As I listen, I gather the pool is tracking the daily word count of a candidate named Valdrek from Clan Stormbreak. He’s beenon the island for fourteen months now, longer than any other orc waiting for a match. He’s become famous for answering everything in four words or less. Everyone calls him the quiet one, and the women say it with a longing that surprises me. Back home, men who don’t talk are free.
“He was in the elevator with me for nine floors once.” A woman sighs into her soup. “He didn’t say a word. It was sooo romantic, but he didn’t react to me, so obviously I’m not the one.”
I drink my coffee and keep my opinion to myself. You don’t heckle free entertainment. But I could tell them a thing or two about quiet people, starting with the fact that we can hear you.
That’s when the table goes quiet, and one of the women stops mid-sentence. The redhead flips her chart face down. Every woman turns toward the door, so I turn too. Apparently, I’m one of them now.
A pair of shoulders blocks the whole doorway, and an orc ducks into the cafeteria.
“That’s him,” somebody whispers, which I’d worked out on my own.
He’s massive with gray-green skin. His dark hair is pulled back in a knot with one short braid at the temple. On a human guy, that hairstyle would amuse me, but suddenly, my mouth is dry. Something tells me this guy could style his hair any way he wanted, and be wearing a potato sack and I’d still find him sexy.
He collects a tray and nods at the cook. It’s barely even a nod, and the cook visibly grows an inch. Nobody at our table has said a word in thirty seconds. Understandable.
He’s carrying his tray and halfway across the room when he stops. His head comes up.
For a second, he goes completely still, and his eyes sweep the cafeteria like he heard someone say his name. The room is loud and smells like soup. Whatever he’s checking for, he doesn’t find it. He carries his tray to a corner table, sits with his back to the wall, and says nothing at all for the next twenty-five minutes.
I eat and try to keep myself from looking at him every few minutes. I fail spectacularly. He has broad hands and a scar through one eyebrow. When he chews, it’s slow and methodical, and I try not to wonder what his tusks would feel like against my skin. At one point, the women at my table erupt over a new tally, and his scarred eyebrow rises one millimeter, holds, and settles.
A thought pops into my head.
I’d let him.
I set my spoon down and spend way too much time trying to not think of all the things I’d let him do.
At this rate, I’m going to be joining the betting pool and sighing over elevator rides by the time the two weeks are up.
The afternoon session is witness testimony, and the panel is interviewing program participants about conditions on the island. A matched couple goes first, then an applicant who cries about how happy she is with her mate. At 3:40 p.m., the chairperson calls the longest-waiting unmatched candidate in residence.
The door opens, and the room’s air pressure changes.
Valdrek of Clan Stormbreak has to come through the doorframe at an angle. Up close, he’s bigger than he looked in the cafeteria, and this room is a lot smaller. He crosses toward the witness chair, and that’s when I smell him.
Rain on stone, like a granite ledge in a storm, then a sharp juniper. The third note is warm and completely at odds with the rest of it. It’s banked embers, a fire covered carefully for the night.
My hands stop on the keys.
My hands never stop. They’ve kept a clean record through screaming matches, seizures, a fire alarm, and one attorney’s full cardiac event. They do not stop for anything on this Earth. They hover over the keys while the scent of him pours in, and every nerve ending in my body tingles. Heat drops straightthrough me. My skin pulls tight, my nipples go hard so fast it’s embarrassing, and between one breath and the next I’m soaked and aching. I press my thighs together under the table and try to hold it together.
I’ve been in the room with him for nine seconds.
Then the air conditioning kicks on behind me. It’s the same damn vent that has been freezing my ass off since 8:30, and it pushes its current across my neck and out into the room.
Valdrek stops mid-stride like he’s hit the end of a chain. His head snaps up. His chest fills, the biggest breath I’ve ever seen anyone take, and his eyes close. When they open, they come straight to me. His pupils are blown wide and swallow the color of his eyes.
Oh, wow. I can feel my eyes widening in reaction as I hold his stare.
His ears pin flat to his skull. The pitcher of water on the panel’s table starts to slosh up the sides as if reacting to a sound humans can’t hear. I know it’s something he’s doing because I feel it in the soles of my feet and in one other place I’m not going to acknowledge at a work hearing.
He says nothing. The water keeps rippling.
Then he goes to war with his own body, and I get to watch. He makes himself take the next step, and the one after that. He fists his hands at his sides, and his jaw is set so hard the muscle stands out under the gray-green skin. He reaches the witnesschair and grips the back of it. He breathes in deeply and lets it out slowly, like he’s counting.
Several people’s eyes flick to the water in the pitcher and away again. No one mentions it.
“Candidate Valdrek?” the chairperson says. “Please take the witness seat.”
