"You wore that to work?" His voice drops an octave.
"Every day." I drop the blouse on the floor. Corporate Orla would never leave clothes on the floor. Corporate Orla is dead. "Under every blazer. Every button-up. Every boring professional outfit."
"Not boring." He reaches for me, his massive frame moving with surprising grace despite the ill-fitting suit straining across his broad shoulders. His fingers stretch toward me, but I pivot smoothly out of reach, maintaining the distance with someone who has choreographed every move. "Orla."
I arch an eyebrow, letting my gaze linger on him with calculated intention. The power dynamic shifts with every second of silence, every inch of space between us becoming a weapon in my arsenal. "Say please."
His chest rises and falls with barely contained eagerness, those wild green eyes darkening with want. When he speaks, my pulse quickens despite my best efforts to maintain control. "Please." The word emerges as a low growl, rough-edged and urgent, barely restrained. "Come here. Now."
"No." I unzip my skirt, let it pool at my feet. Step out of it wearing nothing but black lace and ruined Louboutins. "You come here."
He stands, closes the distance, lifts me easily. My legs wrap around his waist automatically, and he walks us backward until my spine hits the wall. Cold against overheated skin.
"I love you," he says, and the simple honesty in it breaks something inside me, shatters the last wall I'd been holding up. "My fierce little warrior in heels. My Little Manager who throws binders in puddles."
"I love you too." I frame his face with my hands. "My chaos in a cheap suit. My orc who thinks printers are cursed machines."
He kisses me, and this time it's different. Slower. Deeper. Like we have all the time in the world, because we do. No moresneaking in supply closets. No more quickies in sheds during storms. Just us, unemployed and reckless and completely free.
His hands map my body, learning curves and angles. Mine work at his buttons, peeling away wet layers until there's nothing between us but skin and want and the promise of tomorrow.
"We should probably talk about what happens next," I breathe against his mouth. "Make a plan."
"Later." He nips at the delicate curve of my throat, and I arch into him without thinking, my body responding to his touch with a urgency that bypasses every rational circuit in my brain. The sensation sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold wall at my back. "Right now, I have considerably better ideas than talking."
My fingers curl into his shoulders, feeling the solid muscle beneath damp fabric. There's a small, rational part of my mind—the part that usually dominates every decision I make—that wants to object. That wants to insist we establish parameters, set expectations, create a framework for what happens next. But that voice is drowning under six years of wanting him, of denying myself, of pretending I didn't notice the way he looked at me across spreadsheets and conference tables.
"Tell me," I demand, because even now, even like this, I need to maintain some semblance of control. I need to know what's coming. It's not a request; it's a command, delivered against his jaw in a voice that's barely recognizable as my own.
He does. In detail. In Orcish and English and the language of hands and mouths and bodies moving together.
And for the first time in six years, I don't think about tomorrow at all.
14
THRAKA
The rain stops by the time we dress. Orla's hair is wild, her makeup smeared, her blouse buttoned wrong. She looks nothing like the Ice Queen who terrorized interns with passive-aggressive emails.
She looks perfect.
"We should go back," she says, finger-combing her hair into something resembling professional. It doesn't work. She looks thoroughly ravaged, and I feel a surge of possessive pride knowing I'm the reason.
"Back to my apartment?"
"Back to the office." She retrieves her soaked blazer from the puddle, wrings it out with the efficiency of someone who has optimized every movement. Water streams onto the pavement. "We're fixing this."
I stare at her. "The CEO said one of us transfers to the basement. I already resigned. It's done."
"Nothing is done until I say it's done." She steps into her ruined Louboutins, and despite the bedraggled state of her outfit, she somehow regains that razor-sharp edge. That terrifying competence. "You're getting your job back."
"How?"
"The same way I get everything." She straightens her spine, tilts her chin up. "Superior negotiation tactics and an unwillingness to accept failure."
This woman threw a three-inch binder in a puddle for me. Chased me down a street in the rain. Now she wants to march back into the building that just humiliated us both and demand they reverse their decision.
I love her so much it physically hurts.
