Chapter 12
The letter was face down on the counter, and Nora had been not-looking at it for twenty minutes.
He’d carried it with him when they finally left the nursery and placed it on the kitchen counter.
He’d moved it aside to set down two mugs, with the care of a male handling something he’d decided not to explain.
She’d carried a jar of the cow-udder balm over as her reason for coming—Charlie had gone through it faster than either of them expected—and she’d set it by the sink and never mentioned it, and neither had he.
Charlie was still asleep. The house had the settled hum it got after the last feed, the monitor a small green glow on the table between them. Rognar sat across from her with his hands around a mug he wasn’t drinking from, tired in a way she’d never once seen before.
“Can I ask you something,” she said, “or is that the wrong thing to do right now?”
“You can ask me something.”
“Why the jokes?” She focused on her mug, turning it slowly. “Not tonight. In general. You do it even when it costs you. At the rink Fen thought you were hungover this morning and you let him.”
He considered that with more seriousness than the question probably deserved.
“If you’re the one who laughs,” he said, “nobody checks on you. It’s a good deal. You get left alone and everybody likes you.”
“That doesn’t sound like a good deal.”
“It’s a great deal.” He turned his mug the way she’d turned hers, which she noticed. “Right up until you need something.”
She didn’t answer right away. The green glow of the monitor pulsed a fraction with Charlie’s breathing and steadied again.
“And they don’t take you seriously,” she said.
“That’s the price. A fair price, mostly. You don’t get worried about and you don’t get taken seriously, and for a long time those seemed like the same coin, heads and tails.” He glanced at the letter and then away from it. “Turns out they’re two coins.”
She winced, because she knew what she had to say, and she knew it wouldn’t feel good, but she said it anyway.
“I did that.”
“I know.”
She’d wanted him to argue. She only knew it in the second after he didn’t.
She’d wanted no, not you, you’re different, the little absolution.
He hadn’t said it, and it was so much better that he hadn’t that her throat went tight.
He wasn’t finished. He said the rest of it without malice, because that wasn’t a tool he owned.
“You gave me three eggs last October,” he said, “and decided I was somebody who couldn’t keep eggs in the house.”
She stared at him.
“I’d run out,” she said, before she could stop herself, because it was true and it was the least important true answer available. “You knocked and asked if I had eggs and I gave you three and you—”
“I put them in the fridge,” he said mildly. “And I saw you decide it. You did the whole thing across the fence. It was a short trial. I didn’t get a lawyer.”
The year unspooled backwards in front of her.
The teammates’ cars, the late music, the occasional female she’d cataloged from her office window and filed under of course.
The cool nods. The disapproval she’d worn like a good coat, because it was warm and it fit and it kept her separate.
And every last comfortable inch of it had been visible from this kitchen.
From this exact chair, probably. He’d watched her build the file on him in ten days and he’d let her because letting people was easier.
She had never once considered that the person she was quietly judging had been standing at his window, doing nothing more sinister than making his breakfast.
“You knew,” she said. “The whole time.”
“I knew the whole time.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Say something?” A ghost of the grin, worn thin tonight.
“And what, correct the record? Nora, I’ve spent thirty-four years not correcting the record.
It’s a bad habit. I’ve had it for a long time.
” He looked at the letter, face down between them, and for a second she could see what that meant to him.
“I’m apparently only just finding out what it costs. ”
She reached across the table and put her hand on his arm.
She’d never done that. Not once, in a year of fences and doorways and porch steps.
She’d handed him things and taken things back.
Their hands had brushed over a diaper bag more times than she’d admit to a notebook.
But she had never simply reached out and laid her hand against the warm green skin of his arm the way she did now.
He was so warm, like a stone that had been sitting in the sun all afternoon. Neither of them looked at her hand. They kept their eyes on each other, and neither of them said anything about it, because if he named it she’d have to take it back.
“You’re not the person in the file,” she said. “I’ve known that for a while. I filed you wrong.”
“I know.”
“Stop saying you know.”
“I’ll stop saying I know when you stop being right about it.
” His arm turned slowly under her hand—not shaking her off, but returning her gesture.
His palm came up and her hand slid into it, and his huge fingers closed around hers, the way she’d watched them close around a hockey stick and a mug and his daughter’s head.
“If you want to move your hand, this is the part where you’d do it. ”
“I don’t want to move my hand.”
“Okay.”
She was the one who moved first. She was aware of standing, aware that she was the one making the move. She came around the corner of the table with her heart doing something disorderly. He watched her come and didn’t move to meet her halfway.
