Page 23 of The Outcast Orc (Claimed by the Red Hand #1)

23

QUINN

When orcs celebrate, they don’t hold back. And in driving off their enemies, the Red Hand Clan had plenty of reason for celebration. But for all that Marok had longed for his kinsmen to acknowledge him again, he was eager to leave the festivities. And so was I. As soon as the chieftain stepped down from the dais, we went back to Marok’s dwelling. Taking in that tidy timber-built home crammed with all his trophies and spoils, I felt less like a stranger in a strange land, and more like a wanderer who’d finally found his way home.

I’d last crossed the threshold to Marok’s house as a slave.

And now?

Well, I guess I was still a slave.

“They say Borkul wounded you,” Marok said. “I can always petition the chieftain for your revenge—”

“No head.” I gestured toward his packed shelves. “Where on earth would we keep it?”

Marok considered me. “Your words are light…but a man’s scent never lies.”

He could smell my trepidation? That would take some getting used to.

He removed his heavy chest-plate and hung it from a stout rack. “I thought you would prefer living here to the stable,” he said. “But if I’m wrong, and—”

“That’s not it.” With nowhere to sit and legs far too sore to squat, I settled for leaning against the wall. “Don’t get me wrong. This is a fine house—lack of furniture notwithstanding. And the prospect of being with you—”

My scent must have shifted when I recalled how hot it had been to ride his muscular thigh. He whiffed the air, and I felt myself blush like a stable boy stumbling across the red lantern district for the first time.

“Anyway, the point is, I want to be here because I choose to be. Not because you own me. I don’t expect you to understand. Our people are too different. You’re an orc, and you have a certain way of seeing things, and in your eyes, I’m just some lowly human—”

Marok was fast for his size—stunningly quick—and he flattened me against the wall before I even had a chance to blink. He pressed his broad face into my hair, framing my skull with his tusks, and breathed me, filling my senses with his rock-hard muscles, his mossy earthen scent, and his overwhelming presence. His voice was a low rumble that vibrated my whole body when he said, “You’re wrong, Quinn. There’s nothing lowly about you. The orc soldiers are twice bigger than you, but you never cringe or quail. All of them are terrified of the warhorse—and only you were brave enough to earn its trust. But most important of all, where I failed to warn Ul-Rott of the attack, you made him listen. I don’t see you as a human…but as a hero.”

Back in the Fortifications, I’d been plenty of things. An ambitious dreamer. A clever horseman. Even a good lay.

But I’d never been anybody’s hero.

I flexed my hips and found myself straddling that muscular thigh again. And just like a horse that’s finally grasped its training, my body shifted from caution to arousal so fast it left my head spinning. Marok was so phenomenally big I could hardly make sense of him all. And he’d called me a hero .

His bulk wasn’t intimidating—it was fucking sexy. And when I slid my arms around his waist, he didn’t try to shrug me off. No…he pressed closer.

He was so huge, I had to strain to reach my arms all the way around him. The thought of doing the same with my legs made my pulse throb low in my groin.

And Marok knew it.

“I’ve never lain with a human before,” he said into my hair. “Tell me what pleases you.”

All this big, solid hotness… and he was a giver?

Damn.

“Touch me,” I said as I slid my hands down to clutch the muscular globes of his ass. “Everywhere. Not just my dick. Run your whiskers down my neck. And if you don’t mind the taste of human—”

Marok grunted and spun me toward the center of the room. He grabbed a pelt from the cabinet, the bottom of the stack, and the whole pile slid to the floor in a haphazard heap. If it weren’t for my wound, I suspected he would have just shoved me right down on top of them. But he restrained himself—tense all over, nostrils flaring, chest heaving.

He pulled off his gauntlets and said, “Goblins don’t take off their tabards. And ogres only fuck things from behind so they’re harder to stab. But humans…?”

I shucked off my clumsy linen shirt. “Naked is good. Naked is very good. And as for any stabbing —well, that remains to be seen.” I would definitely get off on him impaling me—over and over—till I forgot my own name. I just wasn’t sure it was physically possible. Because the “weapon” in question was straining against Marok’s leather breeches now, trapped against one leg. And it was just as massive as everything else on him.

He stripped bare to the waist and pressed me down onto the mound of thick, luxurious furs. They slid into place all around us, softer than the choicest featherbed. Marok did touch me then—only to ghost his fingers over the slash I’d taken across the ribs. “I should give you more time to heal—”

I grabbed his hand and brought it to my mouth, grazing my lips over his hard, callused palm. His pupils dilated. “If we don’t do this here and now, Marok, I might just explode. Are you sure you want that on your conscience?”

