Chapter 9
JUNIA
"Your runes are glowing."
"They do that." He's matter-of-a-fact about it.
"Through the bandages."
"They do that too." He nods.
"Is it an orc thing?"
"It's a proximity thing." His brow lifts endearingly.
Oh.
The glow pulses brighter. Soft green light catches his jaw, the ridge of his brow, the heavy shelf of his cheekbone. His eyes reflect it back, two points of amber in the dark, locked onto me with an intensity that makes the flannel feel paper-thin.
"Proximity to what?"
He doesn't answer. Doesn't need to. The glow answers for him, brightening another fraction, painting the cluttered garage in dim emerald.
I can see his face now. All of it. The hard lines and the sharp tusks and the scar that hooks under his left ear and the expression he's wearing, which is not the expression of a man who alphabetizes fertilizer by nitrogen content.
It's raw. Open. Terrified, just not really of falling trees.
He asked for a ceasefire. A permanent one. My chaos on his lawn, his structure in my garden. Everything tangled together.
My pulse hammers in my wrists, my throat, the soft dip behind my ears. The flannel sleeves hang past my fingertips and I bunch the fabric in my fists because my hands want to reach for him and I need a second. Just one second to breathe.
But the air in this garage doesn't cooperate.
It's thick with rain and motor oil and green light and whatever invisible thing crackles between us when we're close.
It has crackled since the first day. Since the fertilizer cloud and the spotless boots and the laminated list. Since he vaulted a six-foot fence with steel shears. Since he caught a tree.
For me.
"Yes."
The word comes out soft. Barely a sound. More breath than sound. But the garage is small and dark and quiet except for the rain, and he hears it.
His whole body shifts. The bucket groans.
He leans that final inch and his forehead touches mine and every nerve in my skin fires at once.
His brow is hot. Fever-warm. The ridge of bone is broader than a human's, heavier, and it settles against my forehead like it was built to fit there.
His breath fans across my mouth. My eyes close.
His hand rises, bandaged palm hovering at my jaw, not quite touching, the green glow warm against my cheek.
"Junia."
My name in his mouth. A deep rumble that vibrates through the point of contact between our foreheads and travels down my spine and pools at it. His fingers graze my jaw. Rough bandage cloth and calloused skin and gentle, gentle pressure, tilting my chin up.
I rise off the bucket.
His other hand finds my waist through the flannel. Massive. His fingers span from my hip to my ribs. He pulls and I go, closing the gap between us, my hands pressing flat against him where the heartbeat is steady and enormous and warm.
One inch. Half an inch.
The power kicks on.
Every fluorescent tube in the ceiling detonates to life at once. White light. Blinding. Industrial. The kind of light designed for a clean garage with labeled shelving units and a pegboard where every tool hangs on its designated hook.
I jerk backward. My boot catches the overturned bucket. The bucket shoots sideways. My arms pinwheel. Flynn grabs for me but his bandaged hand slips on the flannel and I sit down hard on the concrete floor, legs splayed, his enormous shirt billowing around me like a tent.
He's frozen mid-reach. One hand extended. Amber eyes blown wide. Blinking in the fluorescent assault like a man who's been dragged out of a cave.
I'm on the floor. The concrete is cold. My tailbone hurts. My heart is still going at a rate that suggests I should see a doctor.
Around us, the garage reveals itself in full. Every shelf labeled in his blocky handwriting. Every container sorted. The fertilizer rack, and there it is, alphabetized by nitrogen content, just like he said.
Flynn's jaw works. His tusks catch the overhead light. The green glow in his runes has gone nuclear, blazing through the bandages, pulsing fast.
"The power's back."
"I noticed."
He looks at me on the floor. I look at him on the bucket. The fluorescents buzz and hum and wash everything in their flat, merciless, deeply unsexy glare.
His hand is still extended.
I grab it. He hauls me upright like I weigh nothing. The momentum carries me forward and I slam into him and the flannel falls off one shoulder and his hand is on my waist again, huge and hot.
The electronic garage door whirs. Starts to rise. Cool night air rushes in under the gap.
And standing in the driveway, illuminated by the garage light, is Valerius.
The morning after almost-kissing an Orc in his garage while an Elf tyrant watched from the driveway, I wake up to the sound of a diesel engine revving at six AM.
I drag myself to the window, squinting through the curtain.
