Chapter 5
KHALA
Grat and I spent the entire day together, and it was probably one of the best days in my life. After breakfast, Grat took me to check the few traps he’d set and showed me how to reset those that had caught something in them.
We brought some sandwiches with us and had lunch in a small clearing next to a cranberry patch. After collecting the berries, we came back to the cabin to clean the small game that Grat had caught in his traps.
After a dinner of blood sausage, baked potatoes, and sauerkraut from a thick ceramic barrel in his cellar, Grat gave me a long, assessing look.
“All right, here’s the thing, Khala. I understand that you probably aren’t used to bathing…”
A new wave of mortification spread through me.
I’d tried to keep my distance and stay downwind from him all day.
But the pungent stench of the bear hide was impossible to conceal.
The fur hadn’t been perfectly clean even back when I’d stolen it from one of the wagons during my escape.
But after six weeks in the woods, it had become filthy and rancid.
My body underneath it didn’t feel much cleaner, either.
If Grat said I stank, it wouldn’t be a lie. But he tried not to offend me, choosing his words carefully.
“I’ll have to give you a bath before letting you into my cabin,” he said. “Of course, if you’d rather stay out here for the night—”
“No,” I protested quickly. “I’ll bathe.”
Sleeping indoors seemed like a true luxury after so many weeks of dozing on and off in a tree while trying not to fall down or get eaten by some vicious, bloodthirsty monster.
Grat seemed surprised by my eagerness but also pleased.
He nodded. “Taking a bath will do you good. And you should get rid of that smelly hide too. Who knows what nasty bugs are living in there?”
My skin itched even more from his mentioning the bugs.
“I’ll bathe. I want to bathe. Please,” I said again, reaching under the hide to scratch.
Grat filled the wide wooden barrel above the stove with water from the creek. When it got warm enough, he brought out a towel, a bar of burgundy soap, and a stack of clean clothes.
“This is mine,” he said, laying out a giant cotton tunic on the wooden stool next to the tub. “It’ll be big on you, but I don’t have anything in your size here, and there is no way I’m letting you keep that filthy fur after getting you clean. Take it off.”
“Um…” I fidgeted with the end of the rope that tied the bear hide to my body.
My hesitation to get naked in front of him had no reason, however. It was obvious that Grat had no interest in me as a woman, which was refreshing and relaxing. This huge orc I barely knew, made me feel safer than most human men before him.
He mistook my hesitation for inability to manage the knot.
“Here. Let me help you.” He grabbed his hunting knife from the sheath strapped to his left arm and cut through the rope.
Fresh air caressed my skin as the hide loosened from around my body, but I held on to the fur.
“Now, be a good girl and climb into the tub,” Grat rumbled in that deep voice of his.
I suddenly wished that he would see me as a woman, not just as a pathetic, starving stray he’d rescued out of kindness.
The wish came over me in a flash, making me momentarily forget about modesty, and I did something I’d never done before.
I slipped the hide off my shoulders deliberately slowly, as if undressing for a lover.
I angled my head a little to give my neck that elegant curve I was told looked good in portrait poses. I extended my leg gracefully as if in a dance across a grand ballroom, allowing the hide to fall open around my thigh before dropping the fur to the ground.
Now I gave Grat a sultry look over my shoulder to see his reaction.
His eyes opened wide, giving me a boost of satisfaction. His jaw dropped, then…his thick eyebrows moved in an expression that looked disturbingly more like a scowl than awe, or admiration, or at least some interest that I’d hoped for.
“Fuck,” he cursed under his breath, then promptly ripped his shirt off over his head, yanked his pants down, and kicked his boots off.
He disrobed quickly, as if rushing to deal with an emergency, and by the looks of it, that emergency wasn’t him being suddenly overcome with passion for me.
“What’s going on?” I mumbled, utterly confused.
“Into the bath with you, wild thing. Now.” He grabbed me under his arm and climbed in the tub with me.
Maybe I should be alarmed when swept away like that by a huge, naked orc who clearly intended to share the bath with me. Except that I sensed no sexual interest from him. He seemed concerned, not aroused.
“When did you get into the sweet reeds, Khala?” he asked sternly, plopping me into the water.
“What reeds?” I grabbed onto the edge of the tub, bracing against the wave he made when sitting down into the water with me.
“The long, pale, blue grass that often grows by the ponds around here,” he said. “It tastes sweet, so kids chew on it sometimes, mistaking it for a treat.”
“I didn’t eat any grass,” I assured him.