“You and your questions,” he said…and yanked down my breeches.

My hard cock sprang free and lay heavy against my treasure trail. At the sight of it, Marok made a bestial grunt, deep in his throat—then immediately dove down and rubbed his face all over it. I froze, suddenly hyperaware of his tusks sliding along my pelvis. The cool ivory was a stark contrast both to the heat of his breath, and to the tickle of the fine, downy, green hairs that furred his upper lip.

He must have liked what he smelled, because he pressed in deep to the crease of my thigh, snuffling against my balls in a way that made me squirm and gasp. It would have been ticklish, if not for the weight of his rock-hard body flattening me into the furs. Soft and hard. Hot and cold. Everything lighting up my senses, all at once.

And when the wetness of his tongue glided over my taint, I nearly bent myself double arching up off the furs.

Marok’s head jerked up and he made a curious grunt, and I hastened to add, “That’s good. Really good.”

His tusks framed a shadow of a smile as he pressed his face back down between my legs and proceeded to utterly undo me. His tongue was smooth and hot and deliciously wet. Notably muscular, too, as it prodded into me with relentless insistence.

I grabbed my aching dick and Marok shoved my hand away. I might not want to be owned—but the feeling of him working me over with his tongue and his breath and his big, hard hands had me inching toward the point of not caring about anything but the beckoning peak.

And then all sensation stopped as he eased back on his knees to take a look at me. Maybe the ogres were onto something about doing it from behind. With my breeches around my ankles and my knees splayed open, I felt incredibly naked and exposed. My hair was tangled in the furs and my cheeks burned hot. It was a far cry from a quick tug in the alley behind a Fortifications saloon.

“Your ass likes my tongue.” No one had ever claimed something so bold—and a thrill coursed through me as Marok unlaced his breeches one-handed, slowly stroking my dick, drawing out the pleasure, not seeking its end. I liked this new, confident Marok. “Humans and orcs aren’t so different after all.”

His breeches opened and his cock fell free. I’d expected it to match his pale, greenish skin, but it wasn’t entirely green. The dark orcish blood engorging the veins mottled it with a webwork of brown, like some exotic plant.

Some very large exotic plant.

“I wish I could take that,” I said. “But you’re just too damn big.”

But before I could offer him a hand-job, he grabbed a stoppered bottle from a nearby shelf and said, “There’s a way.”

That orcish dick was as thick around as my wrist. “As hot as it might be—no way is it going to fit.”

“Not on its own,” he said, as if that fact couldn’t be more obvious. He pried out the cork with his teeth and spat it out. It bounced off the wall and rolled away. “That’s what this is for. Easewater. Night laurel to relax you. Rocknut oil to slick the way. And dreamweed to dull the pain.”

I swallowed hard. I’m no herbalist and had no clue about the first two things, though I’d seen the dreamweed at work on the blade of the goblin’s knife. Potent stuff, no doubt. But the sheer size of him—

“I might not have coupled with a human, but I know orcs who have. With this.” He brandished the herbal mixture.

“And the human lived to tell about it? Remember…I’m gonna need to get on a horse in the near future—”

“Quinn,” he said calmly. “I would never hurt you.” He seemed so sure. “Do you trust me?”

Despite the sheer enormity of his dick…I did. I glanced at the thick, veined shaft, steeled myself, and nodded.

He decanted a slick of glistening potion on his finger…then nudged it into the crack of my buttocks.

Even his blunt, hard finger might’ve been more well-endowed than a few of my more disappointing tavern encounters, and the feel of it breaching my ass, slippery with fragrant oil, sent a fresh surge of want rushing down toward my groin.

Marok scented the air, looking well-pleased with himself—and I guessed he wasn’t sniffing the easewater. That look was almost enough to make me regret that the numbing dreamweed wouldn’t let me feel much of anything. So long as he didn’t get it on my dick, though, no doubt that elusive peak would beckon to me again soon.

Marok took his time greasing me up, dipping into the bottle again and again. Not just readying me, but probing deep with his thick finger, teasing me, learning just where his touch would make me gasp. Watching my face. Learning my body. I was used to quick gropes and stolen moments. Not this unyielding scrutiny. He was just as methodical with my ass as he was with everything else, and soon my dick was impossibly hard, leaking its own slickness against my belly.

Though when he climbed up over me and set his weight on his elbows, blotting out my awareness of everything but him, the solid prod at my body’s entrance was still daunting. “I thought you said I’d be numb from the dreamweed.”

