And then he stopped.
He lifted his head, mouth wet and gleaming, eyes gone black, and watched me hang there shaking on the brink with a look of pure male satisfaction that made me want to scream.
"Lorkin." It came out a threat and a prayer at once. "I willendyou."
"You told me to stop talking," he said, the absolute bastard, and rose up between my knees and freed himself from his trousers.
I got a hand around him and lost the thread of every thought I had. He was so much, hot and impossibly hard and thicker than my fingers could close around, the heavy head of him already slick.
I guided him to where I was empty and aching, and he took over, notching himself against me and pushing in, slow. I had to breathe through the stretch. He fed himself into me slow, one thick inch and then a pause, then another, letting me stretch totake him. It rode right at the edge where too much tips over into the thing you'd crawl across a floor for. My body gave around him and kept finding more room it didn't know it had, until I was sure I couldn't take the rest, and then I took the rest.
He watched my face the entire time, jaw tight with the effort of going slow, going still each time my breath caught, and when he'd worked the last of himself into me and there was nowhere deeper to go, we stopped there, both of us trembling.
"There," he breathed, forehead dropping to mine. "There you are."
"Move," I gasped. "Lorkin. Move, or I will lose what's left of my mind."
He moved.
He fucked me on that bench with my heels hooked over his arms and my back against the cool stone, the whole forge ringing with the sound of it, the slick wet of us, the smack of his hips into mine, the low broken stream of sound pouring out of him. He pulled almost all the way out every time, dragging that thick length over every nerve until I was empty and clenching and begging, then drove home hard enough to knock the air clean out of me.
Each thrust hit something so deep it whited out the edges of the room. He built it slow, then faster, then merciless, and slid one big hand down to where we were joined so his thumb could find my clit and roll it in time with every stroke. I came up off the bench with a cry, strung tight between his thumb and his cock, sobbing with how close he held me. I scrabbled for something to hold and found his horns.
I got both hands around the base of them and gripped, and he came undone.
The sound he made was nothing a civilized creature makes. His rhythm stuttered, his head dropped into my hands, his whole enormous frame shook, and then he was fucking me inearnest, harder, deeper, the last of his careful control finally and completely off its leash.
I held onto his horns and took all of it and gave it back, meeting him stroke for stroke. And somewhere in the middle of it, with him buried in me to the hilt, his forehead pressed to mine, both of us past any words at all, I felt it.
I don't have a name for it.
Somewhere in the deep middle of me, under the pleasure, under the stretch of him, something I had never once felt before reached out and took hold of something in him, and would not let go. It pulled. It set, like cooling metal.
It swung every part of me around to point at this male and dug in, and it felt more real than the bench at my back, more real than my own name, and I had no idea on earth what it was. Whether it was a true thing or just what this creature did to me when he had me like this, opened up and shaking and undone. I was too far gone to do anything but feel it and be frightened of how badly I wanted it to be real.
"I've got you," he said, ragged, against my temple, my jaw, my mouth. One huge hand splayed over the small of my back, the other still working me where we were joined, holding me onto him like he could keep me there by will alone. "I've got you. Stay. Stay."
And I almost said it. I felt the words come climbing up my throat, three of them: insane and far too soon, and the single most dangerous thing I could possibly say to a male I was going to have to leave. I got my teeth shut over them just in time.
So instead, I came. I came so hard it wrung a broken cry out of me, my whole body clamping down around him in waves while that deep-set anchored thing sang in the center of me, soaking us both, an absolute wet, wrecked ruin of a thing. He fucked me through every last pulse of it, drawing it out until I was wrung dry and shaking. Then he went over the edge rightafter me. He slammed deep and ground there, spilling hot and endless, my name and a broken sound dragged up from the bottom of him, his horns still caught in my fists.
Then we came down. Folded onto the bench and the floor and each other, both of us shaking, both of us soaked, both of us spent. He held onto me like I was the only solid thing left in the room. I held on, and I kept the three words locked behind my teeth where nobody could ever take them back from me.
For now. For a little while longer.
10
LORKIN
The office was still shut.
I'd told myself on the walk into town that Nezara would have the door propped open and the kettle going, back to logging her matches and gentling whoever came through next. I built the whole morning on it. Then I stood in front of the squat human-built box between the apothecary and the cider house and read the same paper I'd read a week back, the corners gone soft from the weather, the words underneath not changed at all.
Closed. Urgent matters at the courthouse.
I read it twice. It said the same thing both times.
A transport was already on its way. Ten days, near enough, before Chloe’s placement with Zarcal officially ended, and the ship came to take my mate back to Earth. The only hands that could strike his name and write mine were still gone after a week, and the clock wasn't waiting for them to come back.
