Chapter 2
I’ve been alone in the bonding room for four minutes, and my body is already gearing up for a repeat of yesterday afternoon.
The room is furnished with a couch built for three humans or one orc, two chairs, a coffee table, a bowl of mints as untouched as the ones in the hearing room.
There’s a plant in the corner doing worse than the two in the lobby.
The handler put two glasses of water on the coffee table, and I almost joked about being thirsty but felt it wouldn’t be taken the right way.
Now the handler is in the hallway with the door cracked, holding a clipboard like he’s going to write down every infraction if we touch.
Wait, am I allowed to touch? I imagine my hands sliding up his shirt and over those hard, warm muscles…
I shake my head. Okay, this is crazy. I came straight from the hearing and got here first on purpose.
If you claim your seat before the loud people arrive, you get to pick your ground.
I chose the chair, not the couch, and my steno case is next to me.
I feel oddly better with it here, like I’m still me even if my body is going haywire.
The doorway goes dark, and every thought drains from my head.
He comes through the frame sideways and still barely makes it, and then Valdrek of Clan Stormbreak is standing in front of me. He’s holding a covered dish and looking at me like I’m what he came to this island for.
His scent washes over me again: the rain on stone, juniper, and banked embers. My body, which I lectured extensively in the shower this morning, practically rolls over and presents its belly. I press my knees together, very composed, fooling nobody.
“You came,” I say, brilliantly. I’m not going to win awards for staying cool under pressure.
Up close, there’s gold hidden under the brown of his eyes. He inclines his head in greeting as he sets the covered dish on the coffee table next to the mints. When he sits down on the couch, it groans in protest, and he folds his hands and looks at me.
Silence.
I’ve appreciated people who don’t say much my whole life, but the silence coming off him is different. My whole body finds it restful and charged at once, which shouldn’t be possible, especially considering all I want to do is climb into his lap and see if his skin is as warm as I imagine it is.
My fingers curl into my palm, and I speak quickly to stop myself from doing something stupid.
“So, I’ve never done this. But I’ve spent years listening to people answer questions for a living, so we’ll start with the easy ones. You can pass on anything you don’t like. Polite passes get a mint.”
What am I even saying? Am I going to force him to eat a mint?
The scarred eyebrow rises a millimeter. That’s amusement. I’d bet the redhead’s whole pool on it.
“Name?” I ask, like I didn’t hear him say it earlier.
“Valdrek.” His voice comes out with that same resonance from the hearing room, and the water in the glass on the coffee table ripples. So does the hair on my body. “From Clan Stormbreak.”
Somehow, I keep my face neutral.
“Occupation?”
“Warrior. Stoneworker.”
“How long have you been on this island, waiting to be matched?”
“Fourteen months.”
Four words, two words, two more. His face says more than his mouth does. The eyebrow rises and settles, the ears pivot, and the corner of his mouth lifts half a degree.
“The dish.” I nod at it. “Did you cook that?”
“Yes.” He pauses, and his voice deepens even more. “You worked through the meal today.”
My lips part, but I can’t breathe. I proofed the morning session in the hearing room during lunch and only ate a granola bar. He somehow knows.
“Orcs court with food first,” I blurt out. “Provision. It’s the first gift.”
His ears come forward. “You read about us.”
“I read all of it.” And it’s true, the binder I read on the ferry has all this information.
“The courtship gifts, the scent science, the claiming bite that makes the whole thing permanent. The pamphlet covers it in exactly one sentence and then changes the subject.” I reach for the lid on the dish. “Well. Let’s see what you brought me.”
It’s a dark stew with root vegetables and shredded meat in a gravy that smells heavenly. There’s a flat bread folded in a cloth that’s still warm and a spoon next to it.
No man has ever cooked for me before. My nipples harden, and there’s a buzz between my legs. I’m holding the lid and staring at the stew like it’s porn.
“It’s traditional,” he says, and I glance up at him. His ears pin back slowly. “If it’s too strange, the cafeteria has—”
He stops.
“Has what?”
“Other food,” he finishes, and his ears are flat against his skull now.
He’s nervous about the stew. I somehow know this deep in my soul. He’s concerned it’s not good enough for me.
