Page 53 of Single Pucking Orc

She heard it at eleven-forty.

She was still up. She told herself she was still up because of the four a.m. the night before and the general chaos of the schedule. In anyone else’s ledger she’d have caught that lie in a heartbeat. She heard the engine cut. She heard a door. She didn’t hear him go into the house eight feet from hers. His house, dark and empty and waiting, the sensible place for a male to go at eleven-forty after three days on the road. Instead she heard boots on her path.

He didn’t go home first.

She had the door open before he knocked. He stopped in the doorway, his bag still on his shoulder, road-creased and tired and enormous, filling the frame of her small tidy hall. He looked at her, and whatever he’d come to say vanished.

She was already moving.

The bag hit the floor, but she didn’t hear it. She was up on her toes with both hands fisted in the front of his shirt. His arms came around her hard enough to lift her clean off the mat. Neither of them said I missed you. It was in the bag on the floor. It was in the eight feet of grass he hadn’t walked to his dark house. It was in the way his face went into her hair and stayed there.

“I had a whole speech about the travel crib,” he said, muffled, into the side of her neck.

“Later.”

“Later,” he agreed, and got the door shut behind them with his heel.

It was different, and both of them knew it was different, and the difference was what she’d remember. The last time he’d laughed, and she’d been shocked by the strangeness of a male laughing in her bed. It had been light in a way she hadn’t known could coexist with heat, a joyfulness that surprised her.

There was no laughter now.

There was only him, solid and warm and heavy against her, his hands at the buttons of her shirt, his mouth on her throat, and the single-minded urgency of a male who knew precisely what he wanted and wasn't waiting for it. She pushed his jacket off, her hands clumsy, and he kicked it away impatiently, and when she got the shirt off over his head he took hers with it, and the last of the lightness was gone.

They made it to the bed. Barely. She was on her back on the mattress, and he was standing over her, stripping off his belt, and his eyes were hot enough to burn through her remaining clothing. His chest was broad and green and moving faster than she'd ever seen it, his breath uneven. He ran a hand from her hip to her knee and dragged her jeans down, and she lifted to help him, and they were both half-dressed and frantic.

"Rognar." She was wet already, just from looking at him, just from his hands on her. "I don't want to wait."

He groaned. He stripped off her underwear with the same urgency, and she heard his belt come free, and then he was on top of her with nothing between them, and she reached for him.

He was huge and hard and too hot to be real, and she wanted him so badly she couldn't wait to take her time. She arched up against the head of his cock, and he made that low sound she liked, and his hand went to her jaw to tilt her face up to his, and he watched her as he pushed in.

"Look at me," he said. "I want to see you."

He went slow, which she'd have thought impossible in the state they were in, but she was grateful for it, because he was big, and she had to adjust to him a little at a time. She bit her lip, and his thumb moved there, and he eased her lip out from between her teeth and held it there while he seated himself, deeper and deeper, his eyes never leaving her face.

She felt him fill her, all the way in, her legs around his hips, and he stopped for a second with his face close to hers, and said, "Nora," in a voice she'd never heard before. Rough. Throaty. And then he started to move.

She didn't last. She hadn't expected to. She was already on the edge from the look in his eyes, from feeling him above her, the size of him, the weight of him, and the way he was looking at her. She came fast and hard with his hand on her face, her nails in his back, and he held still through it and watched her every second.

She was still shaking when he leaned down and kissed her, a deep, tender kiss that was nothing like the rest of it, and when she opened her eyes he was smiling at her.

"I missed you too," he said.

He stayed on top of her, his weight balanced on one elbow, and kissed her while she caught her breath. Then he started to move again, and she knew he'd been waiting for her, holding back, and she kissed him deeper and wrapped her legs tighter around him and let him take her the way he clearly needed to.

He was still careful, even now, moving with a control that must have cost him, because she could feel how much he wanted to lose it. She reached between them and found him with her hand, and he groaned into her mouth and pushed into her grip, and that was what broke him.

She felt it when it happened, the precise second he let go and gave her everything he'd been holding back. He buried himself in her with a long, raw sound, and she felt him everywhere, his hand clutching her hip, his mouth on her throat, the way his body fit hers like he'd been made for it. She held onto him, her hands in his hair, and let him drive them both to the end, and when he came it was with her name again, and his whole body shuddering against hers.

“I missed you,” she whispered. “More than I expected.” And she felt him smile against her skin.

Then he turned onto his back and pulled her against his side, and lay there in the dark with his eyes open, breathing. After a while his hand came to rest over her heart, and stayed. She didn’t move. His thumb did that small and slow movement, one beat and then another, and she understood, with a sudden absurd rush of feeling, that he was checking. Making sure she was still there. He did it in his sleep now.

The monitor breathed. Charlie shifted, settled, went quiet. Rognar’s breathing slowed and lengthened and finally caught into the deep, even rhythm of a male who was home after two hundred miles and three days, his hand still warm and open over her heart.

She lay awake in the darkness.

Her house was full. She lay there in the dark with the facts laid out in front of her like a set of books she couldn’t force to balance. Her office had a crib in it. Her counter had bottles on it. Her hall had a basket of client folders shoved against the wall that had no business being there. Her bed had a sleeping orc in it whose hand rose and fell on her chest with her breath. Her nightstand had a monitor on it carrying the small snuffling snores of a child who wasn’t hers, in the technical sense, and was becoming hers in every other sense.