Chapter 5 #2
His hands find my waist. My ribcage. His fingers span so wide they nearly meet at my spine, and the size of him registers in my body before my brain catches up—how much of me he covers with his palms, how small my waist feels bracketed between his hands, how his chest against mine feels like standing behind cover in a firefight.
Shielded and enclosed and consumed all at once. And safe.
We hit the cot together. His weight tips us over and the metal frame shrieks against the linoleum, the canvas sagging under him, I drag him down on top of me because the alternative is letting go and my fingers refuse to release his shirt.
"The patients," I gasp against his mouth. "Other wing. We have to be quiet."
"Then stop making that noise, Kitten." The growl vibrates against my collarbone and rolls down through my chest into the pit of my stomach.
I tug the henley over my head and his gaze tracks the fabric leaving my skin with an intensity that pins me flat. His hands settle on my bare ribs and his thumbs brush the underside of my bra, my back arches off the cot before I can stop it.
His mouth drags down my throat. Teeth and tongue and the rough edge of his broken tusk scraping against the tendon below my ear, the shiver that tears through me has nothing to do with cold.
I press into it—into the jagged edge, into the imperfection, the part of him that he carries on his face for the world to see.
He groans against my neck when I tilt my head to give him more room, and the sound rolls through his chest into mine, low and sub-vocal, a rumble no human throat produces.
His hips pin me to the canvas and I feel his cock, hard against my inner thigh, heat floods my core so fast my head swims. He's big.
I knew that—hard not to, with the way his jeans fit—but knowing and feeling are two different things, and the reality of him pressing against me through layers of fabric sends my pulse hammering against my ribs.
"Jess—" His voice scrapes raw. His hands grip the cot frame above my head, and the metal groans under his fingers, bending inward at the rail.
Not gripping me. Gripping the frame instead.
His knuckles pale to a lighter green with the force, and the restraint of it—the proof of what he holds back, the strength he channels into dead metal instead of my skin—makes me wrap my legs around his waist and grind up against him.
Clothes disappear in fumbled tugs and bitten-off curses. My scrub pants catching on my boot, his belt buckle jamming, both of us too desperate and too clumsy for anything polished. This is months of pretending cracking apart at the seams.
When he pulls back, I see all of him—the green skin, the scars across his ribs, the dark trail of hair below his navel, the thick length of his cock freed from his jeans. My thighs clench. He catches me looking and the corner of his mouth lifts.
"See something you like?"
"Shut up and get back down here."
He drops over me and his mouth finds the hollow of my throat while his hand slides down my stomach, over my hip, between my thighs. His fingers part me, stroking through my slick heat, and the noise I make into his shoulder would embarrass me under any other circumstance on the planet.
"Fuck," he breathes against my neck. "You're soaking, Jess."
His finger slides inside me, and I grip his shoulders hard enough to leave crescents in his skin.
He's careful—one finger first, working me open with slow, deliberate strokes that make my hips roll against his hand.
A second finger, thicker, stretching me, and the pressure rides the line between too much and not enough until my body adjusts and the burn melts into a slick, aching need for more.
I dig my nails into his back. "Finn, I need you."
"Not yet, Kitten." He curls his fingers, pressing deep, and my spine bows off the cot. "You're not ready for me."
"I'll decide when I'm—"
He adds a third finger and my argument dies on a strangled moan.
The stretch pulls tight and hot, his thumb circling my clit in steady pressure while his fingers work me open, I bury my face in his neck to muffle the sounds pouring out of me.
His scent floods my lungs—leather, oil, the deep orc musk that sinks into my brain and shuts down every rational thought I own.
"There." He murmurs it against my temple, his lips brushing my hairline.
"That's it." His fingers pump slow and deep, and my inner walls clench around him, sucking him in, my slickness coating his knuckles.
The cot creaks beneath us. We both freeze, my nails in his shoulders, his teeth against my collarbone, and a laugh bubbles up in my throat before I can catch it. He grins against my skin.
"Quiet, Cooper." He crooks his fingers, and the laugh dies in my throat and turns into a sound I've never made in my life.
When he pulls his fingers free, I whimper at the loss and hate myself for it. He settles between my thighs and the head of his cock presses against my entrance, thick and hot, and my body clenches around nothing.
"Tell me you want this." He braces his forearms on either side of my head, his face close enough that I can count the amber flecks in his irises, the way his pupils have blown wide and dark. His arms tremble with the effort of holding still.
