. Not exactly seductress clothing.
There’s a steaming cup of tea sitting on the coffee table beside the untouched mints.
I want to ask him how he knew exactly when I’d be here, but he probably smelled me coming in this direction as soon as the hearing adjourned.
The pamphlet says that’s a real thing he can do, and I’ve decided to find it flattering instead of alarming.
I expect more small talk, but as soon as I sit and take a sip of the tea, either something in it or the juniper smell of him bypasses my filter, and I ask him something honest.
“Valdrek. Why don’t you talk?”
His ears come around, and he considers me for a long moment.
“Stormbreak is loud,” he says. “My clan. My shieldmate. Everyone. Words are water there. Spilled everywhere, worth nothing. Mine land differently.” And then a door behind his eyes closes.
That’s a partial answer if I’ve ever heard one, but his pupils are spreading, and I’ve got better things to wonder about right now. I put my cup down.
“So you’ve got words,” I say. “Fourteen months on this island, and you’re sitting on a vault.”
“Yes.”
“What’s in it?”
He goes still, and the black of his pupils fully swallows the gold. When he speaks, his voice drops to the register that makes me embarrassingly wet.
“You want to know what I would say?”
My heart pounds.
“Yes,” I say, breathy. “Tell me.”
He looks at the door pointedly and then back at me. “For you. Only ever for you. Close the door, Wren.”
I have never moved faster in my life. I give the poor handler a soft smile as I close it. I turn around, and Valdrek’s standing now, filling the whole room.
“Come here,” he says.
I plant myself in front of him. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but it better end with his cock inside me. My body has been ready for this since 3:41 p.m. two days ago.
“I watched you today,” he says, and the words are an unhurried rumble.
“I walked past the hearing room. You were sitting in the corner holding every word they said, and no one looked at you. I looked. I have been saving words, thess’venna, and I am going to spend them now.
And you are going to stand still and listen.
” He raises a hand to my hair and takes hold of one of my hairpins.
“Shall I tell you what I’m going to do?”
Shall. Who taught the mountain the word shall? At this point, I don’t care. My body has priorities. He doesn’t pull the pin, instead trailing his fingertip down my cheek to the nape of my neck. My skin lights up at the caress, and I shiver.
“God, yes.”
“First, your hair. I have wanted it down since the hearing room.” He takes the pins out slowly, setting each one on the coffee table.
My hair falls to my shoulders in loose waves, and he leans down and inhales against it.
I’m shivering from being this close to him, and it’s good he’s the one speaking because I don’t know how much I can say.
He groans softly, and my clit throbs. “There. Now I’m going to take your clothes off you, and I am going to take my time. Your clothes are your armor. I want to feel how soft your skin is without them.”
His knuckles graze my skin along the collar of my blouse, and the shiver that runs through me gives me away completely.
“You’re shaking.” His mouth is close to my ear now, and the words pour warmth down my neck.
“I can smell how wet you are. I’ve been smelling you all day and thinking about doing this.
You soak through your panties every time you’re around me or think about me.
You press your knees together under the table and keep your face calm, thinking no one knows.
” He pauses. “Tell me you want this. I need the word. Yours.”
“I want this,” I moan. “Badly.”
“Badly,” he repeats, weighing the word. “Then I’ll tell you the rest. When your blouse is off, I’m going to kneel, because you should see what I look like on my knees for you.
And I’m going to take everything else off of you, and lick your pussy.
I am not going to stop until you’ve come twice and forgotten how to spell your own name.
And then, if you ask nicely, I am going to pump you so full of cum you’re going to feel it dripping down your legs. ”
Everything south of my navel clenches hard, and my brain just stops, every thought gone but one — he was saving that?
“What does it mean?” I manage, as the first button on my blouse gives. “Thess’venna?”
“Later.” Second button. Third. “You’ll earn the translation.” Fourth. “Look at that,” he rumbles, dragging one knuckle down the strip of bare skin he’s opened. “Your breath changes every time I touch you.”
The last button gives, and he slides the blouse off my arms slowly, letting the fabric drag.
“Now this.” One finger under my bra strap. “Pretty, but in my way.” He unhooks it and lets it drop.
