The Professor Orc’s Secret (Feral Sons MC #5)

Chapter 1

Ellie

I've rearranged the new releases display twice.

The Le Guin goes spine-out on the second shelf because Lily Rivers has a hold on it and she'll want to see it the moment she walks in, not hunt for it.

The Shirley Jackson reprint goes face-out because nobody in this town picks up Shirley Jackson unless they can see the cover, and the cover is gorgeous.

The Mary Oliver collection goes on the end cap where the afternoon light hits the table, because I'm a librarian and I believe in strategic placement.

Most days the county library gets a version of Ellie Frost in muted earth tones with sensible flats and her hair pinned up with whatever clip didn't fall behind the bathroom vanity.

Today I chose a green dress—vintage, fitted at the waist, and bought at the consignment shop on Main because the color reminded me of the moss that grows on the rocks north of the cove.

I told myself it's laundry day. Every cardigan is clean and hanging in my closet, but I told myself that, and I believed it for four minutes.

Really I dressed up for Colt—Lily's dad.

The worst part isn't that he doesn't notice me. The worst part is that I'm pretty sure he does. And that's a problem I can't solve with the Dewey Decimal System.

The library door swings open at two-fifteen and Lily comes through it the way she comes through every door—at full speed, backpack sliding off one shoulder, a paperback gripped in her hand like evidence she intends to present in court.

"Miss Frost." She drops the backpack on the nearest chair and holds the book up. "I finished the Le Guin. Can we talk about the ending? Because I have problems with it."

I lean against the circulation desk and cross my arms. "What kind of problems?"

"The kind where the author spends three hundred pages building a political system and then resolves it in nine.

" Lily opens to a dog-eared page. She dog-ears pages.

It hurts me on a cellular level and I've stopped correcting her because the arguments she makes about the text are worth the damage to the pages.

"Shevek goes home. He just—goes home. After everything he sacrificed, the ending boils down to 'well, I guess I'll try.

' That's not resolution. That's avoidance. "

I pull up a stool and sit across from her. This is the part of my week I look forward to most, and I don't let myself examine what that means. "Is it avoidance? Or is Le Guin saying that the act of going home with new knowledge is itself revolutionary?"

Lily considers this. She chews the inside of her cheek the way her father does when he's turning over a thought, and the resemblance knocks me sideways for half a second before I recover.

"Maybe," she says. "But revolutionary for who? For the reader, or for Shevek? Because Shevek already knew everything he needed to know before he left. The journey confirmed it. It didn't change him."

"So you wanted the journey to change him."

"I wanted the ending to cost him something." Lily flips the book closed and sets it on the desk. "The best endings cost the character. Otherwise what's the point?"

She's twelve and she argues about thematic stakes like she's got tenure.

Nobody told her she's supposed to soften her opinions, and I hope nobody does.

I love this kid. I love this kid in a way that keeps me up at night because she's not mine, and the line between caring about a patron and caring about a person blurred somewhere around the fifth Saturday and I never corrected it.

"I set aside the books from your hold list." I nod toward the shelf behind the desk. "The Octavia Butler, the Le Guin short stories, and the Ursula Vernon you requested."

Lily grins, the expression pulling wide enough to flash the small tusks she hasn't grown into yet. She has her father's broad jaw and dark hair, the same green-grey skin. "The Ursula Vernon? You got it?"

"It arrived Thursday. I may have expedited the request."

"Miss Frost, you're the best."

"I know." I hand her the stack. "Go. Read. Return in the condition you found them."

"No promises about the dog-ears."

"I'm aware."

She tucks the stack under her arm, then pauses. "Hey, Miss Frost? Do you have any of those granola bars left? The ones from the reading program?"

"In the desk drawer. Help yourself."

Lily grabs two and shoves one in her backpack.

"Dad forgot to eat again. He does that when he's working.

I found him at the kitchen table at midnight last week with, like, four spreadsheets and an empty coffee pot.

" She says it matter of fact, the way a kid reports everything about their parent.

She bites into the other granola bar and talks through it.

"I made him a sandwich but he didn't notice it until morning. "

I don't say anything to that. But I hear it. And I add it to the list of things I know about Colt Rivers that I have no business keeping track of.

She takes her books to the table by the window—her table, the one she claimed six months ago with the reading lamp that tilts—and opens the Butler before her backpack hits the floor.

I straighten around the circulation desk.

Move the date stamp. Adjust the pen cup.

Normal things, the small rituals of a Saturday afternoon in a building I've run for four years, a building I rebuilt from an underfunded storage closet into a real county library with programs and holds and an interlibrary loan system that the state association asked me to present at a conference last year.

I'm good at this. I like this life. I built it on purpose after Derek slid divorce papers across the table between bites of anniversary pasta, and for five years it held.

Then Colt Rivers started picking up his daughter every Saturday at four o'clock, and the life I built stopped being enough.

The door opens at four.

Colt fills the doorway. Six-foot-five of orc in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, messenger bag over one shoulder. Salt-and-pepper hair. Scarred hands. He ducks slightly coming through, the way he always does.

"Miss Frost." He nods.

"Mr. Rivers."

We've done this for months. He usually signs the pickup sheet. I hand him Lily's hold receipts. He thanks me. I tell him to have a nice evening. He tells Lily to get her things and then they leave. I lock up at five and drive home and eat dinner alone in an apartment full of books that don't leave.

But today is different. Lily spots him from the window table and waves him over with the urgency of someone flagging down air rescue. "Dad. Dad, come here. Look what Miss Frost pulled for me."

Colt crosses the library, ducking the display sign by the children's section. He bends to look at Lily's stack and his eyebrows rise behind the reading glasses.