"I want you." The words rip out of me with a rawness that makes my eyes burn. "I've wanted you for months, you idiot."
His pupils swallow the amber whole. His upper lip pulls back from his tusks and the air around us shifts, charged and feral.
"Mine."
The word falls out of him—torn from somewhere below conscious thought. His expression cracks with shock at his own voice, and the vulnerability of that, the involuntary claim, the way he holds his breath like he's bracing for me to shove him away—
I reach between us and guide his cock inside me.
He pushes in slow. Inch by inch, letting me adjust, his jaw clenched so tight the muscles in his neck cord rigid.
The stretch burns, thick and relentless, filling me past the point where I think I can take any more, and then a fraction deeper.
I grip his forearms and breathe through it the way I breathe through pain—steady, controlled, measured—until he bottoms out inside me and we're both shaking.
"Fuck." His forehead drops to the curve of my neck. His breath comes ragged and hot against my pulse. The low orc rumble rolls through his chest into mine, vibrating at a frequency my nervous system reads as safe even when everything else screams too much, too close, too real.
He moves. Pulls back slow, pushes in deep, and the drag of his cock hits a spot inside me that whites out my vision.
My nails carve into his back and I bite down on his shoulder to keep from crying out.
He growls—low and raw, the broken tusk grazing my neck when he turns his head—I arch into the scrape of it, into the rough edge, wanting more of the thing that makes him different from every man who came before.
The cot protests beneath us with each thrust, a rhythmic metallic groan that would be funny if I could think, but thinking left the building somewhere between his third finger and the first roll of his hips.
His hand slides down to hitch my thigh higher on his hip, the angle changes and I nearly bite through my own lip.
"Finn—" His name scrapes out of me.
"I know, Kitten." He fucks me harder, his hand gripping the cot frame, the metal whining and bending under his fingers while his other arm hooks under my back and pulls me flush against him.
Skin to skin, his mouth finding mine in a messy, desperate kiss that swallows the sounds neither of us can hold back.
My orgasm hits without warning—no slow build, no climbing wave, just a sudden clenching that rips through my body and locks every muscle tight around his cock.
I bury my scream in his shoulder, my teeth in his skin, my nails in his back, and he follows with a sound that lands somewhere between my name and a growl that vibrates through the cot frame and into the floor beneath us.
He catches his weight on his forearms before he collapses, both of us gasping and trembling in the narrow space. One leg of the cot buckles, tilting us sideways, and he catches us before we roll onto the floor, a breathless laugh shaking through him.
He holds me afterward, both of us pressed together on a canvas surface built for one, and I can't stop trembling. Not from cold. From the raw, terrifying fissure of letting someone past every defense I spent six years constructing.
His face presses into my neck, breathing me in. His heartbeat hammers against my chest, matching the frantic pace of my own.
"Jess—"
"Don't." I close my eyes. "Don't ruin this with talking."
His arms tighten around me. His thumb traces a slow line down my spine.
"Wasn't planning to."
We lie there. His heartbeat slows against mine. His scent clings to my skin, sinking into my hair and my pores. The amber emergency lights hum overhead, and the silence outside the clinic holds—the eye of the storm, the false peace, the calm that promises nothing.
Then the radio crackles.
"All stations, Nightfall Emergency Management. Eye wall passage accelerating. Second half expected within thirty minutes, repeat, thirty minutes. All sheltered positions maintain cover."
I pull away from him. The cot groans as I sit up, reaching for my scrub pants, my boots, the henley that smells like him and me and everything I let happen. My hands shake while I dress. I clench them into fists and shove them through the sleeves.
He sits up behind me. His hand finds my hip, a single point of contact, steady and warm.
"This doesn't change anything." I say it to the wall, not to him. My voice holds flat and even, the combat-medic cadence that got me through two tours and a cross-country drive with everything I owned in the back seat of a truck.
"Liar."
I don't argue. He's right. But he said he loved me, and the last man who said that spent four months seeing my damage before deciding it cost more than I was worth. Finn hasn't hit that wall yet. He will. Everyone does.
The walls go back up—not all the way, not like before, but enough to get me through the next twelve hours. Enough to keep the part of me that believes him locked in a room where it can't do any damage.
I stand and pull the henley down over my hips, and head for the trauma bay.
His voice follows me down the hall, quiet and certain and impossible to outrun.
"I'll be right here, Jess. I'm not going anywhere."
I don't turn around. But my hand presses flat against my chest where his heartbeat still echoes, and I hold it there all the way to the door.