Chapter 7
Varek's hands moved on her waist. Before she could register it, he'd turned her—lifted her, really, like she weighed nothing at all—and settled her facing him.
Straddling him.
Her knees bracketed his hips on the bench.
The nightgown rode up, bunching around her thighs, and the only thing between her body and his was two layers of linen and whatever he was wearing beneath his leathers.
Her hands landed on his shoulders for balance, fingers curling into the rough fabric of his tunic.
"Oh," she said. It came out breathless.
Varek's hands settled on her hips, steadying her. His thumbs traced slow circles against the curve of her waist, the same motion he'd been making for the past hour, but now she could see his face while he did it.
"Better," he said.
"Better for what?"
"For seeing you."
Heat prickled up the back of Mab's neck. The hall was emptier now, but a handful of warriors still lingered at the far tables, finishing their meals, talking in low voices. Any one of them could look up and see her perched in their war-leader's lap like a hen on a fencepost.
"People are watching," she said.
"Let them." His hands tightened on her hips, not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough that she felt the shape of each finger through the linen. "They can look all they want. They won't touch."
Varek's palms spread wide across her back and pulled her forward.
Mab's breath caught. Her chest pressed against his, the thin linen of the nightgown doing nothing to disguise the warmth of him, the solid breadth of muscle beneath his tunic. Her hands slid from his shoulders to his chest, fingers splaying against the rough-woven fabric.
His nostrils flared. He leaned in, not to her mouth, but to the curve of her neck, and inhaled.
The sound he made was low, animal, a rumble that started in his chest and vibrated through hers. His nose traced a line from her collarbone to the soft skin beneath her ear, and she felt the brush of his tusks against her jaw, dragging lightly across her pulse point.
"I've been breathing you in all morning," he said against her throat. "Every time you shifted in my lap. Every time you leaned back against me."
His hand closed in her hair, tilting her head to give him better access to her neck. His breath was hot against her pulse.
"Do you know what I thought about while I fed you?" The words vibrated against her skin. "I thought about feeding you other things. My fingers. My tongue. My cock."
Mab gasped. She had never heard such filth, but somehow his voice made the words feel less like vulgarity and more like promise.
"I thought about laying you out on this table," Varek continued, his mouth moving against the hollow of her throat. "Pushing this nightgown up around your waist. Making you come with my mouth while my men finished their breakfast."
"Varek," she said in a scolding tone.
"That's my name." His teeth grazed her pulse point, not quite a bite, and she shuddered. "Say it again."
"We're in the middle of the hall."
"We are." His tongue traced the spot his teeth had touched, a wet heat that made her thighs clench around his hips. "And I'm not going to do any of those things. Not here. Not yet."
His hands slid down from her waist to the curve of her hips, then lower, fingers pressing into the soft flesh of her thighs through the bunched linen.
"But I want you to know what I'm thinking." His voice was a growl against her collarbone. "I want you to know that every time I look at you, I see you spread open beneath me. Every time I touch you, I imagine where else my hands could go."
His fingers kneaded her thighs, slow and deliberate, and Mab's hips tipped forward without her permission. The movement pressed her against him, against the hard ridge she could feel through his leathers, and Varek's breath hissed between his teeth.
"There," he said. "That's what I want. You, moving toward me. Not away."
Mab's hands fisted in his tunic. Her heart was pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat, her wrists, the soft place between her thighs.
She should be mortified. She should be pushing away, putting distance between them, remembering that she was a scullion in a dead woman's nightgown and he was an orc war-leader.
But his hands felt like they belonged on her body. His voice felt like it was reshaping something inside her.
"I've never—" She stopped. Swallowed. "No one has ever talked to me like that."
"Do you like it?"
His hands hadn't stopped moving. His thumbs stroked the soft flesh of her inner thighs, and when she didn't answer immediately, he pulled her hips forward, grinding her against the hard length of him.
Mab's breath left her in a rush. Her fingers dug into his tunic, and her hips rolled against him before she could stop herself, chasing the pressure, the friction, the searing heat of him through all those layers of fabric.
"Answer me." His voice was rough. "Do you like hearing what I want to do to you?"
"Yes." The word came out broken. "Yes, I like it."
Varek's grin was slow and wicked, his tusks catching the light from the fire. "Good." His hands tightened on her thighs, holding her still when she tried to rock against him again. "Remember that."
Then he lifted her off his lap and set her on the bench beside him.
The sound she made was half whimper, half protest. Her body was still thrumming, still aching, still reaching for him even as he stood and stretched his arms over his head like a man waking from a pleasant nap.
"I have work," he said. "Inventory of what we're taking north. Messages to send ahead. A conversation with my brother about supply lines that should have happened yesterday."
"What about me?"
The question came out before she could stop it. She was still sitting on the bench, nightgown rucked up around her thighs, face flushed, body wound tight as a bowstring. And he was talking about supply lines.
Varek looked down at her, one brow raised. "What about you?"
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Whatever you want." He said it like the answer was obvious. "Walk the grounds. Sleep. Eat. Sit in the sun. Nothing, if nothing suits you."
Mab stared at him. The words made sense individually, but strung together they formed a shape she couldn't parse. "I don't understand."
