Fragile Bond (9 page)

He opened his eyes when he realized Marc had left off fumbling with his uniform and gone completely still. All the details were getting lost in the blurry hues of thermal sight, Marc’s body a sea of orange and red bleeding into white.

Eyes half shut, mouth hanging open, he had his head turned to the side, his chin angled up. Exposing as much of his neck as possible. “Do that again.”

The whisper was a low rasp. It sounded strange, almost pleading. Part of that had to be Hamm’s painfully heightened senses. He could hear the ragged quality of each breath sawing in and out, even the drumbeat rhythm of Marc’s heartbeat. Desperate to calm down and regain a semblance of control, he curled claws into the ground, flexing hard. Some of the details filtered back through the shades of thermal, hovering just in between like teetering at the edge of a cliff.

A slow exhale of his breath wafted over the swath of skin he’d wet with his tongue. Marc trembled against him in response, and he couldn’t resist the urge to taste again. Hamm dragged his tongue up the bared column of Marc’s neck, hesitating with his lips at the front to feel the soft vibrations as he moaned.

And then he journeyed south over Marc’s body, burying his face in warm, musk-heavy spots as he found them. The soldier roused enough coherency to finish freeing himself, and Hamm’s nostrils flared at the scent that slammed into him.

Hamm pushed the cloth out of his way with rough, impatient hands and buried his face against Marc’s bared stomach. He ran his lips, the tip of his tongue up the length of the man’s shaft. Curling his tongue around the head and sliding him into his mouth down to the root. Sucking with every ounce of encouragement he could muster.

Marc writhed, moaned, and spewed strings of words so fast and low the translation subroutine couldn’t begin to cope. He sank his hands into Hamm’s hair and grabbed hold, fingers flexing and clenching. A tremor of pleasure rippled down Hamm’s spine every time blunt nails scratched at his scalp. His cock twitched at the stimulation, lengthening, stiff against the inside of Marc’s thigh, trapped beneath him. The meadow grass brushed against his sensitive skin, and he flinched, shifted. Marc kept his fingers buried deep in his mane, but eased up and relaxed into long strokes that teased at him in ways he’d never imagined. When Hamm purred, the man’s stroking became more insistent, trying to show him something. The scent of musk from Marc’s groin was so strong, he had trouble thinking of anything at all through the pheromones swamping him. Rhythm. He matched it, sucking with mouth and tongue in cadence to Marc’s fingers. He feared hurting him, his skin was so soft, so thin. He could easily inflict pain instead of pleasure in his need for more, to slake his craving to taste.

He craved other things, too, but that fear kept him firmly in check. However fragile Marc seemed in comparison, though, Hamm definitely wasn’t hurting him with what he did. Marc lifted his hips, thrusting up against his mouth, and his hands clenched and flexed, stuttering through Hamm’s mane to stumble upon his ears. Hamm growled, low and deep, as Marc grabbed his ears hard and pulled. Hamm glanced up at him, eyes wide, orgasm slamming through him to spill on the grass beneath him. Marc tossed his head back, neck exposed completely as his body arched up off the ground and trembles wracked him. He came in Hamm’s mouth, salty liquid spilling over Hamm’s tongue and down his throat.

When Hamm finally eased away and chafed his cheek against the exposed patch of Marc’s stomach, the man breathed a ragged sigh and stroked his hands over Hamm’s face. Looked up at him with glazed eyes.

“You stay when the others get here.” Hamm’s blood was still working its way back north to his brain, or he would’ve been more coherent. Couldn’t blame himself though. The human’s cum tasted even better than his pheromones smelled, for starters.

“Stay?”

“Yes, Marc. Here.”

“I think I can stay for a while. The Contact and Communications team will need help.”

Hamm clenched his hand on Marc’s thigh, then soothed his heavy touch away with the flat of his palm. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for, but it was something.

And it wasn’t empty promises. The faint scent of
truth
still clung persistently to him. An honorable soldier. An overture of peace, willingly offered. Yes, a prisoner, but there’d been no duress.

Unless Marc counted being disarmed as duress. It was possible. But he’d scented no distress, just a blend of frustration, confusion, alarm. No different from his own experience over the past few hours.

“It will be easier to deal with them if you are here.” Less stressful. Less likely to go horribly wrong. He crawled up Marc’s body and nuzzled the soldier’s neck. It was okay to let himself show affection this way. The alien had no idea what it meant. A hundred, a thousand little slivers of communication, lost on him. It puzzled and frustrated him all at once. And he wondered how much he was missing, too. “Then I will be here for you.” Marc pushed up on an elbow and curled his lips, not showing his teeth the way he had before. Then he canted his head to watch the sky.

Hamm eased back and stared at the line of Marc’s arched neck, unable to grasp the meaning in the onslaught of emotions he felt when he looked at Marc. The sharp edge of possessiveness, the suffusing warmth of clan, they didn’t make any sense in this context. At least he’d bought himself time to figure it out.

“Steady as you go, Mike-Tango Seven.” Marc unkeyed the mike on his radio and tugged on Hamm’s arm, motioned the furr behind him toward the tree line.

Thankfully, his behavior didn’t seem to have altered in the least. Marc wasn’t sure how he’d respond if the furr started acting differently after their romp in the middle of the meadow.

Where the ground team’s transport was now touching down.

He had enough unknowns in this situation without adding to them.

His cock still tingled faintly. The skin on his arms and neck pimpled with an unfelt chill at the memory of Hamm’s mouth milking him, the feeling of convulsive pressure and vibration from the furr purring as he swallowed.

