Page 21 of Claim
She gazed at him for a heartbeat, her hands on his chest, pressing him into the cushions as if he couldn’t just rise up and toss her aside.
Can’t or won’t.
With a growl more ferocious than any orc, she dipped her head to kiss him again.
In this position, his hands were free to caress, and he reveled in the way she felt so different from him, pliant and sleek, her flesh yielding under his fingers when she arched up into his touch, both surrendering and demanding.
At the same time, the delicacy of her sent alarm klaxons clanging through his head.How much did he think he could hold and protect?He’d been marked as apex from hatching, but just because no other egg had absorbed the royalixir to become apex didn’t mean he wasgoodat it.Hadn’t Dorn betrayed them?Hadn’t thePratorimattacked the ship and nearly killed his brother?Weren’t they still at risk from Illgattoa demanding that repayment?Revealing his fears to June when there was nothing she or anyone else could do was unfair, wrong.
She levered herself up on stiffened elbows, her breathing ragged.“Yeah, whatever you’re thinking…” She paused, seeming to reconsider.“If and when you need to slow or stop, just say so.You said I’m the only one you can tell about how you’re feeling, so I’m trusting you to do that, yeah?”
He gazed at her.Of course everyone on the ship had to trust that he was doing the right thing as apex.But he’d never had any of them say it aloud.The sentiment wrenched at him in a way he didn’t understand.Because she was trusting him not as apex, but as Mag, himself.
He reached up to cup the hard flex of her jaw, the fierce little meebu.“I will say it,” he promised.“I have reviewed the IDA handbook”—he did not have to tell her how many times—“so I am clear on the basics of intimacy between our species.But I trustyouwill tellmewhat you want as well.”
She angled her chin to kiss his palm.“We’ll figure it out together.”
She’d said that about the Luster too, but this time she meant just the two of them.When was the last time he had been only himself?Or maybe this was the first time.
And this might be also the last.
Boosting half upright, he kissed her with a ravenous, brutal need, and she answered him with an energy that more than reflected, it gathered and shattered him, like he was a ray of light cast through a prism into wavelengths seen and unseen, coming apart and spearing out over the light-years.
With her arms wrapped around him, her breasts pressed against his torso.Soft, so soft, but the thick tips were hardened to diamond points drilling through his control.When he touched them, marveling at the way she responded, her moan made all his hands shake.
He gripped her hips tighter with his lower hands, and she twisted into him, grinding on him, as if he was a rock to crush between her thighs.He couldn’t quite restrain a rumble of surprise.
She made a surprised sound of her own.“A full body vibrator?Do that again.”
Such an imperious command from such a little meebu.He pulsed again, the pressure wave swelling through his ichor, reverberating through his muscles, his thick carapace a sounding board.
At the throbbing pulsation, she moaned again.Holding tight to his tusks, she bowed back, her breasts thrusting and her buttocks sliding on his thighs.The night light glow glistened on her skin.Intrigued, he tilted forward to suck one distended nipple between his lips.She squealed, bucking against him insistently, pleading and demanding, “Again.”
Ah, this order he could satisfy.
The handbook had specified that dating and mating could be only partly addressed via instruction but also the imagination and most especially experience.So he watched and he listened, then he touched and he tasted, and when he finally sent his sonoscry through her, she dissolved not into disparate beams of light, but into a gasping, shuddering puddle, sweet as yezo—and with a matching bite, her teeth scraping his upper shoulder, before she collapsed on him.
When he growled again, she groaned at the vibration.“Mag… Oh my god.”
All his hands settling possessively on her backside, he corrected, “Apex.”
Chapter 7
She would’ve laughed or groaned or something, but she was all out of breath.All out of bones too, it seemed; she couldn’t even lift her head to glare at him.
Not that a glare would’ve been serious because…oh my apex.
Even though he wasn’t doing the sonoscry anymore, her body kept tingling, from every little hair across her skin to deep in her core.As the tingling eased, it matched the slowing of her heartbeat, like she was glowing from the inside.
Geez, it hadn’t beenthatlong since she’d had an orgasm.Not that she’d ever had an orgasm with an alien demi-god.Who would’ve guessed that someone like her, a hairdresser from Nowheresville, Earth, would get such a chance?
Except…it wasn’t really a chance, was it?That implied maybe something more could come of this.Something more thanhercoming.From the IDA handbook and the discussions among the other women, she already knew the orcs didn’t really orgasm the same, that they received pleasure from the feedback loop of the sonoscry.Mag the royal and practically holy orc apex would never allow himself to succumb to mere lust.She hadn’t really fucked a god; she’d just spent the night with the vulnerable man behind the scar.
Not even a whole night, and truly, what did she know about the man either?
With her eyes closed, the night light traced comets across her trembling eyelids.If only she’d had enough yezo to fall gracelessly into sleep so she didn’t have to hear him fumble through some alien demi-god equivalent of “I have to work early in the morning, but I’ll text you later.”
With a silent sigh, she tilted her head up to kiss the underside of his jaw.The muscle there was hard—more so than all his other muscles, which was saying something.Yeah, clearly Mag, apex and man both, was regretting this fleeting chance.
