Fragile Bond

by Rhi Etzweiler

  “What the fuck are you doing?” He tried to twist away, escape the thick scent swamping the air. Resisting the urge to saturate himself with that smell took every last shred of willpower he possessed.

  Which only confused him. Whatever mental faculties remained to him went offline under the onslaught of arousal and the tingling of his skin. This didn’t make any sense. They had him under control. He was doing what they wanted—it even coincided with what needed to be done, according to SFI protocol. Everyone would be happy. Marc would survive this in one piece. And take a very, very long and much-needed vacation. So why did the furr commander keep up the pretense of arousal and attraction?

  “I don’t understand this.” Hamm said more, Marc was certain of it. The translator didn’t engage though, so it was just a series of pleasantly vibrating rumbles. That really annoyed him, the not-quite-random hiccups. Hamm’s arm tightened, pulled Marc flush up against him. He slid fingers down Marc’s neck, honey-brown eyes following as he traced Marc’s shoulder.

  Hamm’s intensity held his attention. That point of focus seemed to help him keep his thoughts halfway untangled as well. Marc swallowed and found his voice. “I understand less than you. Especially with the translation device being selective.”

  “Selective?” Hamm leaned in and stroked his cheek against Marc’s. It gave him just cause to indulge himself—too much temptation to resist. He buried his face in that mane, finally. Warm, soft, and thick with musk. The surging adrenaline and endorphins were a heady combination. The tremors ran down his arms and legs. Heat coiled low in his gut as his cock went fully hard. It made him light-headed, it happened so fast.

  Had Hamm asked a question? Yeah, he had. And it had been something important. Fuck, he didn’t care about anything. Except that those hands sliding over him weren’t touching his skin. Exploring through Kevlar-gel cloth. When the male palmed his buzzed scalp, Marc leaned into the caress with a moan and closed his eyes.

  No conscious thought as he rotated his hips forward. Breath already ragged, desperate for stimulation. He sank his fingers deep into the thick mane of hair. Didn’t care how rough his grip was. He didn’t worry about hurting Hamm. He could take it. More than that—wanted it, if that growl was anything to go by. Hamm met his force ounce for ounce. Large hands bracketing Marc’s hips, sliding around to grab his ass. Lifting him off the ground, bearing his weight with ease. Just enough height to bring them face-to-face.

  The radio crackled, spewed a baritone male voice. “Foxtrot-Sierra-Red One, this is Mother. Confirm your last.”

  The voice was a knife through his arousal. Oh shit. Paris-One was forward base communications. They had patched him through to ship command on board Mother Diaspora.

  Hamm held his gaze, his grip not weakening.

  Grateful, Marc borrowed some of that strength as he gave his call sign again. “Mother, be advised. Contact with sapient indigenes.” Contact, indeed. He had to pause and cough away the tickle of laughter in the back of his throat. “Request all aggressive forwards stand down. Advise deployment of Charlie-Charlie.”

  Contact and Communications. Standard operating procedure, straight from the manual for handling sapient encounters. Technically, Marc should shut the hell up, back the fuck off, hole up and wait for the team.

  That wasn’t about to happen. He wouldn’t, couldn’t. He didn’t know if it was just the endorphin high feeding into it. Or if it had anything to do with the alien’s eyes, the steady expression. Either way, the reality of the situation was that Hamm shouldn’t trust him. Because though the furr was no enemy to Marc, they were preparing for war.

  And yet Hamm trusted him. Trusted that he’d spoken truthfully in explaining the circumstances earlier. Didn’t seem to hold him accountable for the deaths of those other furrs, which didn’t sit well with him at all. In fact, it made the pleasant effects of the pheromones fade fast. The commander didn’t strike him as the type to take deaths lightly.

  Ignorance of the law wasn’t protection from it. Why should this be any different? What else could furrs detect and interpret besides pheromones?

  Fuck, anything was possible. The male gave another growl, a rhythmic cadence that the translation device once again ignored.

  Marc lowered his gaze, disentangled his hand from Hamm’s hair to trace the lines of his face. Jaw, cheek, nose, dragging fingertips gently over his lips. He was far from a handsome creature by human standards. But he was fucking beautiful.

