Chapter 12 #2
I drag her shorts and underwear down in one pull.
My palm slides between her legs. She's soaked, slick and hot, her arousal floods my senses until the kitchen narrows to bourbon, dark cherries and the sharp sweet salt of her on my skin.
I push two fingers inside her and curl them deep.
Holly's head drops back against the cabinet, her walls clenching around me in tight rhythmic pulses.
The bond gives me her side of it. The stretch of my fingers inside her, the fullness, the curl hitting a spot that sends white light across the backs of her eyelids. I nearly come from her pleasure alone.
"Rex. I need you."
I pull free and line up, notching the head of my cock against her entrance.
When I push inside her, slow, the bond splits me open.
I feel the stretch from her side. My size, the thickness of me pressing into her, the burn and the fullness and the ache of her body opening around mine.
The sensation of my cock gripped in her tight wet heat layers on top of it.
Two bodies' worth of feeling in one nervous system.
My hands grip the counter edge on either side of her hips and I stop halfway, forehead pressed to hers, breathing hard.
I have never been this close to coming from a single thrust.
"Don't stop." Her voice breaks. "I need all of you."
I push the rest of the way in and her gasp tears through my body. I hold there, seated deep, her thighs trembling around my hips, both of us breathing in short ragged pulls while sensation crashes between us like a current with no ground wire. Every nerve ending I own fires from two directions.
I move. Slow. Slower than I've ever fucked her, because I can feel what my size does to her body and it rewires every instinct I have.
Each stroke sends her sensation crashing into mine.
The drag of my cock against her inner walls, the pressure at her cervix when I push too deep, the angle that makes her breath catch and her pussy clench.
I adjust without thinking, tilting my hips, finding the stroke that makes her whole body arch off the counter.
Her fingers twist in my hair and she pulls my mouth back to the claiming mark on her neck, pressing my lips against it. The taste of blood and salt surging through the wound turns every thrust into something closer to a freefall.
"I can feel—" She can't finish. The bond is giving her my side now. My pleasure, my desperation, the way her pussy gripping my cock feels from inside my body. She makes a sound I've never heard from her, raw, broken and beautiful.
I fuck her on her kitchen counter with the claiming mark wet under my mouth and her body locked around mine.
Her thighs squeeze my hips, I feel the pressure from both sides.
Her orgasm builds before her body shows it, a bright hot wave climbing from the base of her spine that I feel like it's my own.
I chase it. My hips drive into her, deep and steady, the doubled sensation collapses the distance between us until I can't tell whose pleasure belongs to who.
"I'm close," she pants against my jaw. "Fuck, Rex, I can feel yours too."
The bond carries her orgasm into me the same second mine tears loose. Her walls squeeze around my cock in long rolling contractions while I come inside her, pulsing, and the doubled sensation whites out every thought in my brain.
A sound rips from my throat that isn't English.
Her name in the old orc language. Not Holly. A word I've never spoken, never learned, dragged out of me by the bond like it's been sitting in my blood since the day I met her. It means home.
The word hangs in the kitchen. Holly goes still against me.
Through the bond, I feel the moment she understands it.
Not through translation but through the way you understand your own name when someone calls it across a crowded room.
Her arms tighten around my neck. She presses her lips against mine and breathes the word back to me. Wrong pronunciation. Perfect meaning.
I hold her on the counter with my face buried in her hair. I don't move. I don't pull away. I don't reach for my jeans or scan the room for my boots.
Her touch traces the back of my neck, and she feels what I feel: the staggering relief of a man who stopped running and found out the ground held.
Later, tangled in sheets with the streetlight cutting across the bed, I trace the compass rose tattoo on her forearm. The one she got in Portland two years before she moved here.
"I need to tell you something." Her voice comes out quiet. Not small. Holly doesn't do small. Just quiet in a way that means the words matter.
I pull her wrist to my mouth and press my lips to the inside of it. "I'm listening."
She doesn't say it right away. Her jaw works, the muscle jumping under her skin, and she stares at the ceiling like she's trying not to cry.