"Which part?"
"The part where I do nothing." She tugged the nightgown down over her thighs, suddenly aware of how ridiculous she must look. Flushed and rumpled and asking an orc war-leader for a chore list. "I've never done nothing. I don't know how."
"Then learn," he said. "You have three days before we ride. Spend them however you want. If you want to work, find work. If you want to sleep until noon and eat your weight in bread, do that. No one will stop you. No one will punish you for it."
His thumb traced the line of her cheekbone. The same slow, deliberate pressure he'd been using all morning, but gentler now. Less heat. More steadiness.
"But if you go looking for a mop because you don't know what to do with your own hands when they're empty," he said, "I'll take the mop away and find something better to fill them with."
The grin was back, edging up over his tusks, and then he was walking away. His boots rang against the stone floor. He didn't look back.
Mab stood and tugged the nightgown back down, smoothing the linen over her thighs. The handful of warriors at the far tables had gone back to their conversations. None of them looked at her.
Her skin was still flushed. Her body was still humming. She stood up. Her legs held, which surprised her a little. She walked out of the hall, and no one stopped her, and no one asked where she was going.
The holding was quieter than she'd ever heard it.
Not silent. There were orcs in it, and orcs were not a silent people.
She could hear voices from the hall behind her, the scrape of benches being moved, someone laughing in a room she couldn't see.
From deeper in the building, the thud of something heavy being set down.
Inventory, probably. Varek's supply lines.
But the human sounds were gone. No clatter of pewter from the scullery. No shrill bark of orders from the upper floors. No rustle of skirts in the stairwells, no murmur of gossip from the servants' corridor that ran behind the main hall.
Mab reached the end of the corridor and turned left without thinking. Toward the kitchens. She'd taken three steps before she caught herself.
Not the kitchen. Not yet.
Instead, she went out the door to her left into the kitchen garden.
It was small and poorly tended since Hester's death, the beds half-choked with weeds. Mab had kept it up for a while after Hester died, but Garrad hadn't cared about the garden, and eventually the weeds won.
Mab stood at the edge of it now, her bare feet in the cold grass, and looked at what remained. Hester's herb beds, overgrown. The sorrel had bolted, its seed heads brown and dry, rattling in the wind. The thyme had spread across the path stones, fragrant when her foot caught the edge of a runner.
She crouched beside the rosemary.
It needed cutting back. The lower stems were woody and bare, and the new growth was all at the top, reaching for light.
Hester would have pruned it in autumn. Hester would have taken the cuttings inside, dried them in bundles over the hearth, used them in the lamb if there was lamb or in the bread if there wasn't.
Mab closed her hand around a sprig and snapped it off. The smell hit her, sharp and clean and green, and her throat closed around it.
Hester's hands had smelled like this. Rosemary and rendered fat and the iron smell of the big kettle. Hands that had rapped Mab's knuckles when her knife work was sloppy. Hands that had pushed a ribbon across the prep table on her birthday and said, I saw it at market and thought of you.
The ribbon had been green. Cheap silk, fraying at the edges, the kind of thing you'd buy for a penny from the back of a peddler's cart. Mab had worn it in her hair for one day. One day of feeling like someone had seen her and thought she deserved a small, bright thing.
Iris had cut it off while Mab slept. Mab had found the pieces on the floor by her pallet in the morning, sheared clean with the sewing scissors Iris kept in her apron pocket.
Iris had never said a word about it. Hadn't needed to.
The message was the cut itself: don't think you're anything.
Don't think anyone sees you. Don't think a ribbon changes what you are.
Mab had stopped asking for things after that.
Not all at once. Gradually, the way you stop reaching for a shelf that burns your hand every time you touch it.
She'd stopped wanting ribbons, then wanting notice, then wanting anything at all that required someone else to give it.
She'd closed the wanting down, room by room, like shuttering a house for winter.
By the time Hester died, there was nothing left to shutter.
She stood up.
Whatever you want.
Mab opened her fist. The rosemary sprig lay in her palm, bruised and dark, the oils shining on her skin.
She wanted.
The word arrived without an object attached to it. Not I want this or I want that. Just the verb, bare and terrifying, a door swinging open onto a room she'd boarded up so long ago she'd forgotten it was there.
She wanted.
She wanted to be touched. Wanted Varek's hands on her hips, his voice against her throat, his breath on her skin. Wanted to be looked at. Wanted to be seen.
That was the part that made her breath go shallow.
Not just the touching. The being seen. The being known, in her body, by someone who wanted to know it.
Someone who looked at the softness and the width and the heaviness of her and didn't calculate what could be trimmed away but instead calculated how to get closer to all of it.
She pressed the rosemary sprig to her nose and breathed in, and the scent was Hester's hands and the ghost of a green ribbon and the morning she'd stopped wanting, all at once.
And underneath it, rising like bread, like heat, like something that had been waiting almost three decades to be named...
she wanted Varek Redhand. Wanted him consciously.
Wanted him awake. Wanted him with her eyes open and her hands unclenched and her whole self standing in the daylight where he could see her.
It was the most frightening thing she had ever felt.