"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, theway 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 assafeeven when everything else screamstoo 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."