“Your breasts are going to be heavy in my hands,” he says, before he’s touched me at all, in absolutely no hurry. “Heavy and perfect. And when I get my thumbs on your nipples, you’re going to make a sound that’s just for me to keep.”
By the time he palms my breasts, I’m pushing into him shamelessly. He’s right about everything. When his thumbs cross my nipples, I whimper loudly.
“There,” he rumbles. “That sound. Fourteen months, this island called me silent. I was just waiting for someone worth answering.”
Then he kneels. Seven feet of orc coming down to his knees in front of me is a geological event.
Even kneeling, he’s not that much shorter than me.
He peels my skirt and panties down slowly.
When I step out of the last of it, shoes included, I’m standing completely naked while an orc looks at me like I’m the banquet he’s been waiting years to devour.
“Lie back on the couch,” he says. “Let me work.”
No way I’m going to argue. The couch is exactly the right height for this, which raises questions about who’s ordering the furniture that I’ll pursue another day. He settles between my thighs, wraps two enormous hands around my hips, and stops, mouth an inch from my pussy.
“Look at you.” His breath alone is almost contact. “Swollen and wet. All this under the gray skirt in the corner of that room.” His thumbs spread me open, and the sound that comes out of him is half growl, half grace before a meal. “I am going to tell you a secret, my heart. I talk when I work.”
My heart? I don’t have time to dwell on his word choices.
He isn’t lying about talking while he works.
The tusks, which I have been quietly wondering about since the cafeteria, turn out to be part of the plan.
They come in smooth side first, two warm curves settled against my inner thighs, at an angle he has clearly worked out in advance.
He solved a problem I hadn’t even considered, and if his hands weren’t holding my thighs open, those tusks alone could.
His tongue is longer than a human’s and more dexterous, which the orientation binder didn’t cover. Does the person who wrote it even know? He uses it with months’ worth of patience, long strokes and then a tight, devastating focus. And every time he lifts away half an inch, he talks.
“Sweet like honey.” He says it against me, and the rumble goes right through my clit. “I’ve been wondering what you’d taste like all day.”
I don’t get an answer out before he’s licking me again. The next time he surfaces, I’m moaning loudly.
“Your thighs are shaking against my ears.” He sounds deeply satisfied about it. “Leave them there. I want to feel it when you come apart.” I’m whimpering as he continues to speak between deep licks. “I’m going slow now. Right there. Feel your legs give.”
They nearly do.
“Now faster. Don’t hold your breath.”
I’m already holding my breath.
“Breathe, Wren. I have time. I’m not going anywhere for a long, long while.”
Four seconds of warning before every single thing he does, so my body braces and melts in the same breath.
“Valdrek.” My hands find his hair, that one short braid. “I’d like to amend the record. You shouldn’t talk to anyone but me. This is mine.”
I writhe against him when he laughs against my pussy. “Hold on to my braid,” he murmurs, “it’s traditional.” I’m not sure if he’s joking, but I twist it around my fist anyway.
He seals his mouth over my clit and stops talking entirely. The silence is filthier than the words.
The first orgasm forces my back off the couch. My thighs clamp around his head with absolutely no effect on him whatsoever as he keeps licking. I cry out so loudly, there’s no way the handler in the hallway can’t hear me.
Valdrek works me through it without one wasted motion, and then, just as promised, he does not stop.
“One,” he says against my thigh, and starts over.
He gentles and rebuilds, two thick fingers sliding into my pussy and his tongue working my clit in circles.
“I feel you building already.” His voice comes back deeper. “Don’t fight it.”
“Valdrek—”
“Give me one more.” His fingers curl and find a spot that makes my whole body jolt. “Right there. I know.”
“You waited fourteen months,” I gasp, or try to. It comes out in pieces.
“I did.” He doesn’t lose his rhythm. “Fourteen months. And I keep what I’m given, Wren. So give.”
The second one rolls in and keeps rolling, and somewhere in the middle of it, I hear myself say his name in a register I’ve never once used in this life.
When I can see again, he’s sitting back on his heels, forearm dragging across his mouth, looking unreasonably proud of himself.
“You,” I inform him, from a boneless diagonal sprawl, “have been hoarding a national resource.”