"Like two people who have not just—"
"Yes." She composed herself with effort. "Exactly like that."
He moved to the door, opening it for her. The corridor beyond was dim and quiet, the fortress settling into evening routines. Verity stepped past him, then stopped at the threshold. The flagstones pressed hard and uneven through her thin soles. She turned back.
"Next week," she said. "For the report."
"Next week."
She walked away before she could do something inadvisable, like reach for him again. Her footsteps echoed against the walls, too loud in the quiet corridor, announcing her retreat to every closed door she passed.
The route back to her chambers took her past the great hall. Voices drifted through the open archway, orcs at their evening meal, the clatter of plates, someone's booming laugh. She kept her head down and moved quickly, though no one seemed to notice the disheveled human scholar scurrying past with her hair falling from its pins.
Her door was a relief. She closed it behind her and leaned against the wood, pressing her spine flat to its solid surface.
The fire had burned low in her absence. The room was cold, the bed still neatly made, her notes still spread across the desk where she had left them. Everything exactly as it had been three hours ago. She was not.
Verity touched her mouth.
His taste lingered there. The pressure of his tusks against her cheeks had left no mark she could feel, but she pressed her fingers to the spots anyway, mapping the fading impression of smooth ivory on skin.
I have been thinking of your body since the moment you arrived.
She pushed off from the door and crossed to the washbasin. The water was tepid, but she splashed it on her face anyway, watching droplets run down her reflection in the small mirror above the stand.
Her hair was a disaster. Pins dangled uselessly from half-collapsed coils, and the careful arrangement she had spent twenty minutes constructing had become something that looked like she had been caught in a windstorm. Or caught against a warchief's chest with his fingers buried in her hair.
She pulled the remaining pins free and let her hair fall.
The woman in the mirror looked back at her. Round face. Soft jaw. The kind of features that faded into crowds, that slid past notice, that had never once stopped anyone in their tracks.
You are considered beautiful. By our standards. Profoundly so.
Verity turned away from the mirror.
She undressed, folding her blue wool dress over the chair, unlacing her stays with trembling fingers. Her nightgown was where she had left it, draped across the foot of the bed. She pulled it over her head and climbed beneath the furs.
The bed was cold. She curled onto her side, drawing her knees toward her chest, and stared at the dying embers of the fire.
She had kissed an orc.
No. She had kissed Targesh. She could still feel the span of his hand against her face, the rough drag of calluses on her cheekbone. That was not a category. That was a man.
Already her mind was circling, trying to reassemble its usual scaffolding, the analytical distance, the scholarly frame.The evening's events, considered in context, suggest a pattern of cross-cultural attraction consistent with—
She could still feel the vibration of his growl against her palms.
The scaffolding collapsed.
She thought of his books. The worn spines.I keep what I read. Some things are worth returning to.
The pillow had warmed beneath her cheek. Her breathing had slowed without her noticing, each exhale longer than the last, the room blurring at its edges.
Tomorrow there would be archives. Dust and parchment and the comfortable clarity of historical analysis. Tomorrow she would be a scholar again, methodical and precise, and this night would become simply another data point in her ongoing study of orc culture.
She did not believe it.
Chapter 11