“No, I said it would take away the pain.” Marok angled himself thoughtfully and flexed his hips. “Why bother coupling if you don’t feel it?” A push. Resistance. Too much—too big. He grabbed a handful of my hair to anchor himself and pressed again. But it would never—

A guttural moan escaped me as his tapered cockhead forced past the resistance and breached my slickened hole. Marok echoed the sound with a deep rumble.

With excruciating care, he backed out a few inches…then pressed in again, even harder.

This. This. This.

I’d been starving for something deeper and I hadn’t even realized it. Not until an orc was filling me with his impossibly big dick.

I wrapped my legs around him and my hip joints throbbed. My wild ride on Destroyer’s back was nothing compared to what Marok was doing to me now. Everywhere we brushed together, some novel sensation reminded me the man between my legs was no human. The pebbly hardness of his hide skimming my inner thighs. His tusk gliding along my temple. The downy fur of his upper lip teasing my forehead. The forest-floor scent of him blossoming between us as we both began to sweat and strain.

It was the slowest, most deliberate fuck I’d ever had—that I ever could have even imagined. Inch by painstaking inch, Marok worked his way in. Spreading me. Filling me.

Undoing me.

There was no pain, but the pressure was nothing short of exquisite. I climbed as I was filled and filled and filled, my heartbeat throbbing in my engorged cock leaking slickness all over my belly. I felt like I could hang there on the cusp of my orgasm forever…until Marok slipped a hand between us and wrapped his callused palm around my weeping dick.

I didn’t just come. I came apart.

Even in my throes of pleasure, I knew Marok was struggling to control himself. He couldn’t push all the way in—not without disemboweling me. I’d taken maybe a third of him, at best. But that must’ve been enough.

His orgasm followed right on the heels of mine. He grunted and went rigid all over, and soon the slipperiness of the sex oil morphed into something else entirely as he pumped me full of his wet, hot seed.

Even spent, he stayed there between my legs, gazing down at me with a look I wasn’t sure I could interpret. Possibly…tender? Though between the green skin and the tusks, it was kind of hard to tell. “You and I are much alike,” he said.

The opposite of what I was thinking…but I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to explain. Marok could be a real cipher, and I was curious to know what was going on behind that staid exterior.

He gave his words a moment’s consideration, then said, “I am a warrior. I could never be a slave. And you are just as proud.”

Well…he wasn’t wrong.

As if to bring home his point, Marok rolled us into the furs so he was no longer over me, but side by side—as an equal. “Anyone in the Red Hand Clan is either an orc or a slave. There’s no room here for anything in between—this isn’t the bazaar with its mix of races. But claiming you for this household means that any orc who wrongs you would answer to me.”

“It’s for my own protection. I get it.” Though my tone may have said otherwise.

“I have claimed you in front of the chieftain and the clan—and you are mine. But….” Marok reached tentatively for my hair, seemed to think better of it…then changed his mind again and ran his fingers through the strands as if he’d never touched anything quite like it. “If you wish to leave, I will escort you from our territory myself.”

I noted he didn’t say he’d come with me. Maybe that was a promise he simply couldn’t make.

The men I’d spent time with back in the Fortifications would promise me the stars and the moon—but once they got off, I’d be lucky if they bought me a drink. I realized I liked it a lot better when promises actually meant something.

“So…I need to get my face branded?”

Marok gave an orcish huff. “Not with my scent all over you.”

Well. We’d need to make sure we rubbed ourselves together on a regular basis. No great hardship there.

Marok’s fondling of my hair emboldened me to skim my fingertips over the craggy ridge of his brow, then trail them along the smooth hardness of his tusks. “We have an expression where I come from, to seal it with a kiss. I’m guessing that’s not really a thing here.”

“It’s not.” He trailed a finger down my cheekbone. “But if you wish to show me how it goes, I will learn.”

Speaking of the Fortifications, I couldn’t help but think back to my last fateful encounter with the blacksmith’s apprentice—the one that had inspired me to seek greener pastures, and eventually landed me here. I’d gone in for something more intimate than our usual hand-jobs…and it hadn’t ended well. As little as this felt like my final tryst with that big oaf, as I eased myself up and pressed my face to Marok’s, my body viscerally recalled the moment I’d been shoved away. But Marok didn’t balk. He was very still. And when I carefully fit my face between his tusks and skimmed my tongue across his lower lip, he gave a low murmur of satisfaction.

His downy upper lip tickled my stubble as he opened to my kiss. And I decided I could live with the other orcs calling me a slave—just as long as here, where it counted, this proud orc general and I were truly equals.