"Octavia Butler?" He picks up the collection. "Parable of the Sower?"

"Miss Frost got me the whole list," Lily says. "She got the Ursula Vernon through interlibrary loan. It came from Eugene."

"Eugene." He glances at me over Lily's head, and one eyebrow lifts. "That's really going above and beyond, Miss Frost."

"Lily's reading list is worth the paperwork."

He sets the book down. Lily drags him to the community board near the entrance where Holly's photographs from the photography workshop hang—kids with disposable cameras, the harbor in afternoon light, and one shot I come back to every time I pass it: Colt and Lily from behind, walking past Betty's Diner, Lily's arm looped through his, both of them backlit by the late-autumn sun.

Holly captured it. Neither of them knew she had the camera up, and the unselfconsciousness of the image does something to my chest that I refuse to name.

Colt studies it. He adjusts his glasses.

"Holly has an eye," he says.

"She does. She ran the workshop last month. Lily's work is right here." I point to the lower row. A close-up of rain on a fire escape. A shot of the library's front steps at dusk. "Your daughter has an eye too."

He adjusts his glasses again.

Lily shelves her holds herself. She insists, and she does it correctly, by Dewey Decimal, because I taught her the system in September and she took to it with the ferocity of someone who believes in order.

She disappears into the stacks with her armful of books, the library gets quiet, and Colt stands at the circulation desk with nothing left to wait for.

His hand lands on the book next to the stamp pad. My copy of Middlemarch, dog-eared and spine-cracked, the Penguin Classics edition I've carried since college.

"You're reading George Eliot?"

"I've read her three times."

His eyebrows lift. "I used to teach her."

"Middlemarch specifically?"

"Victorian lit. Portland State." He leans against the counter and his reading glasses slide down his nose. He pushes them up with one scarred finger. "I built a whole seminar around marriage plots. Austen, Bronte, Eliot. Half my students signed up because they thought it'd be easy."

"Let me guess. It wasn't."

"Dorothea Brooke has a way of ruining people's expectations about romance." The corner of his mouth twitches. "I had a twenty-year-old kid tell me she made him rethink his entire relationship. He'd been dating his girlfriend for three weeks."

I laugh before I can catch it. "That's the best thing about teaching, though. When someone reads a book you've read a dozen times and shows you an angle you missed."

He looks at me. Not at the shelves, not at the stacks where Lily disappeared. At me. "Yeah," he says. "It is."

"They hired me because having an orc in the English department looked good on the brochure.

" He says it with a laugh. "Kept me for six years.

Then enough parents called the dean about their daughters being in a classroom with a monster, and the department chair let me go and called it a 'restructuring.

' She used the word 'climate' four times. "

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I got a motorcycle and a better job title out of it." His mouth quirks. "Secretary sounds impressive until people find out it means I balance a spreadsheet and argue with Knox about receipts."

I laugh. It comes out louder than I mean it to. I cover my mouth, but his focus has already dropped to where my fingers press against my lips. When it lifts back to my face, his expression has changed.

"What about you?" He nods at the shelves behind me. "This wasn't always here, was it?"

"No." I trace the edge of the desk. "When I took over, the county budget gave me a closet with water damage and a shelf of donated Danielle Steeles.

I spent two years writing grants and calling every used bookstore between here and Astoria.

The interlibrary system took another year.

The children's programs took six months of begging the county board for funding they didn't want to give a library they didn't think anyone used. "

"And now Lily can get an Ursula Vernon from Eugene."

My throat tightens. "Yeah. She can."

He holds my gaze for a beat longer than the sentence requires and my skin prickles with heat and I wonder if he can tell, if orc senses pick up things like elevated heart rate, like the flush climbing my neck, like the fact that I chose this dress on purpose and I'm standing close enough to catch his scent for the first time.

Leather, ink, and underneath, sharp and alive, not human, and my body registers it before my brain catches up.

I've read this before. I've read it a hundred times in the paperbacks I keep in my nightstand drawer.

It never once happened to me at the circulation desk.

The front door opens. Sarah Stone comes in with a box of donated school books balanced on one hip and Reeve gnawing on a board book in the crook of her other arm. Reeve drools on the book's cover with the commitment of a baby who has opinions about literature.

"Donation drop-off," Sarah says, and then her gaze moves from me to Colt standing at the counter and back to me. She doesn't say a word. She just gives me the smile. The one that means I'm going to get a phone call later.

"Thank you, Sarah. I'll catalog them Monday."

"No rush." Sarah shifts Reeve higher on her hip. "Take your time."

She leaves. Colt clears his throat. "Sarah's, uh—"

"Yeah."

"Right, anyway, I should get Lily," he says.

"She's in the stacks. Shelf eight."

He pushes off the counter, glances down at Middlemarch, and walks toward the stacks.

Lily comes out with her backpack zipped and her holds tucked under one arm. Colt steers her toward the exit. At the community board, he slows. Looks at the photograph of himself and Lily one more time.

"Miss Frost." He turns in the doorway. "Thank you. For the books."

"Anytime, Mr. Rivers."

He nods and they leave.

I lock up at five. The library settles into its after-hours quiet, and I stand behind the counter where Colt stood twenty minutes ago and talked about George Eliot like she mattered, about his students like they still sat in the front row, about losing the career he loved with a dry wit that made me laugh hard enough to embarrass myself.

I can still smell him. Leather, ink, and that sharp edge I've never been close enough to register until today. My body responded to it, a low heat that pooled in my belly and stayed, and I'm not going to think about that.

Except I do think about it the entire drive home.