Page 64 of Protective Pucking Orc

“More orc biology, huh?” I could hear the worry underlying her teasing and closed my eyes on a silent curse.

“My eyes started doing this weeks ago, when my Kteer knew…” It wasn’t until I felt the pain that I realized my claws were digging into my chest, as if I could scratch away the longing. I glanced down at myself ruefully. “I should have told you then.”

“Mierda,” she breathed, sounding terrified. “Told me what?”

I took a deep breath and turned around…

“We are Mated, Sofia. I’ve known for at least a month now. It was why I started coming to the café so regularly—I couldn’t not see you each day!” Gods, my heart was trying to pound out of my chest, and I was desperate to make her understand. “You are my Mate, the one the gods chose for me, and I am yours.”

Her expression told me she didn’t understand.

Of course she didn’t understand. I’d said it like a male dropping a boulder on a rock outcropping—here, this is yours now, mind your feet.

“Mated,” she repeated. The towel slipped a half-inch, and she caught it without looking, the way she’d juggled everything for years—Rosa, her job, her past. “Like—married? Is that an orc word for⁠—”

“No.” I stopped. Started over, slower, the way my mother had done for me when I was a kitling and had asked why my father watched her cross a room like she hung the moon. “Sit. Please.” I blew out a breath and rubbed the back of my neck. “Let me do this right.”

She lowered herself onto the little loveseat under the window, knees together, towel tucked, watching me with big, trusting eyes that seemed to be pleading not to prove her wrong. Not to be a threat.

I did not want to be a threat.

So I crossed the room and knelt at her feet.

It brought me down below her eyeline—me, looking up at her, my Sofia, small and damp and wary on a loveseat built for a human. Her breath hitched. I felt the exact moment she understood I wasn’t going to loom.

“There’s a thing among my people,” I said. “A knowing. That’s what we call it, because there’s no better word, not in your language or mine. When an orc finds his Mate, his Kteer—” I pressed a fist to my sternum. “It recognizes her. Not chooses. Recognizes. Like it already knew her and was only waiting to catch up.”

“Your—cah-teer.” She stumbled on it, and gods, even mangled it did something to me.

“My instinct. My hunting-heart. The oldest part of me.” I reached out slowly, and when she didn’t pull back, I took one of her bare feet in my hands. “May I?”

She blinked. “You’re going to—what, rub my feet, while you tell me the universe assigned me to you?”

“Yes.” I pressed my thumb into her arch, and she made a sound that nearly undid all my careful control. “Because if I don’t put my hands somewhere useful, I’m going to put them somewhere greedy, and you asked to talk.”

“Okay.” It came out breathy. “Okay, that’s—yeah. Talk. Feet. Good plan.”

Good plan, the smug part of me agreed. I worked my thumb down toward her heel and kept my voice level.

“It’s not love,” I said. “That’s the part I need you to hear. I love you—that’s a separate thing, and it’s true, and I’ll say it as often as you let me. But the Mate Bond isn’t the love. The bond is—” I searched for it. “You know your own heartbeat. You don’t feel it most days, but if it stopped, you’d know before you hit the floor. That’s what you are to me. I don’t feel you every second. But if you were gone, I’d know before I hit the floor.”

Her toes curled in my grip.

“That’s terrifying,” she whispered.

“I know.” I moved to her other foot. “It terrified me the first time I understood it, and it hit me even harder when I carried you from that parking lot. I laid you in the bed in our medical wing, and my whole life became about a woman who flinched when I got too close, and I thought—” I huffed. “I thought, of all the females in all the world, the gods gave me one who has every reason not to want me.”

She laughed, half startled, half sincere. “That’s not—I don’t not want—” She stopped, then shook her head. “All this time? You said you’ve known for weeks.”

And there it was. I made myself hold her gaze.

“Yes.”

“You’ve known for weeks that I’m your—your fated whatever, cosmically-assigned-mind-body-soul person, and you didn’t tell me?” Her voice climbed. “I’ve been lying awake wondering if I was insane for falling this fast, if I was just—just grateful, or scared, or making it up, and you knew⁠—”

“I knew.” I didn’t flinch from her frustration; I’d earned every condemnation. “And I didn’t tell you, and I’m sorry. Torrk had to sit me down in a locker room and call it what it was before I understood how badly I’d gotten it wrong.”

“Which was?”