Flynn stands in the fence line between our properties, wearing his faded tee shirt and cargo shorts and a pair of work gloves that look like they could palm a basketball.
He's directing a rented excavator with sharp hand signals.
Military precision. Warband habits die hard, apparently.
The front yard fence is already gone. Every post. Every slat. Every perfectly measured, perfectly stained plank of cedar that separated the front halves of our properties. A pile of lumber sits stacked in his driveway, organized by length. Of course it is.
I pull on my floral overalls, stuff my feet into boots, and stumble outside with yesterday's coffee reheated in the microwave.
"You tore down the fence."
Flynn doesn't look up from the trench he's marking with fluorescent orange spray paint. The lines are ruler-straight. "You said yes."
"I said yes to a truce. Not to heavy machinery at dawn."
"Truce requires infrastructure." He pulls a rolled blueprint from his shorts. An actual blueprint. Printed on actual blue paper with white grid lines. He spreads it across the hood of the excavator and anchors the corners with four identical river stones. "I drew this at four AM."
I lean over the blueprint. He's designed a combined property layout. His structural elements. My garden beds. Integrated drainage channels. Load-bearing retaining walls. A winding path that connects my porch to his patio through a series of terraced planters.
It's beautiful.
It's obsessively detailed.
There are footnotes.
"Flynn."
"The footnotes are important."
"You numbered the boulders."
"For placement order. You can't set a thirty-two into a forty-seven's slot. The weight distribution collapses."
I stare at him. Potting soil clings to my collarbone from yesterday.
His runes still glow faintly under his bandages.
We don’t mention the garage. We don’t speak of Valerius standing in the driveway last night, thin lips pressed into a blade, watching us spring apart before gliding back to his luxury sedan without a word.
We certainly don’t mention the almost-kiss.
"Where do we start?"
Something shifts in his jaw. The tension bleeds out of his shoulders by a fraction. He taps the blueprint with one massive green finger.
"Boulders."
The boulders are stacked behind his garage on wooden pallets. Granite. Sandstone. Three slabs of obsidian-veined basalt that weigh more than my moving truck. He rented a pallet jack for the big ones. The smaller ones, the ones that only weigh two or three hundred pounds, he carries.
He just picks them up. Arms flexing, veins standing out against moss-green skin, the tee shirt straining across his back as he walks a two-hundred-pound granite slab to its designated position and sets it down with the precision of a jeweler placing a diamond.
I operate the pallet jack. Poorly.
"Left. More left. Junia. My left."
"These things don't have power steering!"
"They don't have any steering. You're supposed to pull, not push."
"I'm a florist, not a longshoreman!"
He crosses the yard in four strides, wraps his hands over mine on the jack handle, and pulls. The basalt slab rolls forward. He presses against my back. His arms bracket mine. His chin hovers above my head and his breath stirs my hair and the pallet jack moves like it's on rails.
"Pull."
"I am aware of the concept now, thank you."
His laugh is a short, low vibration against my spine. He steps back. I miss the warmth immediately and violently.
We dig trenches for the drainage channels.
Flynn operates the excavator for the deep cuts.
I follow with a flat shovel, shaping the edges.
Clay and loam pile up along both sides. My arms burn after twenty minutes.
His don't burn at all, because he's an Orc, and Orcs apparently don't experience muscle fatigue, which is deeply unfair.
By noon, the front property border is unrecognizable. Where a clean fence once stood, a series of terraced granite walls steps down from his higher elevation to my lower beds. The backyard fence still looms behind it, but the front is entirely open.
The trenches run between them like veins. The basalt slabs anchor the corners, black stone gleaming with quartz flecks in the sun.
I sink the first plants. Wild jasmine along his retaining wall. Cascading ferns in the terrace gaps. A cluster of moonbloom orchids, the survivors from the beetle attack, tucked into a sheltered nook between two boulders where they'll get afternoon shade.
I plant. His hands hang at his sides, opening and closing. The bandages are filthy now, soaked through with sweat and dirt. The green glow underneath pulses in that steady rhythm.
"Proximity thing?" I ask without looking up.
Silence. A long one.
"Proximity thing."
I press soil around the orchid roots. My cheeks burn. Everything burns and none of it is from the sun.
The combined yard stretches between our houses like a declaration. No fence. No line. No border.
From somewhere up the street, the quiet hum of a luxury sedan's engine idles. Watching.