  Maybe it was just the pheromones playing with his brain chemistry or whatever. Skewing his perceptions like a recreational drug relaxing inhibitions. Worlds better than anything he recalled paying for.

  “Did you advise for Charlie-Charlie?” The man’s voice came through the radio without the slightest hint of static. As though he stood at Marc’s shoulder, sounding less than pleased. He’d been silent a good while. Probably went to pull up Marc’s GPS chip and get a full debrief on the earlier losses.

  “Affirmative, Mother. Contact with Sierra-India. Team can confirm within minutes of arrival.”

  “Remain on-site to guide. Deploying to your location in twenty. ETA seventeen-hundred Zulu.”

  “Copy, Mother. Out.” He glanced at the chrono readout on the face of the radio. “The team should be here soon. I give it until tomorrow, and you’ll have a full-scale cease and desist order in action.”

  “It stops?” Hamm canted his head, trying to catch his gaze.

  Marc turned the volume down on his radio. “Yeah, ya big tawny. It stops.” You can stop turning on the charm, now. “They should hail for a landing zone within,” he glanced up at the sky, measured the movement of the sun that equated to an hour, “roughly.”

  Hamm’s grip tightened on his ass as he ground his hips forward and curled his lips in what Marc suspected he should interpret as a smile. The attempt at something so foreign lightened the weight in his chest, hunkering like a personnel transport stuck in the mud. “Good. Got some time then.”

  “Time?” The ramrod-stiff length of Hamm’s arousal jutted low against his groin and thigh. It felt suspiciously similar to how Mat’s barrel had felt trapped between them. Marc wanted to rip his uniform trousers off, just so he could feel the difference, that tingling thrill of hot flesh branding flesh. He shifted against Hamm, frustrated by the lack of friction in the right places. Taunting, close, but not quite right. He glanced around. “Yeah, time. Place?”

  Hamm’s gaze narrowed. A growl vibrated through him, and then Marc’s back hit the ground. It had been much too long since he’d had a well-muscled, horny male crouched over him. The furr palmed Marc’s cock through his trousers, fingers tangling with his as Marc tried to focus on undoing the buttons. He growled his desperation and impatience. He sounded nothing like a furr, but he didn’t care. It made Hamm’s own growl shift into a purr and drop an octave, touch growing more insistent. Marc squeezed his eyes shut, tried to take a deep breath and focus, but his skin tingled everywhere. The tension building to the point of pain in his groin kept interrupting his efforts. How many thousands of years of military refinement, and nobody had devised anything better than buttons?

  Hamm listened to Marc growl softly, watched him squirm and writhe as he fought with his clothing. When Hamm tried to slide his palm greedily up the searing heat of Marc’s hard shaft again, the soldier hissed and pushed his hand away.

  That wouldn’t do. The ’nip scent of his pheromones wasn’t enough anymore. He wanted to taste skin and sweat and musk and cum. He growled his impatience and Marc echoed the same sound and tone, right back at him. It cut through his arousal—which felt so intense he doubted he could escape this encounter without demanding a measure of gratification.

  Reccin had sensed it and stayed back in the tree line. His second was far from stupid. He’d scented what Hamm had, too, though he’d questioned the soldier longer than Hamm had needed to be certain of the truth.

  This soldier wasn’t their enemy.

  He wasn’t so lost or mindless that he wou
ld take what wasn’t freely offered. It wasn’t about dominance—not this. Not right here. When Marc continued his ragged breathing and fumbling, Hamm’s patience expired. He wanted to taste. It didn’t matter where he tasted him, just needed skin. He dipped his head, desperation coloring his growl as he licked along Marc’s neck, then closed his eyes against the zing of pleasure that shot through him. Marc’s scent had nothing on the way he tasted. It was as though the male had rubbed ’nip leaves all over his skin. Twice a day. For a year. The vibration of sound as he purred resonated through his entire body, easing the painful edge of relentless need into something softer. Offering a small measure of relief.

  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.