She understood, with a clarity that irritated her, that he was letting her be the one in charge. He was going to let her lead every inch of this, on purpose. That he could hand over control that deliberately was a problem for later.
She stopped in front of him. He looked at her, still seated, which put them nearer to eye level than they had ever been, and she got her first honest study of his face this close.
The amber-brown eyes, the beard shorter and neater than she’d realized, the two tusks curving up pale from his lower jaw.
“I’m going to have to think about those,” she said, looking at the tusks.
“Take your time. They’ve been there a while.”
She put her hand to his jaw, sliding her thumb along the beard, and tilted his face, trying to recapture the angle of their previous kiss. He sat there and let her, his hands loose on his thighs. He was waiting for her but something about the waiting made her stomach quiver.
She found the angle, and she kissed him. The other times he’d been leading it. This one was hers, and she had nowhere to be, and she took her time, and somewhere in the taking of her time his restraint stopped being in charge of the room.
His hands came up, one at her waist and one between her shoulder blades. Enormous hands, so hot through her shirt that each finger was a separate source of heat. He tugged her in between his knees. She got a knee up onto the chair beside his hip, then thought better of the chair.
“Counter,” she said, against his mouth.
“There’s a counter,” he agreed, and stood, and the room reorganized.
She was up on the counter before she’d fully decided on it, both his hands around her waist, the cold of the stone through her jeans a shock against all that heat. Then he stepped in, and there was no cold anywhere. He stood between her knees and she had to tip her face up and he had to bend down.
She caught one of his tusks with her lip, just enough to make her notice.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “Tip your head. The other way. There.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“I’ve kissed. I’ve never done a supervised trial.” He drew back a fraction, one hand coming up to move a strand of her hair off her face, patient again. “You want to keep the notes?”
“I want you to stop talking.”
“Now that,” he said, “I have never once been asked.”
She got the angle after that, and with nothing left to manage there was only him.
Only his heat and the size of his hands and the low sound he made when her fingers found the back of his neck.
His hand slid up under the hem of her shirt, his palm hot on the bare skin of her back, and she gasped into his mouth.
She got her hands under his shirt, and there was a great deal of him and all of it ran hot, and she stopped thinking in complete sentences.
“Nora,” he said against her mouth. “Tell me if this is where we’re going or if it isn’t. I can do either. I need to know which one.”
“It’s where we’re going.”
“Thank God.”
His hands went to the buttons of her shirt with the concentration of a male who’d learned this exact fine-motor problem on a great many snap-fastened onesies at two in the morning.
She laughed—actually laughed, breathlessly, into his mouth—because he was better at her buttons than she was.
He felt her laugh and grinned against her without stopping, and then her shirt was open and he was kissing his way down her throat, and she tipped her head back against the cupboard door and stopped laughing.
It was a lot to take in at once. The sheer overwhelming size of him, and the feel of his body against her everywhere.
His mouth was on her collarbone, and then her breasts, and she arched into him with a cry she couldn’t possibly have prevented.
He unhooked her bra without looking, and she was half naked on his kitchen counter with an orc the size of her front door and she didn’t want him to stop.
His mouth closed over her nipple and she was shaking already and—
The monitor woke up. A single thin cry, then a second, already ramping up.
His mouth stopped where it was. Neither of them breathed.
And then he groaned and went. He lifted her down off the counter and set her on her feet as if that were part of the same motion as heading for Charlie’s room.
He grabbed his shirt off the floor and was gone, the cries already changing pitch as he reached her, hey, hey, I’ve got you, what’s all this—
She stood in the middle of his kitchen and did up her buttons.
The counter had nearly finished her, but it wasn’t the counter that made her hands shake. It was the fact that he’d gone, instantly. She fastened the second button and then the top one, standing in a stranger’s kitchen that was not a stranger’s kitchen anymore.
She had spent a year waiting for the moment Rognar Stonebreaker would choose himself.
She’d been so certain it was coming. She’d built the file around it.
But it wasn’t coming. It was never going to come.
She’d just watched it not come, over the sound of a six-month-old being told hey, hey, I’ve got you.
Given the choice between his good evening and his daughter’s distress, he hadn’t hesitated for the length of a breath.
The crying thinned, hiccupped, and stopped. He appeared in the kitchen doorway a short time later with Charlie on his shoulder, one enormous hand spread across her back, his shirt back on and buttoned wrong, entirely unrepentant.
“For the record,” he said, “I want it noted that I was having a very good evening.”
“Noted.”
“Write it down.” He patted Charlie’s back slowly, and looked at her over his daughter’s dark head with something that was almost the grin and almost wasn’t. “You write everything down.”