I pick up the spoon and eat, moaning with the first bite. I don’t know what the seasoning is, and I probably don’t want to know, but it gives me the same protected feeling I used to get from my grandma’s homemade stews. Nothing has ever tasted as good.
I blink hard to clear my vision and look at the ceiling for a second. I’m not going to cry over stew in front of him and the handler who could be peeking in here. I’m not.
When I can look at him again, his ears have cautiously risen to half-mast and his eyes are on my face, waiting on a verdict.
“Okay,” I say, around the second spoonful. “You can stay.”
His eyebrow goes up and his mouth tips, while his shoulders drop, like he can finally relax.
The handler in the hallway turns a page loud enough that it has to be on purpose.
I eat while we exchange information, and I learn things about him slowly, four words at a time.
He’s thirty-one. He’s a shieldmate, a sworn warrior bond.
His shieldmate, a loud and beloved orc, found a mate through this program and lives with her on Gorrath Venn.
Valdrek builds dry-stone walls at home. Every rock has to be placed precisely because they don’t use mortar.
He says he reads the rock, and I hold in a joke about him being a rock whisperer.
He applied to the program after his shieldmate found happiness, and he was approved by a female elder who looked at him for four minutes without speaking and said, “You will wait a long time, and it will be worth it.”
“Fourteen months,” I say. “Diane said they paired you but nobody was right.”
“One hundred and six.”
I blink at the large number. “You counted?”
He shrugs.
“You passed on one hundred and six women,” I say, and the warmth in my chest tells me I’m oddly happy about this.
“I looked at the women. Nothing happened. It’s not a choice.” This might be the longest thing I’ve heard him say. His gold eyes meet mine. “Then you.”
My pulse stutters at those two words, and my face flushes.
“So,” I say, trying to find something to talk about before I lie down on the floor and say take me.
“I looked things up last night. You have a translator implant that is somehow making you be able to speak and understand me. Somewhere in your skull, a little chip is doing all of this in real time.” His ears tip, confirming.
“But speech only. It doesn’t translate written words. ”
“Yes.”
“So when you’re not being introduced to one hundred and six women, you can’t read to pass the time. What do you do all day? Fourteen months is a long time to lift weights and be a local legend.”
His ears freeze mid-tilt. His eyebrow comes down, carefully level.
“I train,” he says. “I cook. I study.”
“Study what?”
“Your world.” He reaches over and moves the bowl of mints one inch to the left, which is the first pointless movement I’ve seen him make since I met him.
My spidey sense sits up and takes notice.
He’s hiding something, adorably, whatever it is, because the tips of his ears have gone a deep pink.
The pamphlet didn’t mention ear blushing, but I know what I’m looking at.
I let it go. He can keep his secrets for now. Besides, those massive hands are giving me ideas. According to the binder, orcs are big everywhere…
“Time’s up,” the handler says at the door, sounding genuinely sorry about it.
The thirty minutes they gave us is nowhere near long enough. For one, I didn’t get my hands on him yet.
My body protests as we stand. Being this close to him is a category-five experience. My nose is about level with the middle of his chest, and I swear the heat coming off him is like an oven.
We don’t move toward the door. The handler waits. Neither of us wants the meeting to end, and both of us know it.
“The stew was the best thing I’ve eaten in years,” I tell him, because it’s true.
He looks down at me, and I want him to swallow me whole.
“Maybe we could,” I start, and stop, because the sentence is headed somewhere needy, and being needy isn’t good. “Never mind.”
“Finish it.” Two words, and he waits. Fourteen months of history says he can do this longer than I can.
“Maybe we could do this again tomorrow,” I finish, and my voice only wobbles a little.
“Yes. Come back tomorrow,” he says and reaches out to take my hand. These massive hands could crush a chair, but all he does is squeeze mine gently before letting go.
He leaves, and I walk back to my quarters in a daze.
If I wasn’t reacting to him before the stew, I’d think he dosed me with a sex potion.
I can feel every inch of my skin brushing against the fabric of my clothes.
The farther away from him I get, the more desperate I am to run back to him and find out exactly how big he is everywhere.
None of this makes sense.
I pass two women from the betting pool, and they’re saying the pool has him at seventeen words today.
They have no idea how many he just spent on me.
Even if he doesn’t talk much, I bet he moans when he orgasms. That’s the thought I take to bed with me and toss and turn on for three hours.