I've seen Holly face down a bar full of drunk loggers, take a swing at a man twice her size, stare at her vandalized window without flinching.
I've never seen her fight this hard to get words out.
"I have PCOS. Polycystic ovary syndrome.
" She says it to the ceiling. "I've known for years.
Doctors told me when I turned twenty-two that pregnancy probably isn't in the cards for me.
The odds are low. Not impossible, but low enough that every doctor I've seen has used the word 'unlikely' and then changed the subject. "
She swallows. Her pulse jumps against my lips where I'm still holding her wrist.
"I didn't plan on it mattering to anyone but me.
Every guy I've been with, it never lasted long enough to be a conversation.
But you just put a claiming mark on my neck, Rex.
You just bonded yourself to me for the rest of my life.
And I need you to know what that means. I might not be able to give you a family, I should have told you that first."
Her voice cracks on the last word.
I hold her wrist against my lips. My forehead drops to her pulse and I breathe.
"I didn't fall in love with some future kid, Holly." My voice cracks on her name, and I let it. "I fell in love with you. And if you want to try, we try. We throw everything at it. Whatever happens, happens."
I pull her closer. Press my mouth against her temple.
"But Holly, there's a foster system full of kids who need someone to love them and not keep sending them back.
" My voice catches on sending them back.
"I was that kid. Green skin, tusk buds and a file folder that said hard to place.
Seven homes in ten years. Every single one of them sent me back.
And the whole time I kept thinking, if just one family kept me.
Just one, all the way through. I'd have been a different man.
" I swallow. "I want to be that family for someone. With you."
She doesn't say anything for a long time.
Her breathing changes against my chest. Uneven, then controlled, then uneven again.
Through the bond I feel what's happening inside her: the wall she built around this secret, the one she reinforced every time a relationship ended before it got serious, crumbling.
She expected pity. She expected disappointment.
She didn't expect a man who looked at her broken thing and answered with his own.
"You would have been a great kid," she whispers.
That breaks me. Not the PCOS, not the odds, not the medical terminology. A few words from a woman who sees me, green skin, tusks, every mile of road behind me, and mourns the childhood I lost.
Holly pulls me closer. Her arm wraps around me and she holds on, the bond carries her to me: steady as a pulse. My pulse.
By Sunday night the Anchor looks the same as it always does. Sal tells a story nobody asked for about a marlin she caught in 1987. The brothers fill the bar like they always do—loud, taking up too much space, drinking like men who earned it.
Knox sits in the corner booth with Sarah tucked against his side and Reeve asleep on his chest. The baby's fist curls around the collar of Knox's cut.
Knox holds his beer in his free palm like a man who learned to do everything one-handed the day his son arrived. Sarah traces circles on Reeve's back.
Finn leans against the wall with his arm around Jess, resting on her belly. He murmurs against her temple and she laughs, swatting his arm. He catches her wrist and presses his lips to it with a grin that could power the whole bar.
Garrett sits at the end of the bar with Nina tucked against his side, one massive arm draped across the back of her stool. He doesn't talk. He doesn't need to. Nina leans into his side and his arm tightens around her, and the low rumbling purr in his chest says enough.
Betty arrives with pie. Gerald holds the door for her, hovering at her lower back. Betty sets the pie on the bar and pats Sal's cheek. Gerald pulls out a stool for her.
Colt sits alone with a beer and his phone open to a text thread, scrolling with a focus that tells me the messages aren't from a patrol brother. His reading glasses sit low on his nose. He catches me looking, pockets the phone, and lifts his glass in my direction.
I'm on my stool. The same seat I've claimed since I patched in, the one that lets me see every exit and every entrance.
But I'm not watching the exits.
Holly moves behind the bar. The claiming mark shows above her collar, fresh and dark against her skin. She pours a draft for Finn and slides it across the wood without looking, already reaching for the next glass. Her eyes find mine through the noise and the smoke and the laughter.
The bond hums between us. Warm and mine.
I don't move. My boots stay flat on the floor. For the first time in my life, I'm home.