“Clark?”
“Sorry, sugar.” He shook his head and offered her an apologetic smile. “I was so busy thinking about you, I forgot to listentoyou.”
It was one of life’s greatest pleasures, he decided, watching his mate’s face go all pink like that.
“S’okay,” she mumbled into her mug, cheeks glowing.
Fighting the temptation to hook a foot around her chair leg and drag her closer, he said, “I stopped by to give you a gift and hopefully entice you to have dinner with me. Grand plan was first dinner, then convince you to spend Moonset with me.”
“Why would you do that?”
“What do you mean why?” Clark sent her a bemused look. The answer seemed even more obvious to him now than it did before. Of course he wanted to see if she’d spend time with him. Not only did he have a raging infatuation with her, but his instincts had been pushing him toward Nelly for months and months.
Besides, she was alone. Just like him. Whywouldn’the seek her out?
“We’re strangers,” she replied, looking at him like she couldn’t quite determine what material he was made of. “We’ve never even spoken. I’m willing to allow that I misjudged things, but we don’t even know each other. Why would you want to spend Moonset with me? Your family probably wouldn’t want a stranger around for the holiday.”
Clark leaned back in his seat. The chair creaked under his weight as he considered his mate from across the table.
Despite what some folks thought, he wasn’t as dumb as he sometimes acted. He just didn’t always take things too seriously. That didn’t mean he wasn’t observant, though. He’d spent his entire life working with distrustful, often outright hostile animals. To do that safely, it took a heap of patience, determination, and the finely honed ability to read body language.
So he had no trouble reading his mate’s hunched shoulders, the guileless look of confusion that pinched her brows. He noticed how tightly she pulled her legs in against her chest and the way she clenched her fingers around her mug.
She really didn’t understand why he or anyone might want to spend the holiday with her, and that uncertainty made her uncomfortable. It might have even made her a little bit afraid.
Clark took a deep breath in through his nose and consciously loosened the tense set of his shoulders. It wound him up to see her so defensive, which wouldn’t do either of them a damn lick of good. You didn’t soothe a worked up, distrustful horse by tensing up yourself, and you certainly didn’t reassure a skittish mate by doing the same.
He had to keep calm. He had to be steady. He had to let her come to him, even if that took ages.
“My family is roaming right now,” he finally answered. “My older brothers all live on homesteads of their own, and since we’re in our fallow season, my parents decided to pack up my little sister and take a tour around the territory. I stayed behind to watch the ranch and keep up my business. I knew you’d be alone and since I was too, I thought it just made sense to spend the holiday together.”
And I just really wanted to be with you. Finally make you smile. Hear your laugh. Know what it’s like to be near you, even just for a little while.
Nelly looked down at her mug. In a hesitant voice, she asked, “You… rehabilitate horses, right?”
He couldn’t do anything about the smile that spread across his face even if he wanted to. It was deeply gratifying to hear she knew anything about him at all. “Sounds like we’re not strangers after all, sugar.”
Nelly flushed a darker pink and uncurled herself from her chair. Standing up without looking at him, she said, “Yeah, well, everyone talks about you all the time. You’re everybody’s favorite neighbor.”
He would have been a little tickled by that if he didn’t see the tight set of her mouth or hear the resigned note in her tone.
Clark winced, imagining what it must have been like to hear the town sing his praises for months on end while fully believing that he didn’t just dislike her, but was being a shitty neighbor just to make her feel unwelcome.
Dumbass,he thought, wishing he could go back in time and shake some sense into his past self.Of course she thought I was being an asshole.
He’d done absolutely nothing to endear himself to her. When he lingered at their fence line to catch her attention, she thought he was staking out his territory. When he left notes letting her know that he’d be happy to help with chores, she thought he was criticizing her home. When he begged Suhana for any tiny scrap of information on how to get close to her, Nelly only heard his incredulousness that she’d been able to make friends with her when he couldn’t.
He’d made a damn mess of things.
The only reason he didn’t drop his head onto the table in shame was because… well, it didn’t really matter. Even if it was true that he disliked her, they were tied together in a way that blew his hopes of a courtship right out of the water in the best possible way.
I’m damn lucky.If he hadn’t driven himself into that tree, there was no guarantee she ever would have given him the time of day.
Clark rubbed his sensitized palms on his thighs just to remind himself that it was real. He’d spent about ninety percent of his time in her shower just staring at his hands and feet, a big, goofy grin on his face, and the rest resisting the urge to try and get rid of his erection — an endeavor not made any easier by the fact that he was standing in a cloud of steam scented like her skin.
Every orc knew that masturbation only made the nesting instinct worse. They learned that shit in school — alongside proper nesting technique and the laws around mate snatching.But nothing could really prepare him for the discomfort, nor that conflicting urges that made him simultaneously want to coddle her and bend her over the table for a fast, hard fuck.
There will be time for that.