His vision blurred as his eyes crossed in a spasm of muscle memory.

Sand fleas and bloody boots.
Needed to focus on something else.

If Reccin had witnessed anything, he wasn’t letting on. For which Marc was grateful. He was pretty sure the SFI would consider it fraternizing with the enemy. Never mind that they weren’t at war, weren’t capable of legally declaring such a thing, nor was it in their interests to do so. Regardless, he couldn’t think of a scenario where they’d be pleased. It could just be him starting to panic, though.

“How will your clan—your forces—react to me and these humans walking around unmolested?” Marc had to scrub the back of his hand over his mouth, fake a cough to hide his smile and the urge to laugh at his inadvertent word choice. Which reminded him, he’d been wanting to get some answers about what the fuck was going on. Before . . . well, earlier. That hadn’t changed. He still needed—had a desire—
fuck
. Any information he could acquire about what the furrs were capable of would still prove valuable. Given the developments, his rank would depend on what he could find out. What he knew when they debriefed him.

“Humans.” Hamm echoed the word as he stepped up to stand at his shoulder again, disregarding Marc’s attempt to convince him to retreat.

Then again, he’d negated that himself, engaging him in conversation. Asking questions that the furr couldn’t possibly answer. Real smart. With his brain a mushy soup of endorphins, he couldn’t think straight. Or he could, but it demanded a monumental effort. He needed some air unlaced with that scent. The C-C team would be depending on the intel he gleaned from his interactions.

“Yes. Humans.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. Was that really the first time he’d named them for the commander? See, this was why he needed all his brain cells firing. “You are furr. I am human.”

“You’ll need constant escorts. All of you.”

Hamm stared at the transport shuttle searing a circle in the meadow’s center. And Marc studied the male’s profile, the shape suggested beneath the thick mane. The faint feathering of hair that framed his features, tapered off to blend into the complexion of his skin. A dusky hue of golden bronze that accentuated every toned muscle beneath the flesh.

He had no idea what he was looking for. A detail that would explain his fascination. Nothing, maybe. It required more effort than he could exert to look away. The team’s impending appearance sank through at last and he cleared his throat. Chafing a hand over the nape of his neck, he diverted his attention back to the shuttle.

“Right. There’s going to be three of them on there. They’re gonna want to stay for an extended period of time. Not just a few hours or a day or two. You got four furrs you trust not to murder us in our sleep?”

The shuttle doors unsealed with a hiss of equalization, and Hamm’s hackles rose slightly before he rustled his mane with a quick shake to settle the hair back down.

“Reccin will have no problem keeping them safe.”

Marc glanced back at the chief, who ambled closer with his eyes wide and what Marc interpreted as a cub’s curiosity. Yeah, he and Reccin would get along fine. Between the two of them, they could maybe keep the team safe.

He hadn’t considered Hamm’s trust in Reccin would be so thorough. Maybe furr politics were simpler than what he was used to. More like the cohesion he’d had with his squad.

“That should work out well. Reccin and I should be able to keep them out of trouble.”

“You don’t think my second can handle a few humans on his own?” Hamm bumped Marc with his shoulder, jostling him. Marc staggered over the edge of a half-buried boulder and caught up against a tree trunk, barely suppressing a grunt of surprise.

The furr had untapped strength. Something he’d let himself forget after the violent moments of that first encounter, after that earlier wrestling match when Hamm had leapt halfway across the room and pinned him to the wall. Only the Kevlar had protected him from a few dozen broken bones. Talk about a rock and a hard place, being sandwiched between a furr and a wall wasn’t conducive to relaxation. Or goodwill. Why, then, did he continuously find himself experiencing both?

Horace Deuce-Niner was turning out to be a study of contrasts in more ways than he ever imagined.

“Come on, then. Let’s find out.” He pushed away from the tree and smirked at Hamm’s wide expression of concern. He still wasn’t sure why he hadn’t freaked out. How had any of them managed to keep a level head and see the path to a peaceful, logical solution in this debacle? He doubted many in SFI would’ve been able to do the same.

The shuttle’s door stood open and his radio crackled again, demanding a response. Apparently he’d missed the team’s initial hail.

“Red One, please respond.” There was a frantic edge in the radio controller’s voice.

Did they suspect an ambush?

Marc keyed his mike. “Stand by to disembark. On approach from northwest quadrant. The leader of indigene faction is accompanying. Secure all weapons.” Last thing he wanted was a chair force jockey getting trigger-happy.

“Roger that, Red One. Got your signatures on the infrared. Registering a third?”

“That would be the commander’s second.” Marc worked his way around a boulder, reaching back to steady Mat’s barrel, only to get mentally smacked with a reminder that the rifle wasn’t there. The ghost-sensation of Mat’s form and weight when he moved created a sense of wrongness as he strode toward the shuttle’s entry.

“Roger. Passenger disembark in progress. Out.”

The three members of the Contact & Communication team stepped out into the open to stand in a loose semicircle as though guarding the door of the shuttle. A middle-aged man and two women, one whose hair was in danger of teetering past salt-and-pepper into pure white.

The younger woman stared at the nearest flora as though she’d discovered religion for the first time. The other two team members stared at Hamm, flanking his left side as they approached. Marc had only seen expressions like theirs in close quarters combat. When an opponent saw defeat, their own death, staring them in the eye.

He’d worn that expression before. More often today than any other time that he could recall.

Most recently, when he’d looked down to see those fangs baring inches from his groin.

Long, curved enamel slick with saliva.

The line between violence and benevolence was sometimes so thin as to be invisible.