No. Not crying. Laughing.
She is laughing, her eyes bright and wet, and she reaches across the table and grabs my hand with both of hers, her small fingers wrapping around my thick wrist, and she squeezes.
"That was the hottest thing I have ever seen in my entire life," she says.
I stare at her.
My brain has stopped functioning. I should respond, that I should say something coherent and appropriate, but every single synapse in my head is currently occupied with processing the fact that Livia just used the word "hottest" in reference to me, and I do not know what to do with that information.
"I..." I start. Stop. Try again. "You are not frightened?"
"Frightened?" She laughs again, and she is still holding my wrist, her thumbs pressing against the inside of my forearm where my pulse is pounding hard and fast. "Narod, you just calculated the exact risk factors of breaking my ex-boyfriend's bones in the cocktail bar and delivered it like a quarterly earnings report. You were terrifying. You were perfect. I wanted to applaud."
The heat flares hotter, sharper, and I feel something inside me shift and crack, the tight, rigid control that I spent years building suddenly splintering under her words.
She is not frightened.
She is not disgusted.
She is looking at me like I am something valuable and rare and worth keeping, and I feel the last fragile thread of my restraint snap.
The growl starts low as a deep, primal rumble that I spent my entire adult life suppressing, the instinctive Orcish response to threat and claim and possession, and I feel it roll up through my ribs and vibrate in my throat, and I cannot stop it.
It spills out of me, rough and raw and entirely uncontrolled, as Livia's eyes go wide, the way her breath catches, the way her grip on my wrist tightens.
The growl vibrates through the table. I feel it in my bones, in the floor beneath my feet, and the way Livia's lips part and her pupils dilate, and I know, with absolute certainty, that she feels it too.
"Oh," she whispers.
I force myself to breathe. To pull back. To wrestle the instinct down before I do something catastrophically inappropriate in this very public, very human establishment.
"I apologize," I say again, and my voice is hoarse and unsteady. "That was?—"
"Don't apologize," she says, and her voice is breathless and a little bit unsteady too, and she is still holding my wrist, her fingers pressing against my pulse. "Don't you dare apologize for that."
I stare at her.
She stares back.
The air between us feels charged and heavy and impossibly fragile, and I realise, with a sharp and terrible clarity, that I am in significant danger of falling completely and irrevocably in love with this woman.
The probability of my heart surviving this encounter, zero percent.
CHAPTER 5
LIVIA
The growl is still vibrating somewhere behind my sternum when the bartender materialises at our table, and I look up at her with what I can only assume is an expression that communicates something deeply unhinged, because she blinks, glances at Narod, and then blinks again.
"Another round?"
"Check," I say. "Please. Now. Immediately."
Narod's amber eyes are still fixed on me, warm and unsteady and slightly wild around the edges. I absolutely cannot look at him directly or I will combust into something that would be very difficult to itemise on a tax return.
The sound. That sound. It is still inside me, lodged somewhere between my ribs, a deep, resonant vibration that had zero percent to do with fear and one hundred percent to do with something I have not felt in a very long time, a hot, low pull behind my navel that my body is treating as a five-alarm emergency requiring immediate evacuation.
I am a practical person. I am a spreadsheet person. I believe in logical outcomes and risk assessment and not making decisions in emotionally elevated states.
