His answer surprised me. None of the men in my life cared about loyalty to their wives, though they demanded it from all their women. My late husband was so obsessed with leaving an heir of his blood that he had bedded every female of a child-bearing age he could get his hands on, both before and after our wedding. My father had so many mistresses, I could never keep up with their names.
“So you’re enjoying a lot of women while you’re single then?” I asked, curious to learn more about him.
“When I can. Sure.”
“Why only when you can? Are women not jumping in bed with you?”
“Frankly, I don’t have as many women as most people think,” he confessed. “I like having fun at the parties when the folks from other keeps come over. I drink and dance with a lot of women. So everyone thinks I fuck everyone I dance with every week.”
“But you don’t?” I prodded.
He heaved a breath. “One or two, sure, but I’m not exactly the most handsome orc in the keep. Orc women have plenty of other, less scarred options. And human girls? Most of them find bog orcs ugly, even without the scars.”
Where I came from, bog orcs were definitely considered ugly, and I could see why. Grat’s large, brawny body looked like a mountain came to life. Every part of him was wide, thick, and solid like a rock.
His facial features were also far from being conventionally handsome. In addition to his ghastly scar, his prominent eyebrow ridges, the high, protruding cheekbones, and gleaming white tusks that jutted out from his lower jaw gave him a fierce, menacing look that many would fear and no one I knew would call good-looking.
Sitting with my back to him, however, I couldn’t see his face. I felt only the caring touch of his large hands as he massaged my skull, washing my hair.
“Good looks aren’t everything,” I said. “In fact, they mean nothing at all.”
“For wild things maybe,” he dismissed. “Lean down this way. Let me rinse the suds out of your hair.”
I let him lower me backwards into the water as he leaned over me. His face was now directly over me, but he didn’t look into my eyes, focusing on pouring the water and rinsing the soap out of my hair.
His brows moved closer in concentration. His lips parted slightly, with the tip of his tongue poking out by his right tusk. He looked as fierce as ever, and many would still find him ugly. But there was something endearing in the way he gave all his attention to the task of washing my hair.
“How did you get your scar, Grat?”
He flinched, then covered it up with a grin. “If anyone asks, you tell them I got it in battle, deal?”
“Deal,” I agreed. “But how did it actually happen?”
“I was a kid and stupidly believed I could get a boar on my own. It was a good thing that Grandpa happened to be close by to intervene just in time. Otherwise, the boar would’ve taken my entire head off with his tusks. Wild boars are vicious in the Wetlands. They eat mostly plants and mushrooms, but they would kill anything just for fun. All done.” He helped me to set up again and smiled brightly. “I bet you’re now the cleanest wild thing in the world.”
“Thank you.” I wrung the water out of my hair. The warm, peaceful feeling that settled over me proved too hard to contain inside my chest as it erupted from me in soft, unexpected giggle.
“Well…” Grat lifted me out of the water and reached for the towel. “Let’s get you dry, dressed, and ready for bed now.”
CHAPTER 6
GRAT
She was a curious little thing, that wild thing of mine. Nothing about her fit into a neat, perfect mold.
Laying in my bed, I listened to Khala’s soft breathing coming from the bottom bunk bed by the opposite wall. I no longer thought it had been a mistake for me to feed her. A mistake would’ve been leaving her hungry and alone in the woods, defenseless against the wildlife she wasn’t familiar with.
As a wild woman who was used to sleeping in a cave or in a tree, I expected Khala to balk at spending the night in a bed. I offered her a blanket on the floor instead. But she seemed happy to get into the bed and under the covers. Her face relaxed, and she stretched in it with a soft, peaceful smile as I tucked the covers around her.
My tunic—the smallest I could find—reached down to her knees, with the long sleeves completely hiding her hands. But she appeared glad to be clean and had settled in bed quickly. It wasn’t long before her breathing deepened, with sleep claiming her quickly. But sleep was evading me tonight.
I wondered what had happened between Khala and her tribe. She’d said she had no family. She didn’t even want to return to her people. And it puzzled me.
A clan was everything to a bog orc. The people in the small human settlement we had in the Wetlands also seemed to be a close-knit bunch. Like all families, we’d had arguments, and even fights, both in the human settlement and in the orcs’ keep. But no one was banished without a fucking good reason.
What could Khala possibly have done to be left behind by her people? What crime did she commit?
I struggled to think of her as a criminal. There was a vulnerability in her small frame and her large, guarded eyes that made her look more like a victim than a perpetrator. She had tried to steal from me. But I would probably steal food, too, if driven to starvation as she clearly had been.
