JUNIA
His mouth crashes into mine like a thunderclap.
No warning. No gentle preamble. One second I'm watching green runes pulse across the canyon wall of his body and the next his hand is cupping the back of my skull, rough palm against tangled curls, and his lips are on mine with the full devastating weight of six feet seven inches of Orc who has been holding his breath for weeks.
I grab his shirt.
That stupid, beautiful, thrift-store tee shirt. My fingers twist the faded cotton into a knot at his sternum and Ipull. Pull him closer, pull him down, pull until the trellis bites into my shoulder blades through my overalls and his body is a wall of furnace heat pinning me against the cedar.
He groans into my mouth.
Deep. Guttural. The sound vibrates through my teeth, my jaw, my collarbone, settles somewhere south of my navel and detonates. His other hand finds my hip, fingers spanning the entire width of it, thumb pressing into the dip above my waistband hard enough to leave a green-tinted bruise I'll admire in the mirror for days.
I bite his lower lip.
He makes a sound that is not human. Not remotely. Some pre-language noise from whatever ancient battlefield his ancestors carved their names into, and his grip on my hip tightens and he lifts me clean off the ground. My boots leave the dirt. My back drags up the trellis, rough wood catching the fabric of my tank top, and suddenly we're eye level. Eye to glowing eye. His irises have gone full molten amber, no pupil, just light.
"You're going to break the trellis," I whisper against his mouth.
"I'll build another one."
His teeth find the hinge of my jaw. The soft skin below my ear. He drags his mouth down the tendon in my neck with a precision that would be surgical if it weren't so feral, and the cedar behind me splinters and cracks but we don’t give a single solitary damn because his tongue hits the hollow of my throat and my legs lock around his waist like they've been rehearsing this in secret.
Soil smears between us. His shirt, my overalls, the potting dust that lives permanently on my skin mixing with his sweat into something earthy and raw. He carries the scents of fresh-cut grass and cedar shavings and the ozone tang of activated runes, and I bury my face in his neck andinhaleand my fingers rake down his back and the shirt rides up under my nails.
Muscle. Everywhere. Thick slabs of it layered over a frame that could benchpress my entire greenhouse.
My nails drag. He hisses.
"Do that again."
I rake harder. His hips buck against mine and the trellis gives up the ghost entirely. The vertical beam behind my left shoulder snaps with a sharpcrackand we lurch sideways into the garden bed. His combat-trained reflexes fire before gravity does. He twists mid-fall, one massive arm cradling my skull, and takes theimpact on his shoulder blade. We crash into the freshly turned soil of Phase Three: the pollinator meadow bed.
Loose dirt explodes around us. Dark loam and shredded mulch rain down. I land on him with a thud that knocks my breath loose and he grunts and his back leaves a Flynn-shaped crater in my carefully raked seedbed.
"My meadow."
"Worth it." His hand slides up my spine. Buries itself in my hair. Pulls my mouth back to his.
We kiss in the dirt like two people who have been starving. Messy. Desperate. His tongue tastes like black coffee and the spearmint gum he chews when he's stressed and something underneath both of those things that is purely, irreduciblyhim. I plant my palms flat on his muscles and push myself up just enough to see his face.
Glowing runes. Amber eyes. Dirt in his hair. A smear of potting soil across his cheekbone.
He's perfect.
He's an absolute disaster. A meticulous, rule-obsessed, cargo-shorts-wearing disaster spread-eagled in my flower bed with his shirt rucked up to his armpits and half of Phase Three's topsoil in his hair, and the rigid line of his jaw has gone slack, and his breathing sounds like he just sprinted a mile, and his hand on my hip is trembling.
Trembling.
This man caught a falling tree with his bare hands and his fingers are shaking against my skin.
I press my forehead to his. Our breath mingles. Hot, fast, desperate.
"You just destroyed my trellis AND my seedbed."
"Filing a citation in the morning."
"Against yourself?"
