Ravaged By the Orc Raider

She spent thirty-two years learning to disappear. Then a raider tore the wall down and refused to let her.

Mab has always been good at taking up less space. Scullery maid, stone wall, the woman no one thanks and no one sees. The kitchens of Lord Cresswick’s holding taught her to keep her head down and her wants smaller than her hunger. She stopped expecting more a long time ago.

Then the raid bell rings for the first time in her life, and the world she survived goes up in blood and firelight.
She hides. He finds her anyway.

Varek Redhand is seven feet of scarred green muscle and amber-eyed certainty, an orc war-leader who looks at every soft curve she was taught to apologize for like it’s the reason he crossed the mountains. He claims her in the dark and carries her north, two orphans in tow, into a granite fortress warmed by hot springs and a heat she doesn’t have words for.

He calls her abundance beautiful. He means it.
But he claimed her in the shadows. The mountain is still waiting to hear him say it in the light.