I most certainly would have eaten it, had I known it was sweet and edible. I’d been so hungry for so long, I would’ve eaten anything.
“I stayed away from the ponds,” I said. “The one time I came close to water, I got attacked by some rodents with lots of legs and tails.”
“Spider rats?” He reached for the soap. “They have eight legs and three tails.”
“Nasty creatures.” I shuddered, scratching my chest.
Grat grabbed my wrist, moving my hand away. “Don’t scratch, you’ll make it worse.”
“What will I make worse?” I glanced down.
The pink welts from my scratching crisscrossed the wide bluish lines that marred my chest and shoulders.
The raised edges of the lines bloomed with a bright blue rush of dots.
Grouped in fours like the lucky clover leaf, the swollen dots looked like small pink flowers covering my body in long discolored stripes.
“What the hell is this?” I screamed in horror and would’ve bolted out of the tub had Grat not caught me by my arm.
“You’ll have to wash off the juice of the reeds. Like this.” He rubbed my shoulder with the soap, lathering my skin.
“Will it help?” I whimpered.
“The soap has red pine sap in it. It’s the best thing against the sweet reed. My mother washed my mouth with it when I was four and ate a bunch of sweet reeds once.”
“You survived,” I exhaled with relief.
“I did. And you will too. Sweet reed won’t kill you, but it itches like crazy, especially if you wait long enough for the rash to turn purple.”
It itched badly enough already. I hadn’t paid it much attention before, thinking it was just the sweat and the dirt under the bear hide that itched my skin. But now that I saw the rash, all I wanted to do was to scratch it.
“Don’t scratch,” Grat warned. “Once we wash it properly, you’ll feel much better.” He leaned around me to take a look at my back. “How did you manage to get it all over yourself like that? Did you roll in the damned thing?”
“I wanted to bathe in the pond, so I took my clothes off,” I explained.
“What clothes?” He cast a confused look at the discarded hide and a few dirty rags that were left from my dress and undershirt.
Afraid that he’d demand an explanation for those, I scrambled for a distraction.
“So, how do I make it better?” I rubbed an inflamed welt over my collarbone.
He promptly moved my hand away again and soaped my chest. “I am doing it better, see? Once it’s clean, the itch will stop, and as long as you stay away from the sweet reed from now on, you’ll be fine.”
He didn’t use a washcloth, gliding his huge hands over my skin to spread the suds on my chest instead. I stiffened when his large palms moved over my bare breasts. But he washed them with the same methodical concentration as any other part of my body.
His touch was firm but gentle, sending my emotions into an unexpected area. My nipples hardened as he rubbed the soap over them. My heart beat faster. A warm, achy feeling stirred low in my belly.
“Get up a little. Let me see more of you,” Grat instructed.
Obediently, I rose on my knees, with the water level dropping to my hips.
“Silly girl,” he rumbled good-naturedly. “Just look at you. You got it everywhere.”
He lathered my belly, then slid his palms down each of my thighs. As one of his huge, warm hands traveled back up my left thigh, it slipped, with his thumb bumping high between my legs.
Desire zapped through me. Air rushed out of my lungs. I bent over, gripping the edge of the tub.
“Did I hurt you?” Grat worried.
“No…” I exhaled a shaky breath.
He glanced at my face, and finally—finally—seemed to realize that I wasn’t just some “stray” he’d picked up in the woods but also a woman.
A woman, who had never been touched with this much care before by a man who harbored no hidden agenda but simply tried to make her feel better.
I was also a woman, who hadn’t touched herself for a very long time while being busy fighting for survival.
I pressed my thighs together, sending a shiver of desire through my naked body, too aroused and too tired to hide it from him.
“Oh,” he uttered, looking a little stunned. “Did I get you excited, my sweet wild thing?”
“Mhm,” I half-nodded, half-moaned in response.
Grat cleared his throat, looking uncertain. “Do you need me to…uhm, take care of it for you?”
He stroked the inside of my thighs. His thumbs brushed the short curls between my legs, not quite touching where I wanted him to touch me the most.
“Please,” I exhaled, not allowing myself to think too deeply into it.
Grat had managed to put me at ease with him, and I felt more shocked by my feelings than ashamed of them.
“How do you like it, Khala?” he rumbled. “Rough or gentle?”
“Gentle,” I said, almost pleading.
“Hm,” he grunted. “I don’t fuck gently, sweet thing.”
“I don’t need you to fuck me, just…keep touching me. Please?” I whimpered, feeling almost dizzy with need.