The orc residential floor smells like carpet cleaner and cheese. I refuse to wonder about that. Valdrek’s door is the third on the left. We’ve spent some time here. One very memorable night where I found out exactly what the wheelbarrow position feels like, and my abs didn’t even complain the next day, because my pussy was too content to let any other part of my body object.
He gave me the code to his door, and when I crack it open, there’s running water and a clatter of dishes. Valdrek’s being domestic in a cloud of stew and dish soap thick enough that, for once, he can’t smell me coming.
From inside also comes a voice that is not his.
It’s a woman. Professionally breathy, mid-sentence, pouring out of a tablet speaker at full and unabashed volume. The sentence she’s in the middle of is one I’ll remember word for word until I die.
“His Grace’s hands tightened on her bodice. ‘Say it,’ he growled. ‘Say you burn for me as I burn for you, or so help me I shall ruin you for every other man in England.’”
I stand in the doorway and experience total enlightenment.
Shall!
Ten years of not reacting on the record, and my face throws out the whole policy in one second. The grin takes over, a hand clamped over my mouth to keep the giggle in because the duchess isn’t finished being ruined.
Valdrek of Clan Stormbreak, shieldmate, stoneworker, terror of betting pools, is standing at his little sink washing a stew pot with a dish towel over one shoulder. Dinner sits covered beside the sink, and the tablet on the table narrates the ruination of a duchess.
When he senses me, he goes catastrophically still. He turns, and his eyes cut to the tablet, which informs us both what His Grace does next. He scrambles for the off switch, wet fingers skidding on the screen, the narrator getting one more full ecstatic clause out before he kills it.
We stare at each other.
His ears are flatter than I have ever seen them, pressed to his skull, tips flushed a pink so deep it’s practically a peony. He’s holding a dripping stew pot, and the expression of a warrior facing his scariest foe.
“Wren,” he says, and before he can continue, I cut him off.
“Don’t you dare say four words right now.” I close the door behind me, because whatever happens next is not for the hallway. “Stories, huh. Instructive.”
He sets the pot down and picks up the tablet. He turns it on and holds it out.
I take it from him. It’s the IMA library audiobook catalog portal. The heading at the top of his history says HUMAN COURTSHIP, which is a category he has apparently invented himself. There’s a folder icon, and the number under it says three hundred twelve titles.
I open it and scroll. I can’t not scroll. Duke after duke. Highlanders. A firefighter series, complete. Something with a hockey team. Cowboys, an entire ranch of them. The covers are a cavalry charge of open shirts, and the listening log runs down the side, fourteen months deep, hundreds and hundreds of hours, 1.0 speed, no skips. At the bottom, in the little space where the library app lets you rate things, he has given five stars to every last one.
“You can’t read,” I say, waving the tablet at him. “So you’ve been listening instead.”
“Keth showed me how.” His voice is even. “I asked where I could hear stories about human mating customs. He was very happy to help. He is always very happy to help.” He pauses. “He chose the first ten. They were all dukes.”
I’m going to buy that blue overachiever a gift basket the size of his head before we leave.
“The IMA gives us classes,” Valdrek says. “Slideshows. Rules for doors and handshakes. Nothing about”—he gestures toward the tablet and the ruined duchess—“this. I had time. One hundred and six introductions is a great deal of waiting, Wren. The others lifted weights and complained. I studied.”
His chin comes up, the ears rising defiantly. “When my mate came, I was not going to stand in front of her with empty hands and four words. Humans put their whole hearts in these stories. What they want said to them. What they wish someone had said. I took what was true, and I threw away the dukes’ behavior, because the dukes lie constantly and create nine chapters of problems that one honest conversation would solve. I do not respect the dukes.” The eyebrow makes its position on dukes clear. “But their words were good. So I kept the words, and I waited, and I practiced in my head and in the shower.”
I have sat in rooms while people said the most important sentences of their lives. No testimony comes close to this. There’s seven feet of orc in front of me with a dish towel over his shoulder, admitting he taught himself to love me in advance on the faith that I’d show up.
“The night in the bonding room,” I say. “Everything you said to me.”
“Every word was mine,” he says. “The books taught me the language. You taught me what it was for.” The corner of his mouth tips up. “I revised constantly after I met you. The material had to be adapted. None of the books had anyone like you in them.”
That’s the sentence that does it. I set the tablet down on the table and stalk toward him. When I grab two fistfuls of orc shirt, he comes down to meet me with zero hesitation.
The kiss detonates on contact. He hauls me up out of my shoes with one arm, my legs going around him as far as they go, which is not far since he’s a geographic feature. The taste of him floods in, heat and tea, his tongue twining with mine.
There are tusks in this kiss, smooth curves of them at my cheeks while he angles around them. Against my mouth, his voice is rough, that register that ripples water. “Say it. Tell me what you want,thess’venna. I keep what I’m given.”
“You.” It comes out with no dignity. “All of it. Talk me through it. Ruin me for every other man in England.”
I feel his laugh in my ribs